Latest news with #TorreyPeters
ABC News
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
How author Torrey Peters made trans history with Detransition Baby
Four years ago, Torrey Peters made history with her debut novel Detransition, Baby when she became one of the first trans fiction writers to be published by a major US publishing house. The novel, a sharp comedy of manners set in the 2010s in Brooklyn's trans community, was a critical and commercial success — a bestseller and winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award, Amazon buying the TV rights, and a spot on The New York Times' best books of the 21st century list. Perhaps more importantly, it opened the gates. "Even though the political times were better [for trans people] when Detransition, Baby came out, I was one of one or two trans women with one of the big four presses that year," Peters tells ABC Arts. "This spring, I can think of 15 or 20 myself, and I'm sure there's more that I don't know." Nobody, including Peters, thought her follow-up would be historical fiction about 19th-century lumberjacks. Or that the characters would speak using near-indecipherable slang words like crackleberry (eggs) and Scandahoovian Dynamite (tobacco) — all taken from a real dictionary collated by the children of loggers. While the titular story of Stag Dance, Peters' follow-up collection, is a world away from 2010s Brooklyn, it was that distance that allowed her to approach questions of identity and gender anew. "Following Detransition, Baby, I felt like there was pressure on me to do something witty and sparkling," says Peters, who was in Australia earlier this year for the Sydney and Melbourne writers' festivals. "And I was like, 'Well, there probably is not a lot of expectations on me to do the logger thing, so I'm free to do it how I want.'" The story was inspired by her own retreat to a long-abandoned log cabin in Vermont, a fixer-upper bought as an escape after the success of Detransition, Baby transformed her into, arguably, the best-known trans writer — overnight to most, though Peters was established within the US's trans literary world via two self-published novellas, which reappear in Stag Dance. "Really, it's a shack — 12 feet by 12 feet, no running water, no electricity, an outhouse," Peters says. "It's very cold, muddy and dirty up there. And I loved it, in some ways. "The area was previously logged, and it's been about 100 years so the forest has grown up — but I thought about people who were living in that forest without even the mild amenities that I had." During her reading, Peters learned about stag dances, an 18th and 19th-century US tradition where outposts of isolated men would throw parties with a select few acting as women for the night, signified via a triangle cloth placed over their crotch. "It seemed like such a funny, potent symbol," she says. "'One of us is a woman, so we just cut some brown fabric and put it over our crotch' — the most on-the-nose, over-simplified thing that you can imagine. Stag Dance's protagonist is Babe Bunyon — a strong, burly beast of a man who surprises everyone, including himself, by volunteering for an "ersatz twat". It's never quite explained why Babe wants to be a "skooch" (sexy lady) for the night. Instead, it's an "unwanted yearning" that arrives and never leaves, though Babe regularly describes his "uncommon size and strength" as a source of agony, lamenting his giant feet and strongman muscles. "He probably does not see himself very clearly," Peters says. "The ways he insults himself are quite extreme — he says things like, 'You could set a beer glass on my brow shelf,' which is a particular site of anxiety for trans women. So, suddenly, I started lending him my insecurities, things that I actually would never say to anybody." We, in the 21st century, might read Babe as a trans woman experiencing dysmorphia, but he lacks that language — a gift to Peters, who says that these terms, while useful to explain trans experience, are somewhat emotionally "ossified" from overuse. "With the brow, you're like, 'That's preposterous, you're dysmorphic,'" Peters says. "But he would never use a word like that. "And trying to have a logger say it without any of the modern language, I rediscovered things that I found pretty magical about the trans experience." Where writing academically about an experience can "deaden" it, she says, resisting that language frees up space to focus on the feelings associated with that experience, instead. At the same time, Peters notes that only a few figures across Stag Dance's four genre-spanning stories — including the apocalyptic Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, teen love story The Chaser, and sexual thriller The Masker — identify as trans. Babe and most of the other characters fall into what Peters calls the "weird gender feelings" category. More broadly, they all experience some disconnect between how they appear to the world and how they feel inside, something Peters says almost everyone can relate to. "It's highlighted in trans people, but that's more a result of our society," she says. "It exists in cis people [too]." Stag Dance arrives in a much different political climate in the US from Detransition, Baby. Some of the second Trump administration's first executive orders removed hard-earned trans support and rights, including the ability to have a different gender from that assigned at birth on a passport, as well as funds supporting trans youth or any program that "promotes gender ideology". When asked if she worries that the political climate will halt trans literature's mainstream success, Peters is adamant it won't. She points towards those 20 books she mentioned earlier, including works by Rose Dommu, Tommy Dorfman, Harron Walker and Emily St. James. "Although this era is bad, we have more of a voice than we've ever had before," she says. "And I think our stories are better, our art is better, our worldview is more joyous and compelling. I think we have a better time. I think we throw better parties and, if people get a chance to see that, I think they're gonna like what we're doing." Torrey Peters' Stag Dance is out now.
