A confession: I very nearly quit putting this list together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout the year I keep a running list, adding new names whenever I learn about an upcoming queer book\u2014from Tweets, publicist pitches, endless NetGalley scrolls\u2014and I usually start writing the blurbs for each book a few months before the list is due. Let me also add that, because I am a novelist myself, someone who works very hard to put words on the page in a good-enough order for someone to respond to them, I try and read at least a little of each book featured. And here\u2019s an incredible truth that\u2019s both deeply satisfying and makes my job surprisingly difficult: there are more and more queer books published every year. There was a time when I could complete a list like this in an afternoon; I was lucky to find a dozen explicitly queer titles. Now there\u2019s a pretty solid chance I miss a good number of them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In mid-December\u2014at the half-way point, and a couple days after my birthday\u2014I looked at the list, halfway done then, and thought, \u201cThere\u2019s no way I can do this. There\u2019s no way I can finish putting together this list in a way that does each book justice.\u201d Partly it was the volume, yes, and partly it was the ambient dread of being alive in 2023. Partly it was also because of the lingering emotional hangover from publishing my debut novel and the approaching completion of my second\u2014experiences that have left me excited, enervated, vulnerable, and protective of my own mental health. Partly I\u2019ve become wary\u2014weary?\u2014of continuing to delineate LGBTQ stories from cis-straight ones, as if our identity is a genre, as if I\u2019m daring hetero readers to overlook these books because of who the protagonists and authors choose to fuck. Partly\u2014maybe superficially\u2014I felt a crippling nihilism at the idea of putting so much time into this list only to have to promote it on the hollowed-out shell of an app whose home screen now serves as a violent reminder of how much we\u2019ve lost at the whims of idiotic wannabe despots. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here\u2019s how I finally finished this list: I read all the other ones. I went through most of the \u201cbest of\u201d lists from last year, the \u201canticipated\u201d lists for this one. And while we\u2019re thrown a couple bones every now and then, given some gestures at progressive appeasement, our stories are still routinely passed over. Queer culture\u2014our fashion, our humor, our art\u2014has always moved everyone forward, toward a better, freer, more-fun world; we are and have been the tide that lifts, so our stories deserve not only to be included but centered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here are 42 works of literature that will lift us all this year\u2014bold new books by Judith Butler, Carlos Maurice Ruffin, Brontez Purnell, Lucas Rijneveld, Garrard Conley, R.O. Kwon, and Miranda July; and auspicious debuts from Daniel Lefferts, Emma Copley Eisenberg, and Ursula Villarreal-Moura.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tom is an architect in his sixties, constructing what he hopes will be his “masterpiece.” But his longtime boyfriend has recently broken up with him, and both his sister and his niece\u2014the latter of whom is the center of his life\u2014are soliciting his help in solving crises of their own. Less<\/em> author Andrew Sean Greer says McCauley’s “poignant, joyous, explosive” latest is one to cherish: “A book that loves you back. What more could you want, my gosh? Read it!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grieving the dual losses of both her father and the end of her first queer relationship, Shiva Margolin, a student of Jewish folklore, embarks on a sojourn to Poland, her family’s ancestral homeland. Danielle Evans calls Fruchter’s debut “a gorgeous and full-hearted exploration of inheritance, grief, desire, and connection, at once a story about what it means to go looking for the ghosts we always knew were there and what it means to be in the right place to encounter the unexpected things we didn\u2019t know we were waiting for.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n The newest from French-Canadian cartoonist Delporte is a beautiful, moving look at coming out later in life, a diary-style graphic memoir about the queer liberation of both the body and mind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n How To Wrestle a Girl<\/a><\/em>, Blackburn’s 2021 story collection, was a revelation, barbed and bold. She writes so well about the weirdness of grief and the grief of being weird. Her new novel centers on a successful speculative fiction author who discovers her brother dead by suicide and carries on pretending he’s still alive, a reality-shattering charade with far-reaching consequences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ordorica, a poet, weaves a tapestry of love in loss in