SMALL BEAUTY

jiaqing wilson-yang

 

cover art by Lee Lai

 

First published by Metonymy Press in Canada.

Winner of the 2016 Lambda Literary Awards prize for Best Transgender Fiction and finalist for the Writers Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize

The energy of thunderstorms is a rebalancing of charges in the atmosphere. The rain moves in cycles. It is the sky too full of water to take on any more.

When her cousin dies, Mei abandons life in the city for his now-empty house in a small rural town. There she connects with their shared history, discovers her aunt’s secret love, and reflects on all she has left behind.

Why is support so rarely uncomplicated? What are the lineages we carry within us? In the tumult of loss, can the dead ever console the living?

 
 

FORMAT: Paperback

LENGTH: 224 pp.

ISBN: 9781925704044

PUBLICATION DATE: July 2018

COVER ART: Lee Lai

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

jiaqing wilson-yang is a trans writer living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Small Beauty is her first novel and won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction. Her work has appeared in Carte Blanche, Room Magazine, Ricepaper, The Kit, and Poetry is Dead. Sometimes she plays music. www.littleqing.com

PRAISE FOR SMALL BEAUTY

“Small Beauty embodies everything I look for in new queer writing: a scorchingly original and engrossing voice, telling a story we haven’t heard before, that’s still somehow familiar, humane and heart-bruisingly recognisable.”
Benjamin Law

“A quiet, gorgeous meditation on grief, race, and community, wilson-yang’s writing more than delivers on the title’s promise. ... Small Beauty joins the small but growing numbers of trans-genre novels written by transgender women that are revolutionizing our ideas of how trans people can exist within fiction”
Morgan M. Page, Lambda Literary

“wilson-yang is a fucking beautiful writer and her lyrical prose about this messed-up girl is some of the most gorgeous writing trans lit has been blessed with.”
Casey Plett, The Winnipeg Review

“Every paragraph is dense with meaning, each one concise, descriptive, and exacting, I found wilson-yang’s sentences tantamount to poetry and was struck immediately by the tautness of the text.”
Kaley Kiermayr

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