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Stag Dance & Stories
A Literary Fiction Short Story Collection by Torrey Peters
Subgenres:
- Trans Fiction,
- Queer Fiction,
- Short Story Collection
This book is for you if you're into...
- Gender-bending lumberjack stories with rivalry and obsession
- Queer fiction that sidesteps respectability for raw, subversive perspectives
- Acidly funny takes on transness and community at the margins
From Little Stack
Torrey Peters made history in 2021 when her debut novel, Detransition, Baby, made her the first openly trans woman nominated for the Women's Prize for fiction. She followed that up with Stag Dance, a collection of stories that further revealed her unique authorly talents.
Peters' work explores gender and queerness through unexpected lenses, putting aside notions of so-called respectability in favor of politically charged and highly subversive perspectives. In the title story, a group of lumberjacks organise a stag dance, a kind of drag ball, and fight for the honor of being the most beautiful cross-dresser.
This inventive, boundary-pushing follow-up to Detransition, Baby takes on gender, transness and lives on the margins in all of their gorgeously complicated glory.
In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters's keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.
In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.
Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In The Chaser, a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, The Masker, a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.
Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.
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