A young gym­nast crush­es on an old­er, more tal­ent­ed team­mate while con­tend­ing with her over­worked moth­er. A new­ly queer twen­ty-some­thing jug­gles two inti­mate rela­tion­ships — with a slip­pery anar­chist lover and an idio­syn­crat­ic meals-on-wheels recip­i­ent. A queer met­al band’s sum­mer tour unrav­els amid the sticky heat of the North­east­ern US. A code­pen­dent lis­ti­cle writer becomes obsessed with a Japan­ese ASMR chan­nel. The sto­ries in Per­son­al Atten­tion Role­play are pro­pelled by queer lone­li­ness, mixed-race con­fu­sion, late cap­i­tal­ist despon­den­cy, and the pit­falls of inti­ma­cy. Tak­ing place in Mon­tre­al, Toron­to, and else­where, they fea­ture young Asian mis­fits strug­gling with the desire to see them­selves reflect­ed — in their sur­round­ings, in oth­ers, online. Chau Bradley’s pre­cise lan­guage and inves­ti­ga­tion of our more trou­bling moti­va­tions stand out in this wry­ly fun­ny debut, through sto­ries that hint at the uncan­ny while remain­ing ground­ed in the everyday.