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Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Marlon James. Riverhead Books, 2019. Violent, lyrical and intense prose follow a troubled warrior around a high fantasy version of epic Africa. His quest is complex and caught up in stories inside stories, diversions that are literal as well as narrative, and James style tumbles through nonlinearly and evoking raw images. This book is full of pain, fear, rage and their flipsides of strength, grace and beauty. It is a difficult masterpiece.
Cantoras. Carolina De Robertis. Knopf, 2019. A lyrical novel about five queer women living in Uruguay from the 1970s to 2013. They find sanctuary in a coastal community that is temporary, but allows them to create a found family to sustain them despite dictators, trauma, and fear.
Condomnauts. Yoss. Restless Books, 2018. A totally zany space opera that is sexy, erotic and sometimes non-erotic on purpose. Follow along with the human crewmembers whose job it is to have sex with aliens, because sex is the way all aliens have been making first contact long before anyone in the galaxy knew about humans. It’s funny, it’s gross, it’s queer, it’s happy, and it’s weird.
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers. Jake Skeets. Milkwood Editions, 2019. Skeets tells fierce stories of growing up queer and indigenous in the American West. His debut collection of poems is a mix of brutality and tenderness, showcasing the raw beauty and horror of the southwest. Skeets is an essential and ambitious new voice.
Feed. Tommy Pico. Tin House Books, 2019. The final installation in the “Teebs” tetralogy weaves together a bountiful array of themes in this free-verse, tour-de-force of a book-length poem. With a style that moves at the speed of a social media feed, Pico kneads his inner dialogue into a beautiful and funny poetic form, with plenty of pop culture references and internet slang, along with a good helping of depth and meaning. This is queer poetry for right now.
Frankissstein: A Love Story. Jeanette Winterson. Grove Press, 2019. Three intertwined stories explore a transgender doctor falling in love, a cryogenics lab with people frozen and waiting to be revived, and Mary Shelley writes her famous story.
Gideon the Ninth. Tamsyn Muir. Tom Doherty Associates, 2019. After growing up in the geriatric 9th house of bone magicians, Gideon longs to be anywhere else. When she plans a daring escape, she is instead forced to fight against the other eight necromancer houses alongside her childhood nemesis to win a deadly trial put forth by the Emperor.
Girl, Woman, Other. Bernardine Evaristo. Grove, 2019. A joyful read following connected characters in the UK, each with their own lived experience with identities of color and queerness. Each section haș its own voice and style while the connected nature gives varying perspectives of the others.
Grease Bats. Archie Bongiovanni. Boom! Box, 2019. This collection of comics follows the daily adventures of two queer main characters and their circle of friends. These comics explore the realities that queer individuals face in everyday life with dry humor.
Half Moon Street. Alex Reeve. Felony & Mayhem, 2019. Half Moon Street features a transgender main character, Leo Stanhope. Leo finds his life turned upside-down when the woman he loves is murdered. When local authorities show little interest in the truth of the killing, Leo turns into an amateur sleuth in order to discover what happened. Though this novel is imperfect, it remains a valuable addition to the list of works featuring a transgender main character.
In at the Deep End. Kate Davies. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. Julia has a tumultuous coming out in her twenties, followed by a high-intensity relationship with the beautiful and confident Sam. As their relationship intensifies, Sam’s need for control begins to stifle Julia’s newfound liberation. This funny and painful coming of age novel does not shy away from the joys of queer community, or the challenges or shame of finding oneself in an abusive queer relationship. An unexpected and sincere read.
The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics. Olivia Waite. Avon Impulse, 2019. After her father’s death and her female lover’s sudden wedding to a man, Lucy wants nothing more than to distract herself with the challenge of translating a famous French astronomy text; however, in Regency England, the men offering to fund the text’s translation refuse to support a female translator. Luckily, she finds an unexpected ally in the Countess of Moth, a widowed artist whose talents were never recognized. The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics tells the story of how these two women navigate their differences, their shared goals, and, ultimately, their love for one another.
Last Night in Nuuk. Niviaq Korneliussen. Black Cat, 2019. Haunting and evocative prose pulls the reader into the messy lives of 5 young Greenlanders and never lets go, propelling with an inventive style and voice that is brand new and mature at the same time. Featuring lots of drinking and drugs, sex, ambiguity and fluidity, these characters and their relationships tell all about contemporary Greenland, as well as what it is like for any young person just trying to figure stuff out.
Leading Men. Christopher Castellani. Viking, 2019. The real-life relationship between Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover, Frank Merlo, is the starting point for this highly fictionalized tale. At a party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy in 1953, the couple meets a Swedish actress who becomes a pivotal figure in their lives in this lush, evocative story about love and fame.
Lie With Me. Philippe Besson. Scribner, 2019. Philippe and Thomas become lovers in their last year of high school in rural France in 1984. Years later, Philippe looks back on their brief, doomed romance after spotting a Thomas look-alike. Translated by Molly Ringwald.
The Long Road to Liquor City. Macon Blair and Joe Flood. Oni Press, 2019. The Long Road to Liquor City is a graphic novel that follows two hobos, Jed and Thanny, as they search for the fabled Liquor City. Along the way, they run afoul of rail yard sergeant, Ronan O’Feathers, who believes the two to be responsible for the death of his wife. This graphic novel is well-drawn, amusing, and features a unique and endearing cast of characters.
