A hot fashion photographer hacks into girls’ computers with spyware and they love it. A teenage bride seethes with jealousy as her A-list husband tends to a Make-A-Wish child. A famous Twitter user is flushed down a toilet at a party in the Hills. This is the world of Parasocialite, where excitement and ecstasy abound — but happiness is harder to come by.
The debut poetry and prose collection from Brittany Menjivar.
Buy Parasocialite from Dream Boy Book Club
Read excerpts in SARKA, HAD, Spectra, and Dream Boy Book Club
Check out Brittany’s thoughts on Parasocialite in Black Lipstick Magazine, The Creative Independent, Hobart, Moral Crema, the Yale Daily News, and Voyage LA and on the Tales from the Mall podcast
Praise for Parasocialite…
Named one of Nylon’s “Must-Read Releases” for March 2024
“Youth has always been a foreign country but in Britt Menjivar’s hands, it’s a different planet. In the ecstatically doomed stories of Parasocialite, girlhood is sci-fi, dating apps are existential mirrors out of Ingmar Bergman, coolness is survival horror, and someone’s like seriously going to kiss deadmau5 tonight.” - Geoff Rickly, author of Someone Who Isn’t Me and lead singer of Thursday
“Parasocialite is the glamour-pop hot-pink glitter prose of the post-2010s internet age. A debut with a beautiful mixed-media approach, jumping from dystopian valley girl short stories to poems on female rage, lust, and Instagram-induced apathy. For some reason, the entire experience of reading this book reminded me of my fear that every UberEats delivery man who comes to my apartment door is going to murder me!” -Alex Kazemi, author of Pop Magick and New Millennium Boyz
“Crush the one-way media mirror! Transubstantiate your profile pic! Vaporwave the food court of flirtationships! And hyperventilate the wow & now of Parasocialite!” -Jack Skelley, author of Fear of Kathy Acker
“Complex. Haunted. Reminiscent of Sylvia Plath if she’d had a bit more of a glimmer in her eye.” -Chandler Morrison, author of Dead Inside and American Narcissus
“Hyperpop-shiny, whip-smart prose.” -Los Angeles Review of Books
“In this stinging short story collection, LA-based writer Brittany Menjivar takes to task the absurdity of the city and the modern era.” -Nylon
“Cycling between the mundane and the sublime, Menjivar’s small prayers probe the fantastical to access the reality of a Western woman’s becoming.” -Artillery
“Brittany’s writing makes you feel like you know her… [Parasocialite] offers us the mirror that makes our blemishes look like beauty marks.” -Black Lipstick Magazine
“[Menjivar] completely reinvents alt-lit in her own image.” -Angel City Review
“Felt like you’re hanging out with a friend, chit-chatting… so f—ing fantastic.” -Reading with Meg
Parasocialite
Photo by Samuel Braslow