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Join us on Thursday, May 30 at 7 PM as Griffin Hansbury talks about his new novel, Some Strange Music Draws Me In. He will be in conversation with Emet North.About the Book
From an award-winning author, this provocative novel tells an emotionally gripping story about friendship, family, and transgender awakening in a working-class American town.
It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.
Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive page turner about multiple electrifying relationships—between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury, in elegant, arresting, and fearless prose, dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.
About the Author
Griffin Hansbury is the author of Vanishing New York and Feral City (as Jeremiah Moss). A Pushcart Prize winner and Lambda Literary Award finalist, his writing has appeared in several publications, including n+1, the New York Times, and the New Yorker and Paris Review online. A trailblazer in the field of psychoanalysis, he was the first analyst to practice and publish as openly transgender. He lives in Manhattan.
About Emet North
Emet North has lived in a dozen states over the past decade and has no fixed residence, though they feel most at home in the mountains. In previous lives, they worked in an observational cosmology lab on a grant from NASA, taught snowboarding in Montana, researched Lie algebras, led wine tastings, waited tables, trained horses, and wrote a thesis on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Their debut novel, In Universes, is a queer awakening fractured across the multiverse, which came out this April from Harper Books.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
9 COLLEGE ST, 01075, 9 College St, South Hadley, MA 01075-1148, United States,South Hadley, Massachusetts
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