Torrey Peters

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 A VULTURE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR)

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.

A Novel & Stories

Stag Dance

Lindsay

“Fell over blacked out and hung myself up from a nail.” She isn’t bragging. She’s matter-of-fact: half a claim of responsibility and half a shrugging abdication of it, the way one might explain that there’s garbage everywhere because a raccoon got into the trash. Yeah, you could have fastened down the lid, but raccoons gonna raccoon, so what can you do?

he’s one of those men, apparently, for whom all women’s actions politely cease when his attention wanders elsewhere

james cao

“Fine. Anyway, now it's different. I'm t4t for you in the abstract. Trans girls loving trans girls. And you're trans, so you're included.”

We are right now lying in bed beneath an arsenal: a sniper rifle, a shotgun, and an AR-15 mnodified to be automatic, all hung horizontally above the headboard so that you can accelerate from REM sleep sleep to deadly motherfucker in a matter of seconds.

She licks her lips, and when she speaks, she's gone infuriatingly dreamy. “I was thinking..." she says, then stops and starts again. "I was thinking that I want to live in a world where everyone has to choose their gender."

He describes the house this girl lives in a coven of trans women polyamorously fucking one another to biblical levels of drama over the soundtrack of Skyrim on PS3, all the while saying how shitty the world was outside the house, until they so confused microaggressions for deep violence that they walked around with knives in their boots and canisters of Mace dangling from their purses—and I exhale with frustration when I realize exactly which girl he's talking about.

It was an illustrated instruction pamphlet for how to perform the Heimlich maneuver. Robbie must have pulled it down from some wall. A little arrow had been drawn in marker pointing to the choking man with the word you inked in beside it. Another arrow said me and pointed to the woman embracing the choking man from behind. Over both their heads had been drawn a heart. Fucking weird.

Next day, the whole of creation preened in bridal finery.

He pricked his finger with the tip of a pocket blade, and on the newly exposed globes of my cheeks, we made circles of rouge. He drew similar on his own. 

“Sisters!” […] The word entered my head like a pin, to burst some terrible balloon that had been there always, structing clear passage. In the reflection, my face near to popped from bashful pride.

Stag Dance quotes

Join the club