INTERVIEWS, ESSAYS, ETC.

ESSAYS & SHORT THINGS
• In Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes feature, an annotated playlist of songs that appear in the novel or tap into its time and feelings
• On Claudia Rankine and David Treuer for Nylon’s feature “12 Authors On the Books That Best Represent America”
• The Year in Reading, for The Millions
• Writers Recommend: have a dog, at Poets & Writers
• On queer scenes in writing and life, at OUT Magazine
• On writing about home, for Powell's Books. 

INTERVIEWS
• In Autostraddle, “Stray City is a Love Story about Friendship, Portland, and Chelsey Johnson’s Queer Community,” and a companion article of “Eight Books to Read if You Loved the Queer Community of Stray City”
• Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Stephanie Burt
• LGBTQ&A podcast with Jeffrey Masters
• The Book Talk podcast goes in-depth (first half interview, second half readers discuss)
• On Nicole Georges' podcast Sagittarian Matters 
• In the Los Angeles Times with Carrie Brownstein
• Shondaland with Jami Attenberg
• "Reading With..." on Shelf Awareness
• A long conversation with Bustle
• At Tin House with Leni Zumas
• In conversation with Michelle Tea for them 
• Lambda Literary with Carter Sickels
• Into with Trish Bendix
• With Caroline Leavitt
• An in-depth Facebook Live video with Harper Academic

REVIEWS AND LISTS
• The American Library Association names Stray City one of the eight titles on their 2019 Reading List, taking top honors in the category Women’s Fiction (aka Women’s Lives and Relationships.) Librarians! The best!
• Autostraddle includes Stray City in their 50 Best LGBT Books of 2018
• Real Simple names Stray City as one of their favorite books of 2018
• For Publishers Weekly, Michelle Tea includes Stray City in “Ten Essential Books about Contemporary Queer Life in America”
• "A richly satisfying read, with so many lines worthy of underlining," says the Minneapolis Star Tribune
• "Stray City Deals With Queer Reality, Not Queer Theory": a beautiful personal essay in Electric Literature by Emma Eisenberg
• The New York Times Book Review! "...Another of the novel’s delights — how clearly Johnson delineates the psychosexual dualities and prejudices of our culture, how effortlessly she instructs even as she entertains."
• Shelf Awareness says "Johnson writes with an energy and emotional intelligence that is at once unapologetic in its honesty and yet tender in its delivery of it. Stray City is a love letter to community, to a nostalgia-inducing era of Portland history, and to anyone who has ever gone looking for one's self and found it in an unlikely place."
• Stray City is officially OUT! LitHub and BuzzFeed have both run excerpts. Reviews at Bookpage and Signature Reads. A Powell's Pick of the Month, a Read It Forward's Favorite Reads of the Month, and a Gertie Book Club quarterly book box selection.
• Stray City has been chosen by independent booksellers as an Indie Next pick for April 2018.
• O Magazine lists Stray City among "10 Titles to Pick Up Now" in their April 2018 issue
• Harper's Bazaar, Entertainment Weekly, Fast Company, and LitHub all feature Stray City on their March must-read lists.
• The Washington Blade calls Stray City "the queer anti-'Gilmore Girls' you didn't know you needed."
• A Goodreads' Best Books of the Month for March 2018! 
• Library Journal puts Stray City on its Spring/Summer Best Debuts list and PopSugar lists it among Best New Books for March
• In the March issue of Marie Claire, Samantha Irby writes, "This novel has everything: the circa-'99 lesbian indie-rock scene! Zines! Answering machines! . . . Our 90s nostalgia is hella high these days, and this tender, funny story made our aging hipster hearts sing."
• Starred review in the Feb. 1 Booklist! One excerpt: "Spanning several eras, up to Andy’s present day, this is a coming-out and coming-of-age story; a surprise-I’m pregnant story; a will- they-or-won’t-they love story; and an ode to a time and place we think we’ve heard everything about—and it’s all utterly fresh. Portraying Portland and Andy’s chosen family with feeling and immense charm, Johnson paints Andy’s love—for her kid, her city, herself, and others—in all its thorny nuance and surprising glory."
• Delighted to make the estimable The Millions Most Anticipated list! (1.08.18) 
• Stray City scores a strong review in Publisher's Weekly ("smart and delightful debut") and lands on more 2018 lists, this time in Autostraddle and the Chicago Reader. (1.06.18)
• More lists! Previews now in Publishers Weekly, the Huffington Post, Bitch, and Nylon, which said, "Radically funny and truly insightful, Johnson's debut novel...is a brilliant emotional roller coaster of a book, exploring what it means to create and sustain a family, and the difficulties of loving people—including yourself."  (12.29.17)
• This elegy for a lost notebook is now up on Hilobrow. It's part of their Lost Objects series, which asks, Why do some objects keep coming to mind, long after they’ve vanished from our lives? (12.2.17)
• Stray City is included on BookRiot's list of 101 Books Coming Out in 2018 That You Should Mark Down Now (11.27.17)

STRAY CITY: A NOVEL

Find Stray City at your local indie bookstore, or order from Powell's, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or direct from HarperCollins. 

Read excerpts in BuzzFeed and LitHub.

