The Fifth Wound

"Chocked full of winding, brilliant sentences sure to turn readers' minds inside out, this is a tale of trans love and fantasy that engages with the full scope of the good, the frightening, and the profound."--Isle McElroy, Vulture

"Transcending the limiting confines of not just society, but reality as well, Mattia's novel promises the reader an experience that recalibrates simplistic notions of truth and fiction, reality and illusion."--ES, The Millions

"Aurora Mattia's cosmic, intimate collection of coming of age trans love and fantasy tells different stories of time travel, transphobia and knifings, and T4T romance."--Sophia June, NYLON

"A speculative trans roman à clef about an interdimensional search for love, agency, and freedom from violence for trans people."--Liberty Hardy, BOOK RIOT

"Mattia flouts genre conventions with a fierce debut about love, trauma, and the publishing industry's gatekeepers."--Publishers Weekly

"I have never read anything like Aurora's writing. I would say less that I have read her work and say more that I have felt it, deep inside my body. It makes my heart ache. It also makes me long for a hard cock down my throat. Her work is a true spiritual experience, in that it causes me lust, grief, anger and ecstasy, sometimes one after the other and sometimes all at once."--Carta Monir

"The Fifth Wound contains some of the most deliriously, convulsively, terrifyingly beautiful writing I've ever seen. In the delicate, fleshy membrane of her prose, Mattia holds shards of pain, defiance, erudition, and above all passion - with all the biblical resonances of that word. The book is an astonishment."--Barbara Browning

"In presenting the transfemme as a systematically villainized siren, The Fifth Wound explores what can happen to us when our songs become twisted and warped, or else ignored. With its evocative, mythological imagery and unexpected turns of phrase, Aurora Mattia's take on the transfeminine confessional is unlike any I've read in recent memory."--Harron Walker

"The Fifth Wound is the tender scar of beauty achieved in language. Drawing on rich description, myth, bible stories, autofiction, breathy pillow talk, and breathless confession, it confects a mirror of glamor for the glamor of its author, but which is then delicately rendered onto the page, as a diptych, that the reader might gasp with pleasure. It's a special kind of transsexual camp, so over the top that what was the top is too far below to see, and we fly free."--McKenzie Wark

"This is a densely embroidered autofictional mythography, a surreal book of hours complete with self-flagellation, a Homeric urban odyssey, ecstatic and violent, tender, devastating, and triumphant, and a hallucinogenic yet visceral medical memoir. Mattia peels layer upon layer, cuts again and again, deep into the wound to spill the life inside."--Sarah Gerard

"Bold, lush, innovative, and extraordinary, Mattia's work daringly reimagines the very nature of storytelling. I've never read anything like The Fifth Wound--and I'll never forget it."--Téa Obreht

"If Gertrude Stein had a child with Virginia Woolf, they would produce an exquisite comma/semi-colon named Aurora Mattia. In Mattia's highly magnetic & hyperconscious world of say boudoir shadows, sugarglass, operating tables, transsexuality, auroral wounds, strident malefic forces, a sentence, a paragraph, an entire chapter does bleed; and, it bleeds hyperchromatically, hyperphilosophically, hyperinventively, and hyper-nonbinarily from The Fifth Wound's 'mouth, genitals, genitals, pores, eyes, ass, and nose' into her body's impeccable sheath."--Vi Khi Nao

"Reading The Fifth Wound is like being initiated into a gorgeous, femme mystery school. Her prose is simultaneously antique and so, so contemporary; I felt folded into worlds I didn't want to leave, worlds marked by longing and corporality, magic and power. Hypnotic and bold."--Michelle Tea