Torrey Peters will follow up her acclaimed debut novel with a new book of fiction coming next year, People magazine reports.
Random House will publish the author’s Stag Dance next year. It says that the book, which collects a novel and three novellas, “pushes trans-genre to its limits to explore who gets included—and excluded—from the possibilities of gender.”
Peters made her literary debut in 2021 with Detransition, Baby, a novel about three people whose lives collide after one of them becomes pregnant. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, “smart, funny, and bighearted.”
Stag Dance is composed of the titular novel along with the novellas “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” “The Chaser,” and “The Masker.”
“The book is my evolving attempt to explore the emotional, lived questions at the murky edges of gender that can’t be captured by identity categories; the places where we are just people yearning, crashing, loving and messing up,” Peters told People. “I hope that by the end of reading Stag Dance, you can no longer really say for sure who does or doesn’t qualify as transgender—or any other gender—not only within the book, but even, and perhaps more freeingly, when you look up from the page.”
Stag Dance is scheduled for publication on March 11, 2025.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
