Bad Language is now available to pre-order from Peninsula Press (UK) or Asterism Books (US/Can): it’s a memoir and manifesto about language, power, violence and resistance (and a little bit of magic). It’s the most intimate & radical book I’ve written and I can’t wait for it to be out in the world. You can read an extract looking at shibboleth, a word that tells us a lot about how power uses words against us, in the wonderful Wasafiri magazine.

Join us Weds 12 November, 6.30pm at Burley Fisher Books London to launch it (free, booking essential). I’ll also be at No Alibis Belfast as part of Outburst Queer Arts Festival on Tues 18 November, 6.15 pm (£5 or free access ticket, in conversation with Stacey Gregg) and Bookhaus Bristol on Weds 26 November (£7, in conversation with Noreen Masud), with more events lining up for 2026.

And The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin is the second Le Guin collection I’ve co-edited with Sarah Shin for Silver Press – this is very different to Space Crone, collecting Le Guin’s wonderful hand-drawn maps with reflections, poems, interviews and recipes from contributors Federico Campagna, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Daniel Heath Justice, Bhanu Kapil, Canisia Lubrin, Una McCormack, David Naimon, Nisha Ramayya, Shoshone Collective, Standard Deviation, and Marilyn Strathern. The exhibition runs at the AA until 6 December.

Raising funds for #Valentines4Palestine, an indie bookstore and publisher fundraiser for PEN International’s Writers at Risk fund. You can get The God File direct from me: please send £2/£4 postage (UK/ROW) + ur donation (anything is welcome!) via Paypal, and leave your address in the note. If you don’t have Paypal, email me and we can sort it out. It will also be available in store at Burley Fisher Books, London for £5.

The God File is designed by Loose Associations and printed by Loose Associations and Barely Printing.

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An essay on art, bodies and fascism

In an era where identity politics is being weaponised against the very people it has sought to make visible, how can we reclaim complexity?

In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized modernist artworks. Named Entartete ‘Kunst’ – Degenerate ‘Art’ – it sought to define degeneracy, display it and destroy it.This act of violent appropriation is one episode in a long and ongoing history of the erasure of queer and non-normative cultures.

A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing works against this erasure; it is a manifesto – a catalogue for an exhibition that could never take place. Drawing on work from dissident sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to South African artist Zanele Muholi, as well as a century of queer cinema from Sergei Eisenstein to Pedro Almodóvar, So Mayer creates an archive of resistance.

How might we continue the joyous riot?

Praise for A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing

‘This book is a small revolution that becomes a party that you won’t be leaving soon. I believe we’re living in a time of fresh erasures, systemic violences working that global pandemic to take some other bodies out. Looking so freshly at the history of queerness, sexual deviance and the long long coordinated erasures of colonialism, bigotry and transphobia the essential non binary nature of art opens up right here like the wildly singing flower it is and So Mayer’s compelling version makes sense, makes me listen.’ – Eileen Myles

‘A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing is a reflective, creative walk through some of the worst – and best – people of the last hundred years, looking at the power of images and their relationship(s) with text. In a time of rising fascism, So Mayer highlights ways that artists have found strategies of resistance, and offers hope in historical analysis.’ – Juliet Jacques

‘A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing links together everyone and every thing from Magnus Hirschfield to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jewish primary school, Thatcher, AIDS, Ursula Le Guin, the Third Reich, and gender politics into an essay that is both readable and urgent. Only So Mayer could pull off such a feat – and link it all up to queer cinema from Derek Jarman to Paris Is Burning. A book of thoughts for an emergency – that is to say, for today – that is absolutely worth reading with haste, but not in a hurry.’ – B Ruby Rich

In further incredible news, Truth & Dare is now available in North America, alongside A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, thanks to fantastic indie champions Asterism. You can order direct from Asterism, and the book has also been sited in the wild at Powells, Portland OR (support bookseller unions!), Ursula K. Le Guin’s local and favourite bookstore so this is beyond imagining.

