Performer Non Grata

Risk Bonaventura, a successful but insecure investment banker, moves his family from New York to Madrid to buy his way into bullfighting (a brutal childhood dream meant to edify his ego) only to be struck by conscience mid-fight and left seriously injured by the bull.

Published by Rebel Satori Press

Cover design by Igor Karash

What They’re Saying

  • "Alessandro has written a psychoanalytic farce on our strange political moment, using the Bonaventura family as a decoder. I laughed and groaned my way through this family’s mishaps. Alessandro is working in an endangered queer genre; it’s rare to find such Sadean wickedness and wit in a contemporary novel"

    — Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased

  • "By turns biting and grotesque, audacious and cruel, Performer Non Grata pierces through the absurdity of how and why we keep deifying masculinity."

    — Manuel Munoz, three-time O Henry Award winner and author of What You See in The Dark

  • "Brian Alessandro’s satire is warm but stinging. His view of toxic masculinity is accurate and compassionate. He is inventive, funny, odd. He’s speaking to our crazy times."

    — Edmund White

  • "In sharp, nuanced prose, Brian Alessandro cuts to the core of the human psyche. Strident and imaginative all at once, this novel is a welcome throwback to the kind of unchained fiction that makes so many readers want to write in the first place. As such, Performer Non Grata offers itself up as a vivid, necessary montage of desire, narcissism, and toxic masculinity."

    — Chris Campanioni, editor-in-chief of PANK and author of The Internet is For Real

  • “Brian Alessandro’s Performer Non Grata is a face-meltingly perverse satire-cum-farce, a sort of contemporary love child of Wilde and Burroughs, streaming with blood, splooge, booze, snot, bitcoin, litcoin—and prancing with turgidity. Theater as novel, and vice versa, with no guide for determining the gaslight from the candelabra, the performance from the performance-within-the-performance, colonized from colonizer, faux-minist from feminist, ancient myth from YouTube voyeurism, victim from perp. Who, or what, is there to root for beneath the effluvial wreckage? In a novel whose allegory is the bullfight, I ended up cheering for the bull!”

    — Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize winning author of frank: sonnets

  • “A madhouse novel, both scathing and unforgettably tender, in which the real and the absurd are one…Alessandro is a virtuoso.”

    —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Drown, and This Is How You Lose Her

  • Lambda Literary

    One of the most anticipated books of April 2023.

  • "It melted my face off!"

    Gal Beckerman, Books Editor for The Atlantic

  • Considering a Place in Fiction for Badly-Behaved Queers

    The Gay & Lesbian Review

  • Dennis Leroy Kangalee Reviews Performer Non Grata

    The Passion of an Outside Artist

  • Reading With Brian Alessandro

    Shelf Awareness

  • Tom Cardamone Reviews Performer Non Grata

    Out in Print

  • Newsday

    Review

Actor and two-time winner of the Audio Publishers Association's Best Male Narrator Audie Award Edoardo Ballerini reads Part II Chapter I of Brian Alessandro's novel, "Performer Non Grata."