Resources
From Category: Fiction
Stone Butch Blues
By Leslie Feinberg. This 1993 autobiographical novel is a radical queer classic. Jess, a factory worker in Buffalo in the 1960s and 70s, endures family rejection and police violence as a butch lesbian. Black-market medical treatment allows Jess to live as a man for awhile, affording them some safety but alienating them from their lesbian community and history. The choice to revert to a gender-nonconforming appearance feels authentic yet dangerous. Meanwhile, they're attempting to build solidarity in the workers' movement without exposing themselves to anti-queer attacks, a path that culminates in activism in 1980s New York City alongside their trans femme lover. In keeping with Feinberg's Communist philosophy, the book is free to download from their website, or available from Lulu.com in hard copy for the cost of printing and shipping.
The Best of Michael Swanwick
By Michael Swanwick. This first volume in a career retrospective of the award-winning speculative fiction author spans over 25 years of creative tales about planetary consciousness, time travel, steampunk con artists, dinosaur tourist attractions, and what would be gained and lost if we could re-engineer the human brain.
Enter Ghost
By Isabella Hammad. A troupe of Palestinian actors navigate obstacles to stage an Arabic-language adaptation of Hamlet in the West Bank, angering the Israeli government with their implied critique of an illegitimate ruler. This subtle and thought-provoking literary novel is narrated by Sonia, an expat with British citizenship who returns to her family home to find direction in life when her acting career stalls. Her journey from spectator to activist mirrors Hamlet's emergence from passivity. The story explores what it means to engage in political resistance as an artist in our current moment: Hammad neither overstates the power of protest theater, nor succumbs to crude materialist dismissal of art as a luxury or distraction.
Ojo
By Donald Mengay. In this Joycean novel about queer life in the American West, a young man flees his repressive Cleveland suburb and the ghost of his first lover, to find himself as an artist in a trailer on the edge of the Colorado desert. In the small town of Ojo Caliente, Jake's unlikely family-of-choice comes to include a swinging pastor and his lesbian wife's feminist book club, a construction worker torn between his passion for Jake and his comically fertile wife, and an assertive Latino lover who lives in a household of sharp-tongued trans femmes. This fragile utopia is further riven by the advent of AIDS, yet sensuality and farcical humor leaven the grief. Reading this multivocal, stream-of-consciousness story is like overhearing tantalizing snippets of strangers' conversations on a long train ride. One gradually learns to recognize their voices without context or transitions, and the close attention required to follow the narrative makes its scenes that much more memorable. Ojo is the second book in a planned trilogy that began with The Lede to Our Undoing.
Don’t Know Tough
By Eli Cranor. This heart-wrenching novel limns American toxic masculinity and small-town desperation. Billy Lowe is a small-town Arkansas football star who's only ever known abuse and poverty. His response to everything is violence, but deep down he wants to be a better person. His Coach thinks of himself as a heroic Christian mentor, but when it comes down to it, his savior complex and selfishness get in the way. Coach's daughter is the one who actually understands the meaning of sacrificial compassion. She not only sees Billy's innocent soul but is willing to share his stigmatized and dangerous existence in order to reach him. Their unlikely friendship revolves around literature. If anything can give Billy the self-awareness to break intergenerational patterns, it might be a book.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
By Deesha Philyaw. These bittersweet stories immerse the reader in the lives of Black women struggling against patriarchy and hypocrisy. Mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and secret queer lovers weigh the risks of authentic intimacy versus passing on patterns of repression to the next generation in order to keep them safe. Philyaw's debut book was a National Book Award finalist and a PEN/Faulkner Prize winner.
A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest
By Charlie J. Stephens. This exquisite coming-of-age story depicts a queer youth struggling to survive in the rural Oregon of the 1980s. In the human world, the narrator's life is defined by poverty, instability, and abuse from their mother's boyfriends. But to Smokey, a nonbinary child with a shamanic connection to animals, the human world is not the only or most important one. The adults are tossed around by delusion and impulse, even Smokey's mother, who is genuinely devoted but succumbs to her addiction to dangerous men. The child's view of reality is clear, compassionate, and attuned to beauty. This makes the book hopeful in a strange way, despite the tragedies that pile up.