his fiction debut, a tenderhearted coming-of-age story about a closeted college student who falls in love with his also-closeted roommate. Fellow poet Eduardo C. Corral calls the novel \u201cmajestic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bestselling author of BookTok fave Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead<\/em><\/a> returns with a novel about a partially deaf lesbian obsessed with black holes and true crime podcasts struggling to balance new connections\u2014both with her formerly estranged half-sisters and her first serious relationship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Imagine a female-fronted version of Call Me by Your Name<\/a><\/em> told from Oliver\u2019s point of view and set on a Greek island and you\u2019ll get something like Johansson\u2019s award-winning novel. Translated from the Swedish, it follows a thirtysomething woman to Ermoupoli as she becomes entangled in a complex relationship between an elegant older artist and her teenage daughter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Waidner’s last novel, the Kafkaesque Sterling Karat Gold<\/a><\/em>, won the prestigious Goldsmiths Prize, and their latest surreal romp is about an author who wins a prestigious book prize. The catch? The trophy and monetary award are difficult to obtain, possibly impossible, and the quest for it sends the author back and forth through time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The titular siblings of Reilly’s charming debut are lovelorn flatmates in New Zealand, navigating their own queer heartbreaks and learning what their place in the world is\u2014both as individuals and as members of a multiracial family. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Alistair McCabe, a young gay college student from the Rust Belt, dreams of a career in high finance, a fantasy turned nightmare when he finds himself entangled with an enigmatic billionaire whose nefarious ambition puts Alistair\u2019s life at risk. Lefferts\u2019s debut, an astute examination the complex intersection of money and intimacy, traces Alistair\u2019s descent alongside the dissolution of the relationship between his paramours, an artistic couple with their own financial and existential woes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The author of last year\u2019s Highsmithian heist dramedy, Confidence<\/a><\/em>, returns with a delirious, thrilling short fiction collection, including one story about a lonely college dropout who reinvents herself as a boom operator for porn shoots, and another about a Twitch streamer whose life is upended by the odd behavior of her best friend and the reply guy fan who\u2019s come to declare his love. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Often it’s easier to think and write about others’ lives, easier to dig for the truth in someone else’s story than it is to search for one’s own. Such as it had been for Sante, an acclaimed chronicler of iconoclastic queer life who found it difficult to confront her own identity, a confrontation made even more difficult by society’s discouragement of gender fluidity. Sante’s achingly poignant memoir charts her late-in-life transition, the shock and euphoria of self-recognition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 100 Boyfriends<\/a><\/em> was a bawdy, brutal, and beautifully raw chronicle of queer Black life, and Purnell’s follow-up, a memoir-in-verse, promises even more of what made that book a must-read. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When I was an editor at O Magazine<\/em>, I had the pleasure and privilege of publishing the dizzyingly good short story upon which this novel is based. It centers on a woman named Celine who is one of the sole remaining umbrella makers in a world in which water (and rain) has become a rare commodity only available to the uber-wealthy. For such a short story, the world Foster built already felt expansive, and I’m excited to see it expanded further. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The always-inventive author of the Pen\/Faulkner finalist We Cast a Shadow<\/a><\/em> returns with an electrifying work of historical fiction centered on a gutsy former slave girl who joins a clandestine band of female spies working to undermine the Confederacy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hera, the droll and extremely self-aware narrator of Gray’s debut, knows falling for a married man twice her age is an ill-fated cliche. And yet. Hera, who has only ever slept with women, works as a news outlet’s comment moderator, and it’s in the chilly, subterranean-seeming office she meets Arthur, a journalist who throws into disarray who she believes she is and who she wants to be. It’s Conversations with Friends<\/a><\/em> meets Several People Are Typing<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n From the author of The Discomfort of Evening<\/a><\/em>, the first Dutch book to win the International Book Prize, comes a queer and profane take on the Lolita archetype, following a pervy veternarian who becomes infatuated with a fourteen-year-old daughter of a local farmer\u2014a girl who dreams of inhabiting a boy\u2019s body. