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Sky News AU
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sky News AU
Stella women's literary prize picks battle with non-existent enemy as it fights 'male gender bias' in the book industry
Australia's 2026 Stella Prize - for women authors - includes a male judge. If inclusivity is embraced to the extent that gender is no impediment to judging a gender-specific prize, then inclusivity has been rendered relativist to the extent of being just ideology with good branding. Paradoxically, it would be considered insensitive, in the current climate, to allege that a male judge was hindering representation and the distinctive voice of dozens of prospective female judges, whose lived experience and perspectives as women might make them inherently more suitable as a judge of a literary prize from which men are exempt as entrants. The Stella Prize claims to fight for gender equality. The Stella website says it 'takes an intersectional feminist approach to privilege and discrimination. We are committed to actively dismantling all structural barriers to inclusion for women and non-binary writers'. This is a sociocultural delusion, ignoring that the publishing industry is disproportionately, almost overwhelmingly dominated by women - roughly 60 to 70 per cent of Australian novels published in recent years have been written by women. The most up-to-date Lee & Low publishing survey found that 71 per cent of people in the US industry are women, including 74 per cent in editorial roles, 70 per cent of book reviewers, and 78 per cent of literary agents, with that number replicated in a scroll through the Australian Literary Agents Association website. Stella boasts: "… Data-driven initiatives – including our long-running Stella Count - collect, analyse, and distribute research on gender bias in the Australian literary sector." Looking at their reports, the findings indicate the systemic bias they allude to is an illusion: 55 per cent of the reviews in Australian newspapers and periodicals are of female authors, Stella's own report found. Similarly, "gender distribution of reviewers by publication" found women leading in eight of the twelve sampled publications. Benjamin Law, the male judge in question, is an Australian writer and broadcaster, and a founding member of the Australian Writers' Guild's Diversity and Inclusion Action Committee. He read Jessie Tu's The Honeyeater and "thought it slapped hard." And he is a massive Torrey Peters "stan". Peters is the author of 'Detransition, Baby' - possibly the most insufferable, archly preening novel of the last ten years. The socio-cultural carve-out here could feasibly be that the prize is also open to non-binary writers, which would open it up to LGBTQ authors, which could just about open it to Law. After all, the prize states: "We recognise that what it means to be a woman is not static and that rigid gender binaries reinforce inequality," suggesting that lived experience as a girl or woman is not a prerequisite to win a woman-oriented literature prize. From the submission criteria: "Entry is open to women and non-binary writers who identify with the Prize's purpose to promote Australian women's writing, in ways that align with the writer's own gender identity. This includes cis women, trans women and non-binary people." In this regard, non-binary writers have been granted a cultural skeleton-key to enter practically any literary competition. With the greatest sensitivity, in interviews and public profiles - including Men's Health, Star Observer, Sunday Guardian Live, SBS Voices, and Wikipedia – Mr Law consistently talks about being gay, with no mention of non binary identity. So there is, at best, an absolutely tenuous connection to the stipulation of "promoting Australian women's writing, in ways that align with the writer's own gender identity". At about this stage, the ideological prevarication and identity-sensitive pussyfooting will have turned your brain to mush. Womanhood, we're told, is an immutable characteristic - rooted in unique, lived experience that demands nurturing and protection in a literary world vulnerable to male hegemony (a hegemony that, statistically, ceased to exist a decade ago). Simultaneously, womanhood is mutable - open to self-declared gender fluidity, to non-binary redefinition, to the idea of a gendered soul. So, if you're a woman, submitting your manuscript to the women's only Stella prize, be conscious of the possibility of your work being assessed by a man - a culturally tuned-in, diverse, LGBTQ identifying published man - but a man, nonetheless. By 2012, when the Stella Prize was introduced, Australian publishing was already female-majority across all layers of gatekeeping, from editors to publicists and agents. In 2012, masculine themes (war, rural isolation, generational stoicism, etc.) were still critically respectable. Even non-urban, non-identity-centric male stories had a place. Literary agents were still receptive to quiet male protagonists, postcolonial masculine narratives, stories about fathers, veterans, male friendship, etc. But these were already waning. By 2012, diversity discourse was emerging forcefully. Male-authored manuscripts that didn't engage identity themes were becoming less fashionable, especially if they lacked a distinct 'hook' (e.g., trauma, cultural hybridity, queerness, etc.). There were already whispers in editorial circles about needing more 'own