Voice of the Fish—Lars Horn
Maxwell Van Cooper, Full Stop, February 21, 2024
“When I heard this winter about Lars Horn’s debut book, Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, I thought—finally. A transmasc lyric essay. I had been waiting for this book. […] Horn recalls Anne Carson and Billy-Ray Belcourt in their lyricism, and at times their poetic prose is as ornamental as that of Ocean Vuong. Voice of the Fish is an ambitious book, with vignettes of history, literature, memoir, and poetry. Yet Horn weaves these different literary disciplines into a holistic portrait of a life on the margin.”
The Annotated Nightstand: What Sabrina Orah Mark Is Reading Now and Next
Diana Arterian, Literary Hub, December 21, 2023
“I saw Horn read and immediately bought, read, and loved this book. For anyone who loves detailed facts or histories and their potential to connect and make meaning of the moment, it is for you.”
Five Books that Explore LGBTQIA+ Experience with the Ocean
Robyn Stegman, Ocean Conservancy, July 14, 2023
“These queer authors weave the ocean into their own narratives and offer us an opportunity to continue to explore the intersections in the environmental and LGTBQIA+ rights movement.”
How Nonfiction Writing and Documentary Filmmaking Curate the Truth
Chachi D. Hauser, Literary Hub, July 7, 2023
“For me, nonfiction is a genre that is excitingly malleable, open to experimentation. I soon came to revere writers like Maggie Nelson, Gloria Anzaldúa, T. Fleischmann, and more recently Lars Horn, who work to further challenge the boundaries of the genre’s definition. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of these writers, like me, also hope to challenge definitions of gender; I often think of nonfiction as a nonbinary genre.”
At the Edge of the Sea: Queer Stories of Oceanic Life (on Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures and Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay)
Thomas Dai, The Georgia Review, June 20, 2023
“Two recent works of nonfiction—Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures and Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish—[…] immerse readers in aquatic worlds that the authors think of as queer. And not just queer as in different, or even queer as in gay or trans, but queer as in sensual and quixotic, elemental and bewildered, sexy and at play. This may seem like a tall order—queering the seven seas—but the strength of these books is that they choose to go there, flirting with preciousness and even mysticism in the process, rhapsodizing on fish, injecting lyricism into the pelagic and dragging benthos onto the page.”
What to Read When You Are Tired
The Rumpus, June 9, 2023
“Each year it’s easier to buy rainbow necklaces in June but harder (or impossible) for trans people to receive adequate medical care. […] I do sometimes need reminding of the ways that queerness has always existed and will continue to exist, and our jobs as editors is sometimes to make reading lists even when it seems like a sputtering match during a new moon night.”
Translating the Body: An Interview with Lars Horn
Cameron Finch, Lambda Literary Review, May 24, 2023
“From bodily modification to the more intangible ways society, history, and culture mark and model an individual, the tattooed body intersects, to some degree, with transness. In this sense, the tattooed body plays into the wider concerns of Voice of the Fish: how to understand a body in relation to the time, place, and people that have shaped it? How to understand a body whose truth problematises its socio-cultural shaping?”
‘Like moving through water while everyone is on land’: the writers exploring sexuality through sea life
Ella Braidwood, The Guardian, February 3, 2023
“A host of LGBTQ+ authors are finding parallels with mermaids, tropical fish and other creatures of the deep as a way to make sense of their own lives.”
Paragraph of the Week: from The Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay
Steven Harvey, The Humble Essayist, January 27, 2023
‘“It is, after all, always the first person that is speaking,” Henry David Thoreau wrote on the first page of my copy of Walden, a sentence that clarified the “I-voice” of the personal essay for me years ago, but Lars Horn in The Voice of the Fish has made it problematic again.’
Perpetual Instability: An Interview with Lars Horn
Natalya Sukhonos, Punctured Lines, January 12, 2023
“Poised neatly between the abstractions of literary theory and the concrete joys of poetic memoir, Horn’s writing is electrifying, aphoristic, restless, and powerfully eclectic, asking the reader to make connections between the abstract and the deeply personal several times within a single page. The result is visceral and deeply moving, like a dream or the force of memory, leaving readers to meander through the different strands Horn offers and reflect upon our own relationship with our bodies and with language.”
GLCA Announces 2023 Winners of the New Writers Award
Great Lakes College Association, January 10, 2023
“The Great Lakes Colleges Association is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 GLCA New Writers Award. […] Creative Nonfiction: Lars Horn, Voice of the Fish, Graywolf Press.”