The Prophets
By Robert Jones Jr. Set on a Mississippi plantation, this devastating yet life-affirming novel centers on the forbidden love of two young Black enslaved men. Multiple perspectives reveal how sexual violation and erotic entanglement give the lie to the brutally maintained separation of Black and white, as well as the complex uses of Christianity to comfort the oppressed while muting their rebellion. Interspersed with the deadly despair of the plantation scenes are hopeful visions of pre-colonizer African cultures that respected queer identities, a legacy that finds expression in the main characters' pure bond.
The Wrestler’s Cruel Study
By Stephen Dobyns. Poet and noir mystery novelist Dobyns branches out into philosophical farce in this ensemble-cast comedy set in early 1990s New York City, where wrestling matches re-enact early Christian disputes about the nature of evil, and anyone's life might unwittingly mimic a Grimm's fairy tale. What holds this capacious story together is the idea that truth is only manifested through artifical personae and constructed narratives—what wrestlers call their Gimmicks—and if there is free will, it consists of noticing your Gimmick and maybe choosing a different one.
White Man’s Grave
By Richard Dooling. This anti-colonialist satire from the early 1990s holds up extraordinarily well. One could describe it as a talkback to Heart of Darkness combined with Tom Wolfe's style of exaggerated depictions of American folly and greed. When a Peace Corps volunteer goes missing in the jungle of an unnamed West African country, his naive Midwestern best friend embarks on a quest to rescue him, blundering dangerously and ridiculously into a web of intrigue involving witchcraft, foreign-backed coups, and misdirected international aid. Meanwhile, the missing man's father, a ruthless bankruptcy lawyer, starts to fear that he's been hexed...and that maybe he deserves it.
The Reformatory
By Tananarive Due. This gripping ghost story was inspired by a real-life ancestor of the author's, who died in a reformatory in the Jim Crow South. "Haints" are the least of Robbie Stephens' problems when he's sent to a sadistic juvenile prison for a trumped-up offense against a white boy in the rural Florida of 1950. The town's white power brokers want to use him as a pawn to bring his father out of hiding; Klansmen and police alike are gunning for Robert Senior because of his work organizing millworkers and registering Black voters. Meanwhile, Robbie's teenage sister and her 80-year-old godmother are discovering that even NAACP lawyers aren't a match for the racist judicial system. Freeing Robbie will require supernatural intervention.
Camp Damascus
By Chuck Tingle. An autistic lesbian teen discovers the horrific secrets of the ex-gay camp that dominates her small Montana community. Forget about demons—the scariest part of this tale is the smiley-face gaslighting that our heroine endures from her parents and the celebrity pastor of the town's prosperity-gospel church. An excellent fast-paced novel with humor and poetic justice served hot.
The Boy in the Rain
By Stephanie Cowell. In this bittersweet historical novel set in Edwardian England, a young painter and an aspiring socialist politician fall in love, but their idyll is overshadowed by the criminalization of homosexuality. This book stands out for its meditative, introspective prose and its insight into how the bonds of love are tested, broken, and re-created as two people mature.
Off the Yoga Mat
By Cheryl J. Fish. Three New York intellectuals on the cusp of their 40th birthdays fumble toward maturity as Y2K looms. Every environment in this gentle yet deep novel is fully realized—from the anarchy of the "freegans" in Tompkins Square Park, to the domestic rituals of Finnish sauna culture, and the Black community of pre-Katrina New Orleans. The protagonists' lives and loves intersect repeatedly, like complex and shifting yoga poses, hopefully leading to a bit more enlightenment by the time we reluctantly bid them goodbye.
The Mountain in the Sea
By Ray Nayler. This compelling hard-science thriller is set in a reshaped geopolitical environment, where humankind's aggressive harvesting of the oceans for protein may have put evolutionary pressure on octopuses to develop a civilization of comparable intelligence as ours. But rather than pitting humans against nature, the multi-layered and well-researched plot comes down to two theories of consciousness: the colonialist quest for knowledge-as-control, or empathy across the mysterious divide of self from other. The stakes are nothing less than human survival on the planet.
