“25 LGBTQ Books You’ll Love from Indie Presses”
Curated by Tucker Lieberman
Indie presses are releasing some of the best LGBTQ books you could ask for
Words like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer describe how people fall in love, present their gender, live on the margins, and find creative paths. LGBTQ is a big category, including diverse individuals and all the unique lives they lead. There are a lot of great books that address these topics.
In no particular order, I put together this list of some really terrific LGBTQ books from recent years. As a bonus, each one of them was published by an indie press! While the biggest publishers can be focused more on what is going to sell the most copies, many small independent teams across the world want primarily to bring readers the best content they can find.
So, let’s get started, shall we?
Here’s my list of “25 LGBTQ Books You’ll Love from Indie Presses!”
#1. Broken Metropolis
Edited by dave ring
Publisher: Mason Jar Press
Genre: Urban Fantasy / Anthology
About the Book:
Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Was (edited by dave ring)explores the edges of urban fantasy through queer narratives in the tradition of Swords of the Rainbow (Alyson Publications, 1996) and Bending the Landscape (Overlook Books, 1997).
This collection contains ten of those edges, each one bright and gleaming, from Claire Rudy Foster’s story of a scientist learning to accept not only herself but the very real impact of astrology on her love life, to Caspian Gray’s tale of a young man looking for an urban legend in the halls of a hospital ward so that he can save the matriarch of his found family. Queer communities hold multitudes, and fantasy writing is a place to explore the magic of possibility. Come explore some of those possibilities in a city that never was.
#2. Boy Oh Boy
by Zachary Doss
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Genre: Short fiction collection
About the Book:
Boy Oh Boy is a collection of queer fabulist stories and flash fictions told via second person, asking readers to share Doss’s explorations of joy and longing. Your boyfriend is many boyfriends, possibly all the boyfriends you’ve ever had or will have. But you must ask yourself whether you have them or they have you. Your boyfriend plays jokes on you—plays jokes on the world. He is forever unattainable, and still you love your boyfriend, even when it hurts you. Doss explores how relationships can be all-consuming, how we transform ourselves to fit within their contour. Eventually, you might change so much that you don’t even fit inside your own body.
This book is so much about space—the physical, emotional, and mental spheres that everyone inhabits. Doss uses humor to deal with the isolation that each of us experiences—not because we’re alone, but because we’ve become detached from ourselves, our needs, and our desires. Boy Oh Boy is our chance to understand Zachary Doss, as well as our strangest selves.
#3. Daniel & Erik’s Super Fab Ultimate Wedding Checklist
by K.E. Belledonne
Publisher: Interlude Press
Genre: Romance
About the Book:
When Daniel gets caught up in the demands of a cheeky wedding planning app, his ance Erik grows frustrated with his preoccupation with adhering to heterosexual traditions. Will Daniel’s groomzilla ways give them the wedding of their dreams, or ultimately lead to their relationship’s demise?
#4. Depart, Depart!
by Sim Kern
Publisher: Stelliform Press
Genre: Speculative Fiction / Cli-Fi
About the Book:
When an unprecedented hurricane devastates the city of Houston, Noah Mishner finds shelter in the Dallas Mavericks’ basketball arena. Though he finds community among other queer refugees, Noah fears his trans and Jewish identities put him at risk with certain “capital-T” Texans. His fears take form when he starts seeing visions of his great-grandfather Abe, who fled Nazi Germany as a boy. As the climate crisis intensifies and conditions in the shelter deteriorate, Abe’s ghost grows more powerful. Ultimately, Noah must decide whether he can trust his ancestor — and whether he’s willing to sacrifice his identity and community in order to survive.
#5. A Door Behind a Door
by Yelena Moskovich
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Genre: Literary / Crime
About the Book:
In Yelena Moskovich’s spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind a Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of ’91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga’s past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.
#6. Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Girl’s Confabulous Memoir
by Kai Cheng Thom
Publisher: Metonymy Press
Genre: Young Adult / Adventure fiction
About the Book:
FIERCE FEMMES AND NOTORIOUS LIARS: A DANGEROUS TRANS GIRL’S CONFABULOUS MEMOIR is the highly sensational, ultra-exciting, sort-of true coming-of-age story of a young Asian trans girl, pathological liar, and kung-fu expert who runs away from her parents’ abusive home in a rainy city called Gloom.
