So it is no accident that writing about sex is now one of my acutest pleasures. In my debut collection, Please Don’t Touch the Body, I focus on delights and pains implicit in the times before and after sex—which in many ways are also sex. A caregiver attempts to reach out to an almost-lover while being haunted by a ghost. A young girl works up the courage to kiss her neighbor only for that neighbor to reject her. Two older women pleasure each other in order to distract from the fact that one of the women is ill. In each of these stories, I’m fascinated by how desire can ripple outward and inward, altering our relationships to ourselves and others. 

While writing Please Don’t Touch the Body, I found myself searching for sex scenes that aren’t just sexy, scenes that prioritize the discoveries and obfuscations and exchanges of power involved in sex as much as its pleasure. For this, I turned to the works of other queer writers. I bring eight of their books to you now. All of them share, I think, a consciousness that comes from being unable to take roles within sex for granted, a consciousness that is as concerned with the mind as it is the body, and which can, depending on the book, produce stories ranging from the outright erotic to the deeply unsettling. 

Fantasian by Larissa Pham

When the protagonist of Fantasian happens upon a woman named Dolores at a college party, she’s struck by how similar they are, their resemblance so deep as to be disorienting. What follows is a tale of carnival confusion, with scenes that are both overtly arousing and psychologically dense: “I suck on her clit, flicking at it featherlike in small shallow movements, and she moans into my pussy and I think to myself now we have closed a circuit.” As the protagonist and Dolores touch each other, the boundary between self and other both hardens and collapses, linking the two women in a loop of desire. Later in the novella, the protagonist assumes Dolores’s identity, easily fooling even those closest to the women, raising questions about what it means to be an individual in a world that often flattens difference.

Mrs S by K Patrick

From the opening lines of Mrs S, sex seems inevitable. The narrator, a nameless teacher at an elite school, watches a woman argue with her gardener. The woman turns out to be the titular Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife. From that moment, the narrator cannot look away from Mrs S. Their sex, when they eventually have it, is a negotiation between the narrator’s dueling desires to be seen and to hide, driven by an increasingly unstable relationship to gender. In fact, every interaction between the narrator and Mrs S is fraught with stakes both personal and mysterious, even (or especially) a moment when Mrs S asks if she can check the narrator for ticks: “I turn, reluctantly. Her hands pause. May I? Yes.” Here is a push and pull, a struggle evident in the shortening of each sentence, ending in yes. Yes, of course. Yes. 

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

What Belongs to You follows an American teacher living in Bulgaria as he grapples with his infatuation with a local hustler named Mitko. Through his interactions with Mitko, the protagonist’s childhood hurts surface in ways that lead to both humiliation and ecstasy. Although the protagonist knows their relationship is unsustainable, he can’t help but try to sustain it, as if by doing so he might reach, at last, permanent gratification. As Greenwell points out on David Naimon’s Between the Covers podcast, What Belongs to You contains only about three pages of explicit writing about sex. And yet longing permeates every interaction—the longing for another’s body, yes, but also the longing to find a home in an inhospitable world.

The Chronology of Water by Lydia Yuknavitch

There is no other book like The Chronology of Water—a chaotic, visceral memoir about the attempts of a girl, and then young woman, to make herself known. Throughout, scenes of childhood sexual assault merge with pregnancy loss, with drug-and-alcohol-hazed college sex, with the intensity of her first attempts to tell her story, with the revelation of squirting during masturbation, with her initial flames of queer desire, with her eventual relationship with her husband, with the death of her abusive father with, with, with. In one account, Yuknavitch describes with engrossing specificity a sadomasochist play party: “I saw a woman’s thighs pierced with tiny blue capped needles – 20 up one thigh and 20 down the other – her eyes were streaming with tears, her endorphin rush coming at those around her like a tsunami, her cunt gushing.” In The Chronology of Water, more is more. Moments from which other authors might glance away bashfully Yuknavitch seems to relish. After reading the book, I recommend watching Kristen Stewart’s mesmerizing film adaptation of the same name, which is just as messy and explosive. 

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

In the Dream House is a genre-bending memoir about Machado’s relationship with her abusive ex-girlfriend. At one point, Machado says, “I didn’t know what it meant to be afraid of another woman. Do you see now? Do you understand?” Throughout, Machado confronts the difficulty not just of telling a painful, personal story but also of telling a story with almost no literary examples. She describes, in turn, moments of intimate joy—“A week after you get back from Savannah, you are fucking on your bed and you come and she says, ‘I love you.’”— and terror—“you saw underneath it last night, when you were so afraid and cowering, and she was screaming, and you were hiding from her, hiding from the woman who once told you she loved you.” Balancing past tenderness with the increasingly destabilizing force of fear, Machado reaches continually for different forms—the unreliable narrator, the soap opera, the romance novel—seeming to search for the right narrative, the one that will at last make the reader see and understand how sex and abuse can blur. 

Exhibit by RO Kwon

On its surface, Exhibit is about a photographer named Jin who risks the relative stability of her marriage to become the submissive of a famous, injured ballerina. Beneath the surface, Exhibit is about hauntings—not just a literal haunting represented through sections featuring an ancestral ghost, but also hauntings of desire and shame, and even hauntings of the sentence. Exhibit’s prose is at once revealing and concealing, punctuating abstracted sex scenes with vivid detail—spirits appearing, briefly, in a dark window. After a moment in which the ballerina strikes Jin with a belt, she traces the faded bruise on Jin’s thigh. Jin shivers and thinks, “I had thought I’d be fine, not having this.” Exhibit asks the reader to pay close attention so as not to miss submerged truths about the story and oneself. 

All Fours by Miranda July

In All Fours, a woman plummets into perimenopause, which the protagonist succinctly describes as “the cliff.” At different points, the sex in the book—or more often, near-sex—involves holding another person’s urinating penis, an existential crisis with a seemingly wise older woman, and (most memorably) the insertion of a tampon. Throughout, bodies collide in ways that seem more concerned with intimacy than with what we might define as sex. Consider, for instance, the moments following the tampon: “We looked at each other in the mirror, very seriously and then slowly smiling. Sex was great, but this. This was something we’d never do with anyone else. Our thing.” Encounters are sometimes awkward, sometimes steamy, and always surprising. All Fours is equal parts celebration and panic, which just about captures my feelings about what awaits my body and spirit beyond “the cliff.” 

Maurice by EM Forster

Maurice follows the seemingly conventional life of a young protagonist as he struggles privately with his attraction to other men. I’ll spoil Maurice for you now: It ends happily. The facts of Maurice’s publishing are sad—completed in 1914, the book was not actually released, due to fear of legal prosecution, until 1971, after Forster died—but its story is ultimately joyful. The least sexually explicit book on this list (although it is far from being without sex), Maurice still demands inclusion because it was written during a time when the very happiness of Maurice’s ending was what made it too risky to publish. In fact, Forster wrote, “If it ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well, for there is no pornography or seduction of minors. But the lovers get away unpunished and consequently recommend crime.” So while each of the books on this list represent the complexity of queer sex in different ways, I’ll conclude by recommending, just as Maurice does, the crime of happiness, and of queer happiness especially.

The post The Best Queer Sex Scenes Are About More Than Just Sex appeared first on Electric Literature.

The intense intimacy of friendship is having a moment in contemporary fiction. But this is only the latest wave in a long literary tradition. Whether it’s the biological sisters of Jane Austen, the soul sisters of Toni Morrison’s Sula, or Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, a fraught, essential friendship completes the two main characters. When things aren’t right between them, or even worse, if one of them is gone for good, the other moves through life with a phantom limb. 

My novel, Talking to the Wolf, centers the profound effect of a friend breakup on four women, in tandem with the accidental death of one of the group. The women in my novel are completely undone by this unexpected loss. The pain of the breakup is compounded by the fact that there will never be a chance to make things right. Each of them—including the ghost—wrestles with the loyalty and turmoil of their shifting friendships as they make their way through a snowbound New York City to their 35^th high school reunion. The primacy of their feelings toward each other affects every aspect of their lives across careers, thwarted ambitions, and romantic relationships.

The “marriage plot” has taken a very long time to die. There’s a powerful cultural mythology around that elusive partner who is both your best friend and your lover—even when those roles are often incompatible. But a friend divorce can feel more painful than the end of a bad marriage. After all, your friends were there to help you tape together your reckless, impossible heart. 

The following books know this well. They span decades and styles, coming-of-age, death, ambition, success and failure. All of them explore the complicated, private heartbreak of losing a friend. 

Ponti by Sharlene Teo 

This novel is haunted by a glamorous mother who became a B-movie horror film star. What a great premise! The story is told from three points of view: the mother, her insecure, adolescent daughter, Szu—a social outcast at her school in Singapore—and Circe, the classmate who appears to be a fellow outcast despite her wealth and beauty. Szu’s distant, cruel mother and her Auntie now scrape by as mediums (though their psychic gifts are questionable, according to Szu). Circe becomes Szu’s “best friend” for better and worse. The novel has a gothic horror sensibility that echoes the campy film that made Szu’s mother famous, but the teenage friendship, with its complex cocktail of loyalty and betrayal, is utterly real. 

Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Michael Emmerich

Yoshimoto has an eye and ear for language that holds us with exquisite simplicity—like a ballet dancer, her words land without a sound. The story follows the close bond between two cousins/best friends in a small coastal Japanese town, while death lingers just offstage. Tsugumi has had a mysterious illness since childhood, but her frail body burns with rebellion. Using rude honesty as her weapon, she shocks and charms her family, especially her cousin, who tells the story of this last summer in their late teens; they both know something is about to change forever. 

The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine

The Grammarians is a word lovers’ book. In it, a pair of identical twin sisters not only have their own language—they share an obsession with language itself. Precocious American children of the late 20th century, the dictionary is their favorite toy. The novel explores the tensions, envy, and loyalties that hold these two together, just as it splits them apart. The semiotics of words shape both of their lives, becoming the lens through which they see the world and each other. A tale of two sisters. 

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This novel gripped me from the start. When three friends develop a highly successful video game in college, a love triangle plays out. Yes, two of them fall in love, but their story is more about the intensity of friendship than romantic love. The cyber world serves as a mirror to the real-life bonds that are changed forever by the price of success and adulthood. I’m not a gamer, but I was utterly compelled by this novel, which is really about the games played between friends and lovers. 

Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett

In this memoir, Ann Patchett tells the story of her highly literary friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, who died in 2002. The reader follows Patchett and Grealy from their graduate school days through their later careers as successful writers. They were opposites in many ways—Lucy was a luminescent poet, the life of the party, and a fragile survivor of childhood cancer, while Ann describes herself as more of a workhorse writer, the stalwart best friend who saw Lucy through her struggles with addiction and repeated surgeries. Patchett both adores and is exhausted by her crucial, talented, difficult friend. At the heart of this book is the urgency and ambition of two young artists. Who is Truth and who is Beauty? You can make up your own mind about that. 

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy 

In this novel, “the wilderness” refers to the wilds of adulthood. How do you get there and what does it mean for your friendships along the way? This coming-of-age in your 20s story follows a group of four young Black women split between New York and Los Angeles, whose cities and backgrounds define their friendships and selves. Spanning two decades, from 2000 to 2020, Flournoy effortlessly time jumps between years and narrators as their conflicts, personal histories, and deep loyalties reveal what they really think about each other. Even as they struggle with expectations and societal judgements, they refuse—or are unable to—leave each other behind. 

Sula by Toni Morrison

Sula may be the “mother” of all contemporary female friendship novels. Even if you haven’t read this since high school, Sula remains a literary cornerstone, speaking to the different parts of us that emerge at various stages of life. There are many entry points—political, sexual, racial, social—but the center of gravity is the friendship between rebellious, bohemian Sula, and her childhood best friend, the more conventional Nel. Sula is both the ultimate outsider and insider of their multigenerational community in Ohio. Although she and Nel swear to share everything as children, Sula never bows to conventional social mores. Secrets and betrayals emerge when Sula returns to town as an adult. But Nel, and the town itself, are not complete without Sula’s agonizing and disruptive life force. 

The post When Friendship Is the Real Love Story appeared first on Electric Literature.

And while not debuts, The Grief Shop (linked stories) paired with Purgatoire (a novel-in-stories) further showcase how stories are a versatile structure with the ability to offer both narrative satisfaction and surprise. 

While the plots may range, the books on this list all have deep characterization at their center. Across drownings (at least two, plus some river spirits), COVID-style plagues (three, in addition to an undiagnosed illness), living in a squat house (on two different continents), and embezzlement (from adolescents to adults), it is truly the people at the heart of these books that make this season’s titles sing. 

Hub City Press: The Ritz of the Bayou by Nancy Lemann

In 1985, novelist Nancy Lemann returned to her hometown of New Orleans on assignment from Vanity Fair to cover the corruption trials for racketeering, fraud, and bribery of Governor Edwin Edwards. Rather than a straightforward courtroom report, what emerges is the convergence of a story about corrupt politicians, and a story about what it means to go home, framed by Big Easy elements like gulf oysters and humidity. Originally published by Knopf in 1987 and infused with wistfulness for a glitzier time, this reissued edition surfaces another type of nostalgia: One for those who remember the heyday of glossy magazines and glamourous editors. Ultimately, The Ritz of the Bayou is a time capsule, but it is a beautiful one. 

Modern Artist Press: Chitra Demands to Go Home by Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay

After being widowed and suffering a stroke at age 75, Chitra’s children send her to Tranquil Town, a skilled nursing facility in Ohio. Chitra does not understand why neither of her sons will open their homes to her; after all, she spent her life caring for them. She longs to return to Kolkata, where the family owns a large home, occupying her days with fantasies of escaping Tranquil Town to return to India. In Chitra Demands to Go Home, Mukhopadhyay gives voice to the familiar and frustrating dynamics of familial expectations, and the challenges of managing aging parents along with both raising children and taking care of ourselves. A thoughtful and relatable novel. 

Forest Avenue Press: Purgatoire by Liz Prato

This novel-in-stories tracks Italian immigrants who made their home along the banks of the Purgatoire river. While fiction, the stories feel historically accurate to turn-of-the-20th Century rural America: A woman is meant to join her husband in southern Colorado, but when she arrives from Italy, he is gone; families are destroyed by booze, secrets, and hard living; a mother will not give up on her dream of reuniting with her children. Prato writes with attention to the specific landscape and to the inner lives of her characters, creating a beautifully nuanced world for this multi-generational story. 

New Vessel Press: My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabbarova, translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden

A young, unnamed narrator is afflicted by a neurological condition that remains undiagnosed but still impacts her body and speech. Living with her traditional Muslim family in the Azerbaijani diaspora somewhere in secular Russia, she is also trapped between nations: She is not Russian enough for her classmates, and not Azeri enough for her grandparents. The novel centers on the narrator’s body—eyebrows, hands, tongue—and tells both the medical and cultural significance of each. And, because her body is not operating the way it is supposed to, she has failed at the most important task for women in patriarchy: becoming a bride. Meticulously detailed and deeply reflective, My Dreadful Body is both an accomplishment of form and narrative. 

Tin House: Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller

Ursula is 16 and living in a group home under the supervision of a social worker. When she gets a job at a nearby art school, her eyes are opened to a world that is very different from her own. The experience is extremely formative, and decades later, readers see Ursula as a renowned but reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym. When a television journalist starts reaching into the past, Ursula is faced with a reckoning. Her old life, which holds the terrible secret of a deadly crime, has long haunted her, and now it might catch up with her, too. A dark, satisfying thriller.  

Heydey: The Last Human Bear by Greg Sarris

Mary is an indigenous Pomo woman, living in 1930s Northern California. She shares a home with her stepmother, and they support themselves by selling herbs and working in agricultural production, picking fruit like strawberries and apples. There is mystery around her family that includes a hint of scandal, and Mary is determined to make her own way, no matter what other people think or say about her. Her stepmother, as part of family tradition, has taught Mary how to become a Human Bear, a menacing shapeshifter who poisons her enemies— and Mary uses this power when she needs to. In The Last Human Bear, Sarris sets a lyrical story of a tenacious indigenous woman against the backdrop of a rapidly changing America to great effect. 

Unnamed Press: Daytime Moon by Kerri Schlottman

When Isa’s brother shows up on the doorstep of her boyfriend’s sleek New York City apartment, the barrier she’s put up between herself and her past is punctured. She came to the city to try and escape the grief of having lost both her mother and her twin sister. Now, the man who raised her is dying, and she is suddenly on a plane back to Southern California. Isa has always had a sixth sense, but in her hometown, her visions are clouded, even after she and her brother begin to uncover family secrets. Daytime Moon is a moving and heartfelt exploration of the bonds between siblings, the power of both chosen family and blood family, and the ties of trauma.

Regal House: When We Were Feral by Shasta Grant

In the wake of an accidental drowning and in the heady time of late adolescence, Sarah, Erin, and Maggie form a tight friendship, despite their different family structures. Maggie’s mother has left their trailer house, leaving Maggie with an absent father and a stoic brother; Erin, the sister of the drowned girl, has a mother whose disappearance is being investigated by authorities and is trying to make her way while her father checks out; and Sarah’s mom, the wife of a pastor, is almost always available to drive the three around or host dinner, but Sarah’s life is not perfect either. They must navigate their own relationships to parents, to one another, and to themselves, all while existing in the liminal space between girl- and womanhood. This is a novel that speaks to both the power and vulnerability of young women, female friendship, and growing up against a backdrop of loss. A riveting read. 

