The novel, now re-released by top publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is interspersed with frank musings on addiction, dissociating during sex, gentrification, and how trans women struggle to find solace online and offline in the 21st century. The sense of isolation that developed during her time on the west coast became the catalyst for writing the book.Īlthough Nevada has been out of print for a number of years, it has accrued an impassioned fanbase and is considered to be part of the queer literary canon. She had just left New York City, and lacking any fellow trans women to confide in, she describes herself as “feeling out of place” back then. While writing Nevada, Binnie was living in a queer communal house in Oakland, California. Upon arriving in the outskirts of Reno, Maria meets James, a Walmart worker whom she is convinced is actually transgender and in need of saving. Originally printed in 2013 with Topside Press, a now-defunct publisher of trans and feminist literature, Nevada tells the story of a punk transgender woman verging on 30 named Maria Griffiths, who embarks on a journey to the western United States after losing her bookstore job and breaking up with her girlfriend in Brooklyn. “I hope that more people read it and go, Holy shit, this has made my life feel possible.” Nevada crept in under cover of night in 2013 and assumed its position as a classic while everyone's attention was elsewhere.this is one for the ages.“A lot of people have read Nevada and said, ‘That book made me figure out I was trans,’ ‘That book saved my life,’ or ‘That book made me realize that I don't have to be as alone as I have made myself be,’” Imogen Binnie tells me just a few weeks before her cult classic novel, Nevada, would be re-released. Torrey Peters I fully tip my hat to former fellow Maximum Rock N Roll columnist and my sibling in the latter-day queer punk literary revolution I say without hesitation that we do not deserve Imogen Binnie AT ALL.it is truly a joy to watch a master of suspense paint the page with a both-feet-on-the-gas-pedal inner monologue, that is at once, spontaneous, acidic, razor sharp observant, fully embodied and (most importantly) vulnerable.TENS ACROSS THE GODDAMN BOARD.'īrontez Purnell I've told people that Nevada is the On the Road of trans literature, but that's glib and unfair to Imogen Binnie, who is a lot smarter than Jack Kerouac. It seems simple, but it had revolutionary effects, similar to Toni Morrison's famous declaration that she 'writes for Black women.' remains an original The scene had a basic premise: trans women writing for other trans women.

This is the book that launched the trans writing scene in Brooklyn that changed my own life.

Nevada binnie