Books for Pride Month

Welcome to Pride Month! As you line up your fun and festivities throughout the month, add a book or two to read from LGBTQIA+ writers. Below are a few recommendations across genres to start your reading list.  

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin

Lin is an Asian American essayist based in Los Angeles and East Sussex, England. In his debut, Gay Bar, Lin revisits the hangouts that were stamped in his own personal history, using those as a jumping-off point to explore queer history through the lens of gay bars.

Gay Bar earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and was named a Best Book of the Year in 2021 by The New York Times, NPR and Vogue.

FICTION, STORIES
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

In Machado’s collection of stories, she combines psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism.

Her Body’s description says of the work, “Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment.”

POETRY COLLECTION
Bodymap by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer, autistic and disabled nonbinary femme writer, as well as a disability and transformative justice movement worker. The book’s description notes that the collection “maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius, and all the homes we claim and deserve.”

They won a Lambda Award in 2020, and Bodymap was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award in 2016.

FICTION, CONTEMPORARY
Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake

Blake is an award-winning author and a teacher, and Delilah Green is the first in her Bright Falls adult-romance series.

Photographer Delilah is pulled back to her childhood home to photograph her estranged stepsister’s wedding. While there, she meets her stepsister’s friend, Claire, who is coping with raising her daughter and dealing with her unreliable ex. Delilah knows how to push Claire’s buttons – but does Claire want her to stop?

NONFICTION, HISTORY
The Stonewall Reader, foreword by Edmund White, introduction by Jason Baumann and edited by the New York Public Library

This book – created for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising – is a collection of “first accounts, diaries, periodic literature and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the Stonewall riots.”

The Stonewall Reader was a finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction and was on 2019 “best book” lists from Tor.com, Harper’s Bazaar and The Advocate.

FICTION, FANTASY
The Witch King by H.E. Edgmon

In The Witch King, “to save a fae kingdom, a trans witch must face his traumatic past and the royal fiancé he left behind.” It is the first in a duology, the second being The Fae Keeper.

According to Edgmon, their works “center the perspective of Indigenous people, trans people and survivors of trauma.”