Tin House: Paradise Pawn by Meg Richardson

Jackie and Kayla are 14-year-old best friends and coworkers at Paradise Pawn, the hock shop where both of their fathers work. It’s another sticky Florida summer, and they are both excited to start high school at a private academy. The girls see first-hand how money impacts life: Some people pawn everything from power tools to CDs trying to make rent, while others buy the shop’s expensive watches and diamond rings for themselves or as gifts. When Kayla’s scholarship falls through and Jackie is faced with a school year alone at a new school, she hatches a money-laundering scheme to raise the tuition. Packed with spot-on observations about best-friendship, Paradise Pawn deftly hits on the feeling of late adolescence, bad decision making and all. An absolute delight. 

Seven Stories: The Grief Shop by Alex DiFrancesco

In the wake of a global tragedy, Gemma is attempting to cope with the numb fallout, just like everyone else. She dyes her hair regularly, just for something to do; she hangs out with her generationally rich friend Xander, who struggles to care about anything other than money; she narrowly escapes death after a woman from her past returns; and she takes a series of jobs she would rather not: at a café, a boxing gym, a funeral home. The Grief Shop is linked stories engendering the best of this genre. Each one works as a standalone, but as a collection it achieves the type of character depth offered by a novel. DiFrancesco captures the ennui of late stage capitalism and the post-covid world perfectly in this compulsively readable book. 

SFWP: The Wedding by Vandana Nair

In her hometown for the extravagant wedding of her cousin, Dr. Ahilya Kapoor is thrust back into familial and cultural expectations. Despite her accomplished career as an epidemiologist, her parents would like nothing more than for her to settle down. Ahilya, on the other hand, is contemplating a huge career move. Still, she’s drawn to a wedding guest who is a London-based, India-born cardiologist. While Ahilya would never give up her own work, she does begin to entertain the idea that falling in love wouldn’t be so bad. However,  when a mysterious illness begins to ripple through the wedding party, Ahilya’s medical training kicks into high gear, and her priorities become clear. The Wedding is a smart take on both the tension between families and women’s professional lives.

Black Lawrence Press: Now I’m Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself by Jill Rosenberg

Left at home alone with her sister for the summer, a girl runs and runs, training for her Olympic dreams while her parents remain absent and her sister pulls away; a high schooler is groomed by her art teacher and her close friend is jealous of the intimacy; in two separate stories, twins and then triplets meet strange fates. In these 10 stories, which range from fabulist to hyper-real, Jill Rosenberg unpacks the inner lives of characters who long to fit in, to understand themselves, and to be loved. Each story is rendered with emotional intensity. Wonderfully raw.

Autumn House Press: Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think by Grace Spulak

Backdropped mostly by the austere beauty of New Mexico, a divorced woman keens for her children while she writes short-stories on her ancient laptop and laments submission fees; a veterinary student has a disastrous affair with her professor in his striking mountain home; two women are followed by a man worried about bears as they hike in Glacier National Park, and they wonder, as the meme goes, who is more dangerous: man or bear? In these stories, Spulak explores when empathy becomes enablement, when romantic commitment borders on criminal, and how the choices we all make to stay connected to the people we love sometimes have hard outcomes. Gorgeously complicated. 

Press 53: Debris by Daniel S.C. Sutter

Step-siblings with no blood ties marry, and the union only further entangles the knot of their lives ; in the title story, an engaged couple must regroup after the Twin Towers fall, but return to old patterns despite the national tragedy and a venue change; a husband and father of two tries to absolve himself from having statutorily raped a teenager by focusing on the 1969 Apollo moon landing. In this debut, Sutter breathes in the South and breathes out a collection which is just as comfortable with the  dreadful as the mundane. A writer to watch. 

Forest Ave: Nice Places by Vincent Chu

Georgie has held a nondescript job at a nondescript tech company for a decade when he decides to leave the boring safety of a corporate salary and travel around the world. However, he doesn’t even make it to the train station before he is robbed of his belongings and his passport; from there, he begins to fake his journey. The novel maintains a kind of playfulness as Georgie and Ant, an art student and Georgie’s conspirator, work to recreate famous sites in Asia and Europe so Georgie can post pictures to his social media. But it also serves as a sobering look at online media culture. As George rises to influencer status, his fake-it-until-you-make-it popularity begs the question of what “making it” really means. Enjoyable, original, and fun.

The post The Small Press Titles You Don’t Want To Miss This Summer appeared first on Electric Literature.

Everyone laughed. The whole thing became a long-running joke, and rightly so. But I stand by my original question. It brings to mind a line from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.” The raw material of reality will always elude perfect description. Capturing the world—into image or language—is to filter it through our own matrices of meaning, which themselves are always in flux. Try as we might, we can never land on a perspective that is perfectly constant or complete or objective. 

It was this unsettled relationship between explanation and experience that got me interested in UFOs, an interest that ultimately grew into my novel, Voyagers. My protagonists, Alex and Ana, go through an experience as children that is quickly interpreted as an alien abduction. But as Alex grows up, he begins to question the completeness of that story, convinced there is some darker truth beneath it. Ana, meanwhile, profits off their childhood experience and finds herself unable to challenge that interpretation of events, even if she wanted to. Their divergent opinions over what actually happened to them might appear, on their surface, to fall into the classic Mulder-Scully binary of believer versus skeptic. But for me, Ana and Alex’s conflict is actually about something far more fundamental. They disagree not about whether or not “the truth is out there” but about the nature of truth itself. The questions they ask are relevant to all of us, even those who haven’t had a close encounter of their own: What happens when an experience is overtaken by the story we tell about it? Which memories do we trust when two people’s recollections diverge? How do we accept that some mysteries in our lives will remain unsolvable, some facts uncertain, no matter how much digging and analyzing we do? And when do we give up the search for the truth, full stop? 

The books in this list all live in that borderland of uncertainty, peering over the edge of consensus reality into the irresolvable. Whether novel, memoir, or (yes, stay with me) museum catalogue, each contends with the instability of our own perceptions, the shifting nature of truth, and the ways we try—and fail—to face up to the unknown and indescribable. 

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay 

On a boarding school picnic to the titular rock, a group of students and one teacher vanish into thin air. The remaining characters unravel in the girls’ absence, unable to tolerate the blank void of an unsolvable mystery. Those who have only seen the film might be expecting a languorous, sensual story full of Lisbon-sister predecessors, but Lindsay’s novel is far darker and funnier than its adaptation. The story toys not just with its characters’ tolerance of uncertainty but with its readers’, too: “Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves,” the prologue reads, before concluding tartly: “As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.” Lindsay did posthumously publish a version of the novel that ends with a depiction of what happened to the women at the top of Hanging Rock, but it is more satisfying (for me at least) to sit in the same unknown as those who were left behind.

Self-Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump

If I hadn’t known Self-Portrait in Green was a memoir, I don’t think I would have guessed. It is exceedingly slender and hypnotically bizarre, full of ghosts and doppelgangers and shocking reveals dispensed as casual asides. There is no attempt to build the steady foundation of self that memoirs are typically built on. The persona that NDiaye constructs on the page questions her perception of nearly everything—from her father’s profession to a friend’s identity to a glimpse of a mysterious woman in green standing beneath a banana tree. Every paragraph seems to double back on itself, swinging between bell-clear certainty and unchecked self-doubt, sometimes in the space of a sentence: “Oh she’ll be back—but in what form? She’ll be back—how can I know that?”

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

Structured as a kind of cross-examination between a dying woman named Amanda and a young boy named David, Fever Dream retraces the events that led to Amanda’s mysterious illness. “Keep going, don’t forget the details,” David urges. But as the details accrete, the investigation grows only more unsettling and irresolvable. Why does David insist certain seemingly minor moments are essential while others are deemed irrelevant? Is David’s interrogation even real? Or is it all in Amanda’s head? And what, exactly, has poisoned David and Amanda both? Ultimately a horror story about parenting, Fever Dream is about the terror of trying to protect a child from the most frightening dangers of all: those you didn’t even know existed. 

The Museum of Jurassic Technology Jubilee Catalogue

For those not blessed to be in the Culver City area of Los Angeles in the odd pockets of time this museum is open, the catalogue of its exhibits is a delightful substitute. Created by David Wilson, the Museum of Jurassic Technology is a museum, in some sense, about museums: Exhibitions on the real (fungally-infected ants) sit alongside those on the unreal (bats that pass through walls), with no winks at the visitor about which is which. The voice of authority pervades all things equally and the effect is mesmerizing and weirdly moving. In a Story Corps piece on the Museum, we hear of one patron who wept after his first visit, saying it was “like a church.” Maybe it’s the attention the conceit inspires, reading each entry carefully to see if we’ve been tricked. Or maybe it’s the awe, seeing real things we’d otherwise have overlooked elevated to the level of imagination. 

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West

A book about discovery and horror in (mostly) the 20th century, When We Cease to Understand the World leads readers through six stories of scientific breakthroughs and the personal and political atrocities they unleash. But the structure of the book is an unsettling breakthrough of its own: The first story, “Prussian Blue” contains (according to Labatut) only a single paragraph of fiction, while the last story is fiction from beginning to end. The cross-fade transition from real to unreal happens slowly but perceptibly and is unnerving in its own way. It is the non-fiction, however, that I found the most terrifying: mass suicides and cyanide capsules, black holes and the uncertainty principle, the quest to comprehend reality leading—inexorably, in Labatut’s view—to ruin. 

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. 

The most charming book you will ever read about nuclear apocalypse, A Canticle for Leibowitz follows life at a Catholic abbey in New Mexico, where monks are tasked with preserving knowledge from before “The Flame Deluge.” Each of the novel’s three sections—really, interconnected short stories—take place hundreds of years apart, moving from a civilization that seems blasted back to the Middle Ages to one capable of space travel. But however much the world changes around the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz, we never leave the small orbit of the abbey, where monks struggle to understand and protect the mysterious, dangerous artifacts they’ve been entrusted with conserving. Funny and frightening, the book becomes a meditation on the astonishingly inefficient, maddeningly incomplete ways that knowledge (and, more rarely, wisdom) gets passed down through time. 

Beings by Ilana Masad

A nesting doll of a book, concerned with the stories we tell about aliens and the moral responsibilities of storytelling itself. The three plotlines in Beings all circle questions of fact and fiction: The first follows Betty and Barney Hill, real American abductees, but speculates on their inner lives; the second concerns a fictional sci-fi writer, but presents her through the authority of letters and archival documentation; and the third takes us to the archivist themself, who is being hounded by an overeager documentary producer about a childhood UFO sighting. These three worlds overlap in ways I did not see coming, calling attention to the constructed nature of all stories. We try to document our lives, to fact check our own memories, to keep careful records we (or others) can come back to later. But there will always be a gap, some terra incognita, whether we are trying to remember our lives or imagine our way into the lives of others. 

The post 7 Books That Blur the Boundary Between Fact and Fiction appeared first on Electric Literature.

My only access to sapphic speculative literature as a teenager was fanfiction. These works were filled with sapphic themes of resilience, grit, and yearning—themes brought on by characters forced to constantly swim against the current. I remember scanning AO3 for sapphic pairings in my boarding school dorm room, retellings of popular media where women characters fell in love with each other instead of men. I’d go so far as to argue that fanfiction is inherently speculative in its basis in an imagined alternate reality, necessitated by the dearth of sapphic characters in mainstream media. Though these fics taught me in many ways how to love against odds and bare my teeth, I found myself hungry for science fiction and fantasy where lesbian relationships were canon, and it wasn’t until college that I read my first sapphic science fiction book and tapped into the larger network of sapphic literary legacy, an experience that made me want to be a writer for the first time. 

When compiling this book list, I was interested in following characters whose queer desires informed their politics and their choices within the plot of their stories. As political violence across our world attempts to enact an increasingly narrow version of sapphic futures, I have looked to sapphic sci-fi and fantasy for ways forward. These eight books present different ideas of scrappy sapphic futurity amidst extremist space cults, communities of exiled pathogenic women, rival xianxia-style martial arts sects, and more. 

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith

Marghe Taishan is an anthropologist testing a vaccine against a virus that, centuries ago, killed all men and most women sent to colonize the planet Jeep. The women who survived found themselves changed—able to reproduce pathogenically, share memories—and developed their own society on the planet’s harsh and frigid landscape. If the new vaccine works, the Company plans to recolonize the planet, threatening the women who live there. Shortly after her arrival, Marghe is captured by a cult-like group of nomadic women called the Echraidhe whose leader sees her as a harbinger of the apocalypse. Fighting to escape, she finds herself drawn to the commune of women and increasingly doubtful of her allegiance to the Company. Written in 1992 and awarded the 1993 Lambda Award for Lesbian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Ammonite is a classic piece of feminist science fiction that explores the concept of gender in a world with only women.

The Tiger Flu by Larissa Lai

In the year 2145, Groom Kirilow lives in Grist Village, a lesbian society of exiled clone women that relies on “starfish,” women who can indefinitely regrow limbs and organs to give to other Grist sisters, and “doublers,” women who can spontaneously become pregnant and reproduce new women. When a stranger from the male-dominated Saltwater City brings with him aerial attack from a megacorporation and a flu that kills both Kirilow’s starfish girlfriend and Grist Village’s last doubler, Kirilow journeys to the pandemic-ridden Saltwater City in search of a new starfish. There, Kirilow meets a girl, Kora, who may be the lost starfish that can save Grist Village. Told in a dual point-of-view between Kirilow and Kora, The Tiger Flu contends with questions of memory, biopower, exploitation, and otherness through a visceral kaleidoscope of fragmented structure.

Interstellar MegaChef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

Now that humanity has expanded across the galaxy and made a new home alongside alien life on the planet Primus, Earth is seen as an uncivilized wasteland. Saraswati Kaveri, a disgraced Earth-based chef whose career has been destroyed by a scathing review, travels to Primus to compete in the prestigious Interstellar MegaChef competition. Things do not go as planned, however, and Saras is quickly eliminated from the competition in a humiliating and xenophobic televised ousting. Forced to pivot, Swati finds work at a restaurant and on an artificial reality food project with tech prodigy Serenity Ko, who is recovering from a drunken public crashout. The project quickly becomes both of their greatest chance at redemption, and the two navigate their attraction to each other alongside questions of culture, self-acceptance, and belonging. Interstellar MegaChef explores themes of culinary imperialism and the ways power constructs food’s value, as well as access and elitism in the restaurant industry.

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Set in a speculative near-future, Land of Milk and Honey follows an unnamed chef through her pursuit of taste and pleasure after Earth’s crops and animal populations are decimated by a widespread smog. Unable to return home from Europe and suffering as a cook in a dying culinary industry, our narrator scams her way into a private chef position for the ultra-wealthy at a mysterious Italian research facility on a mountain the smog has not yet reached. There, she develops a tense relationship with her employer and his scientist daughter, Aida, whose coldness and brilliance at once repulses and intrigues her. The relationship between the narrator and Aida mirrors the novel’s contentions with power, inequity, and racialized violence, creating a complex, deeply human emotional landscape.

Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard

Việt Nhi is a shy junior navigator for the Rooster clan, one of 12 dueling clans that use xianxia-style powers to guide spaceships through dangerous, monster-infested dimensions called “Hollows.” When one of these monsters escapes and threatens to wreak havoc on humanity, Việt Nhi is volunteered for an unwelcome joint-clan mission alongside three ill-suited navigators from opposing clans. During the mission, Việt Nhi is forced to rely on fellow crew-member Hạc Cúc, part of the snake clan, whose shady reputation and penchant for poisons makes her difficult to trust, especially after the mission’s envoy is assassinated and the crew is plunged into a larger and far more dangerous conspiracy.

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

After a war with aliens destroyed Earth, most of humanity chose to integrate with alien society and submit to the all-knowing governance of a supercomputer called The Wisdom. Those on Gaea Station, humanity’s last holdout, see this as a betrayal. There, Magnus is assigned a secret suicide-mission to destroy The Wisdom, while his sister Kyr is assigned to a gender-essentialist nursery position where she is expected to give birth to future soldiers indefinitely. Her opportunity to leave Gaea comes in the form of a captured alien, Yiso, whose ship allows Kyr, Yiso, and one of Magnus’s friends to escape. Off the station, Kyr is confronted with the idea that everything she’s learned all her life has been extremist propaganda, that she alone can choose what she fights for and who she wants to be. A mind-bending space opera with a phenomenal exploration of its sapphic main character, Some Desperate Glory is ultimately a tale of redemption, accountability, forgiveness, and transformation. 

The Deep by Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes

Yetu is the historian for the wajinru, a water-dwelling society of merfolk descended from pregnant Black women drowned by white slavers during the transatlantic slave trade. Her task is to literally bear the story of their traumatic origins, taking memories from others, putting them inside herself, and endlessly re-experiencing them. Once a year, during the Remembrance, Yetu is relieved of this weight and shares all the memories with the wajinru so that can fill the void of longing to know who they are and where they come from. Unsure if she can survive being filled with the memories again, Yetu swims away and winds up onshore. There, she meets her first human, Oori, and must decide whether to return or go her own way. Told in both collective and singular voice, The Deep presents a tremendous, sapphic, Afrofuturist future that both draws from and builds upon the past.

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom

When 60 mermaids beach themselves and keen a simultaneous death cry in the nameless narrator’s polluted hometown of Gloom, she decides to finally leave for the City of Smoke and Lights and start living as a girl. In the City of Smoke and Lights, a person can become anything, and beautiful, dangerous femmes are everywhere if one knows how to look. When a trans woman in the community is murdered, the narrator joins a gang of trans women who seek vigilante justice against bad Johns and those who commit violence against trans women. Told in both letters, poetry, and traditional narrative, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars draws upon Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography to bring into question what truth really is and what it is to tell a story that is emotionally truthful. 

