Knopf Doubleday, Belletristik, Pretty (Englisch, KB Brookins, 2024)

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race. Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective&mdash the tropes, the presumptions&mdash Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change. &ldquo I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,&rdquo Brookins writes. &ldquo Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I&rsquo m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can&rsquo t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says &lsquo female,&rsquo and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean &ndash to be a girl-turned-man when you&rsquo re something else entirely?&rdquo Informed by KB Brookins&rsquo s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency&mdash whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as &ldquo other&rdquo.