A warm, funny, and whip-smart debut novel about rebellious youth, inconceivable parenthood, and the complications of belonging—to a city, a culture, and a family—when none of them can quite contain who you really are.

All of us were refugees of the nuclear family . . .

Twenty-four-year-old artist Andrea Morales escaped her Midwestern religious childhood—and the closet—to create a home and life for herself within the thriving but insular queer underground of Portland, Oregon. But one drunken night, reeling from a bad breakup and a friend’s betrayal, she recklessly crosses enemy lines and hooks up with a man. Mayhem ensues.

A thoroughly modern and original anti-romantic comedy, Stray City is an unabashedly entertaining literary debut about the families we’re born into and the families we choose, the complexity of identity, finding yourself by breaking the rules, and making bad decisions for all the right reasons.

PRAISE FOR STRAY CITY

"Engrossing . . . STRAY CITY makes an expansive canvas, diverse and colorful, for a vibrant portrait of a woman coming into her own, in a city also coming into its own, brimming with music, art and beauty. Johnson's debut is a thoughtful and joyous literary experience, one that celebrates its characters and liberally rewards its readers." —The New York Times

"Radically funny and truly insightful, Johnson's debut novel, about a lesbian who finds herself pregnant after an ill-conceived one-night stand with a man, is a brilliant emotional roller coaster of a book, exploring what it means to create and sustain a family, and the difficulties of loving people—including yourself." —Nylon 

"Johnson's writing is very funny yet emotionally tender, and ultimately is a heartwarming celebration of found families and our desire to belong." —BuzzFeed

"This novel has everything: the circa-'99 lesbian indie-rock scene! Zines! Answering machines! . . . Our '90s nostalgia is hella high these days, and this tender, funny story made our aging hipster hearts sing." —Samantha Irby, Marie Claire

"A propulsive, compassionate, hilarious novel about coming of age at the fraught intersections of Midwestern family norms, punk rock community, and LGBTQ politics." —Leni Zumas, Tin House

"This is a richly satisfying read, with so many lines worthy of underlining. Johnson... brings both time-tested storytelling and 21st- century originality to her work." —The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Spanning several eras, up to Andy’s present day, this is a coming-out and coming-of-age story; a surprise-I’m pregnant story; a will- they-or-won’t-they love story; and an ode to a time and place we think we’ve heard everything about—and it’s all utterly fresh. Portraying Portland and Andy’s chosen family with feeling and immense charm, Johnson paints Andy’s love—for her kid, her city, herself, and others—in all its thorny nuance and surprising glory.” —Booklist, starred review

“[A] gritty, lively exploration of gay life in Portland.” —Entertainment Weekly

"A lively first novel." —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Both an ode to and critique of the modern American family.” —Harper’s Bazaar

"This heartwarming debut novel from Johnson touches on the divide between the family that is given to us and the families we choose." —Real Simple

"The queer anti-Gilmore Girls you didn’t know you needed. . . . . [A] warm, hysterical story." —The Washington Blade

"[Johnson] dive[s] head-first into the hearts and minds of some truly unforgettable characters. If you love a book that draws you in with masterful language and deep understanding of the human spirit, you're certainly in luck.” —Bustle

“Stray City is an incredibly touching debut novel that gets at the age-old question we’re all navigating: How do we understand the concept of ‘home?’” –Bitch

“A charming exploration of identity, and a wonderful homage to Portland’s scrappy, punk past.” —LitHub

“An engaging, immersive saga of family, chosen and otherwise.” —HuffPost

“A humorous and heartfelt exploration of sexual identity and unconventional families.” –The Millions

"Stray City brings an original angle to the trope of exploring the family you’re born into and the family that you choose. More than a coming-out novel (though it’s that, too), this debut is an insightful and entertaining love letter to the LGBTQ community." —Bookpage

 Stray City has it all. As funny as it is moving; as joyful, as radically communal, as it is lonesome, the novel covers the varied complications of place, home, sex, city—but mostly it's about the necessary and unexpected revolutions of the self, and about how queerly we make our way through this world. Honestly, one of the most absorbing, finely-tuned books I’ve had the pleasure of falling down into. Chelsey Johnson is a wonder.
—Justin Torres, bestselling author of We the Animals

Written with wit and sensitivity and exquisite emotional intelligence, Stray City is an absolute pleasure to read. Chelsey Johnson is one of the most refreshing new voices in literature.
—Jami Attenberg, New York Times–bestselling author of The Middlesteins and All Grown Up

A winsome novel about love and belonging—and the possibility of discovering both in the most unlikely of places, and among the most unexpected people. Tender and smart, Stray City is a fantastic debut from a huge talent.
—Cristina Henríquez, bestselling author of The Book of Unknown Americans

A love letter to Portland and to the youthful effort of world-making that created its important queer culture in the '90s, Stray City is a gorgeous, funny, sharply spot-on tale of growing up and making family again and again and again.
—Michelle Tea, award-winning author of Valencia and Black Wave

Insightful and brilliant, Stray City explores the stickiness of doing what’s expected and the strange freedom born of contradiction. I tore through this novel like an orphaned reader seeking a home in the ragtag yet shimmering world that Chelsey Johnson so wondrously brings to life.
—Carrie Brownstein, New York Times–bestselling author of Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl