Author(s): Lars Horn

LGBTQIA+ | Anne's picks

Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a sensuous, immersive memoir thatexplores the trans experience through a sequence of beguiling fragments Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, is akaleidoscopic, hallucinatory memoir that explores the trans experience throughmeditations upon aquatic life and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels inRussia and a debilitating injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak, read andwrite. In their adept hands, these poignant, allusive shards take shape as a unifiedwhole: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries and antiquities serve as interludesbetween - and subtle reflections upon - longer memories of their life, knittingtogether a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book. Horn swims through a range of subjects; across marine history, theology, questionsof the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity and illness. From their childhoodmodelling for their mother's art installations - immersed in a bath with dead squid;encased in a full-body plaster cast - to their travels before they w ere out as trans,these beguiling fragments are linked by a desire to interrogate the physical, and to identify the current beneath. Horn re-examines presumptions about the unchangingnature of the body, privileging instead ways of seeing and being that resistbinaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. Sensuous and immersive, Voice of theFish is unique: a masterful and moving achievement.