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Set amid the squalor and splendor of New York media, Lawrence\u2019s debut follows Lily, a staff writer at a glossy fashion magazine who feels stalled both personally and professionally. Enter Billie, a cosmetics mogul who wants to mentor Lily\u2026mostly from the distance of a phone screen. But what transpires in the digital realm seeps into real life until it\u2019s all but impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. <\/p>\n\n\n\n LaPointe follows up her award-winning memoir Red Paint<\/a> <\/em>with a collection of essays that explore the challenges and triumphs of proudly embracing a queer indigenous identity in the United States today, drawing on both personal experiences and the anthropological work of her great-grandmother. \u201cSasha taq\u02b7\u0161\u0259blu LaPointe\u2019s essays in Thunder Song are loud, bold, and startlingly majestic,\u201d says Night of the Living Rez<\/a><\/em> author Morgan Talty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Set in sixteenth century Scotland, Carr\u2019s fascinating work of historical fiction portrays the year-long imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots in a remote loch-surrounded castle, her only company a pair of inconspicuous-seeming chambermaids. Together, these three women\u2014and later, a fourth, Mary\u2019s lady-in-waiting\u2014plot a daring path to freedom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you haven\u2019t read Honor Girl<\/em>, Thrash\u2019s heartrending graphic memoir about queer summer camp love, then stop reading this and pick up a copy. Here, the author makes her first foray into prose, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of the 1990s Satanic Panic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s hard to imagine a more important moment for a new Judith Butler book, though their mountain-moving work has always and forever been significant and necessary. Here, Butler examines how authoritarians tie together and blame ideas like \u201cgender theory\u201d and \u201ccritical race theory\u201d for the disorienting fear people have about the future of their ways of life, addressing what has become the cornerstone of conservative politics and culture wars: the notion that the very concept of gender\u2014and the questioning of that concept\u2014is a denial of nature and danger to civilization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of you might know Conley as the bestselling memoirist and activist behind Boy Erased<\/a><\/em>, a beautifully written and important book about survival and identity and a complicated family. Get ready now for Conley the novelist. His full-length fiction debut is a lush, epic love story set in Puritan New England. Every one of his sentences is a heaven-sent spectacle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In this debut novel, Tatum Vega, living a fulfilling life in Chile with her partner Vera, finds her past resurfacing when a reporter contacts her about allegations of abuse against the renowned author M. Dom\u00ednguez, with whom she had an incredibly complicated relationship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n How can it be true that the world we inhabit so often feels both plagued by stasis and altered by constant, irreversible transformation? And what does this mean for individuals hoping to find and understand their own identities? These are the big questions of fiction, questions Bulling illustrates in this graphic novel about a couple navigating intimacy and transition in an environment ablaze from climate change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Higgins’s visceral and vivacious debut is about a young, anxiety-ridden, compellingly prickly lawyer who becomes the lover of a married lesbian couple, an arrangement that rearranges her sense of self and her place in the world. I got the chance to blurb this one early, but I’m just going to co-sign Halle Butler\u2019s blurb here: “Sometimes I could not believe how easily this book moved from gross-out sadism into genuine sympathy. Totally surprising, totally compelling.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n An early contender for best title\/cover combo. An award-winning playwright makes her prose debut with this collection of short stories, including one in which a lesbian\u2019s wife becomes mysteriously pregnant, and another about an ambitious sexbot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I first came upon Larson\u2019s work in the queer horror anthology It Came from the Closet<\/a><\/em>, in which he wrote about how John Carpenter\u2019s Halloween<\/em>\u2014about a boy triggered by heterosexual desire becoming a monstrous masked voyeur\u2014was actually a gay coming out story. I was thrilled, then, to discover the author\u2019s upcoming memoir is a sequel of sorts, exploring how terror on screen sometimes mirrors the terror of queer interiority. