Serpent’s Tail to publish the 'acidly funny' Stag Dance by Detransition, Baby author Torrey Peters

Serpent’s Tail has snapped up Stag Dance, the new book by Torrey Peters, whose novel Detransition, Baby  (Serpent’s Tail/ One World) was nominated for the Women’s Prize.

Leonora Craig Cohen, who recently left the publisher, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canadian rights but including audio, from Kent Wolf at Neon Literary in association with Abner Stein Ltd. The book will be edited by publisher Rowan Cope and published in hardback, e-book and audio on 13th March 2025.

"Stag Dance explores trans life past, present and future in a genre-blending quartet of fictions," the synopsis says. "From the adventures of a lonely logger who, deep in the forest, joins his workmates to dance dressed as a woman, to the story of an obsessive boarding-school romance, to the dizzying spectacle of a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend, Peters’ keen eye for the rough edges of trans community and desire reveals fresh possibilities. Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of Lauren Groff or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles and delights."

Cope commented: "Detransition, Baby was a huge critical and commercial success, with our colleague Drew Jerrison winning a Nibbie for his publicity campaign, and Torrey Peters is beloved by the whole Profile Books and Serpent’s Tail team as well as by readers around the world—so we are very excited and proud to publish her latest book next spring. Stag Dance showcases Torrey’s effortless imagination and skill at inhabiting different genres and voices, combined with an emotional depth and vividness that can catch you unexpectedly."

Peters added: "I wrote Stag Dance over the course of a decade. The book is my evolving attempt to explore the emotional, lived questions at the murky edges of gender that can’t be captured by identity categories; the places where we are just people yearning, crashing, loving, and messing up. And I wanted to do that with wild characters and settings: in a hormonal apocalypse, through the eyes of a lumberjack, and at a fetish event in Vegas. I hope that by the end of reading Stag Dance, you can no longer really say for sure who does or doesn’t qualify as transgender—or any other gender—not only within the book, but even, and perhaps more freeingly, when you look up from the page."