As does hearing the same evening that SPACE CRONE is in the 2024 Locus Awards‘ top ten Non-Fiction titles, as voted for in a public readers’ vote.  Locus, like so many magazines, is the home and nebula of so many short fiction writers, and it’s a huge honour to know that SPACE CRONE has connected with their discerning readers. We can’t wait for the hybrid awards ceremony on 22 June (virtual tickets available!), where Connie Willis will be a fierce feminist guest of honour.

*Mohamed (who wrote one of my 2022 faves, You Must Believe in Spring) at Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh

*Sam at Burley Fisher Books in London

Champions Blackwell’s Manchester put Cipher Press’s whole 2023 catalogue behind door 3 of their Advent Calendar

And given that the book starts in a local library and has a story about a sentient library, I’m massively chuffed to be on Leeds Libraries’ Best Reads of 2023!

Welcome to the Mayerverse, where possible is everything. TRUTH & DARE is my first short story collection, it’s completely out there, and I can’t wait for you to read it. I’ll post a sample story soon, but for now, here’s the blurb and cover reveal… There’s loads of events coming up: find out if there’s one near you!

Cornish mermaids take to the football pitch to protest warming seas. Trans students in Manchester searching for the perfect dick accidentally warp the fabric of spacetime. England’s worst pogrom comes for York’s particle collider, powered by bread and gender energy. On Bournemouth beach, a storm delivers an ancestor across oceans of time to sire a drowning descendant. The devil stands a drink at London’s famous gay pub, The Black Cap, while Artemis, in the guise of Joan of Arc, roams a life-or-death night in East Sussex.

Remember the Witchcraft Act of 1927, and the refugees that fled via cinema to defend the Republic of Catalunya? Of course not, it’s been written out of history. This is England, (but not?) as we know it.

A queer quantum tour through what was, what is, what could have been and may yet still come to pass, in a collection that braids high-wire believe-it-or-not memoir with cutting-edge science fiction (or is it?) from alternate timelines that vibrate very close to ours. Truth or dare? Both, always.

Amelia Brown reviewed the book under the title “Endlessly Queer,” for the exceptionally-named t’ART magazine, writing:

Again and again, Mayer finds astonishing new ways to talk about, to investigate, to explode gender and sexuality on the page and the collection is conceptually astounding… Allow time to go in all the directions you are being sent and then to come back to where you started. This collection confirms Mayer as a brilliant writer, thinker and storyteller, and it is a book to keep revisiting across a lifetime.

And Mazin Saleem interviewed me for his substack Artless (part 1 & part 2), which is an inbox fave (check out this fantastic piece on Milan Kundera and storytelling fast and slow), and encouraged me to talk about my favourite subjects: speculative fiction (and why we’re living it), speculative punctuation (take a breath), non-binary God, and generally doing things differently while living difference in solidarity. There’s also a gorgeous review that says:

The stories in Truth & Dare are rich and dense with information… woven into the stories and relevant to them, and is always too fascinating to be superfluous. And its presentation is stylistically glad-ragged and decked-out – don’t expect the spare, ‘deceptively simple’ prose cliché here – without the stories ever becoming jazz-noodley.

This richness is most pronounced in Mayer’s language. You get the impression reading Truth & Dare there’s nothing they can’t write. From sensory detail as specific as it is palpable, like a swimmer’s “body that ripples with those arabesques of light that rise up from the gritty floor of the pool”, to the lyrical – “the skeletons of mist-mapped hedgerows” – to defamiliarising reversals like “coming into sleep”.

Plus I share the murder-wall method of constructing a short story collection… Read part 2 to learn more!

Signed copies now available at these amazing indies:

Gay’s the Word
LRB Bookshop
National Theatre Bookshop
Riverside Bookshop
Brick Lane Books
The Common Press Bookshop
aaaaaaaaaand Burley Fisher Books