Loyalty is excited to host Zak Salih and Carter Sickels to celebrate the paperback release of Let's Get Back to the Party! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice or you can order the book on our website to be added to the event's registration list. Donations will go to BLM DC. There will also be an option to snag the book during the event.

A Most-Anticipated Book of 2021: BuzzFeed * The Millions * Cosmopolitan * Electric Literature * LGBTQ Reads * Paperback Paris

One of Advocate's “22 LGBTQ+ Books You Absolutely Need to Read This Year”

“An intimate saga that brims with necessary conversations about cultural identity.” —O, The Oprah Magazine, “32 LGBTQ Books That Will Change the Literary Landscape in 2021”

It is 2015, weeks after the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, and all Sebastian Mote wants is to settle down. A high school art history teacher, newly single and desperately lonely, he envies his queer students' to live openly the youth he lost to fear and shame.

When he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding in Washington, D.C., he can’t help but see it as a second chance. Now thirty-five, the men haven’t seen each other in more than a decade. But Oscar has no interest in their shared history, nor in the sense of be­longing Sebastian craves. Instead, he’s outraged by what he sees as the death of gay culture: bars overrun with bachelorette parties, friends cou­pling off and having babies. For Oscar, confor­mity isn’t peace, it’s surrender.

While Oscar and Sebastian struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world, each is drawn into a cross-generational friendship that treads the line between envy and obsession: Se­bastian with one of his students, Oscar with an older icon of the AIDS era. And as they collide again and again, both men must reckon not just with one another but with themselves.

Provocative, moving, and rich with sharply drawn characters, Let’s Get Back to the Party in­troduces an exciting and contemporary new talent.

Zak Salih lives in Washington, D.C. His writing has appeared in Crazyhorse, the Chattahoochee Review, the Millions, the Rumpus, and other publications. This is his first novel.

Carter Sickels is the author of The Prettiest Star (Hub City Press, 2020), winner of the Southern Book Prize, the Ohioana Book Award in Fiction, and the Weatherford Award, and the novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012). His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury), a 2013 Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, Guernica, and Catapult. He lives in Cincinnati.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Zak Salih and Carter Sickels for LET'S GET BACK TO THE PARTY