Book Description
A novel about art, desire, and mortality, Casanova 20: Or, Hot World follows a young man isolated by his extraordinary beauty and his strange friendship with an older painter
Cursed by an extreme and unrelenting beauty, Adrian has drawn the frenzied attention of adoring strangers since childhood. As a twenty-nine-year-old in New York City, he spends his days drifting between affairs with women (and occasionally men) who provide him with everything he needs, from spending money to luxurious vacations to even, once, a mini yacht. With this generosity comes a dangerous possessiveness that often puts him at risk of much worse than heartbreak. But as people begin removing their masks in the spring of 2021, Adrian’s aimless sexual availability is interrupted by a shocking discovery: He is no longer beautiful.
Across the country, Adrian’s best friend and companion, Mark, a world-famous painter, has returned to the family home in rural Northern California. He’s faced with his own horrible revelation: He’s dying from the same mysterious disease that will soon take his mother and sister.
Despite the depth of their platonic romance, neither man reveals his fate to the other. Feeling as if he’s disappearing from sight, Adrian searches for answers among his thousands of lovers. In a race against his failing body, Mark becomes obsessed with watching fifty-two VHS tapes of unknown origin, left to him by his sister, before it’s too late.
“An astounding writer, seemingly unconstrained by taboos and waist-deep down in the maw of life” (Torrey Peters), Davey Davis presents a modern-day Casanova figure grappling with what it means to find true intimacy when his very existence means constant exposure to the world’s violent desire.
DAVEY DAVIS is the author of Casanova 20: Or, Hot World, X, and the earthquake room. They live in Brooklyn.
Praise For This Book
Los Angeles Times, A Book to Read This MonthW Magazine, A Fall Must-Read
Alta, A Fall Most Anticipated Read
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
"Casanova 20 is a vibes novel . . . Davis wants to mimetically enact the lockdown’s stasis, boredom and pain. The novel is a study in repetition, like a pianist playing scales. Several passages depict Mark’s new illness-induced routine: wake up, chart his pain, pet his cat, perform excruciating bowel movements, spend the day in bed. The attention to bodily fluids would make Ottessa Moshfegh proud . . . By setting a vaccine-related loss of beauty and an artist’s terminal affliction against the backdrop of Covid, Davis frames the pandemic as a turning point in our national anhedonia—or, perhaps, another extension of queer communities’ circumscribed pleasures, going back at least as far as the AIDS plague." —Ryan Chapman, The New York Times Book Review
"This third novel from Davey Davis is also their best, which is saying something—their previous books, The Earthquake Room and X, were both marvels . . . Davis’ writing is nothing short of beautiful, and the book is unsparing but compassionate. Novels this great don’t come around very often." —Michael Schaub, NPR
"Intoxicating writing—a banger on every page." —Maggie Lange, W Magazine
"Casanova 20 evokes the overwhelming feelings of loss and alienation that have accompanied the pandemic, and connects the pandemic’s deaths and disappearances to those of the AIDS epidemic, as well as the toll of other autoimmune diseases, while asking big questions about beauty and ugliness, desire and intimacy . . . Casanova 20 is the first novel I’ve read that really contends with both the material concerns and the emotional effects of the pandemic." —H Felix Chau Bradley, Xtra
"Casanova 20 is an achievement in intimacy and desire, conjuring a tender story about two men loving against all hope in a world that is in equal parts beautiful and cruel." —Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
"A story that digs unflinchingly into the intimacy of both sex and illness . . . Davis's characters are so haunted by the past that it often becomes syntactically interwoven with the present . . . Casanova 20 achieves this interjectory effect, punching through the well-charted terrains of sex, death, art, pleasure, and beauty with hedonistically lived-in details and incisive observations that rub the reader right up against the skin and the bedpan." —Annie Lou Martin, The Whitney Review
"The novel’s conceit is big, its prose attention-grabbing, its sexual joie de vivre propulsive, but, in the end, the most compelling part is the tender nuance of its central characters as they love both each other and the world. The result is a rare gem of a book—afraid of neither joy nor sorrow and patient enough to find the human heart inside all its gorgeous language. A show-stopping novel that carries within it a quiet, steadfast heart." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Casanova 20 is another stunner from one of the great writers of haunting fiction for our violent, sick, sometimes beautiful world. Davis has written a melancholy, lonely, fully embodied novel about art and desire and the self and how people get through. I was spellbound by every page of this uneasy and utterly surprising book." —Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility
“Davey Davis is a master of moods, beauty rippling into unease like—as in one of Davis’s own metaphors—a firework display reflected on dark and shifting water.” —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
"Enrapturing, entrancing dual narrative about bodily betrayals both real and imagined, fixation, neurosis, beauty, charisma, hotness, youth, death, impermanence, needs, wants, desire, regret, being proactive, being a vector, asking and not asking for what you actually want, and being and not being gay—sometimes at the same time!" —Harron Walker, author of Aggregated Discontent
