Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
This brilliant, innovative, very funny book is among the greatest queer inspirations of the last decade.
Pedro Lemebel, My Tender Matador
This is the title on my Top 10 Novels of All Time list that fewest people (at least in America) have read. It tells the story of an aging Chilean drag queen who falls in love with a macho revolutionary at the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship. I cannot begin to say how much I love it.
Andrew Holleran, Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited
In these first bewildering months of our new pandemic, I have found myself returning to this extraordinary account of an earlier one. This book consists largely of essays Holleran wrote for Christopher Street [a gay men’s magazine published from 1976 to 1995] during the first months of the AIDS crisis. It’s an account of dawning, day-by-day consciousness of catastrophe, as traced by one of America’s greatest writers, the closest heir of Fitzgerald.
Myriam Gurba
An activist, poet, and memoirist, Gurba’s most recent book, Mean, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction.
Juliana Delgado Lopera, Fiebre Tropical
I’m a sucker for Spanglish and camp, the two primary ingredients of Juliana Delgado Lopera’s Fiebre Tropical. It reads like manic poetry, and what’s not to love about baptizing the dead?
Peter Kispert
A writer of fiction and nonfiction, Kispert’s new short story collection is I Know You Know Who I Am.
Kristen Arnett, Felt in The Jaw
If you loved Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, you must also read this perfect collection featuring queer women and their vulnerability. Arnett’s sentences brightly shimmer and cooly reflect sunlight on a dangerous Florida swamp.
David Ebershoff, The Rose City
A powerful, moving collection full of transporting queer stories from the author of The Danish Girl, The Rose City is a book I return to again and again. “The Dress” will break your heart, and contains some of the finest last sentences I’ve ever read.
Paul Lisicky
Lisicky is a writer and educator. Later, a memoir, is out now.
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
There’s so much to be in awe of here: the relationship between son and mother, simultaneously tender and contemptuous; a moody Central Connecticut, the setting of the novel, suffocating, deeply green, mysterious; its sensory language and flexible, adventurous structure. I’ve read it only once, but I suspect I’m going to keep going back to it for the rest of my life.
Rebecca Brown, The Gifts of the Body
This collection of interrelated stories, published in 1994, features an unnamed narrator, a caregiver for AIDS patients, of whom we’re told little. Sentence by sentence, the book’s stripped language is exacting in its refusal of embellishment or overt emotion, as if to emphasize the radical necessity of these acts of care.
Andrew Sean Greer, Less
Less, a novel is about life in the wake of a breakup, derives so much of its humor from awkwardness, though its comedy always burns with genuine pain. This is really a book about the tension between the relationship between closeness and distance, and the ending is so direct that it sneaks up on me every time, choking me up even when I know it’s coming.
J Mase III
A poet and educator, Mase’s most recent book is And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment & Inappropriate Jokes About Death.
Dane Figueroa Edidi, For Black Trans Girls Who Gotta Cuss a Mother F***** Out When Snatching An Edge Ain’t Enough
This book, designed as a choreo-poem, will have you reading to yourself out loud. With various Black Trans characters of a wide range of experiences, this poetic immersion is one of the most brilliantly written texts of our day.
