City Lights Publishers Releases MAN ALIVE by Thomas Page McBee

Far from a transgender transition tell-all, here is a personal yet universal story of charting one's course to ultimate self-recognition.

"Thomas Page McBee's Man Alive hurtled through my life. I read it in a matter of hours. It's a confession, it's a poem, it's a time warp, it's a brilliant work of art. I bow down to McBee-his humility, his sense of humor, his insightfulness, his structural deftness, his ability to put into words what is often said but rarely, with such visceral clarity and beauty, communicated."-Heidi Julavits, author of The Vanishers and The Uses of Enchantment

What does it really mean to be a man?

In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life-one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past, and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.

Man Alive engages an extraordinary personal story to tell a universal one-how we all struggle to create ourselves, and how this struggle often requires risks. Far from a transgender transition tell-all, Man Alivegrapples with the larger questions of legacy and forgiveness, love and violence, agency and invisibility.

Buy here.

About the Author:

Thomas Page McBee was the "masculinity expert" for VICE and writes the columns "Self-Made Man" for The Rumpus and "The American Man" for Pacific Standard. His essays and reportage have appeared in the theNew York Times, TheAtlantic.com, Salon, and BuzzFeed, where he was a regular contributor on gender issues. He lives in New York City where he works as the editor of special projects at Quartz, and is currently at work on a book about modern American masculinity.

Publisher City Lights Publishers