Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Beings

Beings

Masad, Ilana

Hardcover

Science FictionGeneral GLBTQIA FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $28.99

ISBN10: 1639737006
ISBN13: 9781639737000
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: Sep 23 2025
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.14
Height: 1.07 Width: 6.41 Depth: 9.48
Language: English

Winner of the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction

The alien abduction meets lesbian yearning novel that will restore your faith in the universe. Ilana Masad excavates the juiciness of historical archives and the otherworldly mysteries of the everyday in her most brilliant work yet. -Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy

Named a Most Anticipated Book by the LA Times, Washington Post, Autostraddle, Town and Country, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Lit Hub, and The Millions

In 1961, an interracial couple drove through the dark mountains of New Hampshire when a mysterious light began to follow them. Years later, through hypnosis, they recalled an unbelievable brush with extraterrestrial life. Unintentionally, a genre was born: the alien abduction narrative.

In Ilana Masad's Beings, the couple's experience serves as one part of a trio of intertwined threads: Known only by their roles as husband and wife, Masad explores the pair's trauma and its aftermath and questions what it means to accept the impossible. In the second thread, letters penned by a budding science-fiction writer, Phyllis, to her beloved, Rosa, expose the raw ache of queer yearning, loneliness, and alienation in the repressive 1960s-as well as the joy of finding community. In the present day, a reclusive and chronically ill Archivist attempts to understand a strange forgotten childhood encounter while descending into obsession over both Phyllis's letters and the testimony of the first alien abductees.

Over the course of a decade, Phyllis wrestles with her desires and ambitions as a lesbian writer, while the abducted couple grapple with how to maintain control of their narrative. All the while, the archive shatters and reforms, redefining fact and fiction via the stories left behind by the abductees, Phyllis, and the Archivist themself. Masad makes human what is alien and makes tangible what is hidden - sometimes by chance and sometimes intentionally - in the archive.

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