There’s a tense moment when Matthew, a transmasculine character in Crawl—a smart, funny debut short story collection by Max Delsohn—is chatting casually with Harvest, his boss’s boss, at his workplace, when seemingly out of nowhere, she asks him if he’s had “the surgery.”
“People often asked this after I disclosed, but they usually took more time to work up to it,” Matthew’s internal monologue reveals. The story, titled “The Machine,” gradually escalates to show Matthew’s discomfort. After a series of “innocent questions” about his genitals—I know, oxymoronic to think there are in fact “innocent questions” about someone’s genitals—go haywire, he can’t help but lose his temper and yell at Harvest. It’s here when Delsohn’s keen attention to awkwardness brilliantly raises the stakes, “The Machine” being just one of many queer-focused, true-to-life stories in the collection that feel as real as a quickened heartbeat sitting at the Thanksgiving table after your family realizes the guest you brought along isn’t just your “friend.” “The Machine” is the fifth story, falling right in the center of Crawl; which makes sense—I find it to be the heart of the collection.
In 10 stories, five in section one, or “Side A,” and five in “Side B,” Delsohn constructs a collection of trans experiences, some bildungsroman-y, some more introspective, effectively showing the tension of being a transgender person in 2010s Seattle, a city, he implies, while “supposed” to be liberal, and “supposed” to keep his characters safe, isn’t the haven they hoped (at least in the 2010s). Here we have a man who, after taking testosterone (or “T” as many characters refer to it), realizes he’s attracted to other men, there’s another character’s foray into polyamory, and then there’s Matthew, put in an uncomfortable situation to Explain The Trans Experience. Crawl is also one of a few books published by mainstream presses thoughtfully interrogating trans identity, like Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby, The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar, or Krys Malcolm Belc’s The Natural Mother of the Child.
Delsohn himself is transmasculine, an ex-Seattleite—though he called it home for 10 years—one of Publishers Weekly Fall 2025 Writers to Watch, as well as a former stand-up comedian, where he built his platform and made a name for himself talking about his experiences as a trans man. “My name is Max Delsohn, and I’m a transgender person. Does anybody here know what trans people are?” was his usual opener. “Some of you look nervous,” he’d say next. “Don’t worry, this isn’t a TED Talk.” Delsohn quit comedy during the pandemic, when, in a story similar to “The Machine,” a talent scout approached him, asking whether he’d had “the surgery,” then, talked about his transgender niece. “I’ve discovered another way to make trans people laugh, through short stories and essays, happily out of the spotlight,” Delsohn wrote in Vice. “I’ve realized I’m better at entertaining people from my writing desk, surrounded by books instead of cis people.”
And he’s right: Crawl is funny (“Only in Seattle do your three drug dealers leave town together, to boulder”), psychologically astute (“The world will not accommodate me so I have to break apart inside and do something that I don’t want to do or doesn’t make any sense”), and full of sharp imagery (“fell mindlessly back into bed like a gob of butter slipping off the knife”). But interiority is where Delsohn really shines, and perhaps it’s because he’s been through much of what his characters have been through. Eli, an aspiring comedian in “Sex is a Leisure Activity,” for example, notes that his comedy has to do mostly with how short he is (which, he says, works great on dates and on stage), “I thought if I kept talking about how short I was, I could…at least prove I had some sort of handle on the situation,” Eli says. Whereas Delsohn has written about how his comedy has to do mostly with his being trans, “I wasn’t up there because I wanted to enlighten my crowds about some essentialized ‘trans experience.’ I was there to have fun, fuck around, complain, and tell stories,” his jokes, similarly also working well with “women and enbys.”
In addition to Crawl’s well-placed humor and charm, and its shrewd attentiveness to human psychology, Delsohn has written a book about hope. I keep thinking of Dylan: “How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man?” Delsohn’s characters are inching towards an anxiety-inducing future: one that hasn’t been paved for them. Though “There are things we can do,” a character named Simon says to a character named Harold in the collection’s final story. “Therapy, health care, some new trans friends. I’ve been where you are… If you can wait just a little longer, until you’re further in your transition—you find ways to stop hurting so much.” Simon’s speech is a reminder of how hard it is to come of age in a world attempting to stifle who you really are. How intimidating it is to put yourself out there. And how brave it can be, like the characters in Crawl, to keep trying, to keep going anyway.
FICTION
Crawl
By Max Delsohn
Graywolf Press
Published October 21, 2025
