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Sex and Character
Paperback
Publisher Price: $25.00
ISBN13: 9781969900303
Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
Published: Feb 14 2027
Pages: 400
Weight: 0.82
Height: 0.99 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
At once historical novel, erudite inquiry, and intimate character study, Elisabeth Sheffield's Sex and Character boldly examines how medicine, culture, and language shape our understanding of the body, and how the body continually resists the limits imposed upon it.
New York City, 2020. Stefan Pröscholdt Krause, an eighty-year-old retired medical librarian, is isolated in quarantine, dying of breast cancer, when an unexpected chromosomal analysis forces him to confront a truth about his own intersex body that has remained hidden for decades. As his diagnosis unravels the certainties of a lifetime, Krause is drawn back to seven pivotal months in 1966, when, as a young German researcher newly arrived in America, he worked in a pioneering genetics laboratory and became entangled with his brilliant mentor, Dr. Jack Seurat, a celebrated geneticist harboring a secret that would alter both their lives.
In the present, Stefan's solitary existence is disrupted by Raven, a twenty-four-year-old Icelandic graduate student whose connection to Stefan reaches further into the past than either could imagine. Together, their lives expose the unexpected legacies of desire, kinship, ambition, and the uneasy categories through which we understand sex, identity, and inheritance.
Moving between the dawn of modern human genetics and the uncertainties of the COVID era, Sex and Character explores a moment when advances in chromosomal science collided with the sexual revolutions of the 1960s, raising urgent questions that continue to reverberate today.
With the intellectual ambition and formal inventiveness that define Elisabeth Sheffield's work, Sex and Character probes the unstable boundaries between language and reality, the body and identity, and the ways narrative, science, and culture shape our understanding of sex, desire, memory, and identity. In conversation with Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie, Cristina Rivera Garza's The Iliac Crest, and mid-century taboo lesbian novels like Valerie Taylor's The Girls in 3-B, Sheffield's brilliant, audacious novel asks what happens when the stories we inherit about the body can no longer contain the lives we live.
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