voices,' more 'underrepresented perspectives,' and less 'middle-aged white man navel-gazing.' Now, there is a strong diversity / identity tilt, and increasing ambivalence to traditional masculinity, which almost always must be shouldered with quotation marks. Masculine narrative spaces are borderline extinct, outside of genre writing. Male writers in 2025, submitting literary fiction that reflects traditional or psychologically subtle masculinity, face less editorial enthusiasm, fewer agenting opportunities, and lower prize prospects, meaning the situation for men, is now worse than it was for women when they felt compelled to band together to create the women's only Stella prize for literature in 2012. But even if someone instituted a male-only publishing prize - and imagine the opprobrium and scorn around that - It wouldn't occur to me to enter it, because any gender-specific prize, in 2025, is banal and dated. Nicholas Sheppard is an accomplished journalist whose work has been featured in The Spectator, The NZ Herald and Politico. He is also a published literary author and public relations consultant
Hindustan Times
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Torrey Peters: 'Everybody, cis or trans, goes around choosing their gender'
Some stories in Stag Dance were previously self-published before your debut novel Detransition, Baby was published. Tell us about your publishing journey. Two of the stories in Stag Dance were originally self-published. From 2013 to 2017, I was part of a writing scene in Brooklyn that produced several writers who were influential to me, including Sybil Lam and Imogen Binnie. There was another group of writers — trans women writing for other trans women. You could write at a full sprint, without explaining yourself. At that time, people were saying that trans lives were so unique and new that you needed to invent a whole new genre to explain what it means to be trans. I don't think it's that special to be trans. I thought that you could write about trans lives in any genre, so I wrote these two novellas. The first one was Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones — a speculative fiction, which to me is really about the trans community. The second was The Masker, which is about how sexuality gets weaponised against trans women. These two became cult novellas in Brooklyn. They were not travelling all over the world but were being passed hand to hand. I had given it away for free on the internet, asking people to pay what they like. Slowly, they got more and more popular. Some editors came to me and said, 'Do you have a novel?' And I happened to have Detransition, Baby. While I thought initially that I was writing just for transwomen, the themes I was dealing with were bigger — the idea of family, femininity, and aspirational motherhood. Upon its publication, it travelled widely. I thought it'd go only this far but it kept on travelling further until it was translated into 13 languages. In a lot of ways, I felt very free writing that book because there were jokes in it that I thought maybe eight people would get. They were written for my friends. I think enjoyable literature has that sort of intimacy of people writing for somebody that they know; there's a care to it. But after Detransition, Baby, I had a lot of trouble writing because of the expectations. At the time, I was building a sauna in the woods and began thinking about loggers. When I started writing, I thought of this sort of turn-of-the-century lumberjack slang. The thing is that nobody was expecting that; nobody wanted it. As a result, I felt very free again in the same way I did while writing Detransition, Baby. I had The Chaser, plus those first two novellas, and I thought they could kind of go together, so let's put them together as a book, and that's Stag Dance. In my view, Stag Dance is also a pushback against the way queer and trans lives are represented in fiction. Particularly in Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones where the dystopia doesn't run along some feuding between superpowers but gender. Then, there's also a vocabulary that forces rethinking the assumed progress transfeminism has made. It also has fun, politicising via trivialising. For me, the setup of Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones has two jokes in it. The first is post-apocalyptic fiction, in which something momentous happens — a nuclear explosion, a comet hitting the earth, or something unavoidable. But here, two ex-girlfriends invent a contagion that prevents your body from producing hormones, forcing people to take hormones the same way that trans people do. The idea was to say that what you do with your body is a choice. Your gender is not some innate, static thing. But that's why people just freak out when they learn how much of it is constructed; that threatens them. The second joke is the idea that if you take hormones, you're choosing your gender. But we're already choosing our gender every day. We just pretend that we're not doing it. When you wake up and decide if I'm going to have my hair this way, shave, put on makeup, or have my lips filled, you're choosing your gender. You're choosing how the world sees you in the clothes you want to wear, the way you talk, etc. The thing is that everybody, whether cis or trans, goes around choosing their gender. It's funny that people say to trans people that they're choosing their gender because they take hormones. I n the