Culture

14 Upcoming Queer Books To Get You To Summer


While queer literature is still breaking new ground (as the sheer diversity of LGBTQ+ stories for young adults below will attest), 2020 seems to be shaping up as the year that queer lit begins crafting new frameworks atop all that recently levelled land. These frameworks may be critical, as in the case of Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, or visual, as in Noelle Stevenson and MariNaomi’s graphic works. Or perhaps conceptual, like Danez Smith’s Homie — a book with a secret — and Storytelling in Queer Appalachia, a book that is also a demand for visibility. The stories told deepen: trans narratives emerge as complex and ongoing in Meredith Talusan’s Fairest, and long simmering rage sees release, as in the new poetry collection from Canadian Jillian Christmas, The Gospel of Breaking.

What we’re left with is queer stories for almost everyone. Here are 14 queer books to look forward to over the next six months that will satisfy nearly every craving, comprising work from YA, academia, criticism, fiction, comics, memoir, poetry, and hybrid forms, and crafted by writers from throughout the English-speaking world with a range of sexual, gender, and racial identities. Each is stellar in its own right, and many are off the beaten path, having seen less attention from reviewers and other roundups than they deserve. If this is what the first six months of 2020 bring us, we can’t wait to see what the rest of the year holds!

Out now!

Homie (Graywolf Press)
Danez Smith

You’ve already heard about Danez Smith’s Homie, a glorious text that envisions (and uses) poetry as an explosive device. The Black, queer, HIV+ Midwesterner has been lobbing their work our way since 2014’s [insert] boy from YesYes Books and gaining recognition with a Pushcart Prize, a National Book Award nomination, and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. But please don’t let the hype keep you from this brilliant Molotov cocktail of a book. (“i poem ten police a day … i poem them all. i poem them all with a grin, bitch,” Danez writes in the stand-out my poems.) Homie may destroy you, but it will heal you better just as fast. — Anne Elizabeth Moore

February



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