Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

MIDDLE SPOON

Alejandro Varela

A Novel

A whip-smart, blazingly funny novel about heartbreak, unconventional love, and the way society could be, from National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela.

The middle-aged narrator is seemingly living the dream, with a doting husband, two precocious children, a fulfilling career, and all the trappings of a quiet, cushy, bourgeois life. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into the crushing depths of heartbreak for the first time and must face a world that still can't quite wrap its head around polyamorous relationships.

At once the story of a warmhearted but anxiety-ridden man's journey through rejection, MIDDLE SPOON is also a daring reimagination of what relationships, marriage, and family life could look like. Varela audaciously probes at the corners of society in desperate need of change from taboos around intimacy to the shortcomings of Oscar season, gluten-free food, and pop culture revealing the internal, interpersonal, and institutional forces that shape us.

Equal parts tear-jerking and laugh-out-loud hilarious, MIDDLE SPOON is a book for anyone who has longed, nursed a broken heart, or grappled with love at its messiest.

Alejandro Varela (he/him) is a writer based in New York. His debut novel, The Town of Babylon (Astra House, 2022), was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Point Magazine, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Harper's, and The Offing, among other outlets. Varela is an editor-at-large of Apogee Journal. He has a master's degree in public health.

Available products
Book Published 2025-09-09 by Viking

Comments

Nothing gets away from Alejandro Varela; every thought and detail, emotion and memory is taken apart to the atoms. The result is obsessive, explosive, heartbreaking, funny, and brilliant. Middle Spoon subverts the ordinary novel with intelligence and vulnerability, and with its arias of love and choruses of doubt, Varela has made a sly, analytical opera of the heart.

Winking and elliptical, Alejandro Varela's Middle Spoon tells the story of a man trying desperatelyand despairinglyto build a life whose conceits feel at once historically inevitable and on the brink of collapse. Like all scorned lovers, his narrator is a paranoid reader of reality: obsessive, dogged, zealous, terrified. Amid the romantic and familial restructuring, life begins, ends, and begins again. A gripping work of domestic fiction that freaks the emotional constraints of the genre.

Is there any better companion to our quaking world than this bright light of book? Fiercely funny, intelligent, unhinged, and humane, it stares right into the abyss with you, pointing out all there is still left to love.

The charming Alejandro Varela dares us with his utopian one-sided epistolary of a man who wants it all: a husband, a boyfriend, a trans kid, great real estate, and a membership in Brooklyn DSA. To some, perhaps a woke nightmare, to others the gluten-free bourgeois American dream. A vulnerable, nerdy, needy, and charismatic argument for the new novel of the age of chaos, where happiness can only exist at home, and so it must.

What a rollicking delight! In capturing the pain of heartbreak through the lens of a neurotic narrator, Alejandro Varela asks provocative questions about the shape of family and the nature of love. Not only does he pull all that off, but he does it in the epistolary form while digressing into political theory, quantum entanglement, and gay nightlife; and proving frequently hilarious. A triple-axel of a novel.

What a beautiful, timely novel. From the very first page, I found myself exhalingawed by Varela's sharp wit, originality, and the extraordinary care and intensity he brings to every sentence. He truly leaves it all on the page.

[Middle Spoon] explores the beautiful complexity of unorthodox, progressive family dynamics with tenderness and humor in equal measure. . . . A touching yet provocative queer love story about defying societal expectations.