Published in 2013
288 pages
Imogen Binnie wrote a monthly column for Maximum Rocknroll magazine for about nine years, as well as the zines The Fact That It’s Funny Doesn’t Make It A Joke and Stereotype Threat. Her novel Nevada was a thing, then it went out of print and it was less of a thing, and then it went back into print and became a thing again. She wrote for the TV shows Doubt, Council of Dads, and Cruel Summer. She also wrote an adaptation of the film Love, Actually which was set in Burlington, Vermont, in which all the characters were trans, but apparently it would violate “intellectual copyright law” to try to film it, so she posted it on Twitter. She also did a podcast called Imogen Watches Classic Films for a few years. She probably lives with her family somewhere.
What is this book about?
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.
