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Book Club Kits: Nevada

Alamance County Public Libraries offer Book Club Kits for check out to area book clubs. Each kit contains 10 copies of a book and a reading guide.

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Book Summary

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. -PUBLISHER

Discussion Questions

  1. Did you find the title to be relevant?
  2. Did the novel leave you wishing the story was told differently or from a different perspective?
  3. Did the storyline go as you would have expected it? What surprised you?
  4. What did you feel about the main characters and their actions?
  5. What didn’t you like and why?
  6. Were you happy about how the book ended?
  7. Which part of the book did you like the most and why?
  8. What were the main themes you identified in the novel?
  9. What do you think the sequel would be about if you were writing one?
  10. Did this book change you? How?

About the Author

Imogen Binnie is an American transgender novelist who made her debut with the publication of Nevada in 2013.

Binnie was born and raised in New Jersey. She attended Rutgers University and graduated in 2002 after majoring in English and psychology.

Imogen Binnie wrote a monthly column for Maximum Rocknroll magazine for about nine years, as well as the zines The Fact That It's Funny Doesn't Make It A Joke and Stereotype Threat. Her novel Nevada won a 2013 MOTHA award and then lost at the Lambda Literary Awards. Then she wrote for TV shows Doubt and Council of Dads, as well as the (eventually) upcoming Cruel Summer. She lives near Keene, New Hampshire with her family.