Last year at the end of June, my friend Sarah-Hope and I decided that a good way to celebrate #PrideMonth would be by highlighting our top five queer reads of the past year. Hence, the list I offer below that covers books published in 2025 and 2026 to date. I cheated; one of Sarah-Hope's is also one of mine so I included but didn't count it.
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Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian: Overall, the thing I loved about this read was not the fount of factfulness but the fountain of meditative, calm reflection that Author Patty (she refers to herself as such on her website so I'm presuming to do so too) uses to soothe away the hurts being queer in a hostile world has wrought. It delights me that this deeply queer in most senses of the word I'm familiar with has spent more than a year on
The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction! Most recently for the week ending June 2, 2026.
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Stories from the Edge of the Sea by Andrew Lam: How to go on, when you honestly think your world is ending, is at the heart of any immigrant's story. Your world
is ending, are you going to end with it?
Not while someone is cold and hungry, I'm not. I immigrated from my happy world to this ugly, mean-spirited one entirely against my will. But here I am. My kettle's only got words, but heads need filling...feeding...too. There are three 5* stories in here:
The Tree of Life is an elegy to a mother's love;
A Good Broth Takes Its Time "I insure people against tragedy, in a country built on it," says Toan, survivor and thriver on pho's magically Proustian-madeleine insubstantial waft of piercing sadness and joy at the ephemeral moments of recall; and for me, relict of a great, great love gone to AIDS, there's
October Laments that follows a woman who processes her grief in real time posts on Facebook, in a foreign language, for the husband she shared twenty-five years of life with. I suppose we all conduct our love affairs in translation to a degree, but there's a gulf you cannot deny away or fully bridge between older and younger, added to culturally separated lovers.
Any one of those stories would get this collection on my favorites list. But all three? No wonder this collection's
one of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!
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Separate Rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli and translated by Simon Pleasance was the first novel about AIDS in Italian. This book came out in 1989. I assume most of y'all remember something about 1989, but probably not the sheer awfulness of the AIDS epidemic eating the gay-men's communities around the world at that time.
I was there. I loved and lost more than once in the hell of the times. It happened like Tondelli—dead a year and a half after this book appeared—said it did. Leaving a record for those not even born then feels important to me; leaving an anguished, choked sob that records the reality feels urgent.
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We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons is the first novel by yje author of my 2019 six-stars-of-five delight
Black Light: Stories. Grief and grieving are common to us all. It is not, for some, cathartic to experience them in fiction. I'm not one of those people, but if you are, this is not the read for you. I hope all the rest of us will derive the comfort of fellow feeling from this story that was shortlisted for the 37th
Lambda Literary Awards for Bisexual Fiction.
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The Six Loves of James I by Gareth Russell snuck under my harbor-blocking chains set up against applying 2026 identities to 1560s-born folks. Author Russell is scrupulous in making you au fait with his sources. He specifically says, on the occasions he makes a logical leap, that this is what he's doing. Where people in the past used the lens of homophobia to "tar" a man's reputation with the stench of sodomy, much more often than not the "charge" was made absent solid evidence, and for some sort of political or ideological reason. Hence my relieved pleasure with this read's honest offering-up of details I enjoyed learning that led me to think James of Scotland (born in 1966 not 1566) would've *loved* Pride Month.
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My cheat:
(So What) If I’m a Puta? Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire by Amara Moira and translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato and Amanda De Lisio: Self-determination, personal autonomy, individual freedom, call it what you like: It is the central fact in the competing ideologies of high-control and laissez-faire systems of social organization duking it out around the world since 2025. Spoiler alert: It's always going to fall short for one side's happiness and comfort. I myownself want it to fall shortest for the high-control (usually religious) fascist slime. This personal story is a goddamned anthem for the freedom so hard-won and so terrifyingly fragile.
There. I'm out of the closet. I want what "They" only claim to want, the PTB out of my personal business, telling me who I can fuck, marry, or vote for.
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Below, with her permission, I present Sarah-Hope's list of her five extraordinary reads from 2025 and the first half of 2026.
