A Beard Paradox

“Schimel’s eroticism infuses a whole life, from mechanical fucking, to the night air, to a tan line. The stories conjure a world in a sentence. If Hemingway wrote erotica. Personal and sublime.” – Susie Bright

In its fifth printing in Spain, the bestselling Spanish-language collection of homoerotic microfiction by Lawrence Schimel A Beard Paradox has also been published in Slovenian translation. Select stories from the book have been published in Sandra Kingery’s English translation in periodicals such as Words Without Borders, Barcelona Review, Hawai’i Review, and Río Grande Review, as well as numerous anthologies.

Finally, the entire volume is available to English readers for the first time.

Lawrence Schimel is a bilingual (Spanish/English) author and anthologist, who has published over 130 books in various genres. He has won the Lambda Literary Award twice and has been a finalist 13 other times in numerous categories. In addition to his writing, he is a prolific literary translator, into English and Spanish. He has translated over 160 books in many different genres by writers such as George Takei, Danez Smith, Trifonia Melibea Obono, and Maggie Nelson. He served two terms as the co-chair of the Publishing Triangle and co-programmed the OutWrite queer literary conference in the 90s.

He has also won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award and been a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award, the Eisner Award, among other honors. Some of his other queer titles include the children’s books Early One Morning and Bedtime, Not Playtime!, the short story collections The Drag Queen of Elfland and Two Boys in Love, the graphic novel Vacation in Ibiza, and the anthologies First Person Queer (with Richard Labonté), Switch Hitters: Lesbians Write Gay Male Erotica and Gay Men Write Lesbian Erotica (with Carol Queen), Kosher Meat, and The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica. His writing has been translated into over 60 languages, including Luxembourgish, Maltese, Faroese, and Xhosa.

He divides his time between his native New York and Madrid, Spain.

Sandra Kingery, the W. Gibbs McKenney Chair in International Studies and Professor of Spanish at Lycoming College, has translated nearly 30 books. Her translations with students include Xánath Caraza’s Red Teardrop (with Aaron Willsea, 2023 International Latino Book Awards Gold Medal for Best Fiction Book Translation – Spanish to English) and Rubén Varona’s Dust from the Mountain Range (forthcoming, Medio Siglo Press). Kingery’s translation of Pablo Remón’s The Treatment was staged at Lycoming College in 2022.