same story, Infect Your…, Lexi also says that, in the future, everyone will be trans, which reminded me of this popular slogan: The future is nonbinary. It's as if the present isn't — or can't be. The funny thing about a lot of such slogans is that they feel very dated. To say the future is female — or whatever — feels very 2017. Because in some ways, especially in the States, as the political situation has gotten more right-wing, intolerant, and repressive, you realise that a slogan isn't enough. The very idea of saying the future is nonbinary is not only nonsensical because the present is nonbinary, the present is female, the present is all of these things but also because the work is now. You can't defer it. It makes sense to have what Lexi says in the book because the story was written in 2016 when such slogans were around. I think it's interesting now to see that I was a little bit doubtful of some of that stuff back in 2016. Weirdly, I think I'm less cynical now in 2025, where I'm sort of like, I don't care what beliefs or slogans you've got. So long as you're doing something now, I'm fine with it. You turn the sisterhood solidarity equation on its head in The Masker by having the readers confront the idea that it's all about the choices one happens to make when overcome by desire. What did you intend to do with it? The setup for that story was that there's a person who's confused about their gender, and has gotten into online fetish, and in real life happens to be at a convention in Las Vegas. The protagonist Chris is confronted with two sorts of models — the first is a transwoman who has had surgery, who's very into her respectability as a woman. That she's a proper woman. The other is that of a fetishist, who wears a full-body silicone woman suit and is a doctor, who has a job and wife and kids in Los Angeles. He comes once or twice a year to Las Vegas to live his sexual fantasies. It's this dichotomy that interested me. On one hand, if you want to be a transwoman and be respectable, you're expected to erase your sexuality because you're dangerous to women in changing rooms, bathrooms, etc. On the other hand, if you're hypersexual, you're a complete fetishist, a pervert, not a woman at all. The story is deliberately meant to be uncomfortable and icky. As you say, what the character does is a series of betrayals, which are supposed to make you feel bad. For me, that's important if the reader feels bad because I'm asking, 'Why does it feel bad?' It is why I ended the book with this story because I wanted to sort of punch a reader in the stomach and leave. Not in a mean way, but in a way to make them think that if they felt bad then maybe something different needs to be done. In The Masker, the mention of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) makes it feel like a critique of consumerist culture, particularly, the visual medium's betrayal of trans people. But there's also a mention alongside of Pretty Woman (1990), a movie signalling an aspirational life. Why did you employ these cultural references? I think the book of mine that's most in conversation with popular culture was Detransition, Baby. The first few pages note how so much of trans identity is made about transition. But, what do you do when you're five, 10, or 15 years on the other side of transition? As I wasn't part of a generation that had a transwomen older than her, I was looking for models of being a woman in my thirties, so I saw a lot of television. The book names it the Sex in the City problem. You can get a husband and be a Charlotte. You can get a career and be a Samantha. You can have a baby and be a Miranda. You can be an artist and be a Carrie. And these were ciswomen ideals, by the way. So, even if you're a ciswoman, you're trapped. Imagine, as a transwoman, all you can do is aspire to be trapped in that way. The visual media ends up explaining so much of the feeling that I felt as a transwoman. I was a child when Silence… got released. The character in question, Buffalo Bill, whether cis or trans, has no femininity of his own. The only thing he can do is steal femininity. Literally, by killing and skinning ciswomen. Seeing that as a young child was upsetting because I knew I had some sort of femininity inside of myself but, if I looked at the media, it said I didn't. While Sex in the City, in some ways helped me understand myself, Silence… impeded my progress. The stereotype that femininity is inherent, biologically owned or entitled makes you internalise it. So, when the character sees the masker, he verbalises the internalised transphobia by saying that the masker is some Silence of the Lambs shit. A lot of my understanding of myself comes in a sort of detritus and flotsam of visual media, that not only did I see, but it also entered me. Now it comes out in my writing; it is the references, the language, and the sharpness, the sort of lacerating things that are inside of me that then come out in the writing. In The Chaser, the narrator builds a wall to immunise himself from being attracted to Robbie, who does the unthinkable, smashing all expectations one has of a submissive person. There's a suppression of desire at play here, visibilising a simmering of violence. Was that the intent? Yes, that's true. I wasn't interested in writing from Robbie's perspective — the typical way such stories are told where you say here's a nice person. It's difficult to say whether Robbie is trans, gay, or feminine. That was