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Musings on Modern Intimacies
by Manuel Betancourt
Witty and winkingly playful, Manuel Betancourt's Hello Stranger explores modern queer romance and the expansive possibilities of ephemeral intimacies.
"Hello stranger." As an opening line, you really can't ask for better.
Hello Stranger is a book about chance encounters—at a bar, through social media, in a bathhouse—and what a stranger can reveal about who we are and who we could still yet be. A stranger, after all, is a site of endless possibilities.
As Manuel Betancourt looks back on his past relationships, he turns to characters and narratives that helped him question notions of what monogamy and coupledom (and relationships and marriage) can and should look like. From films like Before Sunrise and Cruising to the poetry of Frank O'Hara and the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, Betancourt uses pop culture to make sense of the alluring prospect of forging intimacies with strangers—even, or especially, the strangers within ourselves.
At once a personal excavation and a broad cultural critique, Betancourt grapples with everything from online sexting and real-life cruising to divorces and throuples. Hello Stranger examines the intimacies we crave, value, and oftentimes destroy with rote familiarity.
"The chapters strike an exhilarating balance between steamy and cerebral...The result is an intoxicating invitation to push beyond one's comfort zone in pursuit of pleasure." —Publishers Weekly
"Betancourt is a fluid stylist, demonstrating his intelligence in investigating subject matter that most readers—queer or otherwise—can relate to. As a witty, intuitive observer of human behavior, he validates rather than demonizes the delicious recklessness of meeting strangers and the intimate thrill of the anonymous encounter ... A rewarding and insightful exploration of risk, desire, and anonymity." —Kirkus Reviews
"Betancourt is funny, warm, and brilliant. Reading this collection of essays is like sitting down with your most well-read friend, firing away with connections that show how much our experiences have in common across time and space." —Booklist
"Betancourt beautifully captures the push and pull of intimacy, where love's contradictions can both comfort and confine—a compelling exploration of connection and what's revealed about ourselves in pursuit of it." —Ryan Fitzgibbon, editor of A Great Gay Book
"What fun! Betancourt encourages us to flirt with a stranger. Inside that interaction is the kernel of so much of queer culture. Strangers can help us to shed shame and rethink our self-image. They can teach us how to be a good neighbor and how to extend care and empathy to people we meet. In Hello Stranger, Betancourt uses film to pick apart comforting fantasies about how relationships are made and sustained, and in the process, he puts strangers in the spotlight, right where they belong." —Marcus McCann, author of Park Cruising
"Hello Stranger is a thoughtful and fearless exploration of the oft-overlook relationships that matter as much, if not more, than our romantic relationship with our 'better half.' With his brilliant examinations and keen observations, Betancourt illustrates what we might discover about ourselves (and others) when we start unpacking these intimate (and sometimes fleeting) relationships through an unfamiliar lens." —Zachary Zane, author of Boyslut
This information about Hello Stranger was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Manuel Betancourt is a queer Colombian culture writer and film critic. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BuzzFeed Reader, Los Angeles Times, Film Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books and GQ Style, among others. Manuel is the author of The Male Gazed (Catapult, 2023), Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall (Bloomsbury Press, 2020), and a contributing writer to the Eisner Award-nominated graphic novel series, The Cardboard Kingdom (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2018 & 2021).
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