Striking off on her own, she finds her true family in a group of larger-than-life trans femmes who live in a mysterious pleasure district known only as the Street of Miracles. Under the wings of this fierce and fabulous flock, the protagonist blossoms into the woman she has always dreamed of being, with a little help from the unscrupulous Doctor Crocodile. When one of their number is brutally murdered, she joins her sisters in forming a vigilante gang to fight back against the transphobes, violent johns, and cops that stalk the Street of Miracles.
But when things go terribly wrong, she must find the truth within herself in order to stop the violence and discover what it really means to grow up and find your family.
#7. Fiebre Tropical
by Juliana Delgado Lopera
Publisher: Feminist Press
Genre: Literary / Hispanic American Fiction
About the Book:
Lit by the hormonal neon glow of Miami, this debut novel follows a Colombian teenager’s coming-of-age as she plunges headfirst into lust and evangelism.
Uprooted from her comfortable life in Bogotá, Colombia, into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, fifteen-year-old Francisca is miserable and friendless in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up into an evangelical church, replete with Christian salsa, abstinent young dancers, and baptisms for the dead.
But there, Francisca also meets the magnetic Carmen: opinionated and charismatic, head of the youth group, and the pastor’s daughter. As her mother’s mental health deteriorates and her grandmother descends into alcoholism, Francisca falls more and more intensely in love with Carmen. To get closer to her, Francisca turns to Jesus to be saved, even as their relationship hurtles toward a shattering conclusion.
#8. A Natural History of Transition
by Callum Angus
Publisher: Metonymy Press
Genre: Short fiction collection / Speculative
About the Book:
A NATURAL HISTORY OF TRANSITION is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters, who grow as tall as buildings, turn into mountains, unravel hometown mysteries, and give birth to cocoons. Portland-based author Callum Angus infuses his work with a mix of alternative history, horror, and a reality heavily dosed with magic.
#9. Butter Honey Pig Bread
by Francesca Ekwuyasi
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Genre: Literary / Africa
About the Book:
Spanning three continents, Butter Honey Pig Bread tells the interconnected stories of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye. Kambirinachi believes that she is an Ogbanje, or an Abiku, a non-human spirit that plagues a family with misfortune by being born and then dying in childhood to cause a human mother misery. She has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family but lives in fear of the consequences of her decision.
Kambirinachi and her two daughters become estranged from one another because of a trauma that Kehinde experiences in childhood, which leads her to move away and cut off all contact. She ultimately finds her path as an artist and seeks to raise a family of her own, despite her fear that she won’t be a good mother. Meanwhile, Taiye is plagued by guilt for what her sister suffered and also runs away, attempting to fill the void of that lost relationship with casual flings with women. She eventually discovers a way out of her stifling loneliness through a passion for food and cooking.
But now, after more than a decade of living apart, Taiye and Kehinde have returned home to Lagos. It is here that the three women must face each other and address the wounds of the past if they are to reconcile and move forward.
For readers of African diasporic authors such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Butter Honey Pig Bread is a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family.
#10. Homesick
by Nino Cipri
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Genre: Science fiction / Short fiction
About the Book:
Dark, irreverent, and truly innovative, the speculative stories in Homesick meditate on the theme of home and our estrangement from it, and what happens when the familiar suddenly shifts into the uncanny. In stories that foreground queer relationships and transgender or nonbinary characters, Cipri delivers the origin story for a superhero team comprised of murdered girls; a housecleaner discovering an impossible ocean in her least-favorite clients’ house; a man haunted by keys that appear suddenly in his throat; and a team of scientists and activists discovering the remains of a long-extinct species of intelligent weasels.
In the spirit of Laura van den Berg, Emily Geminder, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, and other winners of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, Nino Cipri’s debut collection announces the arrival of a brilliant and wonderfully unpredictable writer with a gift for turning the short story on its ear.
#11. Silence Is My Mother Tongue
by Sulaiman Addonia
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Genre: Literary / Bisexual
About the Book:
On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos.
For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice.
With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.