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In this graphic novel from the author-illustrator of This is How I Disappear<\/a><\/em>, a French woman who has moved to Montreal to be with her boyfriend begins to uncover dark truths about his past, which forces her to confront who he might be\u2014and who she could become without him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Two summers ago, at the Sewanee Writers Conference, I had the chance to hear Lilly Dancyger read part of an early version of this book, and I was totally stunned. As soon as the reading was over, I started counting down the days until I\u2014and everyone else\u2014could read the whole thing. And now here it is: a soul-stirring compilation of essays about how our earliest intimacies\u2014sisterly, friendly\u2014so often resemble the intensity of romance, how the delineations between different kinds of relationships can blur, how if and when those relationships change or end it can feel like the most devastating heartbreak. <\/p>\n\n\n\n An early contender for Best Premise: when Myriam and Alison fall in love at a local punk show, their relationship begins to play out as different hypotheticals in different realities. What if the two of them became bestselling lifestyle celesbians? What if they embraced motherhood upon finding an abandoned baby in alley? What if one was a CEO and the other was her lowly employee? <\/p>\n\n\n\n For me, July\u2019s 2007 short story collection No One Belongs Here More than You<\/em> was a formative reading experience, a book about weirdo women that fundamentally altered my ideas of what kinds of stories were possible\u2014something Sally Rooney and I have in common<\/a>. In her second novel, July brings her singular brand of sardonic melancholia and wide-eyed wisdom to bear on this tale of a semi-famous middle-aged artist who decides to take a left turn from the left turn she had already planned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Told through several one-sided telephone conversations between protagonist Luciana and her sister Mari, Mogollon’s inventive debut novel is a unique coming of age story about uncovering family secrets and the secrets of the self. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n Parsons’s first book, the wonderful story collection Black Light<\/a><\/em>, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and brimmed with world-weary wit, queer yearning, and Hempel-esque sentences so deftly crafted. Her first novel is just as much a marvel, following a horny housewife and young mother who desperately needs time away for and from herself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Like the landscape depicted within, Bossiere\u2019s memoir about growing up genderfluid in a Tucson trailer park and navigating the challenges of identity in the American Southwest promises to be both raw and beautiful. Fairest<\/a><\/em> author Meredith Talusan likens the book to This Boy\u2019s Life<\/a><\/em>, \u201can indelible portrait of American boyhood that is at once typical and extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few months ago, novelist R.O. Kwon made waves when she read aloud an excerpt from her long-awaited follow-up to The Incendiaries<\/a><\/em> at the Vulture Festival; what better enticement to read something than hearing the author herself warn her own parents against reading it? But if you\u2019ve read The Incendiaries<\/em>, then you don\u2019t need any further enticement. Kwon\u2019s prose is unlike any other, sensuous and sumptuous and yet razor-sharp. Here, she captures the quick\u2013developing intimacy between a photographer named Jin and a ballerina, to whom Jin spills a family secret\u2014a confession with unforeseen consequences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Few authors possess the infectious mix of light- and heavy-heartedness that makes every Steven Rowley novel an experience; his gift is to make the reader laugh out loud one minute and clutch their chest the next. Following the success of The Celebrants<\/a><\/em> (a Read with Jenna pick), Rowley returns to the world of the eponymous gay uncle of 2021’s The Guncle<\/a><\/em>, this time sending sitcom star Patrick to Lake Como for his brother’s wedding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Grattan\u2019s Pen\/Hemingway-longlisted first novel, 2021\u2019s The Recent East<\/a><\/em>, was sublime, a book about family and the mundane magic and messiness of everyday life. His second follows a Midwesterner-turned-Brooklynite at the dawn of the new millennium who takes a job as a dog walker for the wealthy, a gig that places him in the orbit of an older couple. