With Little Fish, Casey Plett established herself as a writer willing to and adept at writing trans women characters with a kind of nuance and complexity rarely seen. With A Dream of a Woman, she offers readers a suite of stories that track the struggles and clarifying joys, however brief, of women trying to shore up lives amid the emotional wreckage wrought by transmisogyny and the strategies they cultivate to survive it. With a focus on intimate scenes of recognition, attraction, and betrayal, Plett builds a world that is recognizable in its casual violence and redemptive in its portrayal of the sometimes tense, often banal ways that love, in all its variance and ambiguity, sustains.
A Dream of a Woman by Casey Plett. Published by Arsenal Pulp Press. The editor is Shirarose Wilensky. A Dream of a Woman is a finalist for Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. The winner will be announced on May 11.