Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age.

A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runsaway from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood–and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles.There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?

AUTHOR

Kai Cheng Thom

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performance artist, and community healer in Toronto. She is the author of the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir Metonymy Press), the essay collection I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes at the End of the World (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book), the poetry collection a place called No Homeland (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in 2018), and the children’s picture books From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, illustrated by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li, and For Laika, the Dog Who Learned the Names of the Stars, illustrated by Kai Yun Ching. Kai Cheng won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers in 2017.

Reviews

Named one of the best books by trans authors in O: The Oprah Magazine

Selected for Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf book club

“Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars uses its warmhearted critique of the conventional tropes of the trans memoir as a way to reinvent those very tropes in fabulist Technicolor.” –Jacob Wren, Montreal Review of Books

“Thom has written a breakout first novel of a young Asian trans femme writer dreaming her own getting free, building complicated family through all her changes, and I am so grateful.” –Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Bitch Media