The post Sapphic Speculative Fiction Is Inventing New Futures appeared first on Electric Literature.

I have the wonderful job of looking through all the new literature in summer and fall of 2026 to highlight those written by women of color. I have deep gratitude and respect for R.O. Kwon who handed me the torch after being the arbiter of this list for years. When I first opened Yu & Me Books in 2021, the goal was always to fill shelves with stories written by writers of color, especially immigrant stories. Storytelling is sharing the aliveness in our complex perspectives and breathing life into the nuances of existence. Sharing stories is also the constant fight for visibility under systems of oppression. For me, it is vital to pay attention to the richness and range within these narratives. To witness the breadth and continuous growth of literature created by women of color gives me much needed hope. As I look through these incredible works coming out this year, I feel deeply inspired and revived. I remember why I created Yu & Me Books and am reminded of the necessity of carrying on.

Through diving into these upcoming books, I felt my shoulders relax as I began to feel far less alone. In these upcoming literary works, I notice major similarities in themes of rest, retreat, confrontation, grief, motherhood, and release. The cohesion of our inherent connectivity becomes clear. Reckoning returns in many of these books, fueling plots and characters to unflinchingly confront their pasts so that they can burn a new path forward. I am excited to delve into these worlds where women are willing to ask the existential questions and do the painful work of standing still instead of running from. This kind of work requires fighting against expectations, societal standards, and misogyny, all while living with ghosts of before. These books are subversive in so many forms. Between the surreal and very real, these women writers show the braveness required in vulnerability and the power necessary for revival. They show the beauty of slowing down to trust one’s intuition. These writers remind us that rest is required in resistance and resilience, and while the dark storms of living will continue, our endurance is rejuvenated by being close to those we love, which includes the self. I am so excited for you all to read these incredible books and to continue this reflective journey together.

June

The Typing Lady: And Other Fictions by Ruth Ozeki

Ruth Ozeki remains one of my favorite authors because she exhibits such a distinct voice and range. Her craft continues to expand with this short story collection that explores childhood ambition, youthful desire, midlife reinvention, and the unfolding clarity of old age. As with most of her work, this collection spans eras and geographies and encompasses the breadth of humanity’s relationship with the written word.

Muñeca by Cynthia Gómez

Taking place in Oakland, California during 1968, Nati Fuentes hears rumors about Violeta Miramontes, a beautiful, young heiress to Spanish colonial wealth, who has been paralyzed by a mysterious illness. Nati is determined to break this dark magic spell to earn a reward, but as romance grows between the two women, Nati must face her own demons. In this richly layered novel, Gómez asks how far is one willing to go to save the one they love even if that means losing their own power.

They All Fall in Love at the End by Haili Blassingame

For fans of Raven Leilani and Kiley Reid, this coming-of-age debut follows Cat St. Clair, who falls for her boyfriend’s best friend and his girlfriend while being in an open relationship, leading to disastrously chaotic results.

Sisters of a Halved Heart by Nayantara Roy

In this irresistible sophomore novel, Roy gives us two sisters who fall for the same man, which leads to the fracturing of their relationship. For those unafraid to dig into complicated sister relationships.

Pool House by Mary H.K. Choi

Mary H.K. Choi debuts her highly anticipated adult novel that looks directly into the complications of family enmeshment and its long tail effects on romance through the lens of an incredibly complicated (but extremely relatable) mother-daughter relationship. With Choi’s distinct voice and sharp language, Pool House is an unflinching novel that stays with you long after the summer days. Darkly funny, sexy, and visceral, this novel is one of the biggest splashes this summer.

Leave and Come Back by Lavanya Lakshmi

A charming and funny debut that asks what it means to be open to love and how to be present while honoring the past. Simran must return to her family home, which she’s been avoiding for the last seven years, to go to her cousin’s two-week long Indian wedding. Her new boyfriend crashes the engagement party and sends the entire wedding into chaos.

Blood Caste: A Devilish Killer by Shylashri Shankar

A historical crime thriller that takes place in Hyderabad, India during 1895. Chief Inspector Soobramania, known as Soob, is called on to investigate three mutilated bodies discovered bearing a striking resemblance to Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel victims. A richly textured backdrop of empire, classism, and the subversive fight against British imperialism create a unique tale that brings suspicion to those in power.

The Hyphenated Life: Bridging the In-Between Spaces of Intersectional Identities by Han Ren

For lovers of Permission to Come Home and Minor Feelings, Han Ren gives space and breadth to living in the in-between spaces to bring confidence for full self-expression within intersectional identities.

Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Jeffers navigates the emotional and historical intersection of Black women’s public lives with her own journey from girlhood to womanhood. Sharp, insightful, and empathetic, Misbehaving at the Crossroads chronicles the crossroads of difficult truths and transcendence. 

Names Have Been Changed by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

This fast-paced debut follows Ophir, who experiences a petty crime spun out of control leading to the estrangement of her family and home in Singapore. She rotates through false identities and begins a confessional broadcast in an undisclosed location about her years on the run across the world. Her constant dislocation and consistent reexamination of identity show us the grueling complications of building a life and home.

July Sun: Stories by Aamina Ahmad

An exceptional debut collection that explores emotional intimacies of ordinary people within seven atmospheric stories. With deep compassion for the emotional nuances of each character, Ahmad finds the pockets of refuge between freedom and constraint.

The Summer of the Serpent by Cecilia Eudave, translated by Robin Myers

In the quiet, residential neighborhood of Guadalajara, Mexico in 1977, The Summer of the Serpent creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of the past within the blurriness of memory and myth. This beautifully fragmented novel twists the mesmerizing shape of combined truths during the moments when childhood innocence dissipates. 

July

Daughter of the Mountains by Fatimah Asghar

A beautiful poetry collection that delves into the edges of existence when one is exiled from their ancestral homelands. In these meditative, humorous, and spiritual poems, Asghar intimately explores the multitudes of fulfillment, betrayal, love, loss, and longing.

Die for Me by Shirlene Obuobi

Shirlene Obuobi wrote one of my favorite romances, Between Friends & Lovers, and I am enthralled by the depth in which she writes her characters that gives them life beyond the page. Die for Me is a propulsive read that follows Sean, who spent the better part of her early 30s healing from an abusive relationship. Transfixed by Julian, she falls for this much-younger man with a deadly secret. Obuobi writes with so much richness regarding the friendships in her novel, and I’m thrilled to see this remains true with Sean’s relationship to her best friend in this upcoming novel.

The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A noir about desire, danger, greed, and seduction in 1940s Mexico. Ulises is a handsome con artist that has just found his newest victim, Perla, but becomes enthralled by her niece who wants in on the scheme. His straightforward plan becomes precariously complicated as he also grapples with his own shaky belief in romance. 

Not with a Bang by Temi Oh

For lovers of dystopian world-ending family dramas. As the rumblings of internal family strife threaten to burst open at the same time an extinction-level event tears the world apart on the morning of the eldest daughter’s wedding, the Mintons have no choice but to fight their way through safety and survival back to each other.

Hustle, Baby by Priya Guns

A sophomore novel that follows a family of Tamil refugees who fled the civil war in Sri Lanka to pursue a better life. Dilo, a teenager, is juggling school, caring for her baby cousin, and helping her family get by. She quickly realizes the system is rigged and is thrown into the schemes of a self-proclaimed day-trading savant, who chaotically turns their family’s world upside down.

Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate by Roopika Risam

This book reveals data as the seed of power through the technology of control that has continued to shape civilizations. With a sharply critical eye through a historical lens, Data Empire brings to light the power data holds above humanity while also giving us hope to imagine what resistance against it looks like. 

Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler by Susana M. Morris

Octavia Butler is an absolute trailblazer. As the first black woman to consistently write and publish in science fiction, Butler used her stories to showcase the best and worst of humanity. Butler envisioned futures with tough, flawed, intelligent, empathetic, and complicated Black women at the center while constantly shifting the perceived landscape of our world. In this exceptional biography, Susana M. Morris contextualizes Butler’s personal story within the cultural, social, historical framework that shaped her life.

I Know the Ants by Lang Leav

In this novel, Leav does not shy away from the complications of long-term female friendships. Mei spirals out of control after discovering her childhood best friend, Soey, published a memoir discussing the tragic events of their shared upbringing. When they reconnect, a chaotic series of events unfolds culminating in a shocking death that puts Mei in the public eye as she confronts the collision of past and present.

August

Kitten by Stacey Yu

A magnetic debut about Katie, who is desperate to escape adulthood as she’s fresh out of college and recently estranged from her mother. She becomes fascinated with her boyfriend’s cat, Silver, who seems to live the life that Katie yearns for. As Katie’s devotion to Silver deepens, she begins to unravel and her inner desires seep through the cracks. Darkly humored and heartfelt, Yu asks us to confront what we truly want and what we are willing to risk for it. 

The Seekers of Deer Creek by Thao Thai

This captivating sophomore novel from the author of Banyan Moon travels from Wisconsin, France, and Việt Nam to follow two estranged sisters searching for a lost painting by a Vietnamese painter named K.P. Lý, hoping that it will reveal familial truths from their fractured past.

Silencio by Clyo Mendoza, translated by Christina MacSweeney

Clyo Mendoza uses fantasy to express the atrocities that exist beyond the realm of language to tell the stories of women surviving femicide and destruction in Mexico. In chapters that alternate between the real and the imaginary, Águeda, a young woman mourning the death of her mother, relates to the world through the sounds she hears from inside of her walls of confinement. In her solitude, she mourns and loves, finding herself connected with all the other women who have disappeared in the landscape of her environment.

Appetite by P. Paramita

A heartfelt and original debut about Zarina, a young chef at a fancy New Haven restaurant, who cooks up modern spins on classic Bangladeshi dishes while enjoying her second passion: professional wrestling. As Zarina becomes closer to her wrestling idol, Sierra Myst, she must grapple with the joy of expansion while being thrust into a new power dynamic that makes her question her own priorities. Both unsettling and uplifting, Appetite makes all of us question where we are in the torture of discovering who we might become. 

Take What You Can by Naima Coster

Friendships, class, motherhood, and independence are richly intertwined in Coster’s third novel. Best friends Val and Milly first bond in France over being the only Black students on a study abroad trip. After a decade apart, both are in their thirties and have decided to raise their daughters together in New York. With lives that have veered further down their own paths, each struggles to see where she fits in the other’s world, especially as an old, buried wound between them resurfaces.

Plant Lady by Minyoung Kang, translated by Shanna Tan

A translated South Korean psychological thriller about Yoohee, who owns a plant shop that is a sanctuary of peace during the day. At night, she offers a secret service to women who come to her about misogynistic men they hope might disappear from their lives. Written with tension and humor that puts the reader on the edge of their seat.

I Punched an Alien and Now We’re in Couples Therapy by Kimberly Lemming

This one’s for the enemies-to-lovers and Survivor fans (what a combo). Kimberly Lemming is a one-of-a-kind writer who expertly mixes the sexy, absurd, and hilarious. As part of the Cosmic Chaos series, this book follows a human woman stranded on a far-off planet and mated to the warlord alien king.

The Sleeping Sisters by Jennifer Givhan

Blending suspense, horror, Indigenous and Latina mythology, Givhan throws her unique spin on Pan’s Labyrinth through the lens of a threatened mother racing with a relentless detective to search for answers along the Río Grande.

Hello Baby by Kim Eui-Kyung, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

In a candid novel about the endurance of motherhood, the bonds of six women undergoing IVF are tested when one of them announces an unexpected birth. At a fertility clinic in Seoul, these very different women and their friendships with each other must undergo the envy and admiration of watching one of their own become a mother. With insightful humor and empathy, Kim Eui-Kyung lays out the range of lengths some may go to seek motherhood and creates an honest portrait of the modern woman.

Where Wilted Flowers Bloom by Johanna Rojas Vann

A sophomore novel from the author of An American Immigrant follows Sandra and her family’s move from NYC to East Nashville for a fresh start. She quickly finds that grief has moved with her and forms an unlikely friendship with her next-door neighbor, Mark, an elderly, widowed, retired pastor. This newfound friendship might just be the key to unlocking a path to healing.

September

Survivor by Octavia E. Butler

Returning to print after 50 years and the final book of the Patternist series, this new edition includes new history essays and a short story. The Patternist series spans from late 19^th century Africa to the far future in outer space creating a complex, unique world with shifting power dynamics.

Mothersucker by Kim Bohyun, translated by Archana Madhavan

A thrilling international debut about women collectively plagued by visceral dreams of vengeance and a vampire who targets misogynistic men who have harmed women. An all-female task force is on the case to solve these chilling murders, bringing to surface the dark underbelly of gender-based violence in Korea. 

The Bitch by Pilar Quintana, translated by Lisa Dillman

Damaris lives in a shack with her fisherman husband on a bluff overlooking Colombia’s Pacific coast. She takes in a motherless puppy as she is grappling with her own fallen dreams of motherhood and forms a bond that touches the tenderest portions of her heart. Quintana uses terse language to express the ever-connected tandem of the desire to nurture and be nurtured.

Tree: My Encounters with Trees by Aya Koda, translated by Charlotte Goff

Recently translated to English and for fans of the movie Perfect Days, this novel takes the reader on an introspective and wonderful journey through the trees of Japan.

Divine Oaths by Elizabeth Agyemang

This one is for the dark academia lovers. In a single day, Sianna loses her entire family while also gaining the power to see lifelines and witness other’s pasts and futures. She defers attending an elite academic institution called Westfield University in Virginia’s swampland to work through her grief. She then meets Kasem, a handsome heir to Westfield, and must work with him to piece together a haunted past to undo a curse that binds them.

The Golden Boy’s Guide to Bipolar by Sonido Reyes

Seventeen-year-old Cesar Flores has just come out to his Mami, his sister, Yami, and their friends while also getting his therapist’s blessing to win back his ex-boyfriend. But he is troubled by “The Thoughts,” the lingering Catholic guilt that is increasing in volume and threatening his self-confidence. Can he be vulnerable enough to ask for help from those he loves?

Taipei Story by R. F. Kuang

The highly anticipated coming-of-age novel from acclaimed writer R.F. Kuang grapples with grief, language, and culture. College freshman Lily Chen is spending the summer in Taipei in an intensive language program and feels split in her cultural identity where she expected to feel at home. She experiences the sudden loss of her grandfather, which throws her into unexpected self-discovery as she yearns and searches for connection through the tapestry of memories and stories. One of Kuang’s most personal novels yet and I cannot wait to read it soon.

The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict by Priya Parker

Community, teams, dynamic friend groups, and healthy relationships all require navigating conflict. Priya Parker reminds us that we cannot form long lasting relationships without a fight and guides us through understanding how to harness the power of healthy conflict.

Tías and Primas: On Knowing and Loving the Women Who Raise Us by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, illustrated by Josie Del Castillo

From the author of For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts, Tías and Primas celebrates the many women that Mojica Rodríguez grew up with in her close-knit Nicaraguan family while fearlessly approaching the continuous, residual effects of intergenerational trauma.

Wicked Endeavors by Kamilah Cole

For those who are witchmaxxing and looking for a romantasy, this one’s for you. Caya is eighteen and wants to take revenge, so she slips into the witches’ world under a new identity. On top of wanting to destroy the witches from within, she finds herself in an alarming love triangle between an enemy prince and an estranged childhood friend.

Terrestrial by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Christina MacSweeney

In this genre-bending collection, Garza experiments with structure and time to expand the bounds of traveling to survive. These characters challenge themes of female freedom through capitalism and class struggle while tethering them with their inherent connection to earth on their Terrestrial hitchhiking journey.

Story Telling: A Writing Life by Isabel Allende

Allende explores her deeply personal relationship with writing and the magic of the craft that allows for understanding the chaos of existence. She weaves wisdom into her own stories while sharing her triumphs, mistakes, and lessons learned from her own lifelong love for writing. 

Witch Daughter by Tanaz Bhathena

Welcome to peak witch season in Tanaz Bhathena’s adult debut about Tahmineh, a temptress and a witch, but most importantly, a woman trying her best to protect the ones she loves.

Before the Queen Falls Asleep by Huzama Habayeb

Each night, Jihad tells her daughter a story from her life when she grew up as a girl. As her daughter, Maleka, prepares to leave home for university, Jihad takes them both through a journey of her past revisiting their Palestinian family while exiled in Kuwait, tenderly weaving her complex experiences of love and loss. With affection, humor, and love, Huzama Habayeb follows Jihad and her family through Kuwait to Jordan to Dubai.

The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw

Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies remains one of my favorite short story collections to this day and I’m so excited to see how she explores the longer form in this, her debut novel. Scharisse Freeman married a megachurch pastor fifteen years her senior and has built a business empire while living very, very well. As her new life creates distance from her community, she is suddenly given the opportunity for acceptance by the other pastors’ wives (the First Ladies) that she’s long waited for. Then, unexpectedly, her life implodes when a long-buried secret emerges into the public eye.

American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee

The highly anticipated novel from the one and only Min Jin Lee, American Hagwon is her sweeping, epic third novel. American Hagwon investigates the space between desire, satisfaction, success, and belonging in the quest to find meaning in this world. Set during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, John, Helen, and their three children strive to regain their footing by way of Seoul to Sydney and finally to Southern California. With a panoramic and sharp lens that is innate to Lee, this novel follows the perpetuating question encompassed in an unshakeable faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security. How far will a parent go to provide for their children’s futures when the future continues to be opaquely unknown?

Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope by Zaina Arafat

As a bisexual, You Exist Too Much is one of my favorite bisexual novels to recommend to people as a bookseller. Zaina Arafat writes with a prose that sucks you immediately into the interior world of her strong voiced characters. I cannot wait to see her prose transform in this moving, luminous essay collection on longing and hope living as a Palestinian today.

