Margaret And The Mystery Of The Missing Body

Margaret And The Mystery Of The Missing Body
Megan Milks
RRP:
NZ$ 39.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 31.20
Paperback
h139 x 203mm - 256pg
30 Sep 2021 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9781952177804
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
Book will have French flapsNew title in Feminist Press' s Amethyst Editions imprint: American LGBTQ+ books that present queer narratives beyond adolescent coming-out, curated by author and literary organizer Michelle TeaIn some ways, this novel tells a familiar story, about a white middle-class girl who detours destructively before she can fully come of age. But it does two things differently: first, it interweaves the style of popular girl narratives like The Baby-Sitters Club and Girl, Interrupted, with an "adult" auto-theory conclusion in the style of Chris Kraus. The protagonist' s coming into queerness and transness is mirrored by the book moving through the predominantly straight genres that shaped her. The second difference is that Margaret leaves girlhood not just by aging out, also by transitioning to a new gender. This novel is written from the author' s own retrospective transmasculine perspective; it is a tribute to the author' s heritage of girl literature, as well as a groundbreaking revival of a beloved literary mode. In this way, this book attempts to make space for the genderqueer and not-yet-transmasculine in the literature of the girl. Transmasculine, genderqueer, and nonbinary writers and characters get left out of the literary discourse on girls all the time. In Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, the deferral of adulthood takes the form of an eating disorder-an overwhelming trope of the nineties. We' ve recently seen a slew of media waxing nostalgic for the decade. This book is more critical than nostalgic. It interrogates some of the most injurious aspects of the nineties in the US: antifeminist backlash, post-AIDS homophobia, slut shaming and sex-negativity, and, of course, the eating disorder crisis-all of which made nineties girlhood a pretty toxic environment. However, the current wave of nostalgia has not properly reckoned with this, and there is still much left to be properly digested. The book concludes with an informal bibliography of inspirational sources, including: The Baby-Sitters' Club, Matilda, Carrie, Girl, Interrupted, Purge: The Rehab Diaries, "Barf Manifesto," The Well of Loneliness, Nell' s Quilt, Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat, the film Thin, Paperback Crush, Feeding Anorexia, and anthologies such as Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender .
"Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is queer dynamite. I devoured this book in one sitting, completely engrossed by the wild plot and by Megan Milks' s stellar, singular voice. This is a book of bodies, sure, but it' s also a book about the messiness of them, their complications and intractability, their frustrating unknowability. Their mutability. Their wonder. This novel is a bright spot of brilliance. I absolutely adored it. " --Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things"Three cheers for Margaret Worms! I wish I could go back to 1995 and slip this book into the lockers of all my high school friends (and enemies). Mostly I wish I could give it to teen me. Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is a brilliant kaleidoscope of nineties teen serials and coming-of-age novels, queer theory, and even a ghost story, and it all comes together in one delicious, surreal, endlessly inventive (and funny! and wise!) page-turner. I just loved this novel and can' t wait to see what Milks writes next. " --emily m. danforth, author of Plain Bad Heroines"What if all those nineties book series about girlhood had been truly honest about the process of growing up? You' d get this wonderful book: a comforting facade that opens into an entrancing and wildly innovative gut-renovation of the genre, with an interior that lays bare the hidden workings of life I wish I' d known on my own first run through adolescence. Brilliant. " --Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby"I tore through this book in a day and was still thinking about it weeks later. It' s the smartest novel I' ve read in a long time and the most politically astute. Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is a coming-of-age novel about growing up through coming-of-age narratives, then reappropriating those narratives from the inside and writing your own freedom. It' s also compulsively readable, hugely moving, and more fun than the pop classics it makes free with. Magnificent. " --Sandra Newman, author of The HeavensMegan Milks' s Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is both delightfully strange and deeply familiar. The classic female coming-of-age novel is not simply queered; the casual horror of it is made manifest with a powerful imagination, both playful and sinister, sweet and surreal and emotionally real. I loved this deceptively fun book. --Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms"Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, a thrilling and surprising crystallization of the best and worst parts of growing up in the nineties, lit up all of the pleasure receptors in my brain. It' s intimate, fearless, and a funhouse of form and style. Megan Milks is a supremely generous writer whose work is daring and alive. " --Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace"Megan Milks has combined the boundlessness of speculative fiction, the raucous joys and radical presence of YA storytelling, and the ingenuity of an avant-garde sensibility with such damn good lyric prose that it made me grin more times than I can count. Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body retrieves the thrill of early novel reading from the corridors of memory and infuses it into a book that is genuinely unique, entirely new, and frankly delightful. " --Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox"Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body is a shapeshifter of a novel: an adventure story, a feminist critique, and a note from your best friend. Every time it changes form, it magically, seamlessly changes feeling. You never know what' s coming next, and it' s always just right. " --Sofia Samatar, author of A Stranger in Olondria"One of the brashest, brainiest, funniest, most electric novels I' ve read in years, containing one of the most winning protagonists to ever bless queer fiction in the character of Margaret Worms. Milks smashes up genres in a glorious free-for-all and emerges with a genuine masterpiece. " --Casey Plett, author of Little Fish
Megan Milks is the author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories (2014), forthcoming from Feminist Press in revised and expanded form as Slug and Other Stories, and Remember the Internet: Tori Amos Bootleg Webring. With Marisa Crawford, they are coeditor of We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers; with KJ Cerankowski, they are coeditor of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives. Born in Virginia, they currently live in Brooklyn.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781952177804
Published: 30 Sep 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: Feminist Press at The City University of New York
Publisher: Feminist Press at The City University of New York
Format: Paperback
Height: 139mm
Width: 203mm
Pages: 256

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