Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and the first black woman to receive this highest literary honor in the English language. Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women that paints a vivid…
A blistering new novel that follows a Filipino American journalist’s return to dictatorship-ruled Manila to research her book on tribes from a “cracklingly original” (Elle) and “singular” (New York Times Book Review) author, PEN Faulkner award-winner, Sabina Murray. Filipino-American Christina “Ting” Klein has just travelled from New York to Manila, both to escape her imminent…
Sketchtasy takes place in that late-night moment when everything comes together, and everything falls apart—it’s an urgent, glittering, devastating novel about the perils of queer world-making in the mid-‘90s. This is Boston in 1995, a city defined by a rabid fear of difference. Alexa, an incisive twenty-one-year-old queen, faces everyday brutality with determined nonchalance. Rejecting…
As we follow Achilles’ metamorphosis from wild boy to demure girl to lover to hero, Statius brilliantly illustrates a series of contrasting codes of behavior: male and female, epic and elegiac. This first full-length study of the poem addresses not only the narrative itself, but also sets the myth of Achilles on Scyros within a…
Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. Inspired by novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover, it is arguably one of her most popular novels; Orlando is a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to…
Starting in the 1990’s, feminist and queer scholars frequently cited Woolf’s Orlando as an example of the potential of modernist experimentation to open up a space for the elliptical articulation of fluid genders and desires. This reading finds its best evidence in Orlando’s cross-dressed erotic pursuits. However, the text’s popularity has been on the wane…
Did you know that in medieval French folklore a person might change sex by passing under a rainbow? Or that same-sex unions have been celebrated by peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, Africa, China, and indigenous America? Or that Sappho, da Vinci, Emily Dickinson, Nijinsky, Benjamin Britten, Mishima, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Keith Haring, Boy George,…
The shaman “Lizard” is one of the two-souled-ones, a Berdache. He must convince his proud and stubborn childhood friend, the warrior Red Wolf, that he, too, is a Berdache and must take the shaman training, before Red Wolf loses his mind. A call for aid comes, so the Berdache, Red Wolf, and the beautiful Chickasaw…
Nevada is the darkly comedic story of Maria Griffiths, a young trans woman living in New York City and trying to stay true to her punk values while working retail. When she finds out her girlfriend has lied to her, the world she thought she’d carefully built for herself begins to unravel, and Maria sets…
Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence. Woman or man? That’s the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue–collar town in the 1950’s, coming…