purposely done because I wanted to make the story stay in the realm of emotions and not invite a political analysis by naming who Robbie is. The other thing is that the sort of emotional building blocks that people normally attribute to trans people are equally attributable to others, too. Say the distance between how you see yourself and how you want the world to see you. The narrator is a cis male, handsome athlete yet the thing he struggles with is the difference between what he knows he is and feels and what he wishes the world saw he was. He's dealing with an inability to express his desire in a way that could lead to love. That he shuts down the possibility of love and makes it just purely sexual or about power — that's shame. So, that's what I was trying to do: things that are supposed to be trans things or trans experiences are things or experiences even the most centred person in a society like a cisgender, white, handsome athlete must also deal with. The only difference is that the latter doesn't want to name what's happening or what they're feeling. And what's scary for others is that trans people have language and names for these feelings that cis people go through. What's scary is also how people refuse to engage with developing vocabularies, which is why some reviewers have called your works 'messy'. There's a book by Joanna Russ about women's literature. She said that literature goes through three stages. The first is that you as a minority say to the dominant culture, 'Don't worry, we're just like you. You don't have to be afraid of us.' Then, there's a second phase when the minority says, 'Actually, we're nothing like you. We reject you. We're quite different. We define ourselves against you.' There's a third phase in which the minority says, 'Actually, we don't have anything to do with you one way or another. We don't define ourselves against or with you. We're our own thing.' These three stages can be seen in Black, gay, or trans literature. There's a fourth stage, which I think Russ doesn't talk about, which interests me. In this phase, the dominant culture picks up the language and lenses developed by the minority culture and applies to itself. At least in the States, you can see how white scholars are talking about race using what was developed by scholars of colour. Whiteness is learning about itself from people of colour. You know, the word heterosexuality came after the word homosexuality when straight people felt the need to have their own word to explain themselves. That's why the incredible freakout around trans people because our ideas are applicable broadly, and when people find them challenging, it only communicates the power of these ideas. Your inclusion in the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021 attracted a demeaning letter, which was signed by a few dead people, too. The funding you received from the Edinburgh Literature Festival was challenged, too. Then, President Trump's executive orders target trans lives. If that wasn't enough, we've literary stars like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and JK Rowling brandishing their ignorance and conservative views. In this context, could you help share how populism affects a writer? I think what I went through with the Women's Prize is indicative of the risks of populism. Obviously, it was painful for me to receive that letter, which looked amateurish and stupid. It got picked up by major newspapers, and I wondered why they were doing that when it was written by idiots. Well, they were reporting it because it would get engagement. But the thing is, this kind of populism is not easily controlled and it's double-edged. When the Women's Prize thing happened, my book was not a best seller in the UK. It had been nominated for the prize but wasn't that reviewed or known. Then, this letter came out and all of these famous writers started talking about my book. They started defending me, discussing it, making it a point. I have a lot of faith in readers because readers read this, heard about this thing and they were like, 'What is up with this?' Rather than just accept the stupid populist thing, they went out and bought the book. So, the week after that letter, my book went from low on some best seller lists to number five on The Times best seller list in the UK. It had never been on the list before that. Please name some people who have inspired you to create what you do? Nevada by Imogen Binnie helped me write the way I was writing. The writing by transwomen for transwomen is a universal thing rather than a niche thing. That book did that to me. But then, what inspired me in the last decade was Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, translated by Ann Goldstein. This realisation that, as a trans woman, I can talk back to the major literature of the era. That, in turn, allowed me to sort of do something that I think is quite audacious. Like, in the novella Stag Dance, written in workers' slang, the actual stag dance is a very specific American writing. Whether it be Moby Dick, written in a whaler talk, whether it be Mark Twain writing about the river stuff, or Cormac McCarthy doing sort of border wars. It was like what if I, as a transwoman, thought that my writing was as important as American, as at the centre as any of this stuff. And maybe I will be so audacious as to talk back to Herman Melville or Cormac McCarthy, even if I come from a small self-publishing press in Brooklyn.
