For more details or to schedule an interview, email Ashley Fortier or call 438-338-4591
About the Author
Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performer, lasagna lover and wicked witch based in Toronto, unceded Indigenous territory. She is the author of several award-winning works, including the poetry collection a place called No Homeland, the children’s book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, and the essay collection I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE: A Trans Girl’s Notes From the End of the World. Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is her first novel.
Accolades
Kai Cheng Thom is the winner of the 2017 Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers.
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars was nominated for the 29th Annual Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction.
Selected by Emma Watson’s International Feminist Book Club, Our Shared Shelf
About the Book
In Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, a haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runs away from an oppressive city where the sky is always grey in search of love and sisterhood—and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles. There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart? Extravagant, unapologetic, and slyly funny, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a transgender glam rock coming-of-age story like you’ve never seen before.
In the Press
Specs
Title: Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir
Author: Kai Cheng Thom
Trim size: 5.25′ x 8′
Extent: 200 pages
Format: Paperback
Season: Fall 2016
Pub date: November 15, 2016
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-9940471-3-7
Category: New adult fiction
Target Audience: QTPOC, queers, trans women, young adults
Market
Trans teens and young adults need more unapologetic, realistic, and possibly even hopeful representations of responses to systemic violence — Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is one such offering.
In Thom’s imagined City of Smoke and Lights, hope and cynicism wash through the dark and bejewelled Street of Miracles, setting the scene for this ode to chosen family, fights against the systems that are rigged to destroy us, and growth up and away from the pain that still circles around to nag us in times of vulnerability.
See, for comparison:
Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn
Lockpick Pornography by Joey Comeau
Lost Boi by Sassafras Lowrey
I’ve Got a Time Bomb by Sybil Lamb
Critical Praise
“Kai Cheng Thom’s girls inhabit a novel surreal and biting and beautiful. I loved reading this book.” —Casey Plett, author of A Safe Girl To Love
“The first lie is that this book is a memoir, the second is that it is not. This is something new, a gorgeous genre breaker, weaving prose, poetry, life lived and dreamt—an incantatory and yes fabulous ode to trans girls of colour, and if you read it right, a DIY instruction manual for changing your sex and the world, a fairy tale for brown girl revolutionaries, sex workers, lovers.” —Trish Salah, author of Lyric Sexology Vol. 1
“It’s hard not to love a book about being trans called a memoir that is so utterly different from the conventional trans memoir, partly by being a novel, mainly by being so exuberantly experimental and in love with language for the sake of it… Fierce Femmes has the soul of a rocker: drugs, violence, love, magic, journeys.”
—Gabrielle Bellot, LitHub
“A shimmering oasis of insanity and beauty caught in a web of half-truths and insight, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is one of the most distinctive books I’ve read in a very long time.” —Gwen Benaway, Plenitude Magazine
Press Images
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- Design by Samantha Garritano
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- Photo by Jackson Ezra
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- Photo by Jackson Ezra