Neotenica is sentence-level sexy and surprisingly funny, my kind of thriller. Joon Oluchi Lee cracks open a window onto a very familiar Bay Area, yet one I've never before seen in fiction. I am obsessed with this book!-Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes The Form of A Mortal Girl
In Neotenica, observation is a way of life, a structure of not-quite-feeling. Wielding aestheticism as a gleeful tool for cultural inquiry, Joon Oluchi Lee undermines the ambivalence of mostly-affluent twentysomethings in the multicultural city by cataloging their detachment. Each chapter offers its own path between awareness and self-expression, boredom and curiosity, sensation and stasis. Clinically described, sexually candid, and viscerally detailed, this is a novel in fragments that builds toward a sadness almost like hope. If you know what this book is when you finish it, then you might not have really finished it.-Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Sketchtasy
Hot, electric, and funny as all hell. This tiny kaleidoscopic explosion of a book is a beautiful dream examining desire, race, tenderness, class, femininity, family, children, and dogs. Inject Neotenica into your fucking veins.-Casey Plett, author of Little Fish
Neotenica resists easy codifications. Through their refracting, and converging identities, the characters of Neotenica function in tandem; a warm ball of sweet matter hurtling through space and yearning for the freedom to exist as itself, not as its facsimile.-June Lei, The Brooklyn Rail
Neotenica is a tiny masterpiece. It's rowdy, alarming, sexy, and gives a deeper exploration of the messy, discursive texture of everyday life. Joon Oluchi Lee has written a novel with such verve and tenderness that you will become obsessed by page one.-Cristina Rodriguez, Deep Vellum Books
Lee (Lace Sick Bag) trains a droll, analytical eye on sex, desire, and gender in this delicious avant-garde novella.-Publishers Weekly
Neotenica trolls desire like a twitter thread but it reads with far more presence and vulnerability. This novella, the third work of fiction by Joon Oluchi Lee is a hot read of the mundane as characters encounter one another in details glowing under blacklight. Told in vignettes, the narratives pivot around the only named character: Young Ae, a Korean born ballet dancer and kaleidoscopes through her straight, though gay-cruising, Korean American husband; his hook up; her hook up; a flirtation; a dog; a child. It is a book meant to be answerless and a temperate tangle but the impressions left unearth sensation and possibility through embracing femininity and altering -craft-wise and desire wise-where a climax can be.-Corinne Manning, Lambda Literary
In all, Neotenica presents itself as a balletic maze of grace and wonder in the minutiae; the erotic poetry of the body and its attendant quality of tactility; the sometimes chuckling, stark but never unpleasant, clear-eyed but not vulgar...What remains is a certain glib playfulness and delight in sensation that makes Neotenica unpretentious but uncavalier, light-footed yet unflinching, and genuinely surprising.-Marilyn Tran, Singapore Unbound
A totally original narrative that could perhaps only be published by a dynamic, independent press.-Stephen Sohn, Asian American Literature Fans
A series of vignettes from the life of a married couple in early 2000s SF. A dainty 100 pages of characters exploring identity & navigating various things like random encounters, casual sex, arranged marriage, public transit. It's filthy and funny and unexpected and entirely delightful.-Book Snack