Gulf Today
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Author Torrey Peters wants to write trans stories for the rest of her career
After the success of her hit debut novel Detransition, Baby, author Torrey Peters was held hostage by the expectations of its readers. The book explored divorce and motherhood, offering a unique trans perspective that went beyond transness itself. It was my favourite novel on womanhood in years. Plenty of others felt the same way; the book was nominated for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the PEN/Hemingway Award the following year. But instead of choosing to appease her new fandom of female and queer readers with a tender story about, I don't know, sad women, she wrote Stag Dance, a strange first-person novella about a horny male lumberjack community with a penchant for rituals. 'I had an almost perverse instinct with that story that was: you know what nobody's looking for? A logger story set in the woods!' Peters, 43, laughs dryly. 'Once I was like, 'I'm gonna do it in this weird slang and amuse myself with it', I felt really free of any expectations.' This mini-novel has now been published together with two other bold and inventive stories in one ruthlessly intimate collection about the unpredictable nature of transness, past, present and future. Today the author is on a video call from Brooklyn, her tawny blonde hair falling on her shoulders. She's wearing a cute baby pink top that colour-matches the cherry blossom canvas on the wall behind her, which is probably a coincidence, but nonetheless adds to my impression of her as being equally thoughtful off the page as she is on. Her answers are smart and instinctual, which could be intimidating, if she weren't warm and wryly funny in a way that feels conspiratorial, as though there are in-jokes to be had at the world's expense. Her world now is not the same one she inhabited when doing interviews to promote her debut. Back then, Peters found herself inside a whirlwind of attention and debate when she was nominated for the Women's Prize for Detransition, Baby, making her the first openly trans author nominated for the award. A bizarre open letter challenging her nomination was published and 'signed' by several dead women writers like Emily Dickinson and Daphne du Maurier. Female writers who didn't know Peters personally spoke out in her defence, which was something, she says, that reminded her of those Lord of the Rings scenes where orcs are closing in but then the Fellowship show up with their light and camaraderie. 'A week later, my book was number five on The Sunday Times bestseller list in the UK, not because of the Women's Prize, but because of what those writers did,' she remembers. 'It wasn't a fallout; it was a rise. And it was a rise not of me, but in terms of me seeing that people are willing to care about and fight for people that they don't even know. And that's wonderful.' In the years since, she's split her time between three locations, New York being one of them. The second home is Colombia, of which she's attempting to become a resident before she is issued a new passport, after Donald Trump's recent legislation requiring citizens to show the sex assigned at birth on people's passports. 'I just am feeling a solidarity with the Americas on a larger scale,' she writes to me later over email. 'There have been fascist and repressive regimes over and over in this hemisphere, and I think Latin American writers/artists/activists have developed many strategies in regard to these flare-ups, so where better to learn what to do next, and how to do it?' Her third home is an off-the-grid log cabin that she shares with her wife in Vermont. As Peters worked on Stag Dance, life imitated art imitated life. She was newly obsessed with saunas and had decided to build her own out there. She was cutting down firewood for warmth, and experiencing the cold and dirt inherent to that type of life. Oddly, it became a natural fit as Peters sought a new way to express herself in writing: this 'lumberjack consciousness' came to her, manifesting in the story through a Mark Twain meets True Grit cadence with a playful twist. She started to annoy her loved ones by speaking aloud in this voice; 'Once again the ox!' is one such exclamation in the story, when a character is lumped with carrying more supplies than are his share. 'I was thinking about symbols of transition, which I sometimes didn't have when I was in the woods. I was always taking oestrogen and stuff but every day I was wearing boots and was dirty and surrounded by drills,' Peters says. 