Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox dares to conjure a world in which Jack Sheppard-the notorious thief and working class hero of eighteenth-century England-is a modern transgender man, so convincingly that the reader is left to question the worth of accepted fact over what they perceive to be fiction this too has something in common with what we trans folks have to deal with as we navigate our transitions, daring to challenge others’ perceptions of what to us is the deepest truth. One asks of an author to create a world that has not existed before, while the other requires a person to believe in the sentience of a self that the world tells them couldn’t and shouldn’t exist.

Writing a novel is like being transgender, because both often require the most daring leap of imagination. The Queer Syllabus is edited by Wesley O. New entries will run on Thursday, September through December, and then will be collected as a living document on the Foglifter website. When we identify our roots, when we point to the work that shaped us as writers and as people, we demonstrate that our stories are timeless, essential, and important-and so are we.

The Queer Syllabus is a joint project from The Rumpus and Foglifter Press that allows writers to nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.

Confessions of the fox jordy rosenberg