Journalist Grace Byron’s debut novel Herculine (Simon & Schuster), out next week, follows an unnamed protagonist from New York to the would-be promised land of her ex-girlfriend’s all-trans-girl commune in the woods of Indiana. Witty, often-chilling, compulsively readable, it’s a saga rich with literary references, both implicit and explicit. (The mysterious rural camp at its center is, of course, named after the 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin.)

Horror and sci-fi fans may not be surprised to see the likes of Gretchen Felker-Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin on Byron’s list of the authors and books that helped inspire her own, but she also name-checks Lauren Oyler, Patricia Lockwood, and other contemporary writers chronicling our debilitatingly online era. See Byron’s ful

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