#12. For Sizakele
by Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene
Publisher: RedBone Press
Genre: Contemporary fiction
About the Book:
Taylor, a queer Nigerian college student, is in a passionate relationship with Lee, a black American basketball-playing pianist. When Taylor develops romantic feelings for Sy, a Cameroonian photographer whose similarities make them instant family, Taylor battles Lee’s jealousy. As Taylor encounters challenges to her femme and African identities, she finds ways, through the kinship of her friends, to define herself on her own terms. FOR SIZAKELE addresses transcontinental identity, intimate partner violence, queer gender and how we love as illuminators of who we are.
#13. Apsara Engine
by Bisakh Som
Publisher: Feminist Press
Genre: Literary / Graphic Short Story Collections
About the Book:
The eight delightfully eerie stories in Apsara Engine are a subtle intervention into everyday reality: a woman drowns herself in a past affair, a tourist chases another guest into an unforeseen past, and a nonbinary academic researches postcolonial cartography. Imagining diverse futures and rewriting old mythologies, these comics delve into strange architectures, fetishism, and heartbreak.
Painted in rich sepia-toned watercolors, Apsara Engine is Bishakh Som’s highly anticipated debut work of fiction. Showcasing a series of fraught, darkly humorous, and seemingly alien worlds—which ring all too familiar—Som captures the weight of twenty-first-century life as we hurl ourselves forward into the unknown.
#14. Felt in the Jaw
by Kristen N. Arnett
Publisher: Split/Lip Press
Genre: Short fiction
About the Book:
Kristen Arnett’s debut story collection explores the lives of queer women and their families in the light of the bleak Florida sun. A young dancer suddenly loses language while her family struggles to understand their new roles. A mother endures a horrifying spider bite while camping with her daughters in the backyard. A family reunion goes sour when a group of cousins are left to their own devices. In these ten stories, outward strength is always betrayed by deep vulnerability: these are characters so desperate for family and connection that they often isolate themselves–and sometimes, it’s the world isolating them.
#15. People I’ve Met from the Internet
by Stephen van Dyck
Publisher: Ricochet Editions
Genre: Literary nonfiction
About the Book:
Stephen van Dyck’s PEOPLE I’VE MET FROM THE INTERNET is a queer reimagining of the coming-of-age narrative set at the dawn of the internet era. In 1997, AOL is first entering suburban homes just as thirteen-year-old Stephen is coming into his sexuality, constructing selves and cruising in the fantasyscape of the internet. Through strange, intimate, and sometimes perilous physical encounters with the hundreds of men he finds there, Stephen explores the pleasures and pains of growing up, contends with his mother’s homophobia and early death, and ultimately searches for a way of being in the world. Spanning twelve years, the book takes the form of a very long annotated list, tracking Stephen’s journey and the men he meets from adolescence in New Mexico to post-recession adulthood in Los Angeles, creating a multi-dimensional panorama of gay men’s lives as he searches for glimpses of utopia in the available world.
#16. How to Fail as a Popstar
by Vivek Shraya
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Genre: Drama
About the Book:
The first play by multi-media artist Vivek Shraya, about fame and personal transformation.
Described as “cultural rocket fuel” by Vanity Fair, Vivek Shraya is a multi-media artist whose art, music, novels, and poetry and children’s books explore the beauty and the power of personal and cultural transformation. How to Fail as a Popstar is Vivek’s debut theatrical work, a one-person show that chronicles her journey from singing in shopping malls to “not quite” pop music superstardom with beguiling humor and insight. A reflection on the power of pop culture, dreams, disappointments, and self-determination, this astonishing work is a raw, honest, and hopeful depiction of the search to find one’s authentic voice.
The book includes colour photographs from the show’s 2020 production in Toronto, and a foreword by its director Brendan Healy.
#17. Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pasttime
by Alex Espinoza
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Genre: History / Sexuality
About the Book:
Acclaimed author Alex Espinoza takes readers on an uncensored journey through the underground, to reveal the timeless art of cruising. Combining historical research and oral history with his own personal experience, Espinoza examines the political and cultural forces behind this radical pastime. From Greek antiquity to the notorious Molly houses of 18th century England, the raucous 1970s to the algorithms of Grindr, Oscar Wilde to George Michael, cruising remains at once a reclamation of public space and the creation of its own unique locale―one in which men of all races and classes interact, even in the shadow of repressive governments. In Uganda and Russia, we meet activists for whom cruising can be a matter of life and death; while in the West he shows how cruising circumvents the inequalities and abuses of power that plague heterosexual encounters. Ultimately, Espinoza illustrates how cruising functions as a powerful rebuke to patriarchy and capitalism―unless you are cruising the department store restroom, of course.
