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Little Blue Encyclopedia book cover

Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian)

$18.95

by Hazel Jane Plante

Fall 2019

Winner of the 32nd Annual Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction
Winner of the 2019 Expozine Alternative Press Awards (Literary, English)
2019 BC and Yukon Book Prizes Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes, Finalist
2020 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature, Finalist

The playful and poignant novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) sifts through a queer trans woman’s unrequited love for her straight trans friend who died. A queer love letter steeped in desire, grief, and delight, the story is interspersed with encyclopedia entries about a fictional TV show set on an isolated island. The experimental form functions at once as a manual for how pop culture can help soothe and mend us and as an exploration of oft-overlooked sources of pleasure, including karaoke, birding, and butt toys. Ultimately, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) reveals with glorious detail and emotional nuance the woman the narrator loved, why she loved her, and the depths of what she has lost.

Also available from Apple Books and as a PDF.

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Category:

Author: Hazel Jane Plante
Price: $18.95 CAD
ISBN: 978-0-9940471-9-9

Cover by LOKI Design
Illustrations by Onjana Yawnghwe

  • Paperback 13.3 x 20.5 x 1.1 cm
  • 200 pages
  • Printed in Quebec

“Little Blue Encyclopedia understands perfectly how pop culture — and pop culture fandom — can become bound up in our lives inextricably. As the narrator assembles her encyclopedia, memories of Vivian when she was alive start to trickle into the text. Sometimes the narrator is conscious of those memories taking over, and sometimes it happens almost without her having to try.”
—Vox

“Grief is a process that encompasses the death of the past and of future possibility. Despite this, Little Blue Encyclopedia is an undeniably optimistic text, one that takes up mournful subject matter and suggests ways it can be worked through.”
—Quill & Quire, starred review

“An exquisite, kaleidoscopic novel bursting with ache and delight.”
—Zoey Leigh Peterson, author of Scotia Bank Giller Prize longlisted novel Next Year, For Sure

“Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) is gorgeously whimsical, inspired, odd and anguished, a tale of longing between trans women, it is also a magical ekphrasis, a tender portrait of where a woman was through a melancholy anatomy of the imaginary world she loved. Reminiscent of early Jeanette Winterson, but also utterly innovative, this is a love letter to heart break and to art as its only, imperfect salve.”
—Trish Salah, Lambda Literary Award-winning poet and author of Lyric Sexology Vol. 1