45 Best LGBTQ Books That Will Heat Up the Literary Landscape This Fall
The offerings are vast, with room for stories by and about people from all walks of queer life.
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"My queerness is a living animal," Casey McQuiston wrote in an essay for Oprah Daily's Coming Out series, "the same way that I am. It lives in tandem with me. It is inside all of my thought processes, it moves my hips when I walk, it makes me pick at my cuticles. It unfolds like a first language every time I open my mouth."
Queerness isn't a solid state, an easy description for sexuality or identity. It means different things to different people. It is a wholly subjective experience, something that lives inside all of us, which is why LGBTQ literature is so dynamic and vast. We read queer books in large part because there is deep profundity in finding out we're not alone, and yet there is a singularity to our stories, to the stories of others.
McQuiston's new novel, One Last Stop, is 1 of 45 on this list of the best LGBTQ books of 2021, illuminating the vast and multi-hued world of the queer experience. There's poetry, history, true crime, time travel, and a slew of dynamite short story collections. These works (which include books that are already on the shelves and others you can look forward to reading later in the year), reveal that as much as we share certain things in common, our narratives—our selves—are various. Our books should reflect that multiplicity.
Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So
So, who passed away in December of last year at the age of 28, was taken from us much too soon—an immense talent whose writing brims with generous, radiant empathy and hard-won wit. He bequeathed us this exuberant collection of stories centered on the Cambodian community of inland California, where donut shops and auto mechanic garages loll in the shadow of Costco, where queer people are out and proud yet still conduct their affairs in shadow, where parents utilize their experiences surviving the ruthless Khmer Rouge regime in order to win arguments against their Americanized children. So's parting gift is a book that bites its thumb at grief and graciously celebrates life.
Out August 3
Imagine Riverdale crossing streams with Stephen King's The Outsider and you'll get a sense of this gripping supernatural mystery in which two girls from very different walks of life investigate the ghostly goings-on in a rural Oregon town. Gould's debut begins as a snappy paranormal yarn and unspools into a profound story about the complex interplay between grief, guilt, and identity.
Out August 3
A hint of Moulin Rouge, a whiff of Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale, a little spritz of Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief—Schaffert's Paris-set page-turner is the exhilarating tale of a queer former criminal whose whims and wits just might help drive the Nazis out of the City of Lights. The Perfume Thief is a pulse-pounding thriller and a sensuous experience you'll want to savor.
Out August 3
Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist by Patrick Nathan
Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist by Patrick Nathan
As citizens of the world, the existential and emotional toll of the last few years has been immense, a superstorm of sociopolitical strife and social media-induced anxiety. Into this tempest wades acclaimed author Patrick Nathan, whose call to arms asks one of the most important questions of our time: "Who gets to police how we see ourselves and others?" It is up to us, this blazing work of nonfiction suggests, to save ourselves—with discernment, with rage, with empathy, with art.
Out August 3
Blackburn, whose first collection of short fiction won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, vividly renders the vulnerability of girlhood on the margins, revealing the aches of that time in one's life when everything feels at once carefree and world-ending. The 30 stories here appear on the page like snapshots from an off-color Polaroid—dazzling and disorienting.
Out September 7
There's a scene a quarter of the way through Tóibín's magisterial new novel in which Thomas Mann, future Nobel Prize winner, listens to and watches the German composer Gustav Mahler conduct his orchestra, an experience that strikes the fictionalized Mann as a "collision of bombast and subtlety." This is also an apt description for The Magician, Tóibín's twelfth novel, a decades-and-continents-spanning saga starring the Death in Venice author, from his boyhood in pre-WWI Lübeck spent hiding his homosexuality to a fateful trip to Northern Italy that would inspire perhaps his greatest known work.
