03/21/2022
The complexities of a trans identity and contemplations of aquatic life provide the pulsating current to these ruminative essays. Horn, a British translator who was born female and identifies as “nonbinary, transmasculine,” revisits episodes of discontent and danger: a 1990s childhood marked by a loathing of girls’ clothing and toys; a confrontation with hostile Russian women in a swimming pool changing room; a terrifying attack in their adulthood by a stranger on the street; and a season of youthful malaise working as a kitchen hand in Belgium while battling podiatric warts that were miraculously cured by a folk healer. All this swirls around the question, “What might gender look like written beyond the blurring of a male-female binary?”—an inquiry that begets picaresque scientific and historical disquisitions on pike, sturgeon, and eels that change sex when they mature. “Noting these aquatic bodies” as a child, Horn writes, “helped dissolve a world I found too hard.” Gleaning resonant insights from the fishes’ mysteriously mutable existences, Horn offers fascinating piscine lore, rendered in prose that’s grounded and evocative even when hallucinatory (weathering a tropical storm, “I watched fish glide between car tyres, suck at weed caught in hubcaps, their bodies illuminated by the beam of car park floodlights”). The result is a sonorous meditation on living a fluid life. (June)
"Horn wants 'language and narrative to carry more physicality.' Voice of the Fish meets this desire with a narrative that swells and recedes, with intimate depictions of the writer’s life as well as more distant tales of Pliny the Elder, a 100-year-old manuscript found in the belly of a codfish, and the history of tattooing.”—Corinne Manning, New York Times Book Review
“Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish was one of those books that left me changed. . . . The writing, sentence for sentence, is extraordinary.”—Alexander Chee, The Millions
"[...] Horn offers fascinating piscine lore, rendered in prose that’s grounded and evocative even when hallucinatory [...]. The result is a sonorous meditation on living a fluid life."—Publishers Weekly
"Horn’s story sparkles with emotional intensity. A promising literary debut."—Kirkus Reviews
“Although they don’t explicitly say this, Horn’s work is essentially an archival one, writing themselves, their body, their gender, and the enigmatic nature of their identity, which ‘exists for the most part as unseen, unworded, unintelligible,’ into our world and the historical record. They leave us with a sense of possibility of what could be, and as their “body finally breathed” at the end of the book, they give us the permission to let ours breathe, also."—Stef Rubino, Autostraddle
“This book left me stunned. Breathtaking in its scope and generosity, Voice of the Fish is that rare work that defies easy categorization. At once a personal memoir and an examination of ancient worlds and marine life, Voice of the Fish also becomes a luminous and compassionate reckoning with borders and boundaries. And all of this written in achingly beautiful prose that catches the light in even the darkest of moments. We are in the midst of a rare and transcendent talent, and how lucky we are that Lars Horn exists.”—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize
“Ocean-deep and brimming with beauty, Voice of the Fish is a wondrous book, formed with the expansiveness and strong currents of a vast body of water. I didn't want to leave until I'd seen every glowing image.”—Elissa Washuta
“Voice of the Fish is a mighty and innovative work unshackled from the patriarchal and heteronormative syntax and prose of the accepted literary cannon, and scalpled into a new way of writing, and therefore understanding, great literary work and memoir. Adventurous, bold, antiauthoritarian, and physical, we would all be well served to take note of this generation of new writers to which Horn belongs, sending us missives from the future of language and storytelling—more exacting, broad and excellent than we have yet imagined.”—Casey Legler
“Casting a wide net into the realms of knowing and existing, trawling the depths of the past and the body, Lars Horn steers us in pristine and ponderous prose to places where the body is washed up, transformed, reborn. Voice of the Fish is a dazzling assemblage of essaying at its finest, a unique dive into history, philosophy, memory, and wonder. It is a voice that swims bravely against the current, finds its origin, and emerges with sequined scales of sparkling language, brilliant in its inked imaginative form.”—Jenny Boully
“Voice of the Fish truly defies one form by embracing many, turning, like its author and subject, from established ideas, towards felt truths, not by denying history, but by recasting it through the lens of a person who has, for all of their life, known themselves through plunging mysteries.”—Faith Hanna, The Los Angeles Review
“There's not a forgettable page in this crazy quilt of prose and prose poems. But in the end it's not the ichthyology, startling and splendid as it is, that lingers in the memory. Giving the fishes voice, Horn finds a voice of their own, all their own, and it's an interiority that radiates. It leaves us all single.”—Tim Pfaff, Bay Area Reporter
“Text trembles on our tongues, is spoken and swallowed, words evaporate off skin, and Horn’s prose hums in a way that often transcends language.”—Ayden LeRoux, Bookforum
01/01/2022
In Also a Poet, New York Times best-selling author Calhoun blends literary history and memoir, examining her relationship with her father, art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, and their shared passion for Frank O'Hara's work as she draws on taped interviews he conducted for a never-completed biography of O'Hara. In Somewhere We Are Human, distinguished writers/activists Grande and Guiñansaca compile 44 essays, poems, and artworks by migrants, refugees, and Dreamers that help clarify the lives of those who are undocumented. Featuring a selection of letters exchanged by Ernest Hemingway and his son Patrick over two decades, Dear Papa was edited by Patrick Hemingway's nephew Brendan Hemingway and his grandson Stephen Adams (40,000-copy first printing). Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, Horn's Voice of the Fish uses fish, water, and mythic imagery to illuminate the trans experience, with travels through Russia and a devastating injury the author suffered as backdrop. Former deputy editor of The New Yorker and former editor of the New York Times Book Review, McGrath looks back on childhood summers as both joyous memory and obvious idealization in The Summer Friend, also considering a close friendship with someone from a very different background. Starting out with his nearly dying on the day he was born, the world's best-selling novelist has some amazing stories to tell in James Patterson by James Patterson (250,000-copy first printing). Having probed the lives of Mary Shelley and Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's wife and daughter, acclaimed biographer Seymour takes on Jean Rhys, the celebrated author of Wide Sargasso Sea in I Used to Live Here Once.
2022-03-15
Shaped like a discursive, commonplace book, this is memoir as creative process.
“How does one write of a self that is fundamentally displaced? Of a self that, for decades, has seen and not recognised its own body?” In Horn’s first book, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, they seek to answer this question, weaving together erudite and personal essays to create a shimmering, watery mosaic of trans autobiography richly infused with literature, science, history, and myth: “I have always enjoyed a more haphazard, more crustacean zigzag through the past,” writes Horn. In the first piece, “In Water Disjointed From Me,” the author grapples with the pronoun I and their sense of gender in physical and linguistic terms: “Nonbinary, transmasculine—my gender exists, for the most part, as unseen, unworried, unintelligible.” Horn’s “mother gave me her strange love of aquariums,” and the author “wished to not be human, to slip from this world, turn saline.” When they were a child, she took performance piece photos of young Lars in a bathtub filled with dead squid, next to a shark, or, starting at 4, in painful full-body plaster casts, “curated, articulated and placed.” While living in Russia, “one of the world’s most homophobic countries, my sexuality, always snarling to the side of me, finally caught up. Bit into this body until it showed itself raw, bloodied.” Writing about a huge aquarium in Atlanta, Horn writes about how, regarding the concept of a gender spectrum, “I just feel like a soul in a strange craft.” They also recount in searing detail being attacked and nearly raped as well as an “aborted suicide.” A severe injury to Horn’s back oddly resulted in the inability to speak, read, or write, so “I tattooed my body with text.” In “some strange, gilled sense,” the author writes ruefully, “my body finally breathed.” Though the narrative sometimes wanders, Horn’s story sparkles with emotional intensity.
A promising literary debut.