88 Writers on the Books They Loved in 2022
Literary Hub, December 19, 2022
“I don’t know if I have read anything this year as aching and beautiful as Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish. […] It moved me in the way that the best literature does.”—Maaza Mengiste
Editor’s Note: How to Be Inspired
Kevin Larimer, Poets & Writers, January/February, 2023
“I think of how Lars Horn describes the diaries of artist-activist David Wojnarowicz, how they resurrected something in the writer. “Opened me to an understanding—murmured, glimpsed,” Horn writes. “Such acute attention. Tenderness even, to others and the world.” Therein lies the secret. To be inspired one must be open to others, to the world, to possibility.”
The Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2022
Laura Sackton, Book Riot, December 15, 2022
“This is queer writing at its best — a beautiful example of just how inventive and world-opening essays can be.”
A Year in Reading: Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee, The Millions, December 14, 2022
“Voice of the Fish was one of those books that left me changed […] the writing, sentence for sentence, is extraordinary.”
Finding Glimmers of Queerness Under the Sea: A Reading List
Sabrina Imbler, Literary Hub, December 14, 2022
“Reading this book felt like a mystical experience—walking through one of those aquarium tunnels that also transports you into antiquity, or perhaps gazing at a fish tank with walls of stained glass. […] I read Voice of the Fish slowly, carefully, and with great envy.”
Aster(ix) Picks: The 12 Best Fiction/ Nonfiction Books of 2022
Aster(ix) Journal, December 13, 2022
“Voice of the Fish is a stunning lyric essay that explores fluidity, genderqueerness, transmasculinity, healing, the body, and the nature of consciousness in piercingly innovative ways. It’s exquisitely crafted, thematically ambitious, and a true joy to read.”—Carolina De Robertis, author of The President and the Frog
Lars Horn’s ‘Voice of the Fish’—Exploring the Trans Experience
Tim Pfaff, The Bay Area Reporter, September 27, 2022
“One indication that good writing is afoot is when friends send you links to it in emails that say, in one way or another, “Get a load of this!” … There’s not a forgettable page in this crazy quilt of prose and prose poems.”
‘Voice of the Fish,’ A Graywolf Prize Winner’s Form-defying Approach to Writing About the Body
Faith Hanna, The Los Angeles Review, August 24, 2022
“Voice of the Fish truly defies one form by embracing many, turning, like its author and subject, from established ideas, towards felt truths, not by denying history, but by recasting it through the lens of a person who has, for all of their life, known themselves through plunging mysteries. It’s a thrilling, adventurous, expansive ride—less for those who seek comfort in well wrought tradition than for those who crave the skilled-freshness of the unexpected.”
Poets & Writers: The New Nonfiction
Poets & Writers, September/ October, 2022
“Oracular eels adorned in earrings. A prophetic crocodile who refused food from a dying man’s hand. Lead boxes, one drilled to represent a bodily orifice; the other sealed, alabaster kidneys resting atop its surface. A saint’s severed eyeballs upon flaming salver.
When working on a project, I amass textual and visual materials. […]The textual sources—often mythological, historical or sacred—I write in notebooks, Word documents, or in endless email drafts that clutter my laptop. Any artworks or objects—I paste as large, grainy photocopies across my bedroom walls. Rising in the morning, falling into bed at night, the images linger across my eyes.”
Footnote Lands ‘Gorgeous, Hallucinatory’ Debut by Prize-winner Horn
Lauren Brown, The Bookseller, July 1, 2022
“Very occasionally, you come across an act of writing that stops you in your tracks with its intelligence and emotional honesty, and makes you view the world afresh. Lars’ gorgeous, structurally inventive and irresistibly readable book is one. I finished it, and immediately started it again. It is wonderful.”
30 Books That Are Still Gay Even Though Pride Month Is Over
Vanessa Friedman, Autostraddle, July 1, 2022
“Lars Horn takes the reader expertly through a huge range of subjects including marine history, theology, gender, the body, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. Throughout, the essays resist binaries and Lars resists the idea that all bodies experience life in a uniform or singular way.”
Where to Turn When You Feel ‘at Odds With Being Human’
Alana Mohamed, The Atlantic, June 27, 2022
“The sea has long tugged at the human imagination, inspiring stories of hubristic individuals seeking to tame the inhabitants of that seemingly endless expanse. […] Yet an emergent narrative complicates both these perspectives, positing instead a deep, co-equal bond between humans—particularly those who feel discomfort with rigid taxonomies, or who exist at the margins of society—and sea creatures of the deep. In the new essay collection Voice of the Fish, Lars Horn wonders ‘how common [it is] to feel completely at odds with being human,’ and uses a long-standing fascination with marine life to reimagine the body’s potential.”
Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin
Poets & Writers, July/ August, 2022
“With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks.”
Summer Reading 2022
Walton Muyumba, The Boston Globe, June 10, 2022
“Horn’s essays arise from sparkling liquidity. They run river like, sometimes eddying, sometimes breaking into tributaries and standalone pools. Horn recovers language, voice, and art after a traumatization. And demonstrates how to return — through literarture’s textures — to one’s self, altered.”
Bodies of Water: Lars Horn Talks about their Elemental Essay Collection, Voice of the Fish
Ayden LeRoux, BOOKFORUM, June 8, 2022
“As a writer who is the daughter of a fisheries biologist, I have found a dearth of books that make “the sciences” sensorial, not simply factual. I have longed for essays that feel like swimming, where language is aquatic, texts saturated with the sonics of being underwater. When I read Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish, I found it did just that by submerging the reader in the mythological layers of the marine. […] [Horn] illuminates how books are bodies, and bodies are books. Text trembles on our tongues, is spoken and swallowed, words evaporate off skin, and Horn’s prose hums in a way that often transcends language.”
A Gender as Fluid as Water, and a Body in Crisis
Corinne Manning, The New York Times, June 7, 2022
“In “Voice of the Fish” — this baptismal, overflowing narrative that reveals the limitlessness of being — Horn’s clear choice is life and light.”
“Voice of the Fish” Examines the Slippery Nature of Bodies
Stef Rubino, Autostraddle, June 6, 2022
“The connections Horn makes between themself and scientific doctrine, history, and the mythological illuminate the complexities of living in the world as a trans person while building a brand new one, one where we can use these stories and our own to show it is possible to live between and live without demarcation.”
An Indies Introduce Q&A with Lars Horn
Max Ruthless, American Booksellers Association, May 25, 2022
“These lyrical essays struck my soul in the most beautiful way. Horn’s writing is both sumptuous and austere and this pensive text covers a broad range of topics with beauty and grace. Lovers of art who challenge your way of seeing the world will find a happy home in Voice of the Fish.”
Summer/Fall 2022 Indies Introduce Featured Titles
Staff, American Booksellers Association, May 04, 2022
“ABA is proud to announce the titles selected for the Summer/Fall 2022 Indies Introduce program.”
Publishers Weekly: Reviews
Staff, Publishers Weekly, March 1, 2022
“The complexities of a trans identity and contemplations of aquatic life provide the pulsating current to these ruminative essays.”
Booklist Reviews
Michael Cart, Booklist, March 1, 2022
“Horn’s sometimes profound, sometimes baffling autobiographical essays have in common a near obsession with water, aquatic life, and aquariums…”
Paper Trail
Staff, BOOKFORUM, September 3, 2020
“The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize has been awarded to Lars Horn for Voice of the Fish.”
Publishers Lunch
Erin Somers, Publishers Marketplace, September 3, 2020
“The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner is Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn.”
Lars Horn Wins Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
Michael Schaub, Kirkus, September 3, 2020
“Writer Lars Horn has won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize for their essay collection, Voice of the Fish, the publisher announced on Wednesday.”
National Translation Awards Longlists, Lars Horn Wins Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, and More
Staff, Poets & Writers Magazine, September 3, 2020
“Lars Horn has won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize for their manuscript Voice of the Fish, which ‘combines personal essay, mythology, theology, and marine history to explore questions of the body, particularly, gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness.’ Previous recipients of the prize include writers Esmé Weijun Wang and Leslie Jamison.”
Lars Horn has won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize
Katie Yee, Literary Hub, September 2, 2020
“The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize was created to celebrate the art of literary nonfiction and encourage emerging writers. You definitely know its previous winners, which include Esmé Weijun Wang (for The Collected Schizophrenias) and Leslie Jamison (for The Empathy Exams). Now you can add Lars Horn to the list.”
Why We Chose It
Jaquira Díaz, The Kenyon Review, March 2, 2020
“Can the body in an essay be formed by the images that surround it? Can the body be composed of silences? Of white space? The essay requires the reader to think about the terror of feeling disconnected from one’s own body, or feeling confined by it, the body itself extricated from the work but always present nonetheless. In the essay, the body is nowhere yet everywhere at once.”