‘Alvina Chamberland writes with every part of herself. Hers is an honesty in perfect balance with generosity, and reading this book is like receiving an ongoing gift.’
- Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
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‘Like a transgender collision of Valerie Solanas and Michel Houellebecq, Alvina Chamberland writes with a passion, rage, and longing that blaze on the page. The urgency of her writing – her demand for connection, recognition, dignity – is sweetened by a playful sense of humour, a disarming candour, and an unfettered, eccentric charm. Hers is a voice to fall for.’
- Rob Doyle, author of Here Are the Young Men and Threshold
‘A work that literally begins with repeated refusals—NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!—ultimately mouths, against the odds, a throaty carnal YES to life in all its broken, impermanent glory. A beautiful book about being here, for now.’
- Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution
‘Reading Love the World or Get Killed Trying is like entering a universe in which the very best parts of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's writing-- the narrative drive, the tonality, the immediacy-- are fused to an unparalleled interrogation of raw human need. Every epoch creates its own people. With action spanning from Reykjavik to Berlin to Paris, Alvina Chamberland has given us a unique gift: a first person account from a child of the new dawn. A book of huge value.’
- Jarett Kobek, author of the international bestseller I Hate the Internet
‘Chamberland shows us, in immersive, stream of consciousness genius, that to be a transsexual is to love the world at all gnarly costs. A generous and staggering novel. Raw, intimate, necessary and poetic, Love the World or Get Killed Trying is an affirmation, a shimmering catalogue of a brilliant, particular mind that binds her experience to a universal swell. Lispector and Woolf's virtuosic daughter. A must-read.’
- Eliot Duncan, author of the 2023 National Book Award nominated novel Ponyboy
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‘Chamberland’s spiky storytelling manages to find dark humor in her accounts of routine harassment from cis men who grope her and demand casual sex (at a bar, a man appeals her rejection by saying, “But I am the greatest!”). This thrums with life.’
- Publisher's Weekly
‘An ode to the Complexity, Pain, and Beauty of Trans Life […] recasting tired, old literary tropes about the so-called limits of autofiction.’
- Vogue
‘An explosive work of autofiction that combines playful and poetic prose, zingy social commentary, and razor-sharp gallows humor.’
- Electric Lit
‘Exquisite [...] Chamberland's prose is relentlessly inventive. [...] A stream-of-consciousness prose poem of raw and unadulterated trans experience.’
- Xtra Magazine
‘An insistent and smiling lightheartedness that doesn't look away, deny or censor the dark the world casts. Alvina’s work stays with me in its shimmering, wild propensity for broad, spirited joy despite being the aim of violence again and again.’
- Polyester Zine
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‘One of the most enjoyable and memorable things I’ve read in years. Its mixture of charm, humour, rage, volatility, pathos and fun won me over within a couple of pages.’
- 3 AM Magazine
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‘Alvina’s stream-of-consciousness narration is sharp, cathartic, and so worth reading.’
- Them
‘Raw, generous, autofiction.’
- Ms. Magazine
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‘A glittering new literary talent.’
- Nylon
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‘This wild work of autofiction is an engrossing travelogue through a trans woman’s lens.’
- SF Chronicle
‘Embedded with passion, urgency, queer rage, and a non stop barrage of italics, capital lettering, and impactive punctuation ... This unique first-person narrated alternative novel is a shocking cold-water plunge just when you need it most.’
- Bay Area Reporter