'What does it mean to have a gender when you're alone in the woods? Who are you performing for? Of course, cutting down a tree is culturally gendered, except when you're alone in the woods there actually isn't culture.' In Stag Dance, the answer to transition involves not hormones but a crude piece of triangle fabric that lumberjacks place over their crotch. That's it, that is all that's needed, though the masculine protagonist – a shed of a man ironically nicknamed 'Babe' – finds it harder to pass among his peers than a more delicately featured logger. I'm surprised to learn from Peters that the triangle wasn't a fabrication, but historically accurate to the North American lumberjack experience ('So I'm not the vulgar one, you can tell your readers,' she says with a knowing smile). Extensive research went into this story, ranging from late 19th and early 20th-century dictionaries of logger slang to exploring the timelines of various technological inventions. While this was helpful to a point, it wasn't Peters's goal to be historically precise or to anchor the story in a specific time period, but rather to create an 'Americana tall tale in a mythic sense'. The other three stories in Stag Dance were written over the past 10 or so years and loosely explore trans identities through various historical lenses or oblique understandings of transness. In 'The Chaser', for instance, the reader is unsure whether the trans character is feminine or gay or whether they might transition in the future. All this ambiguity allowed Peters to move away from the blunt instruments of modern-day descriptors. 'A phrase like 'gender dysphoria', I hear it, and it's like a granite rock,' she remarks. 'There's no way to enter any emotion into that phrase, it's just so calcified as political medical nothingness for me.' A lack of clarity around different characters' identities is almost crucial to them feeling human, caught in the midst of transformation. As such, I didn't realise until halfway through the book that it's a collection of trans stories. When I tell Peters this, she explains, 'I don't even think that what trans means to me is the same as what it means to everybody else or to all trans people.' Most people in these stories, she says, are just people who have 'weird feelings'. 'To me, the basis of being trans is not feelings that are specific to trans people. I think it's a particular constellation of feelings that we all have,' she continues. 'The basic building blocks of being trans are not 'other' to other people: the desire to be recognised by the people that you love as you want to be recognised. The ability to speak what you want without shame. Making active decisions in your life to present and perform how you want to be seen. These are things that everybody does.' On an emotional level at least, Peters says, she doesn't think there's anything particularly unique about trans people's inner lives. What is inescapable about Stag Dance is that it's first and foremost a sexy book ('There's been a desire to neuter any kind of trans sexuality,' notes Peters, referring to fears around trans sexuality, still present in the hysterical debate around trans women and bathrooms). Still, I wasn't necessarily rooting for any of these characters during their sexual escapades. Just as in Detransition, Baby, these are flawed people, chaotic neutral on the moral alignment scale and more real for it. Unsurprisingly, Peters sees her characters as she sees herself and others in her life. 'There's a self that I want to be… as some ideal person who is actualised. Then there's all the actual particulars of my personality and my pettiness and my spite and all those things that get in the way of myself,' she says. 'The number of times that I've gotten in my own way because I've justified, or told myself a story, or lied to myself – that to me is the essence of living.' This relatability, of course, is part of what gave Detransition, Baby such widespread appeal. Whether it's the cattiness or jealousy of her protagonist in that debut, or the act of choosing a possible sexual partner over a likely new friend in 'The Masker', or a lumberjack making a vulnerable effort to look attractive and presentable and failing, these are resonant situations and feelings. Shame, the original emotion, is everywhere in Peters's writing. Much of our conversation is taken up by my suggestion that her legacy thus far is that she has made trans lives relatable to the average cisgender person, a sentiment echoed by writer Chris Kraus in the promotional material for Stag Dance. This prophecy feels even more likely when she tells me that she has no intention to stop exploring the trans female experience in fiction. Her second novel, which she is currently in the early stages of