The Age
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Torrey Peters went off-grid and came back speaking lumberjack
To most, they're pancakes – but to Torrey Peters, they're monkey blankets. Eggs are cackleberries, chewing tobacco is Scandihoovian dynamite, and women are skooches and strumpets. Peters immersed herself so deeply in woodcutter slang while writing her remarkable new novella Stag Dance, set in a 19th-century illegal logging camp, that after a day of writing, she'd amuse (and/or annoy) her family and friends by slipping into her lumberjack voice. And she doesn't just talk the talk. Peters can walk the walk, or in this case, fell the trees. The story was inspired by the time she spent living in her off-grid, 12-by-12, log cabin in rugged Vermont, in the New England region. There's no running water, just a stream for bathing. There's an outdoor kitchen and outhouse; a wood stove heats a sauna. 'I was learning to use a chainsaw because I had to cut the trees for firewood and build a bridge on the logs. Nothing super impressive, but I had to be like This is a spruce, this is a balsam fir. We have beech and maple. I learnt all the different trees and what they do,' Peters says, now safely ensconced in her Brooklyn apartment, flashing mint green nails as she talks. 'It's a real 1880s lifestyle out there, which means that I'll go there for a week at a time, but I think some part of my mind would break if I were there super long.' As she worked, Peters wondered about the people who lived such hard and isolated lives, and the experience of the self while alone in the woods, with only the trees to affirm, challenge or question you. 'I'm from the Midwest, and I was raised a boy. If you told my 17-year-old self that when you turn 40, you're going to be in the woods with a chainsaw struggling to build something but feeling grimly pleased with your proficiency, I would have been like, 'Oh, yeah, that makes sense',' Peters says. 'I never would have thought I'd have transitioned, but I would have been like, that's a masculine model of being. Well, what does it mean that I did transition and I ended up exactly where my 17-year-old self expected?' She had no answer, but those questions laid the first axe-blow for a novel set in a logging camp. During her research, Peters discovered a historical tradition in American frontier camps where dances were held, and some loggers would attend as women. To signify their role, they would attach an inverted brown triangle of fabric over their crotch – a practice that becomes a central motif in Stag Dance. The story follows Babe Bunyan, a large, rugged lumberjack who decides to attend the camp's stag dance as a woman, placing him in a rivalry with the younger, more feminine Lisen. Set against the grit and grime of an illegal logging camp, the story evokes the poetic sensibilities of authors like Cormac McCarthy and Herman Melville. Loading The lumberjack vernacular — for which Peters drew on a dictionary of logger slang — allowed her to approach questions of trans identity through the 'side door'. Phrases like gender dysphoria, she says, have had the life sucked out of them through academic, medical, and online discourse. A lumberjack, however, would never have used that phrase in the first place. This forced Peters to think, and write, about how gender dysphoria feels rather than relying on familiar terms. For Babe, it's summed up in the description: 'No mirror has ever befriended me.' 'I had to reinvent a lot of the trans language that, to me, feels ossified,' Peters says. 'It ended up being quite magical for me that I had this new language to find out these things. They became defamilarised and new for me.' Stag Dance gives its name to Peter's new collection of four stories, each of which deliciously twists familiar genres into unexpected shapes; full of surprises without sacrificing any emotional intensity. The collection also includes Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, a post-apocalyptic tale where a pandemic renders humans unable to produce sex hormones; the boarding school romance The Chaser; and The Masker, a body horror story set at a cross-dressing convention. Only a few characters are explicitly trans, with Peters more interested in breaking down the binary between trans and cis people, revealing the categories as porous and complex. Peters says the gap between how a person feels in themselves or wants to be seen, and how the world sees them, isn't an experience unique to trans people. 'For me, coming at it with emotions was the point. Coming at it without identity, without heuristics, or this is how we break it down, is how I am interested in writing these days,' Peters says. 