Two Nights in Lisbon
Cult Classic
Books

Nevada

9780374606626 fc
Paperback, MCD × FSGO, 2022
200091800

Imogen Binnie

more about author

One of Vogue's Best Books of 2022 So Far, Buzzfeed's Summer Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down,
Book Riot's Best Summer Reads for 2022, and Dazed's Queer Books to Read in 2022

"[Nevada] is defiant, terse, not quite cynical, sometimes flip, addressed to people who think they know. It is, if you like, punk rock." The New Yorker

"Nevada is a book that changed my life: it shaped both my worldview and personhood, making me the writer I am. And it did so by the oldest of methods, by telling a wise, hilarious, and gripping story." —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby


A beloved and blistering cult classic and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction finally back in print, Nevada follows a disaffected trans woman as she embarks on a cross-country road trip.


Maria Griffiths is almost thirty and works at a used bookstore in New York City while trying to stay true to her punk values. She’s in love with her bike but not with her girlfriend, Steph. She takes random pills and drinks more than is good for her, but doesn’t inject anything except, when she remembers, estrogen, because she’s trans. Everything is mostly fine until Maria and Steph break up, sending Maria into a tailspin, and then onto a cross-country trek in the car she steals from Steph. She ends up in the backwater town of Star City, Nevada, where she meets James, who is probably but not certainly trans, and who reminds Maria of her younger self. As Maria finds herself in the awkward position of trans role model, she realizes that she could become James’s savior—or his downfall.

One of the most beloved cult novels of our time and a landmark of trans literature, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada is a blistering, heartfelt, and evergreen coming-of-age story, and a punk-smeared excavation of marginalized life under capitalism. Guided by an instantly memorable, terminally self-aware protagonist—and back in print featuring a new afterword by the author—Nevada is the great American road novel flipped on its head for a new generation.

Read More + Read Less -
  • "Nevada is a book that changed my life: it shaped both my worldview and personhood, making me the writer I am. And it did so by the oldest of methods, by telling a wise, hilarious, and gripping story."

    Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
  • "Imogen Binnie’s gimlet-eyed prose is raw, funny, and then devastating. I can’t get Maria Griffiths out of my head: she’s an edgy heroine, a new archetype―the quintessential late 20s punk rock trans girl blowing up her life and making friends on the road (or in the parking lot)." 

    Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of the Mortal Girl

  • "Nevada is a book that changed my life: it shaped both my worldview and personhood, making me the writer I am. And it did so by the oldest of methods, by telling a wise, hilarious, and gripping story."

    Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby"It is truly a joy to watch Imogen Binnie, a master of suspense, paint the page with a both-feet-on-the-gas-pedal inner monologue that is at once, spontaneous, acidic, razor sharp observant, fully embodied and (most importantly) vulnerable. The writing here infers a time in the not so distant past where the terms 'queer' and 'counter-culture' were synonymous, on top of taking the great American road trip novel and turning it on its entire ass. Originally printed in 2013, this is the type of story that was so nice it had to be printed twice. TENS ACROSS THE GODDAMN BOARD."
  • "Here and now, the novel makes as much sense (if not more) as it did nine years ago when it was first published. In the middle of a trans panic, with transphobes demanding that love, work, achievement and gender all follow the same cis narrative timetable, Nevada steals a car, walks off the job and drives someplace else."

    Noah Berlatsky, Los Angeles Times"A beautiful and occasionally disturbing complication of the oh-so-American trope of the cross-country road trip . . . it’s long past time for the cis reader to form a bond with the brilliance of [Binnie's] work."
  • It is truly a joy to watch Imogen Binnie, a master of suspense, paint the page with a both-feet-on-the-gas-pedal inner monologue that is at once, spontaneous, acidic, razor sharp observant, fully embodied and (most importantly) vulnerable. The writing here infers a time in the not so distant past where the terms 'queer' and 'counter-culture' were synonymous, on top of taking the great American road trip novel and turning it on its entire ass. Originally printed in 2013, this is the type of story that was so nice it had to be printed twice. TENS ACROSS THE GODDAMN BOARD. 

    Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

  • "I'm here to testify that this reissue proves Nevada changed the world. Imogen Binnie's wise, honest, funny and brazenly intellectual work inspired the future and is still provocative, deep and fun to read." 

    Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show

  • "[Nevada] is defiant, terse, not quite cynical, sometimes flip, addressed to people who think they know. It is, if you like, punk rock . . . Nevada understands how, no matter what we do after we come out, we will probably feel that we got something wrong . . . Binnie’s audacity was to address an audience—a community, an us—that hadn’t quite seen itself this way before."

    Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker"Here and now, the novel makes as much sense (if not more) as it did nine years ago when it was first published. In the middle of a trans panic, with transphobes demanding that love, work, achievement and gender all follow the same cis narrative timetable, Nevada steals a car, walks off the job and drives someplace else."
  • "A beautiful and occasionally disturbing complication of the oh-so-American trope of the cross-country road trip . . . it’s long past time for the cis reader to form a bond with the brilliance of [Binnie's] work."

    Emma Specter, Vogue"While it’s true that the iconoclastic beauty of Binnie’s 2013 novel lies partly in its straightforward nature—a bookstore clerk gets dumped and then fired from her job, prompting a solo sojourn out west—it also brims with uncommonly judicious insight into the emotional topography of trans bodies."
  • "A beautiful and occasionally disturbing complication of the oh-so-American trope of the cross-country road trip . . . it’s long past time for the cis reader to form a bond with the brilliance of [Binnie's] work."

    Emma Specter, Vogue"This is hands down my favorite book of the summer . . . Binnie’s fiction has so much to say about the queer and trans experience, bodily autonomy, community, and the ways queer people process trauma."
  • "Binnie’s love of her characters, of their confusion, of their insights and of their language produces its own catharsis of sorts . . . Here and now, the novel makes as much sense (if not more) as it did nine years ago when it was first published. In the middle of a trans panic, with transphobes demanding that love, work, achievement and gender all follow the same cis narrative timetable, Nevada steals a car, walks off the job and drives someplace else."

    Noah Berlatsky, Los Angeles Times"A beautiful and occasionally disturbing complication of the oh-so-American trope of the cross-country road trip . . . it’s long past time for the cis reader to form a bond with the brilliance of [Binnie's] work."