writing, will be about a separatist group of trans people who build a society from nothing. This has obviously been influenced by the right-wing swerve of US politics, something Peters is weighing up currently, as she attempts to write into an uncertain prospective era: 'Four years from now, things could be really dark, and I could write into that future. If I'm wrong, I seem hysterical. But if I try to write for a future that looks like right now, and it gets bad, then I seem like a sort of weird propagandist who isn't with the times.' I wonder if her work's relatability to cisgender people will start to grate if it becomes the repetitive feedback from readers and critics for the decades to come (particularly given the fact that in her twenties, she initially wrote fiction solely for a trans audience; now, she tells me, her aim has changed and she writes for anyone who she might have an affinity with). I can easily imagine us having the same conversation when her next novel comes out, and the next, I tell her. 'I don't think I'll ever get irritated with it because the goal is to synchronise emotions and to get these surprising alignments,' she replies, adding that fiction is the perfect place to do that. She has long realised that trying to appeal to cisgender people's intellect in a bid to create allyship doesn't work in the current climate; it's about hearts, not minds. 'That you think that could be my future is the happiest future you could have predicted for me.' The Independent
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
It List spring reading guide: Fantastic books and where to read them
Welcome to the It List Spring Guide, where we share our picks for the best in entertainment. Catch the weekly It List here for the latest releases that we can't wait to watch, stream, listen to, read and binge. Though reading more is a popular New Year's resolution, there's something about springtime that inspires people to pick up more hobbies. For me, that's always meant reading. I read a lot all year round, but cool spring weather (and upbeat spring attitudes) bring all sorts of new opportunities to curate the exact vibe that elevates the mood of whatever you're reading. Advertisement I combed through the buzzy new releases of March, April and May to recommend your next read, along with my plans to get that reading done. Fiction Emily Henry. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images) Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories by Torrey Peters What to know: Torrey Peters dominated book discourse in 2021 with Detransition, Baby, and now she's finally back with a novel about a group of restless lumberjacks who plan an unusual dance. That and the three other stories included in this book take on the complexities of gender. Release date: March 11 Genre: Literary fiction Page count: 304 Where I'll be reading it: At a picnic with an extravagant bowl of fresh fruit. The Perfect Divorce by Jeneva Rose What to know: When I need a twisty tale about powerful women to get me out of a reading slump, I turn to Jeneva Rose. This one's a follow-up to her smash hit The Perfect Marriage and follows the same protagonist — a lawyer who's now navigating a breakup and an unsolved murder. Release date: April 15 Genre: Thriller Page count: 288 Where I'll be reading it: All around my house, listening via audiobook while spring cleaning. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry What to know: Two very different writers compete to pen the biography of a former tabloid princess and fall in love along the way in the latest book from the queen of earnest love stories, Emily Henry. Release date: April 22 Genre: Romance Page count: 432 Where I'll be reading it: On the beach in a sweater. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong What to know: Ocean Vuong is responsible for some of the most gorgeous strings of words ever put to page, so I have high hopes for his forthcoming novel, which follows a teenager who becomes the caretaker of an older woman. Release date: May 13 Genre: Literary fiction Page count: 416 Where I'll be reading it: At a cafe with an iced coffee. Never Flinch by Stephen King What to know: Stephen King has never failed to scare the daylights out of me in the past, so I expect his new novel will deliver too. This one's about a detective working to stop a serial killer before they murder 13 innocent people and one guilty person. Release date: May 27 Genre: Horror Page count: 448 Where I'll be reading it: Somewhere well-lit. Nonfiction Tina Knowles. (Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images) The Art of the SNL Portrait by Mary Ellen Matthews What to know: You know those