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the new novel from LA Times<\/em> Book Prize finalist, a \u201clightly\u201d canceled mid-list author named Astrid attempts to resurrect her fledgling career when an influencer options her previous novel for TV. What seems like manna from heaven turns into a source of tension, assuaged only by a cocktail of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes\u2014the Patricia Highsmith special\u2014that also causes blackouts. On top of all that, Astrid just wants to love and be loved\u2014mostly with Ivy, a grad student she meets on Zoom who\u2019s studying lesbian pulp fiction form the 1950s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Maren’s debut Sugar Run<\/em> remains one of my favorite novels of the past five years. She is an astute and indispensable chronicler of Appalachian queerness. Her latest centers on two young women in West Virginia\u2014one a teen mother and the other coming to terms with what it means to be trans in rural America. <\/p>\n\n\n\nYou Only Call When You’re In Trouble<\/a><\/em> by Stephen McCauley (Jan. 9)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
City of Laughter<\/a><\/em> by Temim Fruchter (Jan. 16)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Portrait of a Body<\/a><\/em> by Julie Delporte (Jan. 16)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Dead in Long Beach, California<\/a><\/em> by Venita Blackburn (Jan. 23)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
How We Named the Stars<\/a><\/em> by Andr\u00e9s N. Ordorica (Jan. 30)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Interesting Facts About Space<\/a><\/em> by Emily Austin (Jan. 30)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Antiquity<\/a><\/em> by Hanna Johansson, trans. by Kira Josefsson (Feb. 6)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility<\/a><\/em> by Isabel Waidner (Feb. 6)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Greta & Valdin<\/a><\/em> by Rebecca K Reilly (Feb. 6)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Ways and Means<\/a><\/em> by Daniel Lefferts (Feb. 6)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Bugsy & Other Stories<\/a><\/em> by Rafael Frumkin (Feb. 13)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
I Heard Her Call My Name<\/a><\/em> by Lucy Sante (Feb. 13)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt<\/a><\/em> by Brontez Purnell (Feb. 13)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The Rain Artist<\/a><\/em> by Claire Rudy Foster (Feb. 24)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The American Daughters<\/a><\/em> by Maurice Carlos Ruffin (Feb. 27)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Green Dot<\/a><\/em> by Madeleine Gray (Feb. 27)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
My Heavenly Favorite<\/a><\/em> by Lucas Rijneveld (Mar. 2)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Ellipses<\/a><\/em> by Vanessa Lawrence (Mar. 5)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Thunder Song<\/a><\/em> by Sasha taq\u02b7\u0161\u0259blu LaPointe (Mar. 5)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The Tower<\/a><\/em> by Flora Carr (Mar. 5)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Rainbow Black<\/a><\/em> by Maggie Thrash (Mar. 19)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Who’s Afraid of Gender?<\/a><\/em> by Judith Butler (Mar. 19)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
All The World Beside<\/a><\/em> by Garrard Conley (Mar. 26)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Like Happiness<\/a><\/em> by Ursula Villarreal-Moura (Mar. 26)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Firebugs<\/a><\/em> by Nino Bulling (Apr. 2)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
A Good Happy Girl<\/a><\/em> by Marissa Higgins (Apr. 2)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Women! In! Peril!<\/a><\/em> by Jessie Ren Marshall (Apr. 2)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The Long Hallway<\/a><\/em> by Richard Scott Larson (Apr. 16)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
So Long, Sad Love<\/a><\/em> by Mirion Malle (Apr. 30)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
First Love<\/a><\/em> by Lilly Dancyger (May 7)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
How It Works Out<\/a><\/em> by Myriam LaCroix (May 7)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
All Fours<\/a><\/em> by Miranda July (May 14)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Oye<\/a><\/em> by Melissa Mogollon (May 14)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
We Were the Universe<\/a><\/em> by Kimberly King Parsons (May 14)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Cactus Country<\/a><\/em> by Zo\u00eb Bossiere (May 21)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Exhibit<\/a><\/em> by R. O. Kwon (May 21)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The Guncle Abroad<\/a><\/em> by Steven Rowley (May 21)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
In Tongues<\/a><\/em> by Thomas Grattan (May 21)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Perfume and Pain<\/a><\/em> by Anna Dorn (May 21)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Shae<\/a><\/em> by Mesha Maren (May 21)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n