FP Staff List: WILD GEESE + stories of becoming
Warm, witty, and wonderful, WILD GEESE is a brilliant new book from Irish writer Soula Emmanuel. The novel introduces readers to Phoebe Forde, a trans woman settling into being freshly thirty and starting over in Copenhagen, trying to enjoy the simple things in life. That is, until an unexpected weekend visit from her ex-girlfriend Grace suddenly transports Phoebe back in time, complicating her understanding of lives and loves, both past and present.
As we get ready for this beautiful book to spread its wings and take flight into the world, our new sales and marketing coordinator Rachel Gilman compiled a consortium of other novels and story collections exploring the experiences of trans characters falling in and out of love on the journey to finding themselves. Be sure to add a few to your fall reading list!
NEVADA
by Imogen Binnie (MCD x FSG Originals)
From the publisher: “Maria Griffiths is almost thirty and works at a used bookstore in New York City while trying to stay true to her punk values. She’s in love with her bike but not with her girlfriend, Steph . . . Everything is mostly fine until Maria and Steph break up, sending Maria into a tailspin, and then onto a cross-country trek.”
PANPOCALYPSE
by Carley Moore (Feminist Press)
From us!: “It’s early summer in New York City, 2020. The city is largely shut down, and Orpheus—our queer, disabled, poly hero—is lonely, devoid of touch and community. Orpheus manages to buy a bike just before they sell out and takes to the streets looking for Eurydice, the first woman she fell in love with, who broke her heart. But then Orpheus hears mysterious news of the underground bar Le Monocle, fashioned after the 1930s Parisian lesbian club of the same name. Can she find it? Will she ever be allowed to love again?”
DETRANSITION, BABY
by Torrey Peters (One World)
From the publisher: “Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn’t hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart.”
BELLIES
by Nicola Duncan (Hanover Square Press)
From the publisher: “From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?”
A SAFE GIRL TO LOVE
by Casey Plett (Arsenal Pulp Press)
From the publisher: “Eleven unique short stories featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love in settings ranging from a rural Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn. These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never will it be predictable.”
GIRLFRIENDS
by Emily Zhou (Littlepuss Press)
From the publisher: “In seven light-filled prisms of short stories, Emily Zhou chronicles modern queer life with uncompromising and hilarious lucidity. Attending to the intimacy of Gen Z women's lives, these stories move from the provinces to the metropolis, from chaotic student accommodation to insecure jobs, from parties to dates to the nights after, from haplessness to some kind of power.”
MARGARET AND THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING BODY
by Megan Milks (Feminist Press)
From us: “Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body reimagines nineties adolescence—mashing up girl group series, choose-your-own-adventures, and chronicles of anorexia—in a queer and trans coming-of-age tale like no other. An interrogation of girlhood and nostalgia, dysmorphia and dysphoria, this debut novel puzzles through the weird, ever-evasive questions of growing up.”
LITTLE BLUE ENCYCLOPEDIA: (FOR VIVIAN)
by Hazel Jane Plante (Metonymy Press)
From the publisher: “The playful and poignant novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) sifts through a queer trans woman’s unrequited love for her straight trans friend who died. A queer love letter steeped in desire, grief, and delight . . . reveals with glorious detail and emotional nuance the woman the narrator loved, why she loved her, and the depths of what she has lost.”
FELIX EVER AFTER
by Kacen Callender (Balzer & Bray/Harperteen)
From the publisher: “From Stonewall and Lambda Award-winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time. Felix Ever After is an honest and layered story about identity, falling in love, and recognizing the love you deserve.”
PONYBOY
by Eliot Duncan (W.W. Norton)
From the publisher: “Ponyboy unravels in his Paris apartment. Cut to the bar. Cut to the back room. Ponyboy is strung out and struggling. He is falling into the widening chasm between who he is—trans, electrically so—and the blank canvas his girlfriend, Baby, wants him to be . . . In precise, atmospheric prose, Eliot Duncan’s debut novel lays bare the innate splendor, joy, and ache of becoming one’s self.”
THE CALL-OUT: A NOVEL IN RHYME
by Cat Fitzpatrick (Seven Stories Press)
From the publisher: “Visiting all the fixtures of fashionable 21st century queer society—picnics, literary readings, health conferences, drag shows, punk houses, community accountability processes, Grindr hookups—The Call-Out also engages with pressing questions around economic precarity, sexual consent, racism in queer spaces, and feminist theory, in the service of asking what it takes to build, or destroy, a marginalized community.”
WILD GEESE
by Soula Emmanuel (Feminist Press)
From us again 😉: “Phoebe Forde has a new home, a new name, and is newly thirty. An Irish transplant and PhD candidate, she’s overeducated and underpaid, but finally settling into her new life in Copenhagen. Almost three years into her gender transition, Phoebe has learned to move through the world carefully, savoring small moments of joy. After all, a woman without a past can be anyone she wants. But an unexpected visit from her ex-girlfriend Grace brings back memories of Dublin and the life she thought she’d left behind. Over the course of a weekend, their romance rekindles into something sweet and radically unfamiliar as Grace helps Phoebe navigate the jagged edges of nostalgia and hope.”