My Books
By turns a documentary on the personal, a dark comedy of manners, and an extraordinary examination of what it means to live in America.
–Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Ryan Rivas has lived in Orlando’s Colonialtown North neighborhood for over a decade. In Nextdoor in Colonialtown, he pairs photos of the neighborhood with conversations assembled from the area’s Nextdoor.com posts. The result is at turns absurd and abject, goofy and gothic, paranoid and profound. By displacing his familiar surroundings, Rivas evokes the broader White imaginary underlying colonialism and suburbanization.
An exquisitely strange novella.
–Caroline DeBruhl, Creative Loafing Tampa
All his life, the unnamed narrator of this darkly comic and deeply strange novella has believed he’s a lizard person. After an incident at work, he’s sent to a coastal resort for intensive therapy to confront the truth of his peculiar identity. But amid days of lounging by the pool with his fellow recoverings, intensive sessions with a therapist, and the appearance of a love interest with ill intentions, his self-discovery remains elusive.