Overview

"Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn's adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book. Horn swims through a range of subjects, roving across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. From Horn's upbringing with a mother who used them as a model in photos and art installations--memorably in a photography session in an ice bath with dead squid--to Horn's travels before they were out as trans, these essays are linked by a desire to interrogate liminal physicalities. Horn reexamines the oft-presumed uniformity of bodily experience, breaking down the implied singularity of ""the body"" as cultural and scientific object. The essays instead privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. A sui generis work of nonfiction, Voice of the Fish blends the aquatic, mystical, and physical to reach a place beyond them all."

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9781644450895

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Reviews

This book left me stunned. Breathtaking in its scope and generosity, Voice of the Fish is that rare work that defies easy categorization. At once a personal memoir and an examination of ancient worlds and marine life, Voice of the Fish also becomes a luminous and compassionate reckoning with borders and boundaries. And all of this written in achingly beautiful prose that catches the light in even the darkest of moments. We are in the midst of a rare and transcendent talent, and how lucky we are that Lars Horn exists. --Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize

Author Information

Lars Horn holds MAs from the University of Edinburgh, the �cole normale sup�rieure, Paris, and Concordia University, Montreal. Their work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Write Across Canada, and New Writing Scotland. They live in Miami, Florida.

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