Thistlefoot
By GennaRose Nethercott. In this extraordinary work of Jewish magical realism, the American great-great-grandchildren of legendary Eastern European witch Baba Yaga inherit her chicken-legged hut, and find themselves tasked with laying the ghosts of the pogroms to rest. The story is undergirded by a traditionally Jewish vision of death and the afterlife, in which being remembered by your descendants is the most important form of immortality. The Yaga descendants, whose magical powers have their hidden roots in Jewish survival skills, must do battle with the personification of genocidal forces that would erase not only a marginalized people but even the memory of their existence. And there is a traveling puppet show, and a monster-hunting band of queer rock musicians, and a lesbian romance with an animated graveyard statue. What more could you ask for?
Trumpet
By Jackie Kay. Lyrical writing distinguishes this multivocal novel about a trans male jazz musician in 1950s-'90s Scotland and the many ways that people process the revelation of his queer identity after his death.
Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel
By Julian K. Jarboe. Queer magical realism unites the brilliantly inventive tales in this debut short story collection, in which the humor and verve of rebellious outsiders offer sparks of hope in the dystopian world we've made. A sassy queer witch seeks shelter from a manipulative priest in a town rapidly sinking beneath the waters of global warming. A young person's dysphoria is made literal when they menstruate sharp objects instead of blood. Kafka's "Metamorphosis" gets a new twist from a narrator who wants to transition into "a beautiful bug" despite authorities who insist that it's only a metaphor.
All This Could Be Yours
By Jami Attenberg. This novel about the last day in the life of a corrupt real estate developer in New Orleans is an insightful, morbidly funny story about how tragic choices reverberate through the generations. One could call it a Jewish version of "The Sopranos", but where that show was cynical and bleak, this book is full of compassion and even a kind of poetic justice at the end.
The Question Authority
By Rachel Cline. This slim, incisive, timely novel of the #MeToo Movement explores the long aftermath of a popular teacher's serial predation on tween girls in a 1970s Brooklyn private school. Two middle-aged women, once childhood best friends, find themselves on opposite sides of another sexual misconduct case because of the different psychological strategies they employed to cope with their victimization. The Question Authority fearlessly examines the gray areas of consent, understanding that young women routinely overestimate how much choice and objectivity they could really bring to a relationship with an older male mentor.
A Thousand Acres
By Jane Smiley. Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this American tragedy recasts the story of King Lear on an Iowa farm in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. When a tyrannical but enfeebled patriarch divides his farm unequally among his three daughters, their prosperous, provincial world is torn apart by long-simmering rivalries and recovered memories of incest. Not only does Smiley nail the dynamics of a family in denial, she believably ties the personal drama to the American diseases of patriarchal entitlement and the rape of the land.
Into the Drowning Deep
By Mira Grant. Masterful pacing and character development distinguish this cosmic horror novel about a scientific voyage to discover man-eating mermaids, set in a near-future where climate change and pollution are reshaping our relationship to the ocean. On a state-of-the-art ship commissioned by an American entertainment company, a diverse team of researchers fight to survive (and even study) a mysterious predator that overwhelms their defenses and challenges their belief in humanity's dominance of the ecosystem. Several crew members have disabilities, which turn out to give them unique knowledge that proves integral to saving their shipmates. A lesbian romance subplot lends a spark of hope to a terrifying situation.
Six of Crows
By Leigh Bardugo. In this young adult fantasy novel, set in a cosmopolitan and mercenary city-state modeled on 19th-century Amsterdam, a crew of six thieves and underworld denizens must break into an impenetrable fortress to rescue the inventor of a magical weapon that could spark a devastating war. The world-building, social conscience, diversity of characters, and twist-filled plot are all outstanding. The story continues in the sequel Crooked Kingdom.
How to Survive a Summer
By Nick White. In this contemporary Southern Gothic novel, a disaffected young man must confront his memories of an "ex-gay conversion" camp he was forced to attend as a teen, when another former camper makes a horror movie based on a death that occurred there. The book parallels the structure of traumatic memory recovery, converging on the pivotal time period with scenes set before and after the protagonist's fateful summer. His Christian family members are drawn with depth and compassion, and the surprising redemptive ending feels earned.
Ghosts
By Raina Telgemeier. Children and adults alike will shed happy tears over this graphic novel about a Mexican-American family whose younger daughter has cystic fibrosis. In the days leading up to Día de los Muertos, the sick girl and her older sister cope with impending mortality through encounters with friendly spirits.
