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| photo: Hobbes Ginsberg | |
Casey Plett is the publisher at LittlePuss Press, a Stonewall Book Award-winning feminist press run by two trans women. She co-edited Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers and wrote A Dream of a Woman and Little Fish. Arsenal Pulp Press has reissued A Safe Girl to Love, her first book, originally published in 2014.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
A Safe Girl to Love is short stories about young transgender women in the early 2010s. And one of them is not so young.
On your nightstand now:
Alice Stoehr's Cisness or Pleasure. I've been ripping through her collections and they're gorgeous. I love a trans book that's so flippin' gay. Alice is right up there with Emily Zhou (whose collection we're publishing at LittlePuss) for short story writers trans literature is currently blessed with.
Also Jeremy Atherton Lin's Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. I was not expecting it to be so meditative! It is such a delight! "If my experiences in gay bars have been disappointing, what I wouldn't want to lose is the expectation of a better night."
Also I just began Hilary Leichter's Temporary. What a trip so far. It rules.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Roald Dahl--The BFG; Danny, the Champion of the World; James and the Giant Peach; Matilda; The Twits. I feel less fondly about him as an adult, to put it mildly, after learning what an antisemite and a racist he was, but those are the books I loved.
Also the Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith books--The Time Warp Trio forever. Oh, and Matt Christopher! I loved baseball as a kid.
Your top five authors:
Miriam Toews, Sarah Schulman, Iosi Havilio, Bryan Washington, Jeanne Thornton.
Book you've faked reading:
Well, I was once a book publicist, so luckily for you I can say with a straight face that I've never done this.
Book you're an evangelist for:
After Delores by Sarah Schulman. It's such an interesting anomaly in her older fiction, which often has more objectively sympathetic protagonists. And I love those books--Rat Bohemia blows the doors off--but After Delores is so deliciously off the rails: a lesbian noir from 1980s NYC in which a violently heartbroken protagonist must suddenly solve a murder, and she is both messily endearing and extremely unhinged. Like, nowadays when I hear "unreliable narrator," I'm kinda like, yeah yeah yeah whatever. This was the OG of that phenomenon on my personal map. She was a really troubled gay character who felt real, wasn't pretty or put on a brave face, was complicatedly dangerous--and all within a bang-up good time of a novel. Everybody go read After Delores right now.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Lucy Warner's Mirrors when I worked at the Strand. I finally read the first story recently after lugging it around for a decade. It was good.
Book you hid from your parents:
I kinda stopped reading in high school, which is when I would've gotten brave enough to hide anything from my parents, so I don't think I ever hid a book from them. I hid my DVD of Requiem for a Dream.
Book that changed your life:
Nevada by Imogen Binnie. As a messed-up trans human, it mapped a private part of my brain I never conceived of seeing daylight--or even explicitly conceived, period. And as a writer, it set me free.
Favorite line from a book:
"Look to the stars. Look at how the winners get history and the losers get culture. Close your eyes and ask God for light and look for it." --Julian K. Jarboe, Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel
Five books you'll never part with:
Paradises by Iosi Havilio--I maybe wouldn't have begun my novel Little Fish without reading this. It is so moving and propulsive and gorgeous, and the urban life of Buenos Aires he builds is so amazing--and also at its core, the story is the plain, recognizable tale of a lone mother with a small kid putting one foot in front of the other. It's a beautiful dark magic trick of a book, and it will stay with me forever.
A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews--This novel taught me how to write fiction. It's about Mennonites in southern Manitoba, where my family is from.
The Break by Katherena Vermette--This novel shattered my qualms with ensemble casts, and it is beautiful and elegiac and almost perfect. The book blew up in Canada, but I wish the entire world was reading Katherena. It's about Métis women in my hometown of Winnipeg.
Be With: Letters to a Caregiver by Mike Barnes--On the surface, it is a short book of essays about Mike caring for his mother with Alzheimer's. Beneath the surface, it is about the necessity of life.
Little Cat by Tamara Faith Berger--Best hetero sex-writing in existence. Don't @ me.
Other books have been huge on my personal map, yet perhaps eventually they finished doing what they needed to do for me? These books, though, are wells from which I am not done drinking.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Invasions by Calvin Gimpelevich. I had to blurb it, so I was reading it with the work-eye, but it's so unique and beautifully put together that I would love to experience it for the first time with some slow, internal, personal consideration, without any attached owing it of something.
When you have a harried professional literary life, I think it's important to keep reading on the go, books to which you don't owe anything.