Love the World
or
Get Killed Trying

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOEMI PRESS BOOK AWARD IN PROSE

‘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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Through playful poetic prose, sharp social commentary and self-deprecating gallows humor Love the World or Get Killed Trying dives into the mind of Alvina, a trans woman on the eve of turning 30. The reader is invited to follow her journey through the breathtaking wilderness of Iceland and busy city boulevards of Berlin and Paris as she probes questions of eternity, sexuality, longing, death, love, and how hard it is to remain soft when you’re a ceaseless target of straight men’s secret lust and open disgust.

Harking back to the existential lyrical style of Clarice Lispector, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Jean Genet this novel tackles universal issues through a trans woman’s specific lens – insisting on these experiences speaking to far more than just issues of sexuality and gender. Reaching its climax through an urgent wildfire scream-of-consciousness, cry-of-love-manifesto, Love the World or Get Killed Trying is a raw and vulnerable work of multigenre autofiction; abstract in the sense of poetically digging beneath the surface, and experimental in the sense of trying to find out new things and express them in new ways, while concretely asserting that if trans women one day collectively outed every man who seeks them out, a full-blown revolution would ensue by nightfall.

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘Alvina’s stream-of-consciousness narration is sharp, cathartic, and so worth reading.’

- Them

‘Raw, generous, autofiction.’

- Ms. Magazine

‘A glittering new literary talent.’

- Nylon

‘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

Alvina Chamberland

Alvina Chamberland is a Swedish-US American author of predominantly literary autofiction. In 2015, Bokförlaget ETC published her co-authored book Allt som är Mitt: Våldtäkt, Stigmatisering och Upprättelse (English translation: All That Is Mine: Rape, Stigmatization and Reparation ), which received a grant from the Swedish Arts Council. In 2018, her novel Utelåst – Uppväxtnostalgi för freaks ( Locked Out – A Nostalgic Account of Growing Up for Freaks ), a parody of the coming-of-age genre, was published by Dockhaveri Förlag. She resides between Athens and Berlin and has no real hobbies, only intensity and serenity. Love the World or Get Killed Trying is her English-language debut.