End Emotional Outsourcing: How to Overcome Your Codependent, Perfectionist, and People-Pleasing Habits by Beatriz Victoria Albina

People-pleasing continues to be one of the hardest things I have worked through, and I wished I had more tools like this book during that tumultuous period in my life. This book explores the thousands of people, especially women, who have struggled with anxiety, perfectionism, and imposter syndrome that creates layers of distance between them and their true selves. With many tools to regulate the nervous system and reframing habitual thoughts to improve relationships with loved ones, this grounding, healing book will investigate our current definition of codependency by helping women step into their power.

October

We Radiant Things: Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg by Franny Choi

Franny Choi’s poetry is the kind that seeps deep into your soul such that years later, when you’re walking down the street and see sunlight hit the pavement in a particular way, you’re transported back into the specificity of a core feeling she’s described in her lyrical prose. We Radiant Things is her debut essay collection exploring humanity’s obsession with cyborgs while delving into the deeper themes of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and language in science fiction representations of Asian femmes.

The Little Stone Buddha by Grace Lin

The prolifically talented author-illustrator Grace Lin creates another beautiful picture book about a community coming together and the small actions that accumulate to change everything. Inspired by a true story.

Every Story Is a Love Story by Imbolo Mbue

Three years ago, Wolo lost the love of his life in a tragic car accident, destroying their beautiful, shared, promised future. Navigating the horrors of deep grief, he begins to slowly rebuild his life until he receives a letter one day from Victoria, the woman behind the wheel. When he meets her, he is immersed in deep compassion and remorse that unimaginably unfurls his life as he tries to understand if forgiveness can truly ease suffering. 

We (Wé) by Layli Long Soldier

In this visionary collection, Layli Long Soldier uses the multimedia form of visual art, essays, and poetry to examine the true meaning of community through the context of family, nation, history, and language. 

Friends and Family by Natalie Baszile

Babs and Nora became best friends because of their kids and have spent decades together. After the cops are called on their kids while they’re home alone, their loyalty is tested as they uncover their inherent differences in beliefs on race, identity, and allyship.

My Name Means Fire: A Memoir by Atash Yaghmaian

Set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime, and the 8-year Iran-Iraq War, My Name Means Fire is a stunning, bold debut memoir about reckoning with what it takes to survive tragedy. With alternating chapters between inner and outer worlds, Atash Yaghmaian gives us a glimpse into the kaleidoscopic and colorful consciousness of dissociative identity disorder. There are nine beings that are the unique parts of Atash, each one integral to  her survival of the horrors that surround her.

Foreign: A Novel of Land and Longing by Sonora Jha

This engrossing page-turner follows a mother who travels back to her home country in India to bring back her runaway son, all the while discovering the complicated surprises of her once home.

Another Name for Red by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala

A memorable debut about a young Anishinaabe woman who vanishes and her sister (Middle Sister) who tries her best to reconcile in the aftermath of her broken family. But as she continues to investigate the disappearance of her sister, it leads her through a dangerous route that puts her at risk of suffering the same fate.

To God by Esther Yi

Yi’s innovative sophomore novel, To God, is filled with the pulsing rhythms of the imbalanced social structures of late-stage capitalism. Within a single street in a contemporary metropolis, Yi interrogates the prismatic constructs of parasocial structure, internet voyeurism, and deep longing in its cast of characters.

Stellar Smoke by Tanaïs

In this uniquely speculative novel, Qamar is a musician living in New York City who decides to return to the island of her childhood, attempting to settle her relationship with her estranged mother. When she returns, she cannot find her mother but finds a machine consciousness that her mother made in the image of herself. Her interaction with this technology makes Qamar rethink everything she understood about herself, her family, and the future.

November

The Courage to Be Yourself by Fumitake Koga, illustrated by Narano

By the same co-author of The Courage to Be Disliked, this supportive and inspiring guide full of rich illustrations by Narano uses vivid storytelling to bring us through the philosophy of accepting and supporting ourselves while expressing our truth.

The Waiter by Kwan Ann Tan

As a lover of a good “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, I am quivering with excitement for this one. The reader enters this world as an unnamed Waiter navigating a society on the brink of collapse, where you must select your jobs carefully or risk losing work credits while also trying not to lose your humanity. There are eleven different endings and a plethora of pathways towards them as this literary experience makes us all grapple with our agency and desires in a world that’s falling apart.

Weavingshaw by Heba Al-Wasity

In this slow-burn gothic fantasy, Leena is haunted by a secret that she’s had since she was seventeen: that she can see the dead. The Saint of Silence trades coins for divulgences and the darker the secret, the higher the price. To save her brother who has fallen ill, she makes a deal to find the ghost the Saint has been searching for, ultimately leading her to Weavingshaw, a cursed estate on the moors.

How to Be Less Useful: The Joy of Inefficiency by Priyanka Mattoo

Written with insightful wit and honest self-reflection, Mattoo shares her own journey towards being a less useful person and the cost of pleasure in a capitalistic society. She looks at pleasure suppression and the path towards welcoming all that gives us pleasure back into our lives to ultimately become engaged once again with living.

Enter World by Dalia Taha, translated by Sara Elkamel

Taha uses beautiful lyricism to reflect on justice and humanity while writing from Ramallah, capturing her proximity to the Gaza genocide and its unfathomable loss. This collection uses poetry to create empty spaces for landscape to form, materializing worlds from olive trees to prison cells, and declaring the intimate resilience found in the search of beauty amid terror. 

The Squatters by Saba Brelvi

This electric debut delves into the collision of two families navigating motherhood, migration, and selfhood. A simple act of kindness turns into a treacherous unfolding that begs the question, how much are you willing to risk for a woman who has already lost everything? Brelvi writes with an unflinching lens that looks directly into defining conviction and the idea of belonging.

Two Can Play That Game by Zakiya N. Jamal

The time has finally come. A WNBA sapphic romance that will make all Liberty fans squeal with delight. Chelsea is invited to sit courtside at a New York Rebels game when she catches the smile of Adrienne, a six-foot-four player who retrieves a basketball that almost hits her in the face. In a strategic PR move, Chelsea is suddenly in a fake relationship with Adrienne to strengthen both of their public images. As their connection deepens, Chelsea’s on shaky ground when she finds herself actually falling for Adrienne.

Mona: An Immodest Memoir of Race and Rebellion by Azra Liaqat Khan

In a laugh-out-loud comedic memoir about a double life as both a pious academic daughter and a stripper in New York City. Mona is an original journey of self-discovery that navigates through racism, misogyny, and capitalism to explore the multitudes of self.

Love, Witches, and Wahala by Christine Cowan

In the cold November season, this debut cozy romantic fantasy will definitely keep you warm. Nneka is a witch fighting against an ancient family curse: finding her soulmate or having all the witches of Kamalu Lane lose their powers forever.

We Were Here: A History of Black People and Alternative Music by Stephanie Phillips

Stephanie Phillips is a Black punk and alternative music journalist writing a revised history of rock ‘n’ roll and alternative music, now including the Black artists and influential figures who deeply influenced these genres while paying homage to their legacies.

December

The Empire Burns at Dawn by Fatima Al-Shemary

Dunya and Shayda are sisters that are both constricted under the reign of their father who has been scheming for years to seize the throne and isn’t afraid to use his daughters to do it. As they are sent on separate missions to help their father obtain power, they discover newfound dark magic spreading quickly across the land. Both are forced to fight their enemies, their circumstances, and their hearts to break free.

Don’t forget to check out the following titles, published January through May 2026!

January

Birthstones in the Province of Mercy: Poems by Bo Hee Moon

From the perspective of a South Korean adoptee, Bo Hee Moon explores the blurriness of memory and the longing for a home when the definition of home remains unclear. Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams, says “each poem is a whole world, magically conjured from the American vernacular, often enriched by Korean hangul. This is the hopeful, sad, elegiac, and important work of an original poet of great talent and truth.”

The Moon Without Stars by Chanel Miller

I love Chanel Miller as a writer and am always interested in her wide range of artistic abilities. I am such a big fan of her other middle grade novel, Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All, because of the depth, earnestness, and reality of the complexity of being that age. Reading her middle grade books deeply heal the inner child within me by seeing the breadth of all we hold as children and how that parallels all we hold as adults. The Moon Without Stars follows Luna in seventh grade who loves writing and making zines with her bff, Scott. But when one of their zines takes off and Luna is thrust into popularity, she must grapple with compromising who she is to be well liked while navigating understanding who she is. Deeply personal, funny, and vulnerable.

The Old Fire by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

For those who want a book to inhale in one sitting, Elisa Shua Dusapin is a master at that. For lovers of Katie Kitamura, Elena Ferrante, and Joachim Trier, The Old Fire follows Agathe who leaves New York to return to her home in the French countryside fifteen years after she left. A haunting, tender, and tense tale told anachronistically through the various versions of self, home, and family.

Sheer by Vanessa Lawrence

Vanessa Lawrence’s second novel, Sheer takes place over just nine days where Maxine Thomas, the founder of a cult makeup company, is suspended by her own board for a scandal. An investigation to the female gaze, queerness, shifting beauty standards, and the shaky line between empowerment and abuse of power.

Discipline by Larissa Pham

Larissa Pham’s debut novel following her collection of essays, Pop Song, explores a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, her present, and her future as she recovers from a destructive affair with her former mentor. The New York Times writes that “while Discipline sounds like a thriller, Pham makes room for terse reflections on ambition, envy, creative exhaustion and the paintings of Vija Celmins.”

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang

A debut novel full of magical realism that doesn’t shy from the darkness that comes from digging into family history. With folklore and atmospheric prose, Yang brings the reader through the long tail of intergenerational trauma and legacy of colonialism. The narrative moves through the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the Cultural Revolution to unravel the tight intertwinement of fate, family, and forgiveness. 

The Hour of the Wolf: A Memoir by Fatima Bhutto

A kaleidoscopic memoir of finding oneself after the harsh aftermath of a manipulative relationship while still navigating the long tail of grief after the death of Fatima’s father. She is accompanied during the pandemic by her dog, Coco, as she begins to question everything about her life. Fatima is forced to confront the messy and harsh pains of her own experience. A heartbreaking and hopeful read to navigate loss, questioning motherhood, resilience, healing, and a desire for family through art, literature, cinema, nature, and friendship.

On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield

For fans of Victor LaValle and River Solomon, Yah Yah Scholfield writes a sinister and surreal Southern Gothic about Jude, a woman who escapes her abusive childhood home to the forests of Northern Georgia without a plan or destination. Jude soon finds shelter in an eccentric and dilapidated home haunted by a violent history that mirrors the horrors of her own.

Missing Sam by Thrity Umrigar

A thriller following a woman who goes missing on a morning run and her wife’s determination to both find her and clear her own name while navigating the societal dangers of being brown and queer in America. The Washington Post describes it as “both propulsive and provocative, as the initial focus on Sam’s disappearance broadens to consider the far-reaching effects of prejudice and pressures to conform.”

The Seven Daughters of Dupree by Nikesha Elise Williams

For lovers of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, The Seven Daughters of Dupree follows fourteen-year-old Tati who uncovers a legacy of family secrets, leading her on a search for answers through seven generations of Dupree women. In this multi-generational epic, Williams writes with power about the legacy of generational resilience and the complexity of unbreakable family bonds.

I Identify as Blind: A Brazen Celebration of Disability Culture, Identity, and Power by Lachi, with Tim Vandehey

In our increasingly ableist society, it’s more important than ever to be advocating for an inclusive world prioritizing innovation created for people with disabilities. When society values disabled people as the leaders, role models, and key innovators they truly are, everybody benefits. Lachi writes with humor and inspiration to shed more light on all the wisdom inherent in the disability experience.

February

Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison cracks open the American conception of race through the investigation of Black characters in the American literary canon. Morrison examines the white writers who created fictional Black characters and draws parallels to the commodification of Black bodies that built this country while examining the role of fiction in American racial identity. With energetic wit, Language as Liberation interrogates the seeds of language in America’s most famous works and its long-term effects on the skewed perspective of this nation’s subconscious. This work shows the brilliant teacher that Morrison is and redefines our literary landscape as we know it.

black frag/ments: Poems by Lolita Stewart-White

Poems both tender and burning hold the fragmentation of blackness, family, and community while navigating the necessity of pulsing love in the face of grief. Read if you’re looking for language to navigate the tumultuous frequencies of everyday life. Terrance Hayes calls it “a vision of recovery, witness and love.”

The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem by Canisia Lubrin

Canisia Lubrin brings us on a journey through this long-form poetic tribute to her mother. Dreaminess and pain in the ambiguity that grief are the foundation of Lubrin’s decisive and lyrical prose meditating on love, time, and loss through the tumult of living. Booklist writes how “the poet renders time atmospheric, with interiors and exteriors, personal and political, overlapping as Lubrin observes ‘how we are astonished.’”

Simple Heart by Cho Haejin, translated by Jamie Chang

Nana is a Korean playwright who was adopted as a child by a French couple. A Korean filmmaker wishes to make a documentary about her life, and she heads to Seoul where her memory unravels as she learns about her past. For fans of movies Return to Seoul and Past Lives, as well as Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please Look After Mom.

Superfan by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Jenny Tinghui Zhang first novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, still sticks with me. Her writing brings you into the complex characters and worlds she creates and I’m thrilled about her sophomore novel, Superfan, where she explores the horrors and magic of fandom during a shared time of loneliness.

Every Happiness by Reena Shah

For those who love complex and lifelong female friendships despite classism and family. Elizabeth McCracken says “I don’t think I have ever missed a set of novel characters more: astonishingly alive, lovable, aggravating, real. Shah writes beautifully about every sort of love: filial, parental, marital, and above all the longing and vivid pettiness and durable, complicated love between women over decades.”

Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney

Weaving archival research and personal narrative, Rivera Garza examines the borderlands of cotton cultivation and cycles of generational deprivation through the brittle land between Mexico and the U.S. She writes of her grandparents’ journey to these cotton fields and expertly expands from the deeply personal to the larger context of ecocide, colonization, labor activism, and migration.

With the Heart of a Ghost: Stories by Lim Sunwoo, translated by Chi-Young Kim

A debut collection of eight stories that look unflinchingly into the complexity of exploring strange possibilities and desires in life and death. Written with humor and empathy for all the unseen and unexplored feelings that arise between this world and others. Full of love, whimsy, grief, and openness.

Love Story by Afsana Mousavi

A dreamy debut that follows a young transsexual’s feverish passage through her initiation into New York City’s underground nightlife as she attempts to reconcile its predatory yet deeply salvational euphorias. Afsana delves into the blurring lines between transition and cultural capital and the currency of femininity.

Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Tao Leigh Goffe

Through the lens of the Caribbean and braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with received forms of knowledge that have led us astray and dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. 

The Midnight Taxi by Yosha Gunasekera

In this debut mystery novel, a Sri Lankan American taxi driver in New York City discovers one of her passengers murdered in the backseat. Siriwathi, the protagonist, becomes the primary and obvious suspect of the murder. She only has five days to chase through New York to find out who really killed the midnight passenger, or her own life will be over. Yosha Gunasekera is also an attorney at the Innocence Project fighting for the wrongfully convicted and I cannot wait to read her book.

Everyday Movement by Gigi L. Leung, translated by Jennifer Feeley

This powerful novel follows the lives of two women through the crumbling of democracy in Hong Kong. Both have been chased and tear-gassed in the streets of their city after joining tens of thousands of others to protest a national security law that would effectively end democracy. Leung’s writing shows the existential dichotomy of everyday living against the backdrop of a shattering reality.

Bad Asians by Lillian Li

From the writer of Number One Chinese Restaurant, Lillian Li writes about a group of friends grappling with the challenges of perception, stereotyping, and the American dream while growing up Asian American during the rise of the internet. Kirkus Reviews writes that “the novel beautifully explores Asian American identity; economic instability; relationships as both anchor and buoy; the malleability of success; and the ways that ambition manifests itself for better or worse.”

On Morrison by Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell uses her unique experience as both a writer and professor teaching a course on Toni Morrison to give breadth to her wide range of complex, masterful, and innovative experiments with literary form. With close readings and contextual guidance, On Morrison brings the reader on new journeys through her famous fiction and her lesser-known plays and poetry. Serpell will make you want to read literature with fresh eyes and rediscover a love for reading.

Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

For lovers of Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches and Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist, jump into this collection of essays radically reimagining the ideal of “the self” through coexistence with other species. She teaches us to cherish the many other life forms while knowing we will never fully understand them.

Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi

In a subversive, evocative, and sensuous historical epic, Cleopatra tells her own story. Saara El-Arifi builds a deeply lush world that pulls you in with her prose. R.F. Kuang describes the book as “enchanting, smart, and subversive” and Kat Dunn calls it “vividly realized and skillfully unraveled . . . as insightful as it is engrossing.”

Maybe the Body: Poems by Asa Drake

A beautiful debut poetry collection that dives into the conflicts between art and patriotism, labor and longing. With rich imagery and deeply expressive prose, Asa Drake traces multi-generational lineage shaped by economic, ecological, and political dissonance through the Philippines and the American South.

Kin by Tayari Jones

I love the way Tayari Jones writes and am a huge fan of An American Marriage. Kin is full of wit and emotion following two lifelong friends whose worlds converse after many years apart in the face of devastating tragedy. Ann Patchett calls Kin “the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I’m always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound.”

