Red Milk
Devil House
Books

Manywhere

9780374602499 fc
Hardcover, MCD × FSG, 2022
200084546

Morgan Thomas

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Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Nylon, Autostraddle, Electric Literature, Lambda Literary, The Millions, and Lit Hub

Morgan Thomas's Manywhere features lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.

"Wonderful stories. Impressive range. Delightfully, compellingly queer."—Roxane Gay

“Sparkling, imaginative, and inventive.”—Karen Thompson Walker

"The vision of a singular and exciting artist."—Torrey Peters.

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas’s subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.

A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.

Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories resound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.

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  • “Morgan Thomas is an artist of landscape, from the humid peculiarities of the American South, to the bodies and imaginations of these urgent, searching characters. I was awed by the kinetic, alive, innovative, and spell-casting stories in Manywhere, a debut collection that reads like a magnum opus.” 

    Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

  • "The characters in these stories feel fully alive; they reveal their rich and endlessly vibrant interiors through indefatigable exploration and textured thoughts. As inventive as some of Thomas’ storytelling decisions can be, they are never precious or self-indulgent but serve to cast light on the characters’ complex and ever shifting desires. Innovative stories that probe the ineluctable bond between storytelling and identity."

    Kirkus (starred review)

  • "Each story here is a gem, glimmering and precious to behold, but gathered together, Manywhere is a profusion of diamonds. The book is very queer, very well-written, and very goddamn good. Morgan Thomas is a wildly talented writer and Manywhere is a knockout."

    Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of With Teeth

  • "Each of the stories in Manywhere is so surprising, with such range. A gorgeous chorus of voices joining to sing the vision of a singular and exciting artist."

    Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

  • "Wonderful stories. Impressive range. Delightfully, compellingly queer."

    Roxane Gay (via Goodreads)

  • "Thomas’ breathtaking prose sings while somehow also being precise and measured. More than once while reading, I gasped . . . More than once, I was angry at Thomas for being so talented, jealous that I’d never write fiction this well, disappointed that there weren’t 25 more stories to read. More than once, I was moved to tears."

    Abeni Jones, Autostraddle

  • "Thomas writes in a musical, incantatory style that approaches poetry . . . Thomas takes extraordinary care with syntax to let queer characters fully express themselves on the page. It’s almost as if Thomas needed to create a new language to tell these stories; ours is still too binary . . . These breathlessly imaginative stories are all the more remarkable for the elegant, organic ways in which the author unhooks language from its entrenched assumptions about men and women."

    Claire Oshetsky, The New York Times Book Review

  • "[A] visionary and keenly observed debut . . . Throughout, Thomas renders their characters’ explorations in rhythmic litanies . . . [Thomas] profoundly illuminates how the characters come by the stories they tell and those they choose to tell themselves."

    Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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