Nightboat is overjoyed to share that we’re reissuing Leslie Feinberg’s classic of revolutionary queer literature, Stone Butch Blues, in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats in Fall 2027!
Leslie Feinberg’s novel, first published by Firebrand Books in 1993 and long out of print, is a groundbreaking semi-autobiographical narrative of transgender experience that follows its narrator, Jess Goldberg, as she navigates coming out as butch in the bars and factories of the pre-feminist ’60s and then passing as a man in order to survive when left without work or a community in the early ’70s. As Feinberg said, “[With] this novel I planted a flag: Here I am—does anyone else want to discuss these important issues? I wrote it, not as an expression of individual ‘high’ art, but as a working-class organizer mimeographs a leaflet—a call to action…” With this reissue, it’s our hope that Leslie Feinberg’s call to action will serve as much-needed provocation for a new generation of readers, writers, and organizers to clarify, articulate and realize their own radical visions.
Leslie Feinberg was an activist, organizer, journalist, and writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1949, and raised in a working-class family in Buffalo, New York, Feinberg was a pioneering figure in post-war LGBTQ+ life and culture. Feinberg was the first to advance a Marxist concept of “transgender liberation,” one that impacted popular culture, academic research, and political organizing. Feinberg’s work has been widely anthologized and taught extensively both in the U.S. and internationally, with the most significant impact on mass culture being the publication of the novel Stone Butch Blues in 1993, widely considered in and outside the U.S. as a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. Feinberg’s work has earned numerous accolades, including Stone Butch Blues being named in 2023 by The New York Times as the most influential work of post-war queer literature. Feinberg was one of the 50 inaugural inductees inscribed on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument, and The Publishing Triangle confers annually The Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. The Estate of Leslie Feinberg is represented by Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.