A varied, remarkable collection of trans-themed fiction.
Szpara edits an anthology of new, speculative short stories from transgender perspectives.
A transgender man and his melancholy family live in different decades by using an heirloom time machine. A woman works on fostering telepathy between people and animals in order for humanity to get the upper hand in a war with aliens. A female resident of a fishing village, who desires a wombless body, goes to sea in a magic ship. An aspiring librarian is tasked with making books easier to share while simultaneously making them impossible to steal. These and other stories in this collection, set in places both fantastic and familiar, follow characters who seem caught forever between worlds. In an introduction, Szpara explains the content: “There are stories with actual transgender characters, some for whom that is central and others for whom that isn’t. And there are stories without transgender characters, but with metaphors and symbolism in their place, genuine expressions of self through shapeshifting and programming.” From Holly Heisey’s short, epistolary “Contents of Care Package to Etsath-tachri, Formerly Ryan Andrew Curran (Human English Translated to Sedrayin)” to Penny Stirling’s meditative, fragmentary “Kin, Painted,” the tales depict a multitude of forms, genres, cultures, and time frames. All were published in various literary journals in 2015 and represent the diversity of both transgender and speculative fiction. They interact with past literary traditions, respond to the evolving social climate of the present, and, of course, imagine the landscapes of the future. Authors also include Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Everett Maroon, E. Catherine Tobler, and Molly Tanzer, among others, most of whom readers will likely encounter for the first time. The stories are as literary as they are imaginative, written in practiced prose that probes and interrogates the emotional states of their characters. The speculative scenarios match with transgender perspectives in such complementary, productive ways that one wonders why it hasn’t been done more often. Traditional boundaries of identity and structure are blessedly absent, as this anthology challenges readers’ expectations in ways that few have managed to do before.
A varied, remarkable collection of trans-themed fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59021-617-0
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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