'It's not that I am demanding empathy for trans people. It's actually more than I'm demanding that readers have empathy for themselves, and I think in having empathy for themselves – 'Oh yes, I've felt that way before' – they can maybe then start to make maps of what other people are doing, they can make intellectual maps based on those emotions.' Stag Dance is the final story in Torrey Peters' collection and the only one written after her debut novel, Detransition, Baby, became a bestseller in 2021. That novel – a comedy of manners about a trio who plan to raise a baby together – was described by one critic as 'the first great trans realist novel.' Its longlisting for the Women's Prize for Fiction made Peters the first openly trans woman nominated for the award. However, the nomination drew scrutiny, including an open letter condemning Torrey's eligibility by a group called the Wild Woman Writing Club. Peters wrote at the time that she had received an 'outpouring of hate' and expressed hope that the next trans woman to be on the list could at least enjoy the experience more. Peters knows some readers will be disappointed she didn't write another 'trans Sex in the City' in the style of Detransition, Baby – and she started work on a financial thriller set in contemporary Brooklyn. But the weight of the expectation felt restrictive, she found liberation a world away from the contemporary in the minds and language of lumberjacks. 'It's not just unexpected for other people. It's very unexpected for myself. But I think that's like a really good place to write from, when you're surprising yourself,' Peters says. 'Nobody was waiting for this. Nobody was like, 'What we want is a lumberjack novel.' In a lot of ways, that freed me to do whatever I wanted. ' Trans people have increasingly found themselves at the centre of public debate and policymaking in the United States with the Trump administration targeting trans people with executive orders. Loading These include an order that the United States will recognise only a person's sex assigned at birth, and new restrictions on the National Endowment for the Arts, targeting efforts to promote diversity and so-called 'gender ideology'. In a recent essay for New York Magazine, Peters described how under the Trump administration, her passport would be changed from 'F' to 'M' and the consequences that would have when she travelled to Colombia, where she owns an apartment. These policies, Peters says, are designed to intimidate and silence. Initially, she felt overwhelmed by the hostility, but over time, she has become more resolute. 'I'm meant to be scared. I'm meant to say home. I am meant not to go anywhere, and the M is meant to stop me from doing that sort of stuff,' Peters says. 'And in response to that, I have to be like f---k that. I'm going to go to many more places. I'm going to Australia. I'm going to talk about this. I'm not going to be intimidated and more over, I am going to divest from the idea that these people have the authority, and that what they say in any way should be taken seriously.'
Sydney Morning Herald
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Torrey Peters went off-grid and came back speaking lumberjack
To most, they're pancakes – but to Torrey Peters, they're monkey blankets. Eggs are cackleberries, chewing tobacco is Scandihoovian dynamite, and women are skooches and strumpets. Peters immersed herself so deeply in woodcutter slang while writing her remarkable new novella Stag Dance, set in a 19th-century illegal logging camp, that after a day of writing, she'd amuse (and/or annoy) her family and friends by slipping into her lumberjack voice. And she doesn't just talk the talk. Peters can walk the walk, or in this case, fell the trees. The story was inspired by the time she spent living in her off-grid, 12-by-12, log cabin in rugged Vermont, in the New England region. There's no running water, just a stream for bathing. There's an outdoor kitchen and outhouse; a wood stove heats a sauna. 'I was learning to use a chainsaw because I had to cut the trees for firewood and build a bridge on the logs. Nothing super impressive, but I had to be like This is a spruce, this is a balsam fir. We have beech and maple. I learnt all the different trees and what they do,' Peters says, now safely ensconced in her Brooklyn apartment, flashing mint green nails as she talks. 'It's a real 1880s lifestyle out there, which means that I'll go there for a week at a time, but I think some part of my mind would break if I were there super long.' As she worked, Peters wondered about the people who lived such hard and isolated lives, and the experience of the self while alone in the woods, with only the trees to affirm, challenge or question you. 'I'm from the Midwest, and I was raised a boy. If you told my 17-year-old self that when you turn 40, you're going to be in the woods with a chainsaw struggling to build something but feeling grimly pleased with your proficiency, I would have been like, 'Oh, yeah, that makes sense',' Peters says. 