• Age: 16 to 18
• Grade: 11 to 12

Two teenagers shoot amateur porn. Coworkers pool hop after dark. A call centre employee scrambles to keep their shitty job. Sweetheart tries something new in order to pay rent. A group of friends get stoned and go to the movies. Did you hear about the drag BBQ on Saturday? Everyone’s going to be there, and everyone’s going to bring an amazing look.

Set in the twin backdrops of Toronto and Montreal, Our Lady of Perpetual Realness is a glimpse into the lives of contemporary queer youth. Equal parts wry and tender, these six stories follow young, gay men of colour through the confusing, bleak, and often humorous aspects of their day-to-day lives as they struggle to discover the world and their place within it.

Cason Sharpe's profile page

Cason Sharpe is a writer born and raised in Toronto and currently living in Montreal. He has a BA from Concordia University in Political Science, Creative Writing, and Sexuality Studies. He is the recipient of The Renée Vautelet Prize for Political Science. His fiction and criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in C Magazine, GUTS, LESTE, Matrix, Cosmonauts Avenue, Bad Nudes, Alien She Zine, Spectra Journal, and Queer Codes: A Journal of Art History. He is the web coordinator for carte blanche and one half of the podcast TwoHungryChildren.

PRISM International | Candor, Grit, and the Unexpected: A Review of Cason Sharpe’s Our Lady of Perpetual Realness & Other Stories | "for each feeling of inevitable disappointment, there is a feeling of redemption: a small but significant moment when the protagonist takes back control, even if that just means ignoring the bank statement and spending money to ferry to the beach for sunset."

Lemon Hound | "It’s 2017, the year of the great avocado toast debacle, and Cason Sharpe’s debut chapbook of short stories is here to deliver some late-capitalist millennial realness. The collection is consistent, horrifyingly relatable, and the jumping-off point for Sharpe, a genius freak we should all keep an eye on."

The Wilds | "For all its brevity, Sharpe’s prose has an unmistakable luster found not in the words themselves but the secret doors they allude to opening..."

Salon .II. | "[Sharpe's] work is smart, poetic, detailed, funny, and it demands emotional rigour from its readers. Our Lady of Perpetual Realness is a small book, but it’s an important one."

Cult MTL | "Pool-hopping, being broke, riding diversity quotas, shitty jobs and getting stoned all inform the grave lightness of Sharpe’s world view. Sharpe is an astute storyteller, capable of capturing a reader with open arms and holding them close, until they either laugh or weep at the perpetual realness of life."