38 queer books you should add to your reading list 🌈

38 Queer Books Our Readers Recommend You Read ASAP

To celebrate Pride Month, we're highlighting books written by queer authors or featuring queer characters that you should add to your reading list.

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For Your Reading List

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Voung

Even if you're unfamiliar with Ocean Vuong's previous work, it is obvious that On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a foray into fiction by a talented and deft poet. An epistolary novel written in the form of a letter from the main character Little Dog to his mother who cannot read, the book carries themes of miscommunication, leaving behind the past, and what's left unsaid between family in its very structure. As Little Dog recounts the traumatic roots of his small Vietnamese family — their lives largely defined by and built around the Vietnam War — we witness what lengths his mother and grandmother were willing to go to continue life in America and how Little Dog endures both the endless love and persistent abuse caused by the impact — "The rain keeps on because nourishment, too, is a force." With Vietnam still looming large over their household, Little Dog grows up grappling with intergenerational trauma, masculinity, queerness, and being a Vietnamese immigrant in Hartford largely alone. The result is a speaker who has lived wholly through his senses and is at once meticulous and careful in the retelling, as "A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold." This book is for anyone who craves a novel that feels urgent while paradoxically enticing you to sit with every line, rereading until the words don't seem like words — the way we do with the stories in our own memory. Get your copy now. –Rachel Dunkel (@racheldunkel)