Last Look
By Charles Burns. This volume collects Burns' acclaimed graphic novels X'ed Out, The Hive, and Sugar Skull. Imagine that Samuel Beckett and Hieronymus Bosch dropped acid together and wrote a Tintin comic. These horror comics braid the real-world story of Doug, a photographer and failed performance artist obsessed with his lost love Sarah, with the nightmare visions of his alter ego, Johnny 23, a low-level functionary in a breeding factory where woman-like creatures produce monstrous eggs. The features of his grotesque dream world gradually reveal parallels to Doug's real life and the relationship patterns that trap him in isolation. Subtle clues toward the end indicate a Buddhist message about purifying one's mind to escape the wheel of rebirth.
Spinning Silver
By Naomi Novik. This fantasy novel about the braided destinies of three resourceful young women draws on elements of Eastern European fairy tales to create a legend all its own. In a twist on the story of Rumpelstiltskin, a Jewish moneylender's daughter in an alternate-history 19th-century Lithuanian village is kidnapped by the king of the Staryk, sinister ice fairies who want her to turn their enchanted silver into gold. Meanwhile, her peasant housekeeper finds heroism thrust upon her as she strives to protect her young brothers from their abusive father. Their adventures intersect with a reluctant tsarina trying to save her people from the fae's perpetual winter spell. Multiple narrative viewpoints weave a complex tapestry of conflicting loyalties that are ingeniously resolved. Though the book ends, as a good fairy tale should, with some romantic happy-ever-after's, the primary narrative thread is how the three girls grow into their unchosen obligations and become brave leaders.
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter
By Theodora Goss. Suspenseful but basically light-hearted, this series opener is a fun feminist talkback to the Victorian literary tradition of mad scientists who viewed women as raw material for monstrosities. The daughters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde team up with the Bride of Frankenstein, Nathaniel Hawthorne's poisonous Beatrice Rappaccini, and other not-quite-human women from Gothic fiction to track down a secret society that is performing murderous experiments. The third-person narrative includes frequent first-person intrusions by the characters, teasing each other or disputing how the story is framed. Some might find this editorializing a little too cutesy, as it does lower the dramatic stakes by reassuring the reader that the whole team survives to the end of this adventure. However, the style has the serious purpose of offering an alternative to the solitary hegemonic perspective of the male genius, as well as highlighting its monstrous heroines' common origins in the Victorian Gothic fear of hybridity. Not enough plot threads are resolved at the end, in order to leave an opening for the next book—a structural weakness, but one that does not unduly diminish the reader's warm feelings as the book closes.
The Prince and the Dressmaker
By Jen Wang. In this perfectly heartwarming graphic novel, set in "Paris at the dawn of the modern age", a special friendship blossoms between a cross-dressing teenage prince and the working-class seamstress who guards his secret. By day, Prince Sebastian dodges his parents' efforts to set him up with eligible young ladies, while by night, he dazzles as fashion icon Lady Crystallia. Meanwhile, Frances wonders how she can achieve her dreams of success as a fashion designer without exposing her royal client's secret. All ends happily in a tale that is suitable for both YA and adult readers.
Her Body and Other Parties
By Carmen Maria Machado. This splendidly original collection of feminist horror and magical realist stories literalizes the metaphors for women's oppression, going to extremes that break through our numb familiarity with these everyday dangers. Women fade, fall apart, are haunted by cast-off parts of themselves. Yet intimacy and sensual pleasure remain alive like flowering weeds pushing through the cracked cement of the most murderous city.
The Meadow
By Scott A. Winkler. Old-fashioned and wholesome, this Vietnam War era coming-of-age novel reminds us that there was more to America in the late 1960s than the coastal counterculture. The eldest son of small-town Wisconsin dairy farmers, high school graduate Walt Neumann is torn between his dreams of becoming a college-educated writer and his rugged, taciturn father's demand that his sons carry on his legacy of military service. Not your typical rebel, Walt deeply honors his family's traditions of hard manual labor and service to the place they call home, but grows to understand that the traumatic stories locked inside the stolid "Greatest Generation" veterans may be preventing an entire nation from learning from its errors. Beautiful writing and sensitive character portraits make this meditative novel a good opener for blue- and red-state Americans to start understanding each other.
