When I first conceived of these stories, around 2016, a lot of trans writing was very sure that it had to be a specific thing: In order to capture the trans experience, we have to invent a totally new narrative for this wild and different style of life that has strange punctuation and asterisks and parentheses in it! And I was very resistant to this because I was like, I actually think that trans lives are built out of the exact same things that any other life is built out of. The emotions that are operative for a trans person are the exact same emotions that are operative for anybody else. It may be arranged slightly differently or with slightly different balances, but 99 percent of them are all the same. And so, there was a way in which I was like, You know what? I’m going to just write trans stories to show that you don’t need to invent some othering form to explain a trans life. You can explain a trans life in a teen romance. Then, I just started finding them fun.
― Torrey Peters, Interview, The Cut
What booksellers are saying about Stag Dance
- Peter’s is really pushing the bounds of everything gender and sex in such a unique and weird literary experience. I was pretty confused some times but it spoke to me, even as a cis, straight woman. Because who the hell tells us we are only on thing? Gender experience isn’t just this or that, it fluctuates through life and experiences.
― Meghan Haile, The Lynx in Gainesville, Florida | BUY
- Stag Dance presses against the fringes of humanity, asking characters to confront the limits of their knowledge and their self-concepts. Moving between genres with ease, what links these four stories is the way that Torrey Peters asks her audience to reconfigure their attitude towards shame and fear.
― Mikey LaFave, Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia | BUY
- Erotic and quietly touching, instinctive and temperamental, this novella and added short stories delight as much as they disturb. Lumberjack jamborees, dehumanizing skin suits, the shrieks of baby pigs, and a world wracked by a hormone famine come together to make an unsettling experience highlighting the complexities of the queer/femme experience.
― Joshua Lambie, Underground Books in Carrollton, Georgia | BUY
- The risks are high and outcomes are brutal in STAG DANCE, all circling around big questions of is it worth it? Survival, masking, and the consequences–and you feel the punch in every direction each time. Torrey Peters captures the nuances of these spiraling feelings so well, but allows them to play out in painful but satisfying ways.
― Julie Jarema, Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg, South Carolina | BUY
About Torrey Peters
Torrey Peters is the bestselling author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Award, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. Torrey rides a pink motorcycle and splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont.