March

Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom by Camonghne Felix

Throughout Camonghne Felix’s experience at the center of American politics, she has maintained her unwavering belief in language’s foundational revolutionary potential, outside of its deployment for legislative and political ends. In this groundbreaking work of nonfiction, she argues that Black radical poetic traditions model an ethical code and overcome engrained patriarchal and reductive structures.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu

Kim Fu writes an eerie psychological horror about Eleanor, reckoning with the decisions she’s made in her life as grief haunts her into blurring the real and imagined. Eleanor lives in the aftermath of her mother’s death and tries to grapple with her own life under the ghost of her mother’s expectations.

Whidbey by T Kira Madden

T Kira Madden blew me away with her stunning memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and I’m so excited to read her debut novel. Whidbey is an explosive and perceptive thriller that follows three women connected through one man in the aftermath of his murder. In page turning pace, Madden follows the intertwinement of these women to raise questions about the pursuit of justice and the power of the storyteller.

Songs for Darkness by Iman Humaydan Yunis

The voices of four generations of women from one family in Mount Lebanon echo a scarred history starting from the eve of the WWI to the 1982 Lebanon War. Iman Humaydan Yunis honors the lives of these women through songs that are the heartbeat of the required tenacity, generosity, and sacrifice necessary in dark times.

Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin

Sarvat Hasin makes her US debut with a novel about navigating the nuances of a fraught friendship that has lasted for years. Traveling between the past and present, Hasin shows how deeply friends influence each other, propel each other’s art, and break each other’s hearts. Kiran Millwood Hargrave calls it “Simply sublime—about that feverish, feral first finding of true friendship that becomes all-encompassing and reforms who you are.”

Light and Thread by Han Kang, translated by Maya West, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris

The power of Han Kang as a writer is her ability to peer into the hazy grays of existence and build new bridges between internal and external worlds. She sees daily living with a distinctly sharp and perceptive eye such that the reader has no choice but to breath expansively and recognize the additional space available in life. For lovers of The White Book, Han Kang once again masters a cross-genre work full of poems, essays, photographs, diary entries, and reflections in Light and Thread. Through the thread of language, Han Kang’s newly translated work will shorten the distance between the writer and reader and force the heart to beat with aliveness.

On the Prairies We Will Live Forever: Poems by Erica Violet Lee

Erica Violet Lee’s exquisite debut poetry collection explores community love as a pathway towards freedom. She imagines thriving lives for Native girls where there is abundance in the inner-city, which is and has always been home on Native Land. David Chariandy describes On the Prairies We Will Live Forever as “a book of urgent aliveness, a love letter to the author’s most intimate relations and a beacon for all who yearn for a liveable future.”

Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich dives into the wisdom and sorrow inherent in the extremes of existence itself in this short story collection written over two decades. Her range of characters speak to her unparalleled imagination. This collection is done in creative collaboration with visual artwork by her daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe.

Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories by Amal El-Mohtar

In Amal El-Mohtar’s short story collection, she creates exquisite worlds through folk tales, letters, diary entries with beautiful lyricism. Booklist writes that “El-Mohtar brings genuine storytelling talent paired with lush poetic language to deliver the kind of narratives her devotees have grown to love.”

American Han by Lisa Lee

Lisa Lee’s debut novel challenges the assumptions about the immigrant experience with prose both serious and hilarious. Jane and her brother, Kevin, have “successfully” performed all the requirements to make their family proud. Both are athletically and academically gifted until they become distant from their careers and each other. When Kevin goes missing, their family’s dedication to achieving ideals of the ever-elusive American Dream starts to crack and they are forced to confront the past and present. Their family erupts, undoing of the façade of ideals that may be far from real.

Night Owl: Poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

In Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s fifth poetry collection, she explores magic, love, and nature that bloom in the dark hours of the night. She uses the transformative nature of night to shift our perspective on interconnectivity and blurs the borders between us and the surrounding world. Night Owl doesn’t shy away from the noises or silences of the dark and uses them to shine light on the love in revolutionary connection. 

April

Honey in the Wound by Jiyoung Han

Magical realism, mythology, hope, and courage are the heartbeat of this debut novel by Jiyoung Han. Honey in the Wound follows Young-Ja through decades, a girl who infuses food with her emotions. The narrative delves into the lives of a sister who disappears and returns as a tiger, a mother whose voice compels the truth, and a granddaughter who divines secrets in others’ dreams. These women are all of part of one Korean family split across decades and borders by Japanese imperialism.

The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

As a science nerd and a lover of poetry, I could not dream up a better combination than this fantastical and existential intersection of physics, Black feminism, queerness, and pop culture. This debut spans space and time and forces us to reckon with what we truly know about the world and ourselves.

My Dear You: Stories by Rachel Khong

At the core of these stories, Rachel Khong writes tales of love in its many forms: being in love, not being in love, yearning to be in love, in the throes of unexpected yet wonderful lifelong friendships, and the intimate intertwining of love and grief. Read if you’re down to be existential.

Inheritance by Jane Park

A debut novel following Anne, a lawyer in New York, who has a “successful” life contingent on the ignorance of her own past. She starts to unravel her family’s past after her father passes away and she returns home to Edmonton to discover he was from North Korea. Anne is transported back to her own childhood and her parents’ lives as she reads the undelivered letters her father wrote to his brother, who was left behind.

Tailbone by Che Yeun

A fierce debut set in Seoul in 2008 following an unnamed teenage girl escaping an abusive home to live in a women’s boarding house during the global financial crisis. T Kira Madden describes it as “a gripping coming of age tale as savage as it is astounding, Tailbone seduces one first with voice, then swells and electrifies from within the storied walls of the Seoul boarding house in which anything is possible. Tailbone introduces Che Yeun as one of the absolute greats, an extraordinary stylist and singular storyteller of our time.”

Nasty Work: Resist Systems, Explore Desire, and Liberate Yourself by Ericka Hart

Ericka Hart believes that sex ed done right can be a tool for liberation. Through Nasty Work, Ericka takes down society’s deeply entrenched colonial views on sex and gender throughout history in this accessible, candid, and revolutionary exploration of how we can—and should—reclaim our minds and bodies for a more pleasurable existence for all.

Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead by Mai Nguyen

From the author of Sunshine Nails, Mai Nguyen gives us her second novel with her signature style of honesty, hilarity, and vulnerability. Nguyen uses dark humor to dive into Cleo Dang’s raw emotional turmoil following the loss of her child. She starts to work at a funeral home after self-isolating from grief and must navigate seeing her best friend live out a life of motherhood she desperately wanted for herself.

The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe

A debut fantasy novel set in the future where language magic reigns. A young Hawaiian woman, Kea Petrova, must solve a murder to save herself, her clan, and her Hawaiian homeland. Magical and mystical, Shay Kauwe is deeply imaginative in this spellbinding debut. 

The Take by Kelly Yang

I am so excited to see Kelly Yang’s first adult fiction novel, especially from someone who is so brilliantly prolific in the children and YA literature realm. The Take is a fast-paced speculative story about two women clinging to their youth and relevancy when their lives intertwine through an age reversal treatment. 

Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola

A stunning debut that does not shy away from the messiness of young adulthood and the chaos of discovering who you are. It balances the complexity of navigating a question that haunts most children of immigrants: what do we owe to our families and what do we owe to ourselves?

Don’t Tell Me How It Ends by Adrienne Thurman

For those who find themselves waning on romance and want real, relatable, and layered characters who also prioritize the important and complex love found in deep friendship, sisters, and family in addition to romantic love. Nikki Payne calls it “a sharp, funny, feel-good love story about bad dates, big feelings, and one deliciously slow-burning love that captures the serious mess of modern womanhood and manages to be hilarious at the same time.”

Livonia Chow Mein by Abigail Savitch-Lew

An epic that spans a century, this ambitious debut novel follows a multi-generational restaurant owning family living in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Abigail Savitch-Lew unfolds the richness of Brooklyn and the merging of cultures integral to a New York landscape. This book will challenge our perception of what is required to live in true harmony.

The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang

For lovers of Babel, The Language of Liars is a sci-fi with an engaging world full of linguistics. It poses the question, “What does it mean to understand another species and does that understanding cause destruction?”

The Memory Museum by M Lin

In this sharp and lyrical debut, M Lin takes us from present day to the near future following the complexities of home, memory, culture, and survival in China’s One-Child Generation. She stares deeply into the fogginess of existence between memory and future.

Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez

I inhaled Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut, Olga Dies Dreaming, and I’m very eager to read her sophomore novel about a 26-year-old woman who feels smothered by her future while obsessing over her glamorous neighbor. This novel challenges the life that money can buy and the compromises of fiscal assimilation for people of color chasing the “American Dream.”

If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Choyeop, translated by Anton Hur

For lovers of Ted Chiang and speculative sci-fi, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light travels far and wide to expand our imaginations of the unfamiliar. Kim Choyeop is unafraid to live in a sharp but ethereal space to look beyond our world to get a closer look at our shared disorienting and relatable humanity. Incredibly inventive and translated by the prolifically talented Anton Hur.

Molka by Monika Kim

Monika Kim is a queen of horror. Molka is an abbreviation of molrae-kamera, a “sneaky camera” hidden to capture covert images and videos for voyeurs. This novel is a provocative delve into voyeurism, female rage, vengeance, and reckoning.

Boring Asian Female by Canwen Xu

For those who love an unraveling woman protagonist (me included, obviously), then get ready for this addictive debut novel. Elizabeth Zhang is used to measuring herself by numbers, statistics, and productivity while also achieving these exceedingly high standards before rejection knocks her down from her expectations. She gets obsessive chasing her vision of success in this subversive and satirical novel.

Dreamt I Found You by Jimin Han

A contemporary retelling of Korea’s Romeo & Juliet. Full of Korean folklore and magic, Dreamt I Found You shows the power of premonition when the cousin of the star-crossed lovers helps them avoid a tragic fate within a rigid class system. 

Questions 27 & 28 by Karen Tei Yamashita

To be considered for release from the West Coast concentration camps, Japanese Americans were required to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked, to those who had been imprisoned without cause by the US military, whether they were willing to serve in combat for the US military. Question 28 asked them—many of whom American citizens who had never visited Japan—to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Karen Tei Yamashita writes a genre bending novel that chronicles three generations of laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists.

May

Honey by Imani Thompson

An adrenaline filled and dark humored novel about Yrsa, who gains a hunger for murder in the name of feminism. Through murdering misogynistic men, she rides a new high that gives her a greater sense of meaning from her PhD research on Afropessimism. The question is how long this rage can sustain her from her own buried family secrets?

The Young Will Remember by Eve J. Chung

Eve J. Chung’s sophomore novel takes place in 1950 and follows 28-year-old Chinese American journalist, Ellie Chang, who is trapped behind enemy lines during the Korean war. This sweeping novel follows her and the women who help her find her way home, not letting us forget about the resilience of love.

One Leg on Earth by ‘Pemi Aguda

In Aguda’s debut novel after her 2024 short story collection, Ghostroots, she uses beautiful prose to portray the haunting changes (both internal and external) of newfound motherhood. Yosoye is the daughter of a distant mother who discovers she is pregnant. She fights for hope of new life while being haunted by strains of being a mother in an unforgiving world. She must also find her own way to navigate the tumultuous landscape of a rapidly changing Lagos.

Coyoteland by Vanessa Hua

Set in El Nido, an affluent Bay Area suburb, Coyoteland follows Jin Chang who hopes his new move into the neighborhood with his family will help him achieve social status and end his string of bad luck. In the wake of a coyote attack during the escalation of fire season, chaos exposes the town hypocrisies and family scandals that will forever change the fate El Nido and its residents. Written with wit, empathy, and heart, Vanessa Hua gives us a rich suburban drama that forces us to untangle the details of our current world.

Distant Water: Poems by Beth Piatote

Beth Piatote is a scholar of Native American literature and focuses on the endangerment of Indigenous languages. In this debut poetry collection, she reminds us the integrated connectivity of our sonic world governed by ancestral knowledge with her inventive and playful prose through the wisdom of the Nez Perce language.

On Witness and Respair: Essays by Jesmyn Ward

I deeply admire the fantastic lyricism of Jesmyn Ward’s writing and am thrilled to read this collection of her essays. She writes with keen wisdom in this collection that starts from her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi and moves through the titular essay telling the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Ward shows the mirrors, windows, and doors of her life that she finds in writers she loves like Octavia Butler, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison. She reminds us of the healing that comes from writing and shows us hope and beauty in resilience.

Troubled Waters by Ichiyo Higuchi, translated by Bryan Karetnyk

A new translation of five remarkable stories from Japan’s first professional woman writer, Ichiyo Higuchi. Higuchi passed away at 24 in 1896 from tuberculosis and was a major figure in Meiji-era literature shining a light on the lives of Tokyo’s poor and broke a path for women writers.

The post The Most Anticipated Books by Women of Color for Summer and Fall 2026 appeared first on Electric Literature.

As a queer writer, grief came out in my book Spawning Season as an animal. Perhaps this should not have been a surprise given the books I’d been reading, the queer novels and essays and memoirs, all otherwise realist texts, in which animals become more than metaphor. They speak, they are guides, they are demons, they carry the souls of those we lost, those we never had, they allow us, even within large cities, to commune with nature. In these books by queer writers, animals play an essential, mythical role, inextricable from the narrator or the story. Queer writers, I think, often confound the bounds of realism—in literary fiction and nonfiction—in stunning and surprising ways. In these books, that surprise came in the form of the animal. 

Edinburgh by Alexander Chee

In Alexander Chee’s gut-punch of a first novel, Edinburgh, we follow Fee, a young Korean-American kid who finds transcendence through music and his voice. When this site of freedom turns rotten with abuse, Fee is bowled over by the complexities of grief. In the prologue, we see the image of the fox, a trickster, the bringer of good and bad luck. The fox in this novel is protection, evasion, a required outlet for a selfhood broken by abuse. The novel itself, Chee writes, is a “fox story.” 

“Years later on streets in New York,” Chee writes, “women bustle by me, in fox coats. I want to ask these women, do you ever, in that coat, think you can fly? Do you ever feel, wearing that coat, the thrum of a leg about to let fly?” To this day, when in need of protection, I can feel the fox fur on my arm. A new edition of Edinburgh, with a fox on the cover, is due out in October from Mariner Classics. 

This Is the Only Kingdom by Jaquira Díaz

A red-tailed hawk glides, watching, on the cover of Jaquira Diaz’s novel This Is the Only Kingdom. The title itself comes from the poem “Elegy” in the collection Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay. The novel is a story of whether escape—of our circumstances, our hometowns, our families—is possible, and the guaraguao (a red-tailed hawk) returns again and again in the book’s critical moments, as if called out by every gun shot. The guaraguao witnesses, watches, and follows; because the bird can take to the sky, its movement is not limited by our small human condition. As the book’s mystery and violence unfold in tightly lyrical prose, the reader becomes the guaraguao, present but seemingly unable to change the book’s inevitable course. “In the sky, some kind of bird, a hawk or vulture. Floating, tilting sideways, its body swinging this way, that way. Un guaraguao. The women were singing now, the bird dancing in the sky, swaying to the rhythm of their song.” The human and animal, dancing together, each in their own realm. 

Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller

So many queer writers look at an old category—fish for example—with fresh eyes and force readers to reassess their pre-conceived notions. Lulu Miller, a co-host of Radiolab, does just this in her uncategorizable book Why Fish Don’t Exist. Besides an unexpected true crime murder mystery, Miller takes apart why the term “fish” is biologically meaningless. The book shines, though, in moments where the desire, the need, for the coherence of the biology of fish stands in for Miller’s own loss and grief. Ultimately, through Miller and the scientists she profiles, fish represent both our need for control and our absolute lack thereof. Only through fish, it seems, can Miller tell her own story, and see how these underwater animals can actually be perfect, beautiful, in their incoherence. On a swim, “[a] school of silver beings came rushing toward me,” she writes, “barreling beneath me like a catchable train. I dove down into it. It parted and let me in. Hundreds of silver souls enveloping me.” Only underwater could Miller’s grief, and joy, breathe. 

Forest Euphoria by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is a scientist by training and vocation. Maybe it’s my own bias as a scientist and writer, but the two fields seem like vastly different approaches to one fundamental desire: to look closely at the world, at living things, and to understand. Working scientists and writers both know, however, that the best and most profound answers only open new questions, and writing, like science, like life, simply iterates. Kaishian brings this sensibility of searching to her incredible memoir-in-essays, where she weaves together her childhood and path toward science as a profession with a stark discussion of how different types of knowledge become, or are withheld from, scientific inquiry. Throughout, plants and animals (and fungi and bacteria) speak their own stories—mushrooms, snakes, turtles, frogs, and crows. “Like corvids, humans are generalists,” Kaishian writes, “All around the world, this has led to creation stories and cosmologies in which corvids are centered as teachers, offering wisdom and instruction to humans who are struggling to adjust.”

Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn

Lars Horn’s essay collection, Voice of the Fish, considers the body as a site of memory, and aquatic bodies become essential to his understanding of his own. Fish can live for hundreds of years, a living history text; in the 1800s, a fish was caught with a religious scroll preserved in its belly. From his childhood, when Horn’s mother took photoshoots of him in a bathtub full of squid, to his adulthood, where swimming became a site of refuge, fish became a source of knowledge and of confounding mystery at the same time. “Past a certain age,” Horn writes, “my own reflection became increasingly difficult to look at. So, I didn’t. I looked out. Around. At others. Animals. Trees.” This impulse to see the humanity of other things, and the animal in the human experience, makes Horn’s book a meditation on a messy life, the only kind of life possible. 

