Stag Dance
A Quartet
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- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “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.”—People
“Hot, heartbreaking, and thrillingly victorious.”—Miranda July, New York Times bestselling author of All Fours
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE • ONE OF VULTURE'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Elle, Electric Lit, them, Chicago Public Library
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Strange, beautiful, and absurd, each of these four tales from Torrey Peters experiments with gender and the trans experience in brilliantly surreal new ways. In the title novella, a dance at a remote logging camp invites any of the attending lumberjacks to role-play as women, quickly leading to toxic envy between the brawny protagonist and his ally turned rival. In “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” a woman navigates a toxic relationship with her ex as the world succumbs to a contagion that forces everyone to actively choose their own gender. The heightened realities that Peters imagines in her stories can be downright bizarre, and yet each one reflects so smartly on the meaning of gender, we found ourselves contemplating the book for days. Maybe that’s because the core themes that pervade these mind-bending tales—from the violence of transphobia and misogyny to the euphoria of being seen by others the way you see yourself—leap straight from reality onto the page.
