Posted Up

Mercedes is forty-three years old. She has been doing this for twenty-five years. "This" is survival sex work on Chicago's South Side. "This" is running a household of Black and Latina trans women — teaching them how to screen clients, how to set rates, how to stay alive in a city that has never been designed for their survival. "This" is being the person everyone calls when the math doesn't work, when the system fails, when the door needs to be open and the pot roast needs to be on the table and somebody needs to say: sit down, eat, you belong here. Posted Up is the first novel in a five-book literary fiction series, each narrated by a different woman in Mercedes's orbit. In Book One, Mercedes tells her own story — in a voice that is controlled, deliberate, and devastating in its precision. When a new girl arrives at her door and an old threat resurfaces from the streets, Mercedes must navigate the distance between the woman she's built herself into and the woman she was before the building started. This is not rescue fiction. Nobody is saved. Nobody is condemned. The novel renders the daily architecture of survival sex work — the economics, the geography, the relationships, the humor, the violence, the tenderness — with the structural ambition of literary fiction and the emotional specificity of a writer who understands that these women's lives are not case studies. They are lives. Posted Up is for readers of Sapphire, Sandra Cisneros, Hanya Yanagihara, and Janet Mock. It is for anyone who believes that the communities most often reduced to statistics deserve to be rendered as literature. Book One of five. Each novel stands alone. Together, they form a single portrait of a family the world doesn't call a family — but that functions as one, fiercely and completely.