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

Reeling from the suicide of her father, Jessa struggles to keep her family’s taxidermy business alive. The scenes of Jessa working with dead animals take on an almost meditative, religious meaning as she struggles with the senselessness that keeps creeping into her life. The animals—alligators, peacocks, badgers and rabbits—provide the tension between life and death, between blood and guts, the mess of a life, and struggling to “make sure the floor stayed clean.” Although many of the animals in the book are indeed dead, it is their breath that pulses through the narrative. “I just wanted [an animal] that I could hold,” Arnett writes, “something that would move and breathe and reciprocate my affection.” Queerness can make affection so tense, so complicated, that only an animal might be able to offer a safe embrace. 

Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno

In this novel by Melissa Faliveno, Sam returns to a family cabin in Northern Wisconsin where, even in spring, “the light left early and the dark stayed long.” The cabin itself is falling apart, and so too is Sam, newly sober but infected, perhaps, by a dark inheritance. Questions of rot, of family, of light and dark and without and within swirl in this seductive novel. As Sam becomes isolated, the residents of the woods speak up. “When the deer first spoke to her, she was sure she was hallucinating,” Faliveno writes. In a novel with so much human isolation, the doe becomes a main character as Sam struggles with and within herself. When Sam reprimands the doe for telling her what to do—to dump out a beer and attempt sobriety again, the deer responds: “Your mother is gone. And she couldn’t tell you what to do either. She didn’t even know what to do herself.” If Sam will make it out of these woods, the doe may well be her guide, a voice coming from a part of herself made external, other, and animal. 

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I only read Moby Dick recently, as a middle-aged bisexual man, and, wow, it’s the gayest book I’ve ever read. I’m glad I didn’t attempt it as a pre-queer high school kid, as so much of the queerness of the text—not the subtext, the text itself—might not have landed for me. I don’t know how to write a list about queer animal books without including Moby Dick, in which Melville details the ill-fated search for Ahab’s white whale, famously a fish. From the opening scene of Ishmael sharing a bed with Queequeg and waking as “his wife” to the orgasmic definitely-not-sex the whalers share as they extract spermaceti from the head of a sperm whale by sperm squeezing, not only does the white whale represent the hubris of man against nature, but the all-male ship becomes a space wherein the desire for touch becomes not just allowed but a part of the labor:

“Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! All the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed the sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.”

How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler

Ever curious and endlessly probing, Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches is a memoir told through close examination of sea creatures: gold fish, octopus, sturgeon, bobbitt worm. Through telling these stories of the natural world, Imbler is able to narrate their childhood, their life, the forces that invariably shape us, so many of which are out of our control. Imbler’s writing about animal life is tender, intimate. “Imagine you are something like a snail . . . You are not a fast swimmer, but you make do, bobbing around the blue and sealing off your body in spiraled chambers that buoy you up and down the water column.” I can feel myself move with the water. In a recent interview for Orion Magazine, Imbler explained, “I found it far easier to find empathy and tenderness for animals like fish than I did with former versions of myself.” This reaching outward, toward animals, to find love for our own queer selves, given a world that constructs disgust around our touch and identities, undergirds all these books. Given how cruel humans can be, indeed are, to queer and trans people, it is no wonder we give voice and witness to other creatures—a fox, a fish—that we yearn for their protection. 

The post In These Queer Books, Animals Take on a Mythical Importance appeared first on Electric Literature.

My novel, Devil of the Deep, is set in a version of Haiti where queer identities are firmly integrated into society. The titular character, Nnenna Delahaye, is a pansexual pirate captain who forms romantic relationships with other characters regardless of their gender. Nnenna’s adversary, Lu Ortega, is trans and, while his identity causes friction between himself and his father, he finds acceptance from his chosen family. Nnenna’s sexuality and Lu’s gender identity are presented as much as a matter of fact as their identity as Haitians. This representation is intentional for queer Haitians to see themselves normalized in stories of Haiti and to challenge those who refuse to accept our existence.

To know queer and trans Haitians is to understand that we are human. Because of the stigma that continues to plague us, most people will only have the opportunity to get to know us through words on the page. This list of Haitian characters who are undeniably queer, trans, or both, is a starting point for the intentional reader. The featured stories span a variety of genres in fiction, showcasing characters from all walks of Haitian life. To read our stories is to know us, and to know us is to love us.

Amelie & Marie Francoise: Ayiti by Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay’s debut collection of short stories brings to light the realities of what it means to be a part of the Haitian diaspora. It contains 16 vignettes, nestled among which is the story of Amelie and Marie Francoise in “Of Ghosts and Shadows.” The women are lovers forced to keep the true nature of their relationship a secret in order to maintain their places in Haitian society. Still, the people in their lives seem to know that they desire each other and this creates a fine line of tension that all the characters walk: As long as Amelie and Marie Francoise’s desire remains a suggestion, so too will remain the violence that their countrymen reserve for things they do not understand.

Sonia & Dieudonné: What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J.A. Chancy

What Storm, What Thunder sheds light on the real voices of those impacted by the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that shattered Port-Au-Prince in 2010. Sonia and Dieudonné are among the 10 Haitian characters whose lives are forever changed by the earthquake. Sonia, a sex worker, is also queer, which she reveals to Dieudonné in code by stating she is “M” (for masisi, the established term amongst Haiti’s queer folk). Dieudonné is also “M” and, as though the unspoken lifetimes of common experience is all they need, they become business partners: Dieudonné acts as Sonia’s protector as she sleeps with wealthy men in hotel rooms. They share their dreams with each other—for Sonia, the independence of being a wealthy man’s mistress, and for Dieudonné, the comfort and safety of a house in the hills—and dare to chase them when they have nothing left to lose.

Aline Cajuste: The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

Edwige Danicat’s The Dew Breaker is a collection of intertwining stories of Haitians in America whose lives were impacted by the despotic Duvalier regime. Tradition clashes with modernity in the story of Aline Cajuste, a young Haitian journalism intern, meeting Beatrice, an elderly seamstress. Both characters exist within the Haitian diaspora of New York, but the vast differences in their experiences create tension. Beatrice left Haiti to escape political terror; Aline was born in the United States and has only lived among Haitians in America. Beatrice is prim and values quality of experience, a holdover from her life as a woman in Haiti in the midcentury. Aline is privileged and bothered by Beatrice’s seeming indifference to her time. Despite these differences, they have one thing in common: Both are freighted with the realities of being Haitian. Beatrice is haunted by the spectre of a man who once terrorized her. Aline is in a secret relationship with a woman 30-plus years her senior.

Etienne Galois: The Best Man’s Problem by Sera Taíno

Sera Taíno’s The Best Man’s Problem is an honest to goodness romantic comedy in which opposites, Etienne Galois and Rafael Navarro, try and fail to fight their attraction for each other. Etienne is a seemingly carefree photographer who lives life by the seat of his pants. He is Haitian, he is gay, he is beloved by his family. The greatest trauma he experiences is very nearly losing the love of his life when their different approaches to living lead to a seemingly insurmountable conflict. Etienne is an aspirational representation of what life could be like for queer Haitians absent the trauma of homophobia.

Sylvie De Rosiers: Mademoiselle Revolution by Zoe Sivak

Sylvie De Rosiers is the child of an enslaved Haitian mother she never knew and a French coffee plantation owner. She lives with all the privilege afforded to the free daughter of a wealthy aristocrat in the colony of Saint-Domingue until cries for revolution send her family fleeing to France. Her escape from danger is short-lived—France’s own revolution is brewing and Sylvie’s neighbors are Cornelie Duplay, eldest daughter of the Duplay family, and the radical revolutionary staying with them, Maximillien Robespierre. Sylvie becomes politically and romantically involved with both Duplay and Robespierre, adding explicit, unchallenged bisexual representation to a narrative that explores themes of race and privilege.

Miriam: Erzulie’s Skirt by Ana-Maurine Lara

In this deeply intimate novel, Lara explores a fast friendship that becomes a lifelong love between two women of Haitian and Dominican descent living in the Dominican Republic. Miriam comes from a family of Haitian immigrant plantation workers. Micaela’s Dominican family owns a small farm. Both women struggle with the violence and poverty of rural life, and it is tragedy that inspires them to leave their respective homes. When Miriam’s parents die in an accident, she and the father of her unborn child leave for the city and make a home together in a slum of San Cristobal. There, Miram meets Micaela, who has been banished from her family home by her mother, who blames her for the death of her younger brother. They seek solace in each other and in Vodou practice—a departure from their Christian upbringings—and dream of a better life in which they are free to be together.

Pita: Bad Kreyòl by Dominique Morisseau

Bad Kreyòl is a play that tells the story of cousins, Haitian-American Simone and Haitian Gigi, who represent two sides of a family divided by time and geography. At the behest of their shared grandmother, whose dying wish was that the family reunite, Simone goes to Port-Au-Prince in search of her cousin. Gigi owns a boutique there and is protecting her gay assistant, Pita, by lending him her family name. When the cousins reconnect, it’s Pita’s desire to join Kouraj, the largest LGBT rights activist group in Haiti, that creates a core tension between them—Simone supports Pita in following his dream, but Gigi fears for his safety.

The post Queerness Is an Essential Part of Haiti’s Story appeared first on Electric Literature.

My debut novel, Orange Island, grew out of this ache. It is set in 2060 in a Florida battered by climate collapse, where fruit is a luxury, and the heat is something people die from (not too far from what we know today). At its center is Savannah, a young woman piecing together the story of her dead sister Dove, a researcher who spent her life trying to find a way to make humans more resilient to a hotter world. Writing it, I kept returning to the question the book kept asking me back: How do we stay hopeful when things feel genuinely, irreversibly broken? 

The books on this list were companions through the process of writing Orange Island. Some of them I carried around for years before I understood why. They are stories about survival and longing and the stubbornness of love, set against landscapes that feel like characters of their own. They are about land and water and heat, about the people who are shaped by places and the places that are shaped, and often destroyed, by people. They are not all climate fiction, and they are not all tragedies, but they all understand what it means to grieve something that is still technically alive. I hope they find you wherever you are in that grief, and leave you wanting to go outside.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Janie Crawford spends her life moving through a series of marriages and communities in search of autonomy, love, and a selfhood larger than what the world expects from her. Set across central Florida and the Everglades, the novel follows her final marriage to Tea Cake and the life they build together on the muck before a catastrophic hurricane reshapes everything. Janie’s story is about much more than romance, but it is also, quietly, a book about Florida: the muck of the Everglades, the labor of the land, the violence of a storm that will not be bargained with. Hurston writes the natural world the way most writers write people, with interiority and consequence. The hurricane in the final act is one of the most devastating and accurate depictions of what weather can do to a community built without protection. It is a book about joy that never pretends the world is safe.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

After being abandoned by her family as a child, Kya Clark grows up alone in the marshes of coastal North Carolina, surviving by learning the rhythms of the natural world more intimately than the social one. When a local man is later found dead, the town turns its suspicion toward the “Marsh Girl,” forcing Kya to confront the ways isolation can both protect and endanger a person. Whatever you think of this book’s cultural moment, Kya Clark’s relationship to the North Carolina marsh is worth sitting with. She is raised by a place after her family abandons her, and she learns its language more fluently than she ever learns the language of people. The wetlands in this novel are not backdrop. They are shelter, teacher, and, in the end, something like justice. Where the Crawdads Sing takes seriously the idea that wild places can hold us when humans will not.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Set in the 12 days before Hurricane Katrina, this novel follows a poor Black family in rural Mississippi who have no real option but to wait. Ward writes poverty and love with the same precision, and the storm, when it arrives, does not feel like a plot device. It feels like what it is: an event that punishes people who were already being punished. This is essential reading on how climate and catastrophe are not felt equally, and how survival is not just physical but something you carry with you after.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

This one might seem like the outlier, but it earns its place. A couple in post-Arthurian Britain travels through a landscape wrapped in collective forgetting, trying to find their son and make sense of what they have lost. Ishiguro is writing about memory and erasure, but he is also writing about what happens to the land when the people on it stop paying attention. There is a quiet devastation in this book that did not leave me for a long time.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

In a rural Appalachian community, Dellarobia Turnbow stumbles across what looks like a mountainside on fire, only to discover millions of displaced monarch butterflies have unexpectedly migrated there due to climate disruption. As scientists descend on the town to study the phenomenon, Dellarobia begins questioning the limits of her marriage, her community, and the future everyone around her has assumed is fixed. Kingsolver is brilliant at writing people who are not environmentalists but who find themselves in the middle of something they cannot explain and cannot ignore. The protagonist, Dellarobia, is curious and funny and hemmed in by her life. Watching her encounter this strange and terrible beauty is one of the more moving experiences I have had reading fiction about climate.

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook

In a near future devastated by environmental collapse, Bea and her young daughter Agnes leave the last overcrowded city to join an experimental community allowed to live inside one of the world’s remaining protected wilderness areas. As the group struggles to survive under constant observation and increasingly brutal conditions, Bea is forced to confront what survival means. The New Wilderness is a speculative novel at its core, an examination of motherhood, and a quiet horror story, often at the same time. Cook does not offer comfort. The wilderness in this book is not redemptive. It is indifferent, and the people in it are asked to become something they are not sure they can become.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

An Ethiopian immigrant runs a small grocery store in a gentrifying Washington, D.C. neighborhood and tries to make sense of what he has left and what he has found. This is not an environmental novel in the traditional sense, but it belongs here because it understands displacement from the inside. Mengestu writes about longing for a place you cannot return to with a precision that hit me somewhere I was not expecting. Grief for land and grief for home are the same grief, and this book knows that.

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

A woman follows what may be the last Arctic terns on earth on their migration to Antarctica, carrying her own grief and history alongside theirs. McConaghy writes about a world where animals have almost entirely vanished with a restraint that makes it more devastating, not less. It is a book about obsession and loss and what we do when the thing we love is already mostly gone, told by a narrator who is herself a kind of endangered creature. The natural world here is an elegy, and the journey feels both urgent and too late.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

A grieving astrobiologist raises his neurodivergent son alone while the son becomes consumed by the fate of disappearing species. Powers is one of the few writers who can make ecological grief feel personal without making it sentimental. The father-son relationship at the center of this book does what the best speculative fiction does: It makes the abstract catastrophe of extinction feel like something happening to people you know and cannot protect. It pairs naturally with Flight Behavior and fills out the list’s thread of parenthood and inheritance alongside Ward and Cook.

The post The Places We Love Are Disappearing. These Authors Are Grappling With It appeared first on Electric Literature.

I’ve been joking lately that I’m just going to get gayer. I’m going to make up new pronouns. I’m going to keep going out, dancing with my friends—which we call Church—and I’ll go on gay marrying my loved ones as an ordained minister with the highest of internet credentials, and I’ll watch Queer Ultimatum if I have to and Heated Rivalry because I want to, and I will honor the memories of our BIPOC queer and trans ancestors. I will fight for trans youth, and I will keep writing and sharing our stories no matter how much they try to silence or censor us.

Electric Lit’s Most Anticipated Queer Books List was launched by Michelle Hart, who centered and uplifted LGBTQ+ writers and the queer stories that “deserve not only to be included but centered” in literary discourse. Michelle tells us, “Let these new books be a reminder: Even in the face of despair and erasure, we’re still here—reading, writing, and refusing to disappear.”

It’s an honor to continue the work Michelle started in 2022. She reminds me—these books remind me—that queer is the future: It has always been the future. 

This summer, to celebrate Pride, I invite you to save a queer, read a book. We keep the fires lit ’till morning.

With thanks to Amulya Tadimety, Annie O’Brien, Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas, and Shandela Contreras for their assistance with this list. 

Mother Tongue by Sara Nović (May 5)

Following Nović’s novel True Biz, this crip-queer memoir reads as a Deaf manifesto on motherhood. At age 12, Sara Nović began to lose her hearing, but almost no one noticed—not at home, not at school. For much of her adolescence, Nović masked both her disability and her queerness, until an experience of spiritual humility led her to claim not only her deafness, but Deafness: the political act, the community. The book’s raison d’etre seems to be about honoring that experience, resisting erasure, and changing the sociopolitical landscape to be one that celebrates difference, rather than trying to stamp it out. As Nović tells us, no one is a villain in their own story, and in Mother Tongue she sets out to expose the oralist frameworks and audist lobbies that continue to disenfranchise disabled people. Initially conceived as letters to her sons, the work is also a tender examination of family. Nović touches on the challenges of pregnancy, those sleepless nights when her first child S was inconsolable and she’d have to belt out her own rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” It ends, movingly, on her adoption of her second son, K, a deaf child in Thailand living in an orphanage, and who lights up when he finally learns to sign. 

One Leg on Earth by ‘Pemi Aguda (May 5)

“Is it possible to be aware and not feel dread?” asks ‘Pemi Aguda. In One Leg on Earth, Aguda’s debut novel, pregnant women in Nigeria are jumping off of bridges and walking into water to drown themselves—and no one knows why. Yosoye, a recent graduate, relocates to Lagos (“a city looking forward only, hustling forward”) to complete her compulsory NYSC internship; she finds herself working for an architecture firm set to develop the new Omi City out of reclaimed land. Dazed by freedom, Yosoye wanders the dark streets of the city. Following a spontaneous encounter, she discovers that she, too, is pregnant. Amid judgments from coworkers and friends and forces that would seek to mysticize her for having one foot in heaven, Yosoye falls in with the dangerously seductive Beloved. There is a touch of body horror, as there is with all of Aguda’s work—including unforgettable stories of madness in pregnancy—but when the surrounding sand and water start to take on an ominous glare, both Yosoye and the reader find themselves haunted by the dead women. The novel draws on Aguda’s own research with members of the displaced Otodo Gbame community whose waterfront homes were demolished by the Lagos state government. For fans of Samanta Schweblin, Helen Oyeyemi, Rachel Heng; for lovers of Sula.

