Grace Byron: 'Herculine,' Haunting, & Being Trans in America | Riffs & Speculations #2

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

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My guest this week is Grace Byron.

is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Vogue, The Nation, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Herculine is her debut novel.

Buy Herculine here!

Imagine this: an all-trans girl commune in the middle of the woods in the midwest. Also imagine that people can be literally haunted by demons, who prey on trauma. Imagine that those two ideas live in the same world, and are woven into a broader story that also manages to hold within it star-crossed romance; biting analysis of the contemporary creative scene in New York City; revealing moments of friendship, community, sex; and ultimately a portrait of what it means to be a trans woman in present-day America—all in about 250 pages.

Hopefully your mind is already spinning with possibility—and I’m delighted to inform you that all this and more is what you’ll find in Grace Byron’s superb debut novel, Herculine. It should go without saying but I’m gonna say it: go buy this book! Link in the show notes but it’s available wherever you get books.

As a lover of language and narrative, I was excited to dive into all of the above with Grace, and she has lots of great things to say—but of course our conversation extends beyond the craft of writing. We get into a broader examination of the aforementioned topics, further drawing from her work as a critic, especially given the systems of oppression that trans people face, spanning scales local to societal. The best speculative fiction is that which uses the mechanisms of imagination and storytelling to reflect and refract what’s in contemporary society, to help us see messy truths in more nuanced, complex ways. Herculine manages this tremendously, a testament to Grace’s insight and ability to synthesize and translate ideas across forms. These abilities are on full display on our chat.

Never fear: this