“The Queen’s Ball ingests taboo as fuel for a baroque and spiraling story of love in its most prismatic and absurd iterations. Through frightening distortions and hallucinogenic twists of fate, a demented circus of artists, writers, gender-hustling aesthetes, and religious fanatics collude in a glorious discombobulation of propriety and convention. I have never laughed this much at a novel that could somehow shock even the most irreverent of libertines, demanding, at times, absolute disgust. Truly nasty work. Iconic.”
—Juliana Huxtable
“The Queen’s Ball is a heedless novel of transformation of bodies and tenses, a novel of enormity and loss which is, in the end, about writing a novel. Copi is a feckless romantic-his theme is the persistence of love in the phantasmagoria. His tender psychos hurtle through increasingly outré adventures that seem to expand and contract like accordions. Here is crime à la française. Here is a great queen’s verbal aggression, radiant detail, and joyous destructive energy.”
—Robert Glück
“In The Queens’ Ball, a globetrotting, time-jumping, and oneiric “crime novel,” Copi satirizes and destroys himself: a successful, famous, bourgeois expatriate cartoonist living large in the glamour of gay Paris, New York, Ibiza, and Rome in the 1960s.”
—Federico Perelmuter, Southwest Review
“How to resist these delirious parodies, this caustic humor that bows down before absolutely nothing?”
—Le Nouvel Observateur
“Copi is the sassiest, most decadent, poised, unpredictable, violent, galling, and marvelous of any author in the past quarter century.”
—Charlie Hebdo
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