John of John by Douglas Stuart (May 5)

Departing Glasgow for Scotland’s Hebrides islands, Douglas Stuart’s third novel asks a question quintessential to queerness: Can you ever go back home? This is the tender, sore storytelling we’ve come to expect from Stuart, with some pages reading like a summer shower, others like a squall. Having graduated from art school, John-Calum Macleod (Cal) is called back from Edinburgh to take care of his loving, mischievous grandmother Ella, and to work the family croft and sheep farm in bone-cold winter. Cal’s father—also a John, also running from himself—is embattled in a spiritual reckoning few know about. A leader in the local Presbyterian church that gleefully chains down swing sets on Sundays, John pushes his faith and way of life on Cal, at one point telling him, “You look like a cross-dresser that’s thrown on a coat because he’s run out of milk.” Stuart’s secondary characters are outrageously memorable, as with the set of brothers who live together but refuse to speak, demanding a translator even when they’re at the same kitchen table. The novel, a flurry of domestic violence, is also one of warmth and color (literally: To make ends meet, the men work a loom, following a cultural tradition that has not changed very much since the industrial revolution, and one scene includes an erection knit into cloth). Tensions spike when the son, seeking closeness, reaches for his father’s best friend. In John of John, we witness what it means to live side by side, each inside a lonely secret: the very definition of family. 

Turn (W)here by Chet’la Sebree (May 5)

If what you seek is belonging, go to the poets. Following the gorgeous Blue Opening, Sebree’s most recent collection, Turn (W)here is not a mere travelogue but a “travel song,” a panoramic love letter to the poet’s own itinerant spirit. With this project, Sebree takes to the road and searches for home across 16 countries and 38 states, alert to the threat of Black people’s modern day sundown encounters in small towns. Along for the ride, we travel from Jackson, Mississippi, to Dante’s tomb, to the French streets Baldwin walked. Sebree also returns to those places that birthed her people, a father she calls her “guy,” a mother who put herself through law school so that her children might know a different America. She traces her matrilineal line of free Black women in Maryland and asks what owning property means for her family; while the news of the police murder of Philando Castile plays through her radio, she grapples with what it means to be a citizen of a racist nation. Sebree asks: What is required to bring a Black child into this world, this country, of rootlessness? But also, there are table gatherings, and food rituals, and visits with friends—unforgettably, that one luxurious, intimate afternoon spent in Wisconsin when, in a surprising act of kinship, she and her friend do up their hair. In the words of Tina Campt, whom Sebree invokes, Turn (W)here “shifts the optics of ‘looking at’ to a politics of looking with, through, and alongside another.”

Again, Harder by Alice Stoehr (May 12)

One of Stoehr’s devoted readers describes this book as “a lightning bolt into my brain . . . I want to hug and run away from every woman [the writer] creates.” Again, Harder chronicles a sisterhood of trans women living in a large Midwestern town. In the linked short story collection, attractions flare and fizzle, polycules rise and fall, texts come hot and heavy until the fetishism starts, nights end in ass slapping. Money is always an issue, girls are continuously honing their emotional maturity. Harsh, sexy, tender, these stories remind us what we love about queer community, even when the closeness is suffocating (e.g. “I love that girl, but she is a stress.”). The dialogue is delicious, as are the hook-ups. One character laments, “Something’s going to break,” another replies, “Breakage comes with transition,” and still another reminds us, “Nothing is bad, everything is dangerous.” Stoehr, beloved cult author, plays with point-of-view and form. She flirts with the epistolary and the confessional but always makes it funny—an allusion to the Brave Little Toaster is foreplay—and keeps to a razor’s edge the pain, regret, loss. Again, harder, please.

Mighty Real by Barry Walters (May 12)

Storied journalist Barry Walters’s extensive history of LGBTQ music from 1969 to 2000 spans genres, regions, and movements to trace a throughline of a revolutionary queer ethos. The chapters of Mighty Real explore artists whose music and impact have bent boundaries and expectations for gender and sexuality, from the Velvet Underground to Whitney Houston to the Indigo Girls. Walters, a longtime writer for outlets like the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and the Advocate, also weaves in his own stories throughout; as a music journalist and columnist for decades in San Francisco and New York, including during the AIDS epidemic, he captures for us those memories that stay with him. Walters encyclopedically archives moments of queer and trans joy, expression, and resistance, and even spotlights LGBTQ pioneers who have been overlooked in music history. This is the perfect book to read before stepping out onto the light-up queer dancefloor this summer.

Take Me with You by Steven Rowley (May 19) 

What do you do when your husband of 30 years literally disappears into thin air and you’re the only witness? Steven Rowley takes this deliciously bizarre premise and spins it into something all-too real: a meditation on how we never fully know the people we love, even after decades of shared life. Jesse del Ruth, left behind in their Joshua Tree home, must navigate not just grief but the maddening ambiguity of abandonment without closure, the not-knowing that’s somehow worse than any definitive answer. Rowley, who gave us The Guncle‘s perfect blend of humor and heartbreak, returns with his sharpest work yet, a novel that lays bare the essential unknowability at the heart of even our most intimate bonds. It’s speculative fiction as emotional excavation, and it’ll wreck you in the best way.

The Maidenheads by Benny B. Peterson (May 26)

If you think texting your ex is toxic behavior, Jamie and Mari take it to a whole new level in The Maidenheads. A debut novel, Peterson sets their story of tragic teenage passion to the soundtrack of early 2000s grunge, pop punk, and indie rock music, appealing to fans of romance and music fanatics. As lonely teenagers in DC, Jamie and Mari start a punk rock band together. Just as the band is about to get its big break, a messy romantic breakup between the young musicians ruins their chance at fame and leaves Jamie emotionally paralyzed. A decade later, an opportunity for Mari and Jamie to reconnect presents itself. Jamie, feeling stuck in her life as a copyeditor in Baltimore, jumps at the chance to sing alongside her first love again. Ensue romantic chaos draped in bold vocals and angsty melodies. The Maidenheads is a balm for anyone who yearns for the recklessness of the teenage years without the soul-wrecking consequences of adulthood.

Inspiration Porn by Ryan O’Connell (May 26)

After years of candid introspection that fueled a popular blog, a memoir, and the Netflix series Special, writer Ryan O’Connell found himself embarking on self-reflection for an entirely new reason. He and his long-term boyfriend had opened their relationship, thrusting him into unfamiliar terrain: What would sex with strangers look like for him as a disabled gay man? This life-altering moment and more are chronicled in his debut essay collection, which seamlessly swings from discussing growing up with cerebral palsy and an alcoholic mother to chronicling wild sexual awakenings and misadventures. O’Connell approaches each of these stories—about social media, sex, disability, and addiction—with a trademark breezy, witty style honed through early internet and television writing. Unabashedly raunchy and hilarious, O’Connell’s essays normalize the messy, beautiful, and complicated intersections of his life.

Mad Eden by Morgan Thomas (June 2)

Publishing too often uses the word groundbreaking, but in the case of Mad Eden, something about this rings true. Mad Eden, a debut, is nearly impossible to categorize yet joyful to inhabit. Ro, a trans, autie patient advocate, lives in Florida with their oh-so patient partner Liam in a partnership that is built on mutuality. Thomas writes, “There was joy, somehow, in our surviving this place that intended to be inhospitable to us.” The two look after their “adoptive son” Quentin, a minor who is looking to transition but, like countless others, is thwarted. Danger comes in the form of constrictive state laws, false allies, and anti-trans legislation. When a TERF influencer targets the medical facility Ro works for, their tiny queer utopia is threatened. The book feels less like a novel and more like genre spilling into other genres. A work of meaningful intertextuality, Mad Eden weaves together an online fantasy series that builds its lexicon from an essay on autism. There are also dragons, alligators, talk of homemade T, and elegant treatises on time.

There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood by Rasheed Newson (June 2)

Old-school Hollywood glamour meets the razor-sharp wit of the HBO dramedy Hacks in Newson’s searing industry takedown. It’s 1958 in Hollywood, and Aaron Touissant knows where all of the bodies are buried. A backlot fixer for Skyline Pictures, Aaron conceals the secrets of the production company’s most renowned actors—whether it be a star’s queerness or a torrid affair with a mobster’s young daughter. He’s good at his job; a closeted Black gay man himself, Aaron has fine-tuned his muscles for secret-keeping. Aaron, however, meets his match in Xavier C. Barlow, Hollywood’s latest dashing Black movie star, who doesn’t care to hide his queerness (and, perhaps, someone that Aaron has known carnally once . . . or twice). When Xavier’s activism has dire consequences, Aaron picks up his pen to tell the real story of Xavier C. Barlow. Pulling tidbits from candid memoirs by Black stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age as well as archival material, Newson’s novel—like most Hollywood stories—is an irresistible blend of fact and fiction. 

Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth (June 9)

Too many of us queer earthlings have been eagerly awaiting Earth 7 since Deb Olin Unferth’s groundbreaking heist novel Barn 8. The newest work is sci-fi/cli-fi/homosapien criticism in a way only Unferth could write—entirely within and outside of genre. Each sentence introduces us to a vibrant and inescapable future just outside of our imagining, with some of the most moving passages on sand ever written. In a distant (but not too distant) future, after we have completely ruined the planet, two women meet on a fake beach. Dylan, who grew up in a pod at the bottom of the ocean of our de-pop(ulated) world can’t help but be drawn to Melanie, a person so full of plastic and enhanced DNA sequences that people believe she’s a robot. Both Dylan and Melanie are, in their own way, “sidling so far from human that humans didn’t recognize [them] as one of their own,” finding each other, and then coming apart. Meanwhile, Dylan’s researcher mother uploads her consciousness onto a chip hurtling through space. Dylan’s final creative act is one that Unferth, too, seems compelled by: to capture life before it’s too late. Earth 7 is an adventurous, wry, utterly human novel (that “original root of sadness and wildness”), and it will be here long after we’re gone.

Nymph by Sofia Montrone (June 9)

Set in a crumbling hotel in the Italian countryside, Nymph is written for those whose idea of a perfect summer vacation consists of long, slow walks in a rustic setting rather than sunburning at a beach club. Our protagonist, Leo, lives in Manhattan but spends every summer cleaning the guests’ rooms in her family’s agriturismo alongside her rapidly aging grandmother. The summer before Leo leaves for college, her grandmother hires Dolores, a sun-tanned California girl who came to Italy to study violin making. Romance, of course, ensues between Leo and Dolores, an inevitable response to the nutty aroma of freshly-brewed espresso, sprawling orchards, and winding alleys of an old-school village. While the romance brings the cat to the cream—or the tourist to the vineyard—the complex family dynamics keep the pages turning. Smuggled between teenage longing and retellings of The Odyssey, Montrone asks what happens to a family that would rather wipe snot from a stranger’s headboard than clean their own dirty laundry.

What I Made for Dinner by Krys Malcom Belc (June 9)

In the early pages of his memoir, Krys laments, “What was the adulthood I imagined? I hoped it wouldn’t be this, this middle-aged drudgery my mother was in.” Belc, a transgender man, performs most of the domestic labor for his wife, two sons, and daughter. His memoir, following his family during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, structures the narrative around his favorite internet chefs. He cycles through a seemingly endless loop of Claire Saffitz recipes, Ree Drummond’s The Pioneer Woman reruns, and Stella Park’s YouTube oeuvre. When pandemic restrictions loosen their grip, Belc, perhaps desiring to stay in domestic bliss, decides to have another baby. Filled with relatable frustrations about parenthood, as well as well-researched tidbits of food TV history, come hungry to What I Made for Dinner. You’ll leave inspired to try your own hand at making the gorgeous cinnamon bun recipes that look anything but simple.

Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer (June 9)

If you take one book to the beach with you this summer, let it be Villa Coco. Fresh from undergrad, fumbling through life as if tasked to do “someone else’s shopping,” a young man takes up residence in the Italian countryside after answering an ad for an adjutant. Instead of cataloging Picassos and priceless artifacts as he’s been hired to do, he becomes an assistant to the Baronessa (known to her friends as Coco), is promptly nicknamed Giovedì, and is tasked with pruning roses, fixing septic tanks, and responding to his employer’s every whim. After many bad choices in love, our young gay protagonist has taken a vow of no more men for a while, has yet to learn that wherever you go, there you are. He enters into an affair with a married man and must choose between want and freedom. The novel, as charming as Greer’s Pulitzer-prize winning Less, is full of witty aphorisms, tall tales, and superstitions: At one point, Giovedì, mistakenly setting a hat on a bed, is ordered to touch a man’s testicles so that nobody dies. In Greer’s world, servants and guests never speak the same language, villains seduce diamonds from Sicilian prices, someone is always related to the queen, and every conversation becomes a delightful conundrum. Each passage is a flirtation with food, or light playing on water beneath a bridge, or the Baronessa’s Italian cousin. Or the Baronessa herself, who holds together her world (the only world) by sheer will and scheming. Villa Coco, laced with wistful, playful nostalgia, reads like youth itself.

As If by Isabel Waidner (June 16)

If your doppelgänger came along, would you be tempted to switch lives? What if the people who love you end up liking them just a bit more? What if you found yourself taking their sadness for your own? In this surrealist work reminiscent of Rivka Galchen’s fiction, two desperate men who appear to be identical are mistaken for one another and decide to swap lives. Lewis is a failed actor and grieving widower, Korine is a failed father and husband; each covets the illusory freedom the other seems to have. After the swap, Korine spends nights beneath an overpass studying to be an actor, while Lewis cares for Korine’s child, who isn’t fooled by the dupe, but still teaches Lewis how to behave like his father. Amid double-bluffs and suspicions, pretense and envy, this is spy versus spy on an existential level—and simmering beneath, a restlessness that has to do with class, grief, and dreams deferred. Queer literature always wants to know if we are brave enough to imagine a life outside of the one we’re contained by. As If is a book that asks: What keeps us alive?

Sourland by Ariel Delgado Dixon (June 23)

Trust a lesbian to tell you everything you need to know about sex, cows, and weed. It’s 2010, and Sapphire, the purveyor of an illegal cannabis farm and a pansexual known for her trysts with much younger lovers, goes missing. In her absence, her ex-girlfriend Frankie, a former ballet dancer, faces off against Fizz, the current male lover, for control of the property. Sourland is a lush, hidden land tended by bands of drifters, some with professorial knowledge of weed: It has the potential to pull in millions. It’s also overrun by rats, runaway bulls, runaway tractors, and wild pigs, all of them out for blood. Additionally out for blood are the rippers who target the outlaw farm, locking Frankie in a barrel. But the story really heats up when JJ, Fizz’s ex-partner, returns for revenge. Sourland, which Delgado Dixon dedicates to “the farm,” is full of sinewy desire, deception, shootouts and chases, and characters you might meet in a Delillo novel. Atmospheric, with an eye for people, it reads like no other crime novel. 

Perverts by Mac Crane (July 7)

 “We were in love, and we were perverts, and for a while we didn’t have to think about anything else,” Crane writes in their title story. They go on to say that actually, they were not perverts at all, but “human proof of boldness, of desire, of terror.” In 2026, this reads like queer manifesto. These 17 stories are not about perverts, but perversion—resisting boundaries. “Smear the Queers”—told in the sly, wounded voice familiar to queers everywhere—is about a boutique service that allows straight people to hunt queers in role-playing scenarios that become all too real. Other titles include “Alex Adams, the Dyke Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” “Topping is Not for the Grief Stricken,” and “Have No Records of Your Ass.” There are failed messiahs, sex parties, seashell porn, blackmail, wealth gaps, hatchlings, rebellious Futurewives, excellent descriptions of hugs and how we fail each other, and so, so much disappointment. Parenthood resembles nothing you’ve thought up before. Even as these stories demand more, more, more, they point to an absence, and everything is distraction from “spooky” pain. Perverts is in conversation with writers like Allegra Hyde and Lydi Conklin; everyone is on their worst behavior. We know we’re at the right party.

Chosen Family by Madeleine Gray (July 14)

Coming hot off of her debut novel, Green Dot, Madeleine Gray offers up a witty and delicious lesbian coming-of-age story. Two best friends who have known each other since high school and do not in any way feel a thing for each other (wink wink) decide to have a baby together in the spirit of queer utopianism. Eve and Nell first meet at an all-girls school in Sydney in 2007, where they are plagued by mean girls, The OC, and having to mask queerness in adolescence. As their families of origins having woefully failed them, they are propelled towards both queer interdependence and emotional isolationism. After a painful falling out, one that asks us how any of us made it through high school, the two reconnect in college, where they find selfhood, art, and chosen family. Plenty of U-Haul lesbian jokes abound in these pages, plus a toying with gay male stereotypes that hints at being in-crowd while reckoning with heteronormativity. (“Straight people raw dog while queers have to actively family plan.”) The book is so funny (and fun!), the quips finally for us, not at us. Gray shows us that chosen family is really about the connections that carry us through our lives.

Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection by Samantha Paige Rosen (July 14)

In an era when what we mean by home is constantly shifting—thanks to Covid, ongoing economic crises that make house ownership untenable, private catastrophes—Living, Together celebrates every queer expression of cohabitation. At age 29, Samantha Paige Rosen moved in with her parents, found she loved being part of an intergenerational household, and got her curious about all of the other joyful, creative ways people live in community. In Living, Together, more than 20 writers and activists share how they make new, collaborative spaces. Contributors range from their twenties to their nineties, in varying genders, races, classes, mobilities. The work is structured in three thematic sections spanning from biological and chosen families, to collectives arising from shared ideologies, to radical departures from communal living. Debutiful’s Adam Vitcavage writes about living with his sister as adults—watching Drag Race, arguing over which Thai spot is best—and departing as friends. Sarah Thankam Matthews, relaying the mutual-aid organization she initiated during the pandemic, talks about “the we of Bed-Stuy Strong.” Kristen Arnett gets married and, touchingly reflecting on the power of chosen family, realizes she doesn’t have to do it all on her own. 

