Failure to Comply: Updates & A Giveaway

Hello all! A brief interruption to our regularly-scheduled recommendations to bring you some news from publishing-land. First, I can’t believe Failure to Comply drops [with the shiny new cover you see above] in less than two months! I can’t wait to share it with all of you, and appreciate every single person who has requested an ARC, reviewed the book in advance, and/or listened to me rant about the stresses of attendant to this whole process.

If you’d like to preorder a copy, you can do so on Bookshop [this is my affiliate link], the evil place [please only use this if not u.s. based], and featherproof’s website. A portion of pre-order revenue from June will go to alQaws, a Palestinian LGBTQ organization. A portion from July, disability pride month, will go to the Wildflower Alliance, an anti-carceral respite, resource center, and peer-support space for Mad/psychiatrically disabled people.

Here’s some recent news/publicity excitement related to this moment in F2C’s publication.

Blurbs!

I kind of can’t believe it. Rivers Solomon told me they loved my book. I don’t think I’ll ever be the same. I’m putting theirs first, and then interspersing other blurbs throughout the remainder of this newsletter, and then those that remain at the bottom.

Rivers Solomon:

Failure to Comply is a striking and fresh examination of life under boot of hegemonic corporate society lovingly and ecstatically told. With language that sings and stings, this novel disrupts the status quo with the form and poetry of its telling. This book made me feel. Each sentence excited and thrilled. I loved it.

Free Books!

Enter the Goodreads Giveaway for a chance to win a free copy of Failure to Comply. Also, copies for reviewers are still available on Edelweiss, so be sure to scoop one up. If you’d like a review copy and would prefer to get in touch directly, and/or are interested in interviewing me or having me on your show/in your event, contact Addie Tsai (my publicist) and, for book copies, Jason Sommer, EIC of featherproof.

Briar Ripley Page:

Reading Cavar’s Failure to Comply, I couldn’t help but think of the recent David Cronenberg movie Crimes of the Future. Both deal with dystopias in which bodies and their modification are strictly regulated, and people with unauthorized bodies form a vibrant, perpetually imperiled subculture on the margins. Both use this conceit to speak metaphorically about the plights of trans and disabled people, although Failure to Comply’s characters are also presented as literally, textually disabled and trans. But, although Crimes of the Future is often accused of being a “weird movie,” Failure to Comply is undeniably much, much weirder. Cronenberg is super normal compared to this.

A major theme of this novel is language as a shaper of possibility: the ways in which the words someone has learned to use to think about something can dictate their perception of that thing and the limits of what they believe that thing is able to do or be. To this end, Cavar invents eir own conventions of vocabulary, grammar, and tense, and often resorts to devices like staggered text, repeated text, font shifts, and large swathes of white space to indicate when the narrator is having difficulty thinking, having their rebellious thoughts intruded upon by conditioning from the tyrannical RSCH, or unable to conceive of something in words at all. Along with Failure’s frequent narrative dislocations, which blur the narrator’s memories, the narrator’s fantasies, hypothetical alternate (?) pasts and futures, the story’s “factual present,” and more, this makes it a challenging book to read at times. It demands a reader’s careful attention, and it demands the sort of understanding and interpretive lens that is more commonly asked of us by poetry. (Fitting, as Cavar has been writing and publishing poetry for years.)

Failure to Comply rewards this attention with a deft, intelligent sense of humor and wordplay, acerbic Kafkaesque (or maybe Gilliamesque?) satire, and uncompromisingly radical politics around mind/body autonomy and liberation. There were insights here that startled me! And the central romance is a compelling, honest depiction of t4t disabled love and connection, including betrayal, resentment, anger, and causing harm to one another at times. Above all, what a joy to read a work of fiction— something that could be called a sci-fi novel, no less— that positively revels in the fact it’s made of words, of written language. That knows how to use that fact to trick and destabilize the reader like a magician, instead of just (or, often, at all) trying to convey vivid mental images of the various characters and scenes. That’s an exceedingly rare quality these days, and it’s always been rare to see it done ostentatiously yet well.

Apart from Crimes of the Future, I would strongly recommend Failure to Comply for people who liked mid-2010s indie games along the lines of Porpentine's twines (With Those We Love Alive, etc.), We Know the Devil, and Heaven Will Be Mine.

Events!

Things are moving really fast in this department. Catch me at the ALA Convention in San Diego on Saturday, June 29, where I’m moderating the panel “Queer Books in the Age of Book Bans.” At noon that day, I’ll be signing ARCs of Failure to Comply. You can find more info about where and when on your ALA schedule!

In August, I’ll be pretty busy. So far, I’m booked for August 8, 6:30-8pm at the fabulous Firestorm Books (Asheville, NC), and then on August 14, 7pm at the amazing Red Emma’s (Baltimore, MD) with

nat raum

. On August 26, I’ll be at the World Transsexual Forum in NYC. And that’s just the beginning!

Alex DiFrancisco:

In [sarah] Cavar's Failure to Comply, not only the world but the words we think of it in are destabilized and rebuilt. In this dystopia, one's body and mind are tightly policed, and deviance is punishable by isolation and dehumanization. In the wilds of the world beyond, outcasts mete out death to other outcasts, all in hopes of gaining the favor of horrific government overseers. But here, too, in the wilds, there is autonomy, love, and bodily determination found between the horrors. "We continue to push the darkness back," the narrator tells us, because we must. A stunning and terrifying work.

Press!

So many questions, so many interviews. So far, in addition to those generously offered on Goodreads and Storygraph, find press in the Chicago Review of Books, Harbor Review, and

SG Huerta

’s trans poetica. Much more to come.

Nora Hikari:

Incisive in its critique, radical in form, Cavar’s lacerating debut novel, FAILURE TO COMPLY, shepherds the reader through a Mad temporality to show us a world that is a haunting acceleration of ours. Here, the RSCH regime violently manipulates the lives and bodies of the Citizenry in desperate pursuit of pure, fascist perfection. Yet also like our own, it is a world woven with hope amidst grief, love amidst terror, softnesses among axe-blades. FAILURE TO COMPLY reflects in sharper angles, cranking the extant contradictions of our society up to 11, to instruct us how to see the hidden and resist the state of affairs. In conversation with texts like Lowry’s The Giver, Porpentine’s Psycho Nymph Exile, and Nørth’s Sea-Witch, Cavar has given us a new innovation in the technologies of dystopian art.

How to help?

If you’re interested in supporting me / the book, what can you do?

• If you have money: pre-order! If you have money tied to a book club or other organization –– VERY PRE-ORDER! And get in touch if you’d like me to visit your group.

• If you have money: become a premium newsletter subscriber. I have a lot of hats and jobs, and everything helps.

• If you don’t have money: request a copy from Edelweiss or from me. Enter the Goodreads giveaway. Tell your friends! And leave a review!

• If you’re in the area: come to an event! It’ll be fun. I will probably be wearing something silly.

• And for everyone….Request a copy at your library! This is huge. Help me live up to my “librarycard” namesake.

Lor Gislason:

Cavar has created a world so thick with doublespeak and stifling, constant surveillance that escape seems impossible –– and then gives us a weed among the pavement, hopeful and desperate, to live and discover what selfdom is.

Conclusion :)

Thanks so much for reading this far, and for your continued support for this newsletter, my other writing, and now the massive undertaking that is publishing a debut novel. I’m honored to share all of this with you, and having this audience on Substack and beyond has been my reading and writing life so much richer. Big hugs and more soon.