Trip Wires
By Sandra Hunter. With startling breadth of vision, this short story collection reveals the raw and tender material of our common humanity across borders—from a Sudanese refugee in Glasgow, to the survivor of a Colombian paramilitary kidnapping, to young soldiers in the Middle East whose emotional armor is breached by defiantly joyful children. The standout tale "Brother's Keeper" channels Flannery O'Connor to expose the underside of white Christian benevolence toward Africans. For immigrants and wanderers everywhere, gratitude takes a backseat to homesickness, and rescue is not the same as safety. Hunter restores these displaced persons to the center of their own life story.
The Child Finder
By Rene Denfeld. This beautifully written thriller goes deep into the minds of survivors of intergenerational trauma: some who become healers and heroes, pitted against others who pass on the evil that was done to them. In the snowbound mountain forests of the Pacific Northwest, a famed investigator with her own barely-remembered abuse history searches for a little girl who was kidnapped three years ago. Meanwhile, this resilient and imaginative child tries to maintain her sanity in captivity, by reliving her favorite fairy tale and forming a bittersweet survival bond with her captor.
An Episode of Grace
By Linda McCullough Moore. Grace abounds, though sentimentality may be skewered, in these sparkling stories about women taking stock of their flawed relationships with husbands and families—and often finding a surprising bit of information that shifts their longstanding narrative of their lives. A self-lacerating quip or satirical observation of human nature will be followed by a moment of raw loneliness or unexpected kindness that turns the reader's laughter to tears and back again.
Living Right
By Laila Ibrahim. In this timely, heartwarming novel, a conservative Christian mother is forced to question her beliefs about homosexuality when her son attempts suicide. Their journey to acceptance includes a realistic depiction of so-called conversion therapy and how it can tear apart a loving family with a witch-hunt for nonexistent trauma. Sympathetic to faith, this book shows the diversity of views even within evangelical families, as well as the social pressure to keep silent about one's doubts.
A Small Hotel
By Robert Olen Butler. Through brilliant use of flashbacks and alternating perspectives, this intimate novel tells the story of Michael and Kelly Hays, a Southern professional couple who are divorcing after two decades of marriage, though it becomes apparent that they are both still painfully in love with each other. As soon as the reader starts to side with one character, a new twist reveals the other character's vulnerability and the dysfunctional family pattern that he or she is struggling to break. The novel winds toward a suspenseful climax as we wait to discover whether they will tell each other the truth before it's too late.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman
By Kaitlyn Greenidge. This ambitious, unsettling debut novel delves into the secret history of primate research and race relations in America. The Freemans, a high-achieving middle-class black family, accept a live-in position at the (fictitious) Toneybee Institute in rural Massachusetts to teach sign language to a chimpanzee. Their narrative is braided with that of Nymphadora, a maverick black schoolteacher in the 1920s who was seduced into taking part in the Toneybee's questionable experiments. In both timelines, the black protagonists' lives unravel because they underestimated how the white scientists saw them, too, as animal test subjects.
Beauty
By Hubert & Kerascoët. This memorable graphic novel is a tragicomic feminist fairy tale for adults, sketched in an effortless retro style with an earthy color palette suggestive of old storybooks. A troublemaking fairy grants a homely peasant girl's wish for supreme beauty, but the maiden soon finds that being a maddening object of desire is no safer than her old life of humiliation. Her reversals of fortune add up to a profound fable about power, illusion, and sexism.
Lovecraft Country
By Matt Ruff. This suspenseful and satirical novel-in-stories follows an African-American family in 1950s Chicago who tangle with a cabal of upper-class white occultists. Each chapter cleverly inverts the xenophobic tropes of one of H.P. Lovecraft's classic horror stories, with the implication that the heartless and greedy cosmic forces of the Cthulhu Mythos are more a self-portrait of Jim Crow's America than an enemy from beyond the stars.
Amends
By Eve Tushnet. This debut novel by a popular blogger on Catholic sexual ethics combines brilliant satire, heartbreak, and hope. A half-dozen alcoholics from all walks of life are selected for a reality-TV show set in a residential rehab clinic. When healing and repentance become co-opted into the postmodern performance of the "self", is transformative grace still possible? Sometimes, incredibly, it is, but not always, and not in a fashion that anyone associated with the show could control or predict.
