Thursday, September 15, 2016

Stone Butch Blues 20th Anniversary Author’s Edition now available! (free download)



Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg's 1993 first novel, is widely considered in and outside the U.S. to be a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. Feinberg was the first theorist to advance a Marxist concept of transgender liberation" in hir theoretical nonfiction book,* Transgender Warriors: Making History.




Stone Butch Blues has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, been passed from hand-to-hand inside prisons, and been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Hebrew (with hir earnings from that edition going to ASWAT Palestinian Gay Women). The novel was winner of the 1994 American Library Association Stonewall Book Award and a 1994 Lambda Literary Award.

Leslie Feinberg worked up to a few days before hir death in November 2014 to ready the 20th Anniversary Author Edition of Stone Butch Blues to make it available to all, in free-download and at-cost-print editions. This action was one part of hir entire life work as a revolutionary communist to change the world in the struggle for justice and liberation from oppression.

"This Is What Solidarity Looks Like"
This Author's Edition of Stone Butch Blues is dedicated to CeCe McDonald, a young Minneapolis trans woman of color organizer and activist sent to prison for defending herself against a white neo-Nazi attacker.

Accessible at www.lesliefeinberg.net is a slideshow, "This Is What Solidarity Looks Like," that documents the breadth of the global organizing campaign to free CeCe McDonald. Feinberg developed the slideshow with the help of scores of activist photographers."This Is What Solidarity Looks Like" is a powerful teaching and organizing tool to show how a mass liberation movement started from a single community achieves a global reach.

*A Note from Minnie Bruce Pratt* 
(who was kind enough to disseminate this announcement): 

Leslie explains in "Author's Rights and Requests" hir decision as a revolutionary communist to make Stone Butch Blues available free to all through digital download. The at-cost Lulu print version fulfills hir goal of making *Stone Butch Blues* available in a no-profit-to-anyone edition. Leslie's "Author's Rights and Requests" can be found at the end of the new edition. In that section, Leslie also briefly discusses some of hir decisions about
how zie/she chose to narrate the novel.

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