Manywhere: Stories

These breathlessly imaginative stories are all the more remarkable for the elegant, organic ways in which the author unhooks language from its entrenched assumptions about men and women. --The New York Times Book Review

Wonderful stories. Impressive range. Delightfully, compellingly queer.--Roxane Gay

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Nylon, Autostraddle, Electric Literature, Lambda Literary, The Millions, and Lit Hub.

Morgan Thomas's Manywhere features lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas's shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas's subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.

A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.

Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories resound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.

Author: Morgan Thomas
Publisher: MCD
Published: 01/25/2022
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.72lbs
Size: 8.56h x 5.68w x 0.82d
ISBN: 9780374602482

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/22/2021
Kirkus Reviews 12/15/2021
Shelf Awareness 02/01/2022

About the Author
Morgan Thomas's work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review Online, VICE, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, The Greensboro Review, them., and StoryQuarterly, where their story won the 2019 Fiction Prize. They are the recipient of a Bread Loaf Work-Study Grant, a Fullbright Grant, and the Penny Wilkes Scholarship in Writing and the Environment, and they have received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Arctic Circle. A graduate of the University of Oregon MFA program, they live in Portland.