Out September 7
Austin's second poetry collection, after his widely acclaimed debut Trouble the Water, feels like part of a lineage with Jericho Brown's The Tradition and Ocean Vuong's Night Sky With Exit Wounds, queer lyricism that seeks solace and kinship and eroticism in the natural world—"love, and loss/brought to scale in a glorious/algal bloom, a brightness of jade and amber"—and in the arms of friends and lovers: "There is a roof one man's body makes over another."
Out September 7
"Who would I have been back then?" asks the speaker of this aching and astute collection of poems, many of which wrestle with the legacy and intergenerational trauma of AIDS from the point of view of someone born in the pandemic's aftermath. What does it mean to live and love in the wake of a community-rupturing crisis, when a stranger's kiss recalls "those men/of our fathers' generation/who'd rendezvous in parks/past dark?"
Out September 14
Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body by Megan Milks
Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body by Megan Milks
Girl detectives, adolescent angst, all soundtracked to Fiona Apple—Milks's first novel is a mid-'90s marvel, one that acutely captures the surreal Tidal-wave of teenage emotions and the "private heat" of girlhood.
Out September 14
Missy is a cello prodigy turned indie-punk musician whose band is on the ascent. Just barely in her twenties, this former band geek goes all-in on the sex and drugs parts of the rock n' roll lifestyle, wanting not so much to shatter the glass ceiling of the scene's boys club, as to become part of it—a girl with a boytoy in every port. The persona she's constructed is upended when she falls for the female drummer in a fellow touring band. When Missy's lifestyle finally catches up with her, she's forced to seek solace in the embrace of her mother and grandmother—two women who've also wrestled with carving out their own versions of independence. Whittall's knockout novel is a multigenerational riot of grrrlhood and womanhood, a brisk and wistful tour through the ambivalence of responsibility.
Out September 14
Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
The generation of queer people coming of age now is doing so in the long shadow of the AIDS crisis, their lives loomed over by the epidemic's specter but wrestling with its effects in a more abstract way, especially now that treatment and prevention are more widely available. We've grown up reading and seeing the stories of those who lived through it—and those who didn't—but what of the generation in the middle that grew up in the immediate wake of AIDS but before the promise of PrEP. The generation that, as Lambda Award-winning writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore puts it, "came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, internalizing this trauma as part of becoming queer?" Sycamore's necessary and thought-provoking anthology amasses dispatches from writers and activists who weathered the fallout.
Out October 5
Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much by Jen Winston
Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much by Jen Winston
As its tongue-in-cheek title suggests, Winston's unafraid-to-be-messy essay collection dispels many of the myths surrounding bisexuality: for one, that it's "straight plus gay-—an identity made of old ingredients rather than something all its own." Along the way, she astutely argues that identity is not a zero-sum game; it's fluid, always evolving, sometimes in a way that confounds even the person who embodies it. Provocative and profound, funny and frank, these pieces suggest that "confusion is as queer as it gets."
Out October 5
A Tale of Two Omars: A Memoir of Family, Revolution, and Coming Out During the Arab Spring by Omar Sharif Jr.
A Tale of Two Omars: A Memoir of Family, Revolution, and Coming Out During the Arab Spring by Omar Sharif Jr.
In 2012, in the wake of the Arab Spring, Omar Sharif, Jr—the grandson of famed actor Omar Sharif—came out as gay in the pages of The Advocate. In doing so, and against conservative backlash to the movement, he asked, "Am I welcome in the new Egypt?" His memoir attempts to reconcile three facets of his complex identity—Egyptian, half-Jewish, and gay—and unspools both a gripping personal saga and an urgent plea for the place he still very much calls home to embrace equal rights for everyone.
Out October 5
Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League
Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League
Fans of Netflix's GLOW, a canceled-before-its-time dramedy about sports and sisterhood, should rejoice in reading this entertaining and engaging story about a league of semi-pro female footballers—gay and straight, factory workers and mothers, beauticians and truck drivers—and their lasting legacy on the field and off. Like GLOW'S all-women pro-wrestling promotion, the National Women's Football League, which lasted from the early 70s to the mid 80s, began as a "comedy attraction" but soon morphed into a seriously special meeting ground for those who shared "a love for a game society told them they shouldn't (and couldn't) be playing." From two incredible sports journalists, Hail Mary is a glorious and galvanizing chronicle celebrating no-longer-forgotten gridiron greats.