Dooneen by Keith Ridgway (July 21)

Go down the rabbit hole, wind up in Dublin. In this alternate near-future Ireland, the sidewalks move. There are spinners and clickers . . . whatever that is . . . and the city is hot with protest. The government stalks the streets in shadow, and everywhere is “the fucking noise of the fucking progress.” Mew steps through a portal that connects London to home, where he is to speak at a literary conference—but nothing goes straight in Ridgway’s imagination. Mew writes to his beloved, whom he aches to see again, and the novel becomes an unrequited epistolary love story. One black night, he gets (eagerly) claimed by the insurgency. Dooneen is full of absurdist tautologies, counterfactuals, mysterious figures, mysterious horses, songs sung, parents disappointed, gay soldiers, ripped trousers, boy ghosts, and clandestine missions through city tunnels. Ridgway draws on The Troubles without ever quite naming them, and speaks to ones we have yet to face. To Americans, the book will read all too close, with extrajudicial killings and housing disparities, but it is also very funny, spry, reminding us that the Irish are the best at getting through periods of absolute intolerance. For fans of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Anna Burn’s Milkman, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and resistance even when it’s futile. 

The Most Anticipated Queer Books of Spring 2026

Don’t forget to check out the following titles, published January through April 2026!

Genderqueer Menopause by Lasara Firefox Allen (Jan 13)

This groundbreaking handbook, written by a genderqueer doula and accredited menopause coach, offers tools, insights, and solidarity for queer individuals going through menopause. Author Lasara Firefox Allen foregrounds perspectives that have been sidelined and systemically erased in mainstream medical care. They identify resources that are both genderqueer and binary-gender-oriented, integrate quotes from real people they have surveyed, and include an appendix for health practitioners. Firefox Allen centers queer experience, affirming care, and community support, moving beyond heteronormative conceptions of menopause to empower, relieve, and demystify. 

Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno (Jan 20)

In this gothic novel dedicated to Faliveno’s parents, a woman fleeing her own life escapes New York for her family’s cabin in rural Wisconsin, leaving behind a boyfriend, an apartment in Brooklyn, and a job as an editor. After almost a year of sobriety, Sam, grappling with her family’s history with alcoholism—and her mother’s disappearance into the nearby woods—begins to drink again. The book is full of shadows and longing, a prolonged sense of uncertainty about where the danger lies. There are poison plants, conversations with a doe, and flirtations with a cute local named Gina. Faliveno’s crisp prose evokes an ambiguous haunting that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has been through it: “It’s like I’m turning into something else . . . like something is opening up, or making its way out.” This “butch Black Swan” captivated Austin Carter at Pocket Books Shop, the queer-feminist indie bookstore owned by three best friends (with a new second Lancaster, PA location!)

Two Women Living Together by Kim Hana & Hwang Sunwoo, translated by Gene Png (Jan 20)

Two Women Living Together is not a queer book—technically. Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo use the language “cohabitants” to define their relationship, and the best-selling Korean memoir clearly casts the two as women who value their independence. After turning forty and being confronted by the loneliness of living alone, the two move in together. Still, there is undeniable intimacy in these pages: their four beloved cats, shared playlists and guilty pleasures, the little noticings of habits. During a hospital stay, Hana stays by Sunwoo’s side. One section is titled: “If We Broke Up.” In switchback chapters, Hana and Sunwoo create a new domestic sphere that is undefined by patriarchy and social expectation. Sly, subtly subversive, a wonderful companion, Two Women Living Together is anything but straight. 

Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg (Jan 20)

For seven days, across seven chapters, Dell Danvers live-streams her life for the internet, eating hotter and hotter peppers for cash donations. This self-exploitation might sound all too familiar, and at best, Dell is “a morally gray heroine” who would undoubtedly be played by Natasha Lyonne. (Even Torenberg admits she probably wouldn’t like her protagonist in real life!) Nevertheless, like her followers on Live Cast, we readers are eager to know if Dell will do it: will she eat the ghost pepper. Like Dell, we anxiously count every coin that passes through her hands—we’ve seen her paycheck ($0) and her apartment (formerly a closet, no bathroom); most of all, Dell has allowed us a glimpse into her pain, how she is grieving for her comatose sister and reaching for the impossible. Funny, chatty, weird, and at times unexpectedly poignant. You can devour Just Watch Me in one gulp, but, like a habanero, it’ll be sitting with you for hours. 

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson (Jan 20)

“Stories are there to change what is into what if,” Winterson tells us. This is feminist manifesto, literary criticism, personal narrative, oral storytelling—a book that refuses to be categorized, much like its author. Fans of Winterson know she grew up as a lesbian adopted by ultra-religious Evangelical parents: That is, she was told one story about who she was, and the only way she could be saved was to go out into the world and tell another. Many others. Calling on One Thousand and One Nights’ Shahrazad, who tempts and tricks her would-be executioner, the Sultan Shahryar, Winterson tells us tales to keep us on the hook, all while confronting issues like capitalism and consumerism, climate change, and “everything-bagel liberalism.” In One Aladdin Two Lamps, Winterson reminds us that stories are a way to reshape our world, by which she means: our future. 

On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield (Jan 27)

Yah Yah Scholfield’s simmering debut is arriving hot off the heels of her selection for The Best American Short Stories 2025. The book follows Jude, who flees her childhood home and abusive mother, finding solace in a house whose dark history is immediately familiar to her. Developing a solidarity with the spirits of the house, Jude becomes a healer, although the darkness of her past continues to lurk in the shadows. When a mysterious, alluring woman arrives at the house, Jude must come to terms with her desire, demons, and the legacy of violence within herself and the walls of the house.

Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack (Feb 10)

The incomparable Catherine Lacey calls Murder Bimbo “Gone Girl for the Luigi Mangioni era.” A sex worker is recruited to become an assassin at the hands of the US government—and on page one, she’s running for her life. We are seduced by this unreliable queer narrator, caught up in her ex and writing late-night emails about justice and a man named Meat Neck! Propulsive, electric, Murder Bimbo conceals and reveals and conceals again, as any disruptive queer act must. The political assassination at the heart of the book is eerily resonant, though the novel was written before Charlie Kirk was killed. Rebecca Novack, who has a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard divinity school, plays with our readerly expectations about motive, audience, authorship, and the genre of true crime. 

Last Seen by Christopher Castellani (Feb 17)

Last Seen, a speculative literary thriller, follows four young men—Caleb, Steven, Matthew, and Leo—each of whom disappeared between 2007 and 2020, and whose bodies were later found in icy rivers across the United States. The book alludes to the true-crime theory proposed by retired NYPD detectives, suggesting the series of deaths might be linked murders rather than accidental drownings. Many people are convinced the boys are victims of the Smiley Face Killers, an insidious group targeting white, college-aged men who have been drinking. Castellani’s writing tenderly captures the voice of the four boys, and all they’ve lost, as they watch over their loved ones in death: “I am one of those boys they keep finding in the river . . . Caleb Aldrich who was too beautiful to live.” An exploration of grief, masculinity, and homecoming, Victor LaValle calls it “a ghost story, an elegy, a love letter to young men who go missing without a trace.”

So Old, So Young by Grant Ginder (Feb 17)

What’s more queer than following a group of friends to five parties over twenty years? In this tragicomedy full of wit, wisdom, and sizzling dialogue, Ginder shows us how tender and complicated chosen family can be. Six friends try to find each other as they drift apart. Pick the hard adult thing: unrequited love, bad taste in men, job loss, infidelity, binges, unrealized potential. “While this is a distinctly millennial set of characters, their stories of heartache and searching is a universal one,” says Claire Benedict of Bear Pond Books, Montpelier, VT. Ginder’s fourth book, follows Honestly, We Meant Well and The People We Hate at the Wedding, which was adapted into a major motion picture starring Allison Janney and Kristen Bell. Reading it, one realizes that nostalgia is a decidedly queer emotion. At heart, it’s about the little fights between friends that become great distances to travel, and the ways we find our way back to one another. 

Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (Feb 17)

It’s 1970s San Francisco, and nineteen-year-old Celia Dent demands her freedom from her domineering husband. After Vivienne Bianco is murdered at the phone company where Celia works “the elephant graveyard of jobs,” she begins to seek “revolutionary changes . . . violent changes, even.” Celia buys a knife, she fires a gun, she seeks real love. “We can take forever to arrive at the most obvious truths about ourselves, because the will to conform is mighty in us, and the fear of somebody find out we’re not normal is a mighty fear.” This dark, unconventional comedy is quirky, surprising, and sharp!

Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes (Feb 17)

In her introduction to this new edition of Ladies Almanack, Sarah Schulman tells us, “No one loves the lesbians as much as a lesbian in love.” The Ladies Almanack proves that lesbians have always been sly, pissed off, underpaid, but also funny and innovative. The work is a roman à clef about the vibrant lesbian expatriate community in 1920s Paris, focusing on Natalie Clifford Barney’s salon. The mock almanac celebrates and only thinly veils the real people at the heart of the work, including Thelma Wood, Djuna Barnes’s impossible, often drunk, charismatic lover (who apparently also seduced Edna St. Vincent Millay). This is all at once high queer court, social satire, love letter, and flirty literary gossip written in a pastiche of Restoration literature that asserts, “We don’t feel about men the way they feel about themselves.” Reissued by Dalkey Archive Press nearly a hundred years after it was re-written, the work now comes complete with Elizabethan-style woodcut illustrations. Shoshana Bockol at The Head & The Hand bookstore in Philly put this one at the top of her list. She says, “This is the one I’m most excited for!”

Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg (March 3)

Night Night Fawn is undoubtedly the Marxist, trans, comedic dystopia we need in 2026. Initially conceived as nonfiction, Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel subverts form to become an inherently transgressive unauthorized fictional “memoir” that reads as hysterical manifesto. Barbara Rosenberg, a character modeled loosely on Rosenberg’s own mother, is a terminally ill Jewish “yenta.” High on opioids, looking back at her origins in post-war New York—where she grew up with aspirations to be a wealthy Jew—Barbara wonders where she went wrong with her estranged trans son and her ex best friend. As Barbara takes an “unrepentant account of all her failures,” she seeks to understand how her child ended up becoming her greatest fear—queer, unrecognizable, anti-capitalist, manly. As with Rosenberg’s first book Confessions of the Fox, the prose crackles. 

Whidbey by T Kira Madden (March 10)

I’ve been eagerly awaiting this title since I heard T Kira Madden read from her manuscript at the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. The book opens with Kira’s letter to the reader, explaining that this revenge story is fiction but also revealing just how much she had to live through. Whidbey, in many ways, is unfinished business for Madden, who wrote about her assailant in “Feels of Love” in the memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. Her debut novel begins on a boat to an island: A woman running from the man who abused her as a child, a chance meeting with a stranger who promises to kill him—and then, days later, the murder. But in Madden’s hands, this is so much more than a noir story. The sentences are exquisite. The novel gives voice to survivors of sexual abuse and rape, claiming power not only from assailants, but from a broken justice system and the media. Madden, unflinching as ever, even drops us into the perspective of the mother of the convicted sex offender. 

A Lady for All Seasons by TJ Alexander (March 10)

From the Lambda Literary Award finalist comes the sequel to A Gentleman’s Gentleman, named one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of 2025. It’s 1820s London, and the cunning Verbena Montrose at the heart of this queer Regency romance tricks her newly rich best friend Etienne into marrying her. This is a comedy of errors full of yearning and hijinks and genderfluid lovers. You can expect scheming, gossip, a lavender wedding, genderplay, and even a cameo by Lord Byron. Just in time to pre-order from BookWoman for Valentine’s Day, you fans of trans historical romances! 

Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran (March 10)

This lesbian gothic horror set in 1928 at the “pash” Briarley School for Girls is set in the long boarding-school tradition of young people being forced to rely on no one but themselves. The rules are different, the food is terrible, the mood is always brooding. Everybody is always watching, but nobody sees the two girls kissing on the grounds. Emily Locke, who is “not good at discerning the contours of what to be afraid of” is in her final year when her best friend falls mysteriously to her death. Violet, a cunning beauty envied by students and teachers alike, is the first to die, but certainly not the last. This lesbian phantasmagoria has everything: silk gloves, sour milk, clandestine visits to mystics, potentially evil yet sexy French teachers. It brings to mind Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar, Tana French’s The Secret Place, and even the salty teen-girl quips of Christine Schutt’s All Souls. This one was a favorite of Emerson at The Head & Hand bookstore.

Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall (March 12)

Described by Sarah Gailey as “Moby Dick meets Treasure Planet by way of Fleabag,” Hell’s Heart is a sapphic journey through the depths of space and human desire. Earth is abandoned and its remaining inhabitants have taken to the stars, where they survive by harvesting spermaceti, a hallucinogenic fuel produced by massive whale-like creatures. Society has deteriorated into a desolate landscape of corporate accumulation and morally bankrupt religious institutions. With no other options, the narrator—called “I”—joins a voyage hunting for spermaceti, and quickly becomes infatuated with the ship’s female captain, “A.” As the hunt progresses and the captain’s delusions mount, the narrator’s grasp on reality and her sense of self is thrown into question.

My Lover, the Rabbi by Wayne Koestenbaum (March 17)

In this much anticipated novel, nearly two decades after he published his first, Wayne Koestenbaum performs for us the inexhaustible gaze of the lover. “All I ever wanted,” our speaker says of the rabbi, “was to be smothered by his nakedness, to be walled off from the world by the sheer interfering magnitude of his flesh . . . between my body and the rest of existence.” This is a gay, gay book, often told in poetic, staccato chapters, with some sentences going on for pages. One conversation about “the best dermatologist” gets interrupted by “quaint” fellatio and an allusion to Odysseus, ending many lines later in a recommendation to go to Charlottesville. Fans of Garth Greenwell will delight in Koestenbaum’s demonstration of the sublime against corporeal obsession, play, need, humiliation, grief, desire, camp, refusal to engage in any heteronormative norms. 

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro (April 7)

From the incomparable New Directions comes a gorgeous work of collective witness set against an urban landscape. Giada Scodellaro, whose debut Some of Them Will Carry Me was listed by The New Yorker as one of its best books in 2022, archives Black women’s experiences in this poet’s novel. Scodellaro writes, “The community is made up of predominantly black people . . . it’s a place we’ve created for ourselves, okay? Or a place we were forced into and have reimagined.” Conjuring the spirit of Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Ruins, Child weaves folklore, botany and the body—always the body. One chapter is entitled “groin,” another, “sole of the foot.” Ruins, Child is a surrealist, cinematic telling with an eye towards the future. 

Honey in the Wound by Jiyoung Han (April 7)

Set in the 20^th century during the Japanese occupation of Korea, this multi-generational, historical novel follows a family of women with astonishing gifts: one who disappears and returns a tigress, one who can force a liar to speak the truth, one who can see into dreams. The work centers on Young-ja, who infuses food with her emotions, and ultimately uses that power to resist colonialism. In 1931, after Japanese soldiers crush her family’s defiance against the Empire, Young-Ja is taken by a Korean resistance fighter to Manchuria, where she joins a clandestine world of teahouse spies. Han’s writing is lush and moving, and the work is both inventive and deeply researched—sometimes reading as fable, other times as historical account or ancestral narrative. Kirkus describes this stunning debut as “a revelatory work of harrowing fiction . . . [that] validates the hidden powers of ‘powerless’ women.”

Surrender by Jennifer Acker (April 14)

Jennifer Acker’s Surrender is a tale of reinvention, baby goats, and grown up teenage love. After decades of city life, 47-year-old Lucy returns to her childhood home in rural Massachusetts to take over her father’s farm. Almost immediately, challenges arise: Lucy’s lack of experience is compounded by loss and the worsening health of her husband. Lucy finds a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Sandy, her childhood companion-turned-more-than-a-friend, but Sandy’s presence at the farm also draws the attention of her employers, a solar energy company. Exploring grief, desire, and the second adolescence of middle age, Surrender is a must-read of 2026.

Harmless by Miranda Shulman (April 14)

Two years after the fact, Bea is still reeling from the death of her twin sister, Audrey. Where Bea is brusque, driven, and deeply lonely, Audrey was bright and extroverted, and her absence has become a ruling force. Now living in Brooklyn, Bea throws herself into an old dream she shared with Audrey: to start a dog kennel. When old friendships rekindle, desires spark, and the lingering weight of Audrey’s death threatens to sink Bea’s budding dream, she must come to terms not only with the loss, but with the secrets it has brought to the surface.

Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg (April 28)

It’s easy to see why the short story is Emma Copley Eisenberg’s first love, even as Fat Swim follows the author’s wildly successful debut novel and memoir. Eisenberg treats her characters with such tenderness, whether it’s young Alice at the pool (or grown-up Alice at camp), or Jules, the trans assistant to the famous elderly gay writer, or Mama, trying hard to migrate to her queer child’s elastic definition of love. Or, for that matter, any minor character that, in Eisenberg’s loving gaze, is celebrated in all their fulness. The collection resists the erasure of fat bodies in American letters, mostly by giving us all too rare portraits of pleasure and desire. Grace Paley is in these pages, as is summer, and ice cream, and Ray’s Birthday Bar, and refusing to be defined in binary terms. 

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