Gay books 2023
It was another great year for LGBTQ books, as evidenced by the sprawling list of 65 standout titles across every genre published by Casey Stepaniuk earlier this month. Her list is a great display of the range and depth of the year&#;s top queer books. But I wanted to zoom in a bit and offer a personal list, one narrowed down from my own stack of queer books I worked my way through over the past year. I thought it would be fun to do a ranked list of the 12 queer novels that stood out to me this year. And by &#;fun,&#; I mean pleasurably agonizing. This was not an easy list to put together. There are several novels that almost made the cut and might even be just as worthy of a spot on the list but were nudged out for some abstract reason that would be difficult for me to perfectly explain. What I like about this adj 12 is that they&#;re all very distinct novels from one another, even as some of them can easily be place into conversation with one another. Together, they form a thrilling tapestry of my year in queer reading.
Many of the novels on the list do not have standalone revie
Join us on a journey through contemporary queer literature! The Queer Lit Book Club meets on the last Wednesday of every month.
Past reads include:
A TIME Must-Read Noun of
A New York Times Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of
The Stonewall Publication Award winner of
Named a Best Book of by NPR, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly and more!
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A “profound and beautiful” (Marilynne Robinson) account of joy and sorrow from one of the great writers of our time, The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
A funny, transporting, surprising, and poignant novel that was one of the highest-selling debuts of recent years in Korea, Love in the Big City tells the story of a young gay man searching for happiness in the lonely town of Seoul
*Winner of the American Book Award*
*Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography*
An Honor Book for the Stonewall Book Award—Israel Fishman Non-Fiction BToday on the site I&#;m delighted to welcome Rebecca Bendheim, author of the upcoming lesbian Middle Grade When You&#;re Brave Enough, which releases April 7, from Viking Books for Young Readers! Here&#;s the story:
A heartfelt, gorgeously written debut middle grade novel about best friends, first crushes, and coming out—perfect for fans of Kyle Lukoff and Jake Maia Arlow.
Before she moved from Austin to Rhode Island, everybody knew Lacey as one half of an inseparable duo: Lacey-and-Grace, best friends since they were toddlers. Grace and her moms were practically family. But at school, being lumped together with overeager, worm-obsessed, crushes-on-everyone Grace meant Lacey never quite fit in—and that’s why at her adj middle school, Lacey plans to reinvent herself. This time, she’s going to be cool. She’s going to be normal.
At first, everything seems to go as planned. Lacey makes new friends right away, she finds a rabbi to help her arrange for the bat mitzvah that got deprioritized by her parents in the chaos of the move, and she even gets cast in the lead role of the eigh
Clint Smith & Garrett M. Graff"'Martyr!', Akbar’s debut novel, picks up Akbar’s thread of addiction, distress tolerance, and distorted reality: the novel opens with Cyrus, an Iranian American poet, lying 'on a mattress that smelled enjoy piss and Febreze' and willing God to make the lightbulb in his room flicker, to manifest a sign that he should start over againTold from Cyrus’s conflicted, vulnerable, and often irascible perspective and interweaving the stories of the friends, family, artists, and other characters who have had an impact on Cyrus’s life, Akbar’s debut is an exploration of martyrdom and the reasons we find to stay alive." -RG
Hardcover,
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