Love Letters to Jane’s World. Paige Braddock. Lion Forge, 2018. This collection pairs popular comic strips from Jane’s World–the first syndicated comic strip with a lesbian main character–with love letters from notable fans. This curated selection of strips from 1998 to 2018 will be a joy for current fans, as well as for new readers.
The Melting Queen. Bruce Cinnamon. NeWest Press, 2019. The annual crowning of the Melting Queen in Edmonton, Alberta is given an unexpected twist when gender-fluid River Runson is named the newest queen in this modern fairy tale.
Mostly Dead Things. Kristin Arnett. Tin House Books, 2019. After Jessa-Lynn discovers her father’s body on his taxidermy table, she must step up to run the family taxidermy business while her mother and brother fall apart. While grieving both her father and her brother’s wife–her first love, who married her brother Milo and later walked out without a word–Jessa must navigate the world created by their absence, including her mother’s increasingly sexualized art created out of her father’s prized mounts. This Floridian debut is macabre, intrinsically gay, and shockingly funny.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Ocean Vuong. Penguin Randomhouse, 2019. Poet Vuong’s debut novel, featured on several long and shortlists for the year, including the National Book Award Longlist, and winner of the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction. The narrator, a twenty-something Vietnamese-American, is writing a long letter to his Vietnamese mother who cannot read. Vuong’s tender prose spans generations of trauma, exploring the narrator’s family’s experience in war, American poverty, and the narrator’s sexuality and relationships with other men. Vuong redefines form in this dreamlike and groundbreaking novel.
The Priory of the Orange Tree. Samantha Shannon. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. The Priory of the Orange Tree is a welcome queer addition to the existing catalog of high fantasy novels. Presented in three unique perspectives, the novel tells a story of magic, dragons, and political intrigue. At over 800 pages, this feminist fantasy tale will delight readers looking for a long read with a unique setting and well-developed characters.
Red, White & Royal Blue. Casey McQuiston. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2019. The First Son of the United States and Prince of England go from antagonists to lovers in this slightly altered world. Both are very intelligent and quote literary icons in their emails. This was definitely the feel good read of the summer!
Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space). Edited by Catherine Lundoff. Queen of Swords Press, 2018. This collection of short stories features themes of pirates and takes place across different settings and times. These stories feature a wide range of subjects from historical piracy on the seas to galactic piracy in space in the far future. Many of the characters featured throughout these stories are queer identified and are written by queer authors.
The Spellbinders. Aleardo Zanghellini. Lethe Press, 2018. This work of historical fiction reimagines the life of Edward II. The story focuses on Edward’s relationship with a soldier, Piers Gaveston, and how this relationship affects and even helps to build his relationship with his queen before Gaveston is murdered by a jealous earl. This book looks at the medieval king’s personal relationships with an honest and unapologetic lens.
Sugar Run. Mesha Maren. Algonquin Books, 2019. When Jodi McCarty is released from prison after 18 years on a manslaughter charge, she has plans for a low-key future, however the world is not cooperative in this noir-inspired tale of flawed characters living in Appalachia.
Thorn. Anna Burke. Bywater Books, 2019. Rowan is kidnapped by the legendary Huntress of local superstition after her father hunts on the Huntress’s lands and steals a cursed rose. Despite being held against her will, Rowan finds herself drawn to the Huntress, a welcome reprieve from the arranged betrothal that awaits her should she return home. Thorn is a brilliant feminist retelling of Beauty and the Beast.
The Tradition. Jericho Brown. Copper Canyon Press, 2019. Jericho Brown speaks the truth through poetry about being a gay black man in America who is also HIV-positive. Poems reflect his own experiences, some incredibly painful, while others provide insights into other members of his community. If the personal is universal, Jericho Brown represents all of us.
Transcendent 3. Edited by Bogi Takács. Lethe Press, 2018. A vivid collection of the year’s best transgender speculative fiction, these fantastical tales include everything from far futures to time travel, ghosts, horror movies, and much more. This anthology features diverse stories from important new voices: K.M Szpara, Rivers Solomon, Indrapramit Das.
Willa & Hesper. Amy Feltman. Grand Central Publishing, 2019. Willa and Hesper are both students in the MFA creative writing program at Columbia University, but it isn’t until a chance encounter one night in Brooklyn that their relationship turns romantic. The unraveling of their brief, intense relationship, and the journeys, both literal and figurative, that the break up propels both of them towards, are just as formative. The story is told with a thrillingly contemporary sensibility, mixing a lot of funny and playful moments with the sad ones.
Without Protection. Gala Mukomolova. Coffee House Press, 2019. Mukomolova mixes modern life as a lesbian in New York City with classic Russian folktales. In this stunning collection, Mukomolova explores her identities and family through the story of Vassilyasa, a young girl who must fend for herself against Baba Yaga. Her poems are compelling and erotic, a mix of mythology and modernity.
WWJD and Other Poems. Savannah Sipple. SIbling Rivalry Press, 2019. These poems cover themes of what it is like to grow up in Appalachia while queer, female, and fat. She doesn’t shy from the seeming contradictions that evangelical underpinnings carry through her work.
You are enough: Love Poems For the End of the World. Smokii Sumac. Kegedonce Press, 2018. In his debut collection of poetry using haiku format as a starting point in composition, Sumac shares with us all 2 years of poetry created from the experiences of 2 years of his journey as a Ktunaxa, Two-Spirit trans masculine scholar. Funny, touching, and inspiring poems.