'I never would have thought I'd have transitioned, but I would have been like, that's a masculine model of being. Well, what does it mean that I did transition and I ended up exactly where my 17-year-old self expected?' She had no answer, but those questions laid the first axe-blow for a novel set in a logging camp. During her research, Peters discovered a historical tradition in American frontier camps where dances were held, and some loggers would attend as women. To signify their role, they would attach an inverted brown triangle of fabric over their crotch – a practice that becomes a central motif in Stag Dance. The story follows Babe Bunyan, a large, rugged lumberjack who decides to attend the camp's stag dance as a woman, placing him in a rivalry with the younger, more feminine Lisen. Set against the grit and grime of an illegal logging camp, the story evokes the poetic sensibilities of authors like Cormac McCarthy and Herman Melville. Loading The lumberjack vernacular — for which Peters drew on a dictionary of logger slang — allowed her to approach questions of trans identity through the 'side door'. Phrases like gender dysphoria, she says, have had the life sucked out of them through academic, medical, and online discourse. A lumberjack, however, would never have used that phrase in the first place. This forced Peters to think, and write, about how gender dysphoria feels rather than relying on familiar terms. For Babe, it's summed up in the description: 'No mirror has ever befriended me.' 'I had to reinvent a lot of the trans language that, to me, feels ossified,' Peters says. 'It ended up being quite magical for me that I had this new language to find out these things. They became defamilarised and new for me.' Stag Dance gives its name to Peter's new collection of four stories, each of which deliciously twists familiar genres into unexpected shapes; full of surprises without sacrificing any emotional intensity. The collection also includes Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, a post-apocalyptic tale where a pandemic renders humans unable to produce sex hormones; the boarding school romance The Chaser; and The Masker, a body horror story set at a cross-dressing convention. Only a few characters are explicitly trans, with Peters more interested in breaking down the binary between trans and cis people, revealing the categories as porous and complex. Peters says the gap between how a person feels in themselves or wants to be seen, and how the world sees them, isn't an experience unique to trans people. 'For me, coming at it with emotions was the point. Coming at it without identity, without heuristics, or this is how we break it down, is how I am interested in writing these days,' Peters says. 'It's not that I am demanding empathy for trans people. It's actually more than I'm demanding that readers have empathy for themselves, and I think in having empathy for themselves – 'Oh yes, I've felt that way before' – they can maybe then start to make maps of what other people are doing, they can make intellectual maps based on those emotions.' Stag Dance is the final story in Torrey Peters' collection and the only one written after her debut novel, Detransition, Baby, became a bestseller in 2021. That novel – a comedy of manners about a trio who plan to raise a baby together – was described by one critic as 'the first great trans realist novel.' Its longlisting for the Women's Prize for Fiction made Peters the first openly trans woman nominated for the award. However, the nomination drew scrutiny, including an open letter condemning Torrey's eligibility by a group called the Wild Woman Writing Club. Peters wrote at the time that she had received an 'outpouring of hate' and expressed hope that the next trans woman to be on the list could at least enjoy the experience more. Peters knows some readers will be disappointed she didn't write another 'trans Sex in the City' in the style of Detransition, Baby – and she started work on a financial thriller set in contemporary Brooklyn. But the weight of the expectation felt restrictive, she found liberation a world away from the contemporary in the minds and language of lumberjacks. 'It's not just unexpected for other people. It's very unexpected for myself. But I think that's like a really good place to write from, when you're surprising yourself,' Peters says. 'Nobody was waiting for this. Nobody was like, 'What we want is a lumberjack novel.' In a lot of ways, that freed me to do whatever I wanted. ' Trans people have increasingly found themselves at the centre of public debate and policymaking in the United States with the Trump administration targeting trans people with executive orders. Loading These include an order that the United States will recognise only a person's sex assigned at birth, and new restrictions on the National Endowment for the Arts, targeting efforts to promote diversity and so-called 'gender ideology'. In a recent essay for New York Magazine, Peters described how under the Trump administration, her passport would be changed from 'F' to 'M' and the consequences that would have when she travelled to Colombia, where she owns an apartment. These policies, Peters says, are designed to intimidate and silence. Initially, she felt overwhelmed by the hostility, but over time, she has become more resolute. 'I'm meant to be scared. I'm meant to say home. I am meant not to go anywhere, and the M is meant to stop me from doing that sort of stuff,' Peters says. 'And in response to that, I have to be like f---k that. I'm going to go to many more places. I'm going to Australia. I'm going to talk about this. I'm not going to be intimidated and more over, I am going to divest from the idea that these people have the authority, and that what they say in any way should be taken seriously.'
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
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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
