Plett wields language masterfully to share many vastly different trans experiences with readers. The language is tight and matter-of-fact, but also beautiful and sweeping in a way that makes you forget it's there. Plett's voice is strong and fully realized in this collection. 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. 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. 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. Plett tells beautiful stories of trans women as they exist in the world: tangible, fallible, tender and hardened.

Megan Milks, The RumpusĬasey 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. 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. I've always admired Plett's ability to capture the tenderest and most complicated intimacies between characters. 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.Īn 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. In 'Perfect Places,' a woman grapples with undesirability as she navigates fetish play with a man. In 'Hazel and Christopher,' two childhood friends reconnect as adults after one of them has transitioned. 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.

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. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller PrizeĪward-winning novelist Casey Plett ( Little Fish) returns with a poignant suite of stories that center transgender women.Ĭasey Plett's 2018 novel Little Fish won a Lambda Literary Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Amazon First Novel Award.

A Dream of a Woman by Casey Plett