Asexual Portals and Dank Feelings: Review of Debbie Urbanski’s Portalmania

Ela Przybyło Under Review:Portalmania. Debbie Urbanski. Simon & Schuster, May 2025. Debbie Urbanski’s weird and whimsical short story collection, Portalmania, begins with an attentiveness to portals as elusive doorways to other worlds. Portals appear as idiosyncratic invitations to other worlds, often personalized and inaccessible to those they are not intended for, offering the feeling of “a new world assembling” and the possibility of “finding the world where you belong.” In a sense, these portals open the way for asexual or ace liberation: an acceptance of asexuality as a sexual orientation, a recognition that social expectations that all persons must desire and undertake sex are violent, and a celebration of asexual rethinkings of relationships, intimacies, desires, and ways of being in the world. Optimistic as this may all seem, Portalmania’s gift is not only its vision of an elsewhere but its capacity to sit with the difficulties, violences, discomforts, and indeed the dankness…