Necessary Fiction, by Eloghosa Osunde:
Necessary Fiction is one of those novel-ish short story collections (or short story collection-ish novels). It's sent in present day Nigeria, mostly Lagos, and features a wide range of gay/lesbian/queer/nonbinary characters. Most of the characters come from families wealthy enough that they're not concerned with making a living, but those who are not prove to be ingenious in figuring out services that seem to become essential as soon as they're offered/invented. If you like queer fiction, if you like books that are adventurous in terms of style and structure, you're in for a huge treat with
Necessary Fiction. Five Stars
(So What) If I’m a Puta? Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire by Amara Moira: This is a book about resistance and the powers that want to smash that resistance. The resistance is Moira's. She's a literary scholar, tranvestí, and sexworker. The powers are cis het men titillated by pursuing what they would imprison others for, social convention, and the politics of hate—and an infinitude of others. Moira demonstrates that sexwork is like any kind of work: occasionally satisfying, but more apt to fall somewhere along the awakward to the life-threatening (like Amazon warehouse employees, folks working in explosives factories, workers on the processing lines in the chicken business). Read So What If I'm a Puta to spend time looking through Moira's eyes with rage, solidarity, and grief—then look at our own sans blinders and distractions.
Five Stars
Dark Renaissance The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt: Kit Marlowe was not just a brilliant playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, but also involved in the intelligencing (we would call it espionage) that became a significant force in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. We can safely call Marlowe a loose cannon. Greenblatt identifies some of Marlowe's most salient characteristics—button pushing, shocking, espousing the outré—and then examines Marlowe’s plays to see the ways those characteristics are evidenced in his work. If you have any interest in Elizabethan politics and/or queer politics and/or faith and/or drama this is a book you should be pick up posthaste.
Five Stars
These Heathens by Mia McKenzie These Heathens has two settings: small-town Georgia in 1960, where Doris, the central character, lives and Atlanta, where she travels to end a pregnancy accompanied by one of her former teachers. The "former" here is important. Doris left school a year or two ago because she was needed at home. She comes from a church-going family and is a firm believer. Much of her day is shaped by the "rules" her faith has given her to live by. When Doris realizes she's pregnant, she's certain that Jesus doesn't want her to become a mother, so she turns to the most trusted adult in her life who is not affiliated with her family's church: her former teacher Mrs. Lucas. Mrs. Lucas promises she will help and arranges through a childhood friend to bring Doris to Atlanta for an abortion. It's at this point that things begin to get complicated. Doris is meeting people unlike any she's known. These are city people with incomes well beyond those earned by the Black folk living in her hometown. There's Mrs. Lucas' childhood friend, who appears to prefer women over men. Doris has been warned about the dangers of inversion, but she is every bit as fascinated as she is perturbed. And she also meets several young men who introduce her to SNCC, sit-ins, and even a bit of the Nation of Islam. She's also meeting people she's only read about in
Jet or
Ebony: the Kings, Bayard Rustin, and Black entertainers. Watching Doris enter these new worlds, explain them to herself, and make her own way through them is a delight.
Five Stars
My Roommate from Hell by Cale Dietrich: As a general rule, I can’t stand romances, but sometimes a romance comes along that stretches the genre in so many directions that it becomes a delight to read, regardless of preconceived biases. The novel riffs on the enemies-to-lovers trope. Owen and Zarmenus are first-year students at college and roommates. Owen wants to study software engineering then land a high-paying job—he’s devoted to his goals. He’s also gay. Hoping for a studious study partner, he’s instead paired with Zarmenus—that’s Prince Zarmenus, the son of the rulers of Hell, which scientists have just discovered exists. His parents want to him to be a sterling example of a well-behaved demon as a first attempt at an Earth-Hell exchange program. Zarmenus meanwhile wants to party and sleep with as many hot guys as he can. Yep, he too is gay. Their relationship is a disaster from the get-go, things get worse, then they get worser, then they get exceptionally complicated while becoming (maybe?) slightly less worser, then….
My Roommate from Hell is a flat-out comic romp with a cast of characters that may drive you nuts at times, but who you’ll also come to feel deeply fond of.
Five Stars
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...AND THERE YOU HAVE IT! Two retirees, veterans of the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s who came out in our different homes to different results, and developed a shared love of reading...reading Queer stories especially. We shared one title on our favorite reads, and generally show consistent love for our siblings in queerness in their global diversity.
#ExistenceIsResistance
Amplifying voices: celebrating women in translation month | ProZ.com, via LinkedIn
amazing advertising artwork promoting the new Dune movie