Out November 2
On a spring afternoon in 1933, when James Ivory was 5 years old, his parents took him to see his first film. Decades later, he would himself become a legendary, Oscar-winning moviemaker, bringing some of the most cherished literary works to life on the big screen alongside his creative and romantic partner Ismail Merchant: Maurice, Howards End, Call Me By Your Name. The producer-director's memoirs are as stately and intimate as his indelible films, chronicling his childhood in Klamath Falls, Oregon during the Great Depression; his clandestine boyhood crushes; and the tribulations and triumphs of making movie magic.
Out November 2
A surprise bestseller in Korea, Sang Young Park's electric English-language debut perfectly captures the neon-lit potential of youthful nights, or as the novel's narrator puts it, "the boundless energy of poor, promiscuous twenty-year-olds." Our wanton protagonist is Young, a college student in Seoul whose favorite activities are drinking, having sex, and one-upping his ride-or-die female friend, Jaehee, in both. But when Jaehee settles down, Young is forced to take a sobering look at his hard-and-fast lifestyle.
Out November 9
"Too much lives in a moment/to not feed it to the fire of the heart, slow," poet and performer Andrea Gibson writes in their awe-inspiring volume of verse, a book that brims with boundless hope, with sly humor, with burning love, with the brilliance and beauty of the everyday. Gibson's great gift is finding the light in even the darkest, most dire straits. This is a collection for anyone who needs a reminder that "It's okay if you can't imagine/Spring. Sleep through the alarm/of the world. Name your hopelessness/a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug,/Sweetheart, instead/of a grave."
Out November 9
I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat by Christopher Gonzalez
I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat by Christopher Gonzalez
A closeted gay man suffers through an old crush's bachelor party, surrounded by low-priced margaritas and homophobic former friends, but the night takes a turn when he locks eyes with a vaguely familiar bartender. After a breakup, a man "fears his heart might devour itself"—literally—and seeks out a specialist who could help him make it whole. Examining the lives of queer Puerto Rican men, Gonzalez's first collection of short fiction is sometimes bittersweet but always savory, full of piquant narratives of appetite and heartbreak, from nursing a sangria at Applebee's while trying to reconnect with childhood pals to sharing a plate of french fries in a place free from "think pieces and Twitter threads and fat-shamers and coworkers who love happy hour but hate food."
Out December 1
Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor
With psychological acuity and captivatingly sinuous prose, the Booker-shortlisted author of Real Life vividly portrays the inner lives of outsiders. He returns here with a linked story collection that zeroes in on a group of awkward and astute Midwesterners—chemical engineers, mathematicians, artists—and the romantic entanglements that cause them to fall forward into one another's orbits. Check out an original short story by Taylor here.
Out Now
Pushing 40, Skye suffers from the kind of wanderlust that makes her jump not only from place to place but from person to person—though she doesn't think of it as suffering; to her, it's the freedom of living life on her own terms. However, the cloudless blue sky of her isolated life comes crashing down when a 12-year-old girl claiming to be her biological daughter—a result of an egg donation—confronts her. Of course, responsibility for someone else doesn't come easy when you've only just barely been responsible for your own self.
Out Now
Michelle Hart is the Assistant Books Editor of O, the Oprah Magazine. Other writing of hers has appeared on the Millions, the Rumpus, and the New Yorker. Her fiction has appeared in Joyland and Electric Literature. She has been awarded a fiction fellowship by the New York State Writers Institute and was once profiled in her hometown newspaper for being in the process of writing a novel--a novel she is still in the process of writing.
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