whimsical portraits that Saturday Night Live hosts and musical guests always get? Mary Ellen Matthews is the photographer responsible for them, and she's graciously turned some of the best into a book complete with delicious gossip and backstories. Release date: March 4 Genre: Photography Page count: 272 Where I'll be reading it: At my coffee table, where the gorgeous book now lives. I'll be flipping through it slowly and gleefully over the course of the next three months. Authority by Andrea Long Chu What to know: Pulitzer winner Andrea Long Chu writes some of the most perceptive criticism about books, TV and video games. This collection is a must-read for people who take their pop culture seriously. Release date: April 8 Genre: Essays Page count: 288 Where I'll be reading it: At my desk with a pen in hand, ready to underline at least half the book. Matriarch: A Memoir by Tina Knowles What to know: Tina Knowles is best known for bringing Beyoncé and Solange into the world, but she's had a fascinating journey of her own. Release date: April 22 Genre: Memoir Page count: 432 Where I'll be reading it: On my couch with a Beyoncé album on the record player. Uptown Girl by Christie Brinkley
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters review – genre games and gender mischief
When Detransition, Baby hit the shelves in 2021, its success took readers on both sides of the Atlantic by surprise. Longlisted for the Women's prize and selected as one of the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century, Torrey Peters's debut novel was among the titles that defined the literary landscape of the Covid-19 pandemic. Finding herself in the crosshairs of a mounting culture war, Peters became one of the world's best known trans writers, seemingly overnight. Of course, this isn't the full picture. Before her international breakthrough, Peters had self-published two novellas, The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, shifting enough copies for mainstream publishers to take an interest. Both appear in Stag Dance, along with two pieces written either side of Detransition, Baby: the title story and The Chaser. They make up an ambitious compendium of a decade in writing. 'In the future, everyone will be trans': Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is set in a plague-ravaged dystopia where humans can no longer make their own sex hormones. Society falls apart as various factions seek to synthesise and control the flow of replacement hormones taken from pigs. It's a wild and gruesome story, packed with action but economically detailed. The Chaser is a preppy campus romance of sorts, articulating the suffocating desires felt by a Quaker boarding school student for his girlish roommate: it subtly upsets many of our ideas around love and sexual awakening. The Masker tiptoes into murky waters where fetish, queer sexuality and transgender identity mingle, exposing some extremely queasy power dynamics. And the titular Stag Dance, set in a 19th-century illegal logging camp, follows the men as they prepare for their winter festivities. Due to the lack of women, some must volunteer to attend en femme, a strangely kinky tradition that naturally generates unexpected possibilities. It is by turns thrilling and wickedly funny, weaving together bloodthirsty monsters and insatiably horny lumberjacks. A million miles from the tedious pioneer tales of James Fenimore Cooper, it's still a surprise after Detransition, Baby's cosmopolitan comedy of manners. The book as a whole brings to mind Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire in the way it uses genre conventions to address bigger themes. Just as Enríquez's spooky tales channel the horror of Argentina's military dictatorship, Peters inhabits her own disparate genres – dystopia, romance, horror, historical – to weave a transhistorical web of gender non-conforming characters. There is nothing ragtag about this collection, despite its long span of writing and diversity of genre, because Peters is such a capable and considerate writer, skipping between modes with apparent effortlessness. The pieces are meticulously crafted; especially Stag Dance, with its deft pacing and almost operatic denouement. Moreover, it is clear she is having a great deal of fun: even when exploring serious issues around gender and sexuality, the writing is mischievous rather than sanctimonious. Peters seems to delight in complicating liberal identity politics, refusing ever to sanitise her work or narrow her focus, and glorying in some truly rollicking prose. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is published by Serpent's Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
