Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

Award-winning novelist Casey Plett (Little Fish) returns with a poignant suite of stories that center transgender women.

Casey Plett’s 2018 novel Little Fish won a Lambda Literary Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Amazon First Novel Award. Her latest work, A Dream of a Woman, is her first book of short stories since her seminal 2014 collection A Safe Girl to Love. Centering transgender women seeking stable, adult lives, A Dream of a Woman finds quiet truths in prairie high-rises and New York warehouses, in freezing Canadian winters and drizzly Oregon days.

In “Hazel and Christopher,” two childhood friends reconnect as adults after one of them has transitioned. In “Perfect Places,” a woman grapples with undesirability as she navigates fetish play with a man. In “Couldn't Hear You Talk Anymore,” the narrator reflects on her tumultuous life and what might have been as she recalls tender moments with another trans woman.

An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human.

Casey Plett is the author of the novel Little Fish and the short story collections A Dream of a Woman and A Safe Girl to Love, and co-editor of the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers (Topside Press). She wrote a column on transitioning for McSweeney's Internet Tendency and her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Maclean's, The Walrus, Plenitude, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. She is the winner of two Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction, winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and she received an Honour of Distinction from The Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. She lives in Windsor, Ontario.

Casey Plett's profile page

• Long-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize

“I’ve always admired Plett’s ability to capture the tenderest and most complicated intimacies between characters. Exploring addiction, loss, consent, and shifting desires, each story in her extraordinary new collection is somehow even more tender and emotionally complex than the last.” — Megan Milks, The Rumpus

“Casey Plett transports the reader from Pilot Mound, Manitoba, to Portland, Oregon, and back, tying together alternating perspectives and places with direct and detailed prose that's both heart-rending and heartwarming.” — Chatelaine

“Plett tells beautiful stories of trans women as they exist in the world: tangible, fallible, tender and hardened.” — Xtra

“In A Dream of a Woman, connecting to yourself and the world doesn't seem to come from checking in with yourself and your body again and again. It comes from losing yourself in another and in the process, stumbling along the way into a closer relationship with your body and the world.” — Maisonneuve

“Plett has a characteristic style that manages to merge tenderness with Prairie toughness — a style on display in these stories of trans women seeking something — groundedness, maybe, but that dreamlike quality of desire, too.” — Globe and Mail (“The Globe 100”)