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In her new book, Testimony of a Shifter, acclaimed writer and scholar Emma Pérez delves into the prejudice and injustice faced by those who are transgender or are considered different by those in power.
Imprisoned by the totalitarian government, Dr. Benito Espinoza practices for his weekly interrogations by recounting his story to his thirteen-year-old daughter. He tells her about turning his back on his ability to shift his gender from male to female—to Alejandra—to become a scholar in the Grand Library. Most academics are Residents who inherited their seats and believe Descendants like Ben don’t have the intellectual ability to be a person of letters.
Ben conforms to the laws against transmuting, so he manages to secure a place in the library. His life’s purpose is to prove Descendants are as capable as Residents. But an encounter with a clever, beautiful Descendant leads to his unwitting participation in the rebellion against the Impresario and his White Guards. Soon the shifter is involved with the Rebels, trying to save a younger generation of Descendants and shifters from the horrific experiments and violence perpetrated against them.
In a non-linear narrative in which “time is false,” author and scholar Emma Pérez offers a fascinating speculative novel about alternate histories, while pondering race, discrimination and transgender people.
“Filled with lush beauty, harshness, and horrifying brutality, this is one of those books in which you just KNOW what's going to happen at the end—but you’re wrong.” ―The Gay & Lesbian Review on Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory
EMMA PÉREZ is the author of Queering the Border (Arte Público Press, 2022), The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Indiana University Press, 1999), three novels and numerous personal essays. Her novel, Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory (University of Texas Press, 2009) received the Christopher Isherwood Writing Grant, the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies Regional Book Award for fiction in 2011 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2010. Her book, Electra's Complex (Bella Books, 2015), is a mystery that mocks the perils of academe. Pérez was born in El Campo, Texas, and lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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