#less is lost

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The wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked.

Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

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Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Round 1B

Choose a book:

Arthur Less series (Less, Less is Lost) by Andrew Sean Greer

How to Get a Girlfriend (When You're a Terrifying Monster) by Marie Cardno

Voting ended onFeb 22, 2025

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

Arthur Less series (Less, Less is Lost) by Andrew Sean Greer

PROBLEM: You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years now engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes--it would all be too awkward--and you can’t say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations you’ve received from around the world.

QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?

ANSWER: You accept them all.

If you are Arthur Less.

Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face. What could possibly go wrong?

Well: Arthur will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Sahara sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and arrive in Japan too late for the cherry blossoms. In between: science fiction fans, crazed academics, emergency rooms, starlets, doctors, exes and, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to see. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. The second phase of life, as he thinks of it, falling behind him like the second phase of a rocket. There will be his first love. And there will be his last.

A love story, a satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,” “elegiac,” “ingenious,” as well as “too sappy by half,” Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.

Contemporary, literary fiction, series, adult

How to Get a Girlfriend (When You're a Terrifying Monster) by Marie Cardno (Monster Girlfriend series)

Life is tough when you’re an eldritch abomination.

Trillin isn’t technically a person. She’s a tiny breakaway piece of consciousness from the all-devouring Endless, doomed to eventually rejoin it. But when a human witch stumbles into her world, Trillin suddenly has a new reason to figure out individuality–one shape-shifting tentacle at a time.

Sian is sure important magical discoveries are just around the corner, if she can just get her portals to work reliably. Reaching the dimension of the Endless without being eaten on sight is a dream come true, and Sian is determined to explore every bit of it. For science, of course, not for the strangely adorable life-form who keeps popping up and trying to… flirt?

But Trillin’s world can be a dangerous place, and keeping Sian safe might risk drawing the attention of the Endless itself–which will swallow Trillin up along with all her dreams of humanity. Together, can this unlikely duo escape the Endless, figure out the optimum number of appendages, and maybe even find love?

How to Get a Girlfriend (When You’re a Terrifying Monster) is a sweet, low-heat F/F sapphic romance between a witch scientist and a shape-shifting Cthulhu monster. HEA guaranteed!

Romance, fantasy, monster romance, novella, adult

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[someone-is]

From Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer

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Less is Lost, illustration fo the New Yorker, AD Alexandra Zsigmmond https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/andrew-sean-greer-how-less-is-lost-finds-its-footing

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Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer

"Such is love."

[easterndaylighttime]

"No surprise, in fact: novelists, with their love of structure and language and symmetry in novels, are frequently mistaken about the people who inhabit the actual world, much as architects are about churches. What is acceptable as true in a novel - that the waitress, existing merely to drop soup on the protagonist, need only have a hairdo and a hand - is, in the real world, an unacceptable moral error. For while our middle-aged author would probably consider himself a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, certainly never a protagonist, the truth of existence has not quite pierced his soul: That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down."

- Andrew Sean Greer, Less is Lost