Nevada - by Imogen Binnie (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels

"[Nevada] is defiant, terse, not quite cynical, sometimes flip, addressed to people who think they know. It is, if you like, punk rock." --The New Yorker

"Nevada is a book that changed my life: it shaped both my worldview and personhood, making me the writer I am. And it did so by the oldest of methods, by telling a wise, hilarious, and gripping story." --Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

A beloved and blistering cult classic and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction finally back in print, Nevada follows a disaffected trans woman as she embarks on a cross-country road trip.

Maria Griffiths is almost thirty and works at a used bookstore in New York City while trying to stay true to her punk values. She's in love with her bike but not with her girlfriend, Steph. She takes random pills and drinks more than is good for her, but doesn't inject anything except, when she remembers, estrogen, because she's trans. Everything is mostly fine until Maria and Steph break up, sending Maria into a tailspin, and then onto a cross-country trek in the car she steals from Steph. She ends up in the backwater town of Star City, Nevada, where she meets James, who is probably but not certainly trans, and who reminds Maria of her younger self. As Maria finds herself in the awkward position of trans role model, she realizes that she could become James's savior--or his downfall.

One of the most beloved cult novels of our time and a landmark of trans literature, Imogen Binnie's Nevada is a blistering, heartfelt, and evergreen coming-of-age story, and a punk-smeared excavation of marginalized life under capitalism. Guided by an instantly memorable, terminally self-aware protagonist--and back in print featuring a new afterword by the author--Nevada is the great American road novel flipped on its head for a new generation.

Review Quotes

"[Nevada] is defiant, terse, not quite cynical, sometimes flip, addressed to people who think they know. It is, if you like, punk rock . . . Nevada understands how, no matter what we do after we come out, we will probably feel that we got something wrong . . . Binnie's audacity was to address an audience--a community, an us--that hadn't quite seen itself this way before." --Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker

"Here and now, the novel makes as much sense (if not more) as it did nine years ago when it was first published. In the middle of a trans panic, with transphobes demanding that love, work, achievement and gender all follow the same cis narrative timetable, Nevada steals a car, walks off the job and drives someplace else." --Noah Berlatsky, Los Angeles Times

"A beautiful and occasionally disturbing complication of the oh-so-American trope of the cross-country road trip . . . it's long past time for the cis reader to form a bond with the brilliance of [Binnie's] work." --Emma Specter, Vogue

"A good and important book . . . It's easy to see why [Nevada] has reached cult status. [It] is a delight to read. Sharp, energizing, and laugh-out-loud funny . . . It was among the first contemporary novels to treat a trans woman's story in a complicated, nuanced way, not relying on transition for storytelling momentum or treating it as a guaranteed happy ending." --Lily Meyer, The Atlantic

"Most extraordinary of all, [Nevada] wasn't written to appease or amuse a non-trans readership. It was written by a trans woman directly to other trans women, whether they've come out or not . . . I wasn't ready when I first read Nevada. And yet the novel still gave me something that helped me . . . This is why it matters that we make our own culture, our own art." --McKenzie Wark, The Nation

"This is hands down my favorite book of the summer . . . Binnie's fiction has so much to say about the queer and trans experience, bodily autonomy, community, and the ways queer people process trauma." --David Vogel, Buzzfeed

"[Nevada is] both very much of a specific era and timeless, brilliantly delving into the constant hum of self-consciousness that emerges when one is pushed towards the margins." --Daniel Spielberger, W

"A funny, profane, and melancholy portrayal of trans-ness . . . the result is one of the most controversial, explosive endings in LGBTQ literature." --Casey Plett, Harper's Bazaar

"[Nevada] forcefully tears away from nearby literary precedent, departing from the didactic and sentimental functions of memoir and gender novel both . . . The novel rehearses the enormity of human want that sometimes takes the shape of transition: that totally ordinary, totally upending desire for another sex, another form of social meaning and embodied sensation, all of which could give pattern, heft, and coherence to a life that otherwise might feel like it belongs to someone else." --Kay Gabriel, The Yale Review

"While it's true that the iconoclastic beauty of Binnie's 2013 novel lies partly in its straightforward nature--a bookstore clerk gets dumped and then fired from her job, prompting a solo sojourn out west--it also brims with uncommonly judicious insight into the emotional topography of trans bodies." --Michelle Hart, Electric Lit

"It changed my life both as a writer and a messed-up trans woman in this messed-up world . . . [Nevada] has stayed with me forever when I consider what books can actually do." --Casey Plett, them

"It's unapologetic, messy, funny, heartbreaking, frustrating -- and when it's over, you want to talk about it with everyone." --Niko Stratis, Autostraddle

"Nevada is a book that changed my life: it shaped both my worldview and personhood, making me the writer I am. And it did so by the oldest of methods, by telling a wise, hilarious, and gripping story." --Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

"It is truly a joy to watch Imogen Binnie, 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. The writing here infers a time in the not so distant past where the terms 'queer' and 'counter-culture' were synonymous, on top of taking the great American road trip novel and turning it on its entire ass. Originally printed in 2013, this is the type of story that was so nice it had to be printed twice. TENS ACROSS THE GODDAMN BOARD." --Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

"Imogen Binnie's gimlet-eyed prose is raw, funny, and then devastating. I can't get Maria Griffiths out of my head: she's an edgy heroine, a new archetype--the quintessential late 20s punk rock trans girl blowing up her life and making friends on the road (or in the parking lot)." --Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of the Mortal Girl

"I'm here to testify that this reissue proves Nevada changed the world. Imogen Binnie's wise, honest, funny and brazenly intellectual work inspired the future and is still provocative, deep and fun to read." --Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show

"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. Nevada crept in under cover of night in 2013 and assumed its position as a classic while everyone's attention was elsewhere. When you read it, especially the second time, you will marvel at how casually Binnie deploys complex arguments without slowing the momentum of her narrative or the unbreakable flow of her galloping prose. This is one for the ages." --Lucy Sante, author of Maybe the People Would be the Times

"[Nevada] is everything--personal, political, funny, raw, hyper-brainy, and down to earth. I want to stay in Maria's brain forever as she rides her bike through the streets of Brooklyn, doggedly hashing out her existence with humor and befuddled honesty. A really powerful new literary voice." --Michelle Tea, author of Valencia

"Only recently have trans writers begun to write from their own lives, and the lives of their community, lives that are hard, sometimes lonely, or dangerous, but also joyous and even strong. Imogen Binnie's Nevada--funny, harsh, above all, honest and uncensored--was a pioneer in this new wave of trans books. It's great to see it back in print and reaching a wider audience." --Rachel Pollack, author of The Beatrix Gates