Queer Voices Reading Group

In November, we will be reading the cult classic novel Nevada by Imogen Binnie, credited by critic Stephanie Burt as starting a movement of transgender literature in the 2010s and beyond!

Maria, a trans woman in her thirties, is going nowhere. She spends her aimless days working in a New York bookstore, trying to remain true to a punk ethos while drinking herself into a stupor and having a variety of listless and confusing sexual encounters. After her girlfriend cheats on her, Maria steals her car and heads for the Pacific, embarking on her version of the Great American Road Trip.

Along the way she stops in Reno, Nevada, and meets James, a young man who works in the local Wal-Mart. Maria recognizes elements of her younger self in James and the pair quickly form an unlikely but powerful connection, one that will have big implications for them both. This hilarious, groundbreaking cult classic inspired a whole literary movement, and is now published in the UK for the very first time.

"To re-read Binnie’s cult classic Nevada nearly ten years after its first publication is to remember the seismic shift this novel created in both queer/trans literature and in life...Many of us found our north star through literature, and Nevada shines brightly on the western horizon for readers, trans and cis alike, who refuse to buy into the status quo." -Cooper Lee Bombardier, LIBER Review