The 19th Wife
By David Ebershoff. This multi-layered novel intertwines the story of Brigham Young's ex-wife Ann Eliza, a real historical figure who successfully campaigned to outlaw plural marriage in the United States, with a modern-day murder mystery in a polygamist Mormon splinter group. The narrative unfolds through fictional documents—correspondence, research papers, autobiographies—suggesting that truth is subjective and many-sided.
Edinburgh
By Alexander Chee. In this poetic debut novel, a sexually abusive choir director forever alters the lives of a gay Korean-American youth and the friends he loves. The protagonist finds healing through artistic imagination, the survival stories of his refugee family, and taking responsibility for the dark side of his own desires.
A Red Woman Was Crying
By Don Mitchell. Humorous, poignant, and enlightening, these linked short stories are set among the Nagovisi people of Bougainville Island in the Southwestern Pacific. The young American anthropologist in their midst learns as much about himself as about the villagers who have indulgently accepted him as an oddball member of their community. He mourns the collateral damage wrought on this small but culturally rich island by international wars and mining companies.
Catch the Moon, Mary
By Wendy Waters. Fans of Anne Rice and "The Phantom of the Opera" will enjoy this paranormal romance/horror novel that asks creative questions about God, love, and power. The angel Gabriel has tried so long to enlighten humanity that he has become bitter and violent. He has lost faith in love, and believes that humanity must be redeemed by force. He rescues an abused girl who is a musical prodigy, in exchange for a claim on her talent—but her love and innocent wisdom make him question whether the end justifies the means.
Safekeeping
By Jessamyn Hope. This many-layered debut novel, set on a kibbutz (Israeli commune) in 1994, brings together an unlikely community of troubled souls whose fates intersect in surprising ways. At the heart of the story is a priceless brooch crafted by a medieval Jewish goldsmith, preserved by his descendants through centuries of anti-Semitic massacres and international migration. Adam, a drug addict from Manhattan, seeks to atone for the damage he has done to his family, by bringing the brooch to the mysterious woman his late grandfather loved when he was a Holocaust refugee on the kibbutz. His arrival stirs up painful memories for the kibbutz founder, who sacrificed her personal happiness to a utopian project that is now in danger of being disbanded. Meanwhile, his fellow volunteers are on their own desperate quests for redemption and freedom, which sometimes help and sometimes hinder Adam's mission. The novel raises profound questions about the trade-offs between individual fulfillment and collective survival.
Priya’s Shakti
This graphic novel is a collaboration between poet and playwright Vikas K. Menon, artist Dan Goldman, and filmmaker Ram Devineni. The provocative story portrays an Indian female super-hero who fights against sexual violence in a Hindu-inspired mythic reality. The comic's creation was prompted by the December 2012 gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi. The story can be downloaded for free from the website, which also features videos and information about supporting anti-rape activism.
Playing By the Book
By S. Chris Shirley. This funny, heartfelt, and enlightening YA novel follows a Southern preacher's kid on his journey to accept his sexuality without losing his faith. When 17-year-old Jake ventures outside his Alabama small town for a summer journalism program at Columbia University in New York City, he learns that the world is more complex than he imagined, and maybe God is too. Refreshingly, he doesn't reject his family and traditions, but instead takes on the adult responsibility of teaching and transforming them.
Dawn Drums
By Robert Walton. Set in 1864, this historical novel tells the story of the bloodiest year of the American Civil War, brought to life with a chorus of voices both real and fictional. The cast of narrators includes President Lincoln, American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and the women and escaped slaves who fought for the Union and cared for the wounded in field hospitals. This book would be a good addition to a history curriculum for young adults.
Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales and Stories
This website includes the full text of many of his stories in the 1872 English translation by H.P. Paull, plus links to biographical information and other resources.
You Are Not a Stranger Here
Flawless prose captures emotions that are almost too subtle for words. Though his dark themes may seem familiar to readers of literary fiction (several tales feature bereavement and mental illness), these stories shine with moments of wisdom discovered and hard-won love, lifting them far above most examples of the genre.
