Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Terry Dactyl by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, which will be published by Coffee House Press on November 11, 2025. Pre-order your copy here.
From iconic author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore comes a breathless search for intimacy and connection, from club culture to the art world, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19.
Terry Dactyl has lived many lives. Raised by boisterous lesbian mothers in Seattle, she comes of age as a trans girl in the 1980s in a world of dancing queens and late-night house parties just as the AIDS crisis ravages their world. After moving to New York City, Terry finds a new family among gender-bending club kids bonded by pageantry and drugs, fiercely loyal and unapologetic. She lands a job at a Soho gallery, where, after partying all night, she spends her days bringing club culture to the elite art world.
Twenty years later, in a panic during the COVID-19 lockdown, Terry returns to a Seattle stifled by gentrification and pandemic isolation until resistance erupts following the murder of George Floyd, and her search for community ignites once again.
In propulsive, intoxicating prose, Terry Dactyl traces an extraordinary journey from adolescence to adulthood, delivering a vital portrait of queer identity in all its peril and possibility.
Here is the cover, designed by Sarah Schulte.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: “Picture yourself late at night on that dance floor in the flashing lights, your head flipping with the beats and, yes, those pills and potions floating right into your mouth opening up to all that experience, honey, you are there in that magenta light, yes, Terry Dactyl starts on the dance floor at the Limelight in New York in 1991 and do you see how this cover does such a great job of conjuring that experience, the way those iridescent three-dimensional pills and potions and papers sparkle in the light of the disco ball maybe they are the disco ball maybe you are the disco ball but also how everything is flattened for the photocopier in your mouth, do you see the title there, TERRY DACTYL TERRY DACTYL TERRY DACTYL TERRY DACTYL and Sarah Schulman’s blurb illuminated out there in the dark on the side, “Historical fiction on acid” because, yes, tear open the gates of literature with your mouth, yes, let’s take another hit of those glittering gems on the cover, that sense of light but also fracturing or fragmenting, mouths open wide, pink tongues hanging out inside that dark frame of night, right, and, yes, it’s true that the book starts on the dance floor at the Limelight, but also it starts in Seattle where Terry grows up with lesbian mothers in the midst of the AIDS crisis, her mothers are party girls so that disco ball those pills those potions are in their living room with all the dancing queens who are Terry’s role models as a trans girl who knows she’s a dyke in a world that doesn’t offer these options but she is ready still with that open mouth, right, open to possibility but actually the present day of the book is 2020, just before COVID lockdown, our mouths hanging open in shock, in trauma, in trying to breathe in spite of it all, and at this point Terry has been working in an art gallery for two decades so you see the art of the cover once again, the creative mess we’re all in. And I love how this cover shows everything at once—the spectacle, the celebration, the excitement of walking into those night lights, the frenetic movement of the book, the floating between and beyond, the shrieking and crying and laughing and flying and dying and living, yes, living, in spite of it all.”
Sarah Schulte: “Terry Dactyl is edgy, gritty, colorful and loud. There is a bright, dizzying club scene energy that pulsates throughout the story — an undercurrent to a world full of binaries, tensions, and extremes. My design notes read: glitter eyelashes, furry fuchsia dress, wings made of trash, stuffed animals stapled to the walls, anything bright and plastic or shiny and ruined. The cover design we landed on draws inspiration from the photocopier poster aesthetic of the 90s NYC club world. The bold, vocal mouths paired with the shimmering pills speak to a flawed flamboyance; a world of glamour, activism, and excess marked by addiction, sadness and loss.”
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