A Dream of a Woman

Stories

By: Casey Plett

Narrated by: Casey Plett

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

Award-winning novelist Casey Plett (Little Fish) returns with a poignant suite of stories that center transgender women.

Casey Plett’s 2018 novel Little Fish won a Lambda Literary Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Amazon First Novel Award. Her latest work, A Dream of a Woman, is her first book of short stories since her seminal 2014 collection A Safe Girl to Love. Centering transgender women seeking stable, adult lives, A Dream of a Woman finds quiet truths in prairie high-rises and New York warehouses, in freezing Canadian winters and drizzly Oregon days.

In “Hazel and Christopher,” two childhood friends reconnect as adults after one of them has transitioned. In “Perfect Places,” a woman grapples with undesirability as she navigates fetish play with a man. In “Couldn't Hear You Talk Anymore,” the narrator reflects on her tumultuous life and what might have been as she recalls tender moments with another trans woman.

An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human.

©2021 Casey Plett (P)2022 Bespeak Audio Editions

Critic reviews

“I’ve always admired Plett’s ability to capture the tenderest and most complicated intimacies between characters. Exploring addiction, loss, consent, and shifting desires, each story in her extraordinary new collection is somehow even more tender and emotionally complex than the last.” (Megan Milks, The Rumpus)

“Casey Plett transports the reader from Pilot Mound, Manitoba, to Portland, Oregon, and back, tying together alternating perspectives and places with direct and detailed prose that's both heart-rending and heartwarming.” (Chatelaine)

“Plett tells beautiful stories of trans women as they exist in the world: tangible, fallible, tender and hardened.” (Xtra)

Astounding

Such honest, poignant beauty. These are stories you live. I shall return to these stories again and again. my favorites for the threaded story of Vera, and the story of Hazel. but there wasn't a story here that did not touch my heart strings with its truth.

An incredible collection

An incredible collection of sometimes inter-locking stories of discovery, longing. and tenderness from a brilliant storyteller and stylist.