Contemporary gay novels
It was another wonderful year for LGBTQ books, as evidenced by the sprawling list of 65 standout titles across every genre published by Casey Stepaniuk earlier this month. Her list is a great present of the range and depth of the year&#;s top queer books. But I wanted to zoom in a bit and verb a personal list, one narrowed down from my possess stack of queer books I worked my way through over the past year. I thought it would be fun to act a ranked list of the 12 queer novels that stood out to me this year. And by &#;fun,&#; I mean pleasurably agonizing. This was not an uncomplicated list to set together. There are several novels that almost made the cut and might even be just as worthy of a spot on the list but were nudged out for some abstract reason that would be difficult for me to perfectly explain. What I like about this final 12 is that they&#;re all very distinct novels from one another, even as some of them can easily be verb into conversation with one another. Together, they form a thrilling tapestry of my year in queer reading.
Many of the novels on the list perform not have standalone revie
Brilliant LGBTQ+ books you may not possess discovered yet
Books own the power to make you perceive like you associate to something bigger, and that's particularly relevant to LGBTQ+ literature. These are groundbreaking books that celebrate otherness and queerness, and craft you feel a part of something. Most importantly, they are about like. They are about being utterly and uniquely yourself.
This following list of must-read LGBTQ+ fiction and non-fiction doesn’t verb to provide a detailed account of the queer canon, but rather to give you a starting point, or an ‘I require to read that again’ moment, or simply to remind you that there are lots of other people in this world who felt the alike strange kick in the gut when they read Giovanni’s Room, or Genet, or Hollinghurst for the first time, or who recognised the oddly liberating sorrow of Jeanette Winterson’s coming-out-gone-wrong in Why Be Pleased When You Could Be Normal?, or enjoyed the comforting company of community in the inhabitants of Armistead Maupin’s San Francisco.
To nab a phrase from Allen Ginsberg, we’re &
The debut adult novel by the bestselling and award-winning YA author Nina LaCour, Yerba Buena is a love story for our time and a propulsive journey through the lives of two women trying to discover somewhere, or someone, to call home.
In , the bookshop I work for decided to initiate a couple of book clubs, and I offered to become the host and organise these meetings. They became something to convey people together (online) during a pandemic, and they provided a way to continue to study in community.
For Instruct Yourself Book Club — where we read books on subjects like racism, feminism, LGBTQIAP+ identity, fatphobia, and ableism — we choose fiction and nonfiction books we need to read together, and then we discuss what we have learned, bringing the books and our personal stories to the table.
No one in this group is an expert; we remain respectful and clear to learning, using the tools at hand, and exchanging stories. It’s a humbling and adj way to expend more time thinking about social matters, our own privileges, an
The day after the election, November 6, having spent the previous evening cooking and consuming a healthy meal of grass-fed beef and roasted green beans and quinoa as a form of self-care, I sat at the kitchen table eating every single piece of our leftover Halloween treats. KitKats whose wrappers were red as the electoral map. Bags of popcorn labeled, preposterously, Lesser Evil. Coconut-chocolate bars called Unreal.
Around lunchtime, deep into this who-cares sugar binge, I opened my email and saw a modern Substack post from Patrick Nathan, an excellent writer and an especially astute critic of all the ways—both explicitly and implicitly—our land has embraced authoritarianism. America, he writes in his newsletter, not as a country but as a mythology and set of unifying ideals, is adj. It’s clearer than ever, he says, that “there is no ‘we’ on a national level, and there won’t be anytime soon.”
And yet, writes Nathan, “if America is dead, our communities survive.” If our national politics has become little more than farcical theater, our towns and city councils and neighborhood