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Copi, whose given name was Raol Damonte, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1939 and emigrated to Paris, France in 1962, where he died in 1987. He was a prolific playwright, novelist, and cartoonist whose provocative output thumbs its nose at modesty and melancholy. A canonical figure of 1970s Parisian bohemia and counterculture, he produced a prolific body of work that was hybrid and overflowing, ferocious and tender, baroque and distinct from the literary scene of his time. Among his most famous works are The Queens' Ball, The Homosexual or the Difficulty of Sexpressing Oneself, Loretta Strong, and An Inopportune Visit, the first play written in the French language to deal with the AIDS crisis. The unforgettable comics he published in major French outlets such as Le Nouvel Observateur, Liberation, and Hara-Kiri are still widely circulated today. Thibaud Croisy is an author and theater director. In recent years, he has staged several original plays, including Temoignage d'un homme qui n'avait pas envie d'en castrer un autre (Testimony of one man who didn't feel like castrating another man), La Prophetie des Lilas (The lilac prophecy), and D'o vient ce desir, partage par tant d'hommes, qui les pousse aller voir ce qu'il y a au fond d'un trou? (Wherefrom this desire, shared by so many men, to go see what's at the bottom of a hole?). In 2022, he directed Copi's The Homosexual or the Difficulty of Sexpressing Oneself, which was staged in Paris, Marseille, Nantes, Geneva, and elsewhere. He has written numerous texts on Copi, as well as afterwords to several recent editions of his works, and is currently preparing a Copi biography, forthcoming from Christian Bourgois editeur.
""The Queen’s Ball ingests taboo as fuel for a baroque and spiraling story of love in its most prismatic and absurd iterations. Through frightening distortions and hallucinogenic twists of fate, a demented circus of artists, writers, gender-hustling aesthetes, and religious fanatics collude in a glorious discombobulation of propriety and convention. I have never laughed this much at a novel that could somehow shock even the most irreverent of libertines, demanding, at times, absolute disgust. Truly nasty work. Iconic."" —Juliana Huxtable ""The Queen’s Ball is a heedless novel of transformation of bodies and tenses, a novel of enormity and loss which is, in the end, about writing a novel. Copi is a feckless romantic-his theme is the persistence of love in the phantasmagoria. His tender psychos hurtle through increasingly outré adventures that seem to expand and contract like accordions. Here is crime à la française. Here is a great queen’s verbal aggression, radiant detail, and joyous destructive energy."" —Robert Glück ""In The Queens’ Ball, a globetrotting, time-jumping, and oneiric “crime novel,” Copi satirizes and destroys himself: a successful, famous, bourgeois expatriate cartoonist living large in the glamour of gay Paris, New York, Ibiza, and Rome in the 1960s."" —Federico Perelmuter, Southwest Review ""How to resist these delirious parodies, this caustic humor that bows down before absolutely nothing?"" —Le Nouvel Observateur ""Copi is the sassiest, most decadent, poised, unpredictable, violent, galling, and marvelous of any author in the past quarter century."" —Charlie Hebdo