#18. Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
by Charlene A. Carruthers
Publisher: Beacon Press
Genre: Politics / Race
About the Book:
A manifesto from one of America’s most influential activists which disrupts political, economic, and social norms by reimagining the Black Radical Tradition.
Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.
#19. In Search of Pure Lust
by Lise Weil
Publisher: She Writes Press
Genre: Memoir
About the Book:
When Lise Weil came out in 1976, she came out into a land that was all on fire. Lesbian desire was the pulsing center of an entire way of life, a culture, a movement. The air throbbed with possibility. At the center of In Search of Pure Lust is Weil’s immersion in this culture, this movement: the grand experiment of lesbian feminism of the ’70s and ’80s. She and the women around her lived in a state of heightened erotic intensity that was, she believed, the source of their most vital knowledge. Desire was their guiding light.
But after fifteen years of torrid but ultimately failed relationships that tended to mirror the tumultuous political currents swirling around her, she had to admit that desire was also a conduit for childhood wounds. It reared its head when she was feeling wary, estranged― abused, even. It flagged when she was fondest and most trusting. And it tended to trump love, over and over again. In the mid-’80s, when a friend asked Weil to accompany her on a Zen retreat, she was desperate enough to say yes. Her first day of sitting zazen was mostly hell―but smitten with the (female) roshi, she stuck with it, later returning for sesshin after sesshin. A period of difficult self-examination ensued and, over a period of years, she began to learn an altogether different approach to desire. Ultimately, what her search for pure lust uncovered is something that looks a lot like love.
#20. A History of My Brief Body
by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Genre: Sexuality, Race & Colonial Canada
About the Book:
The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.
For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.
Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray’s writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.
#21. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
by Jenn Shapland
Publisher: Tin House
Genre: Literary Interest / Memoir
About the Book:
How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered—an icon and idol—alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.
Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers’s life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others’ narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers’s life—her history, her secrets, her legacy—reveal to Shapland about herself?
In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation’s greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.
#22. Sick
by Jody Chan
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
About the Book:
“Jody Chan writes, ‘have you ever found your specific wounds curled up in a song / written by someone else?’ SICK is medicine and music. This book unearths a tenderness unknown to me before reading these poems and witnessing their ‘humble magic.’ Chan’s lyric is a landscape I return to find myself. How lucky are we to be living and reading while Jody Chan is writing and teaching us how to be ‘warm & unafraid’–what a tremendous, marvelous gift.”–Yujane Chen
“This striking debut–poems of history, of beauty, of violence, of grief–will surprise you at every turn of phrase and page. Chan’s work is innovative, their treatment of the universal human condition meticulously unique. Do not miss this collection.”– Erica Dawson
“In SICK, Jody Chan examines loss through brilliant and stunning lyric, each poem urgent with gentle ferocity. So much exists here in the absence of what is said, so much feels vestigial–a phantom limb that keeps aching through deftly crafted nuance, simply mesmerizing. The many exigencies of grief appear and reappear in this collection like a ‘hungry ghost,’ but Chan proclaims/reclaims, ‘this is a love story this is a love story this is a love story.'”–Jay Ward
#23. The Malevolent Volume
by Justin Phillip Reed
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
About the Book:
Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent Black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.
#24. Genesis
by Crisosto Apache
Publisher: Lost Alphabet
About the Book:
With the use of Apache Language (Ndé Bizaa) & Navajo Language (Diné Bizaad) Apache creates a cascading resonance where the reader is asked to separate themselves from what they know of Native American history, and consider the Indigenous experience in America through Apache’s experiences on the reservation and in urban settings. Through these locations we are exposed to meditations on sexuality, Native American identity, and historical trauma… GENESIS delivers an experience that is both kinetic and visceral.” —Santee Frazier
“GENESIS whirls. These poems record not only the nine months of history occurring while the poet formed in gestation… it attempts to make sense of the whirling world of chromosomes, of snow across body-laden battlefields, the whirl of strobe lights in a sex club, and the spiral which meets in the center where isdzán and haastiń (woman and man) become indistinguishable. Apache’s collection challenges our footing on things we thought we knew.”—James Thomas Stevens
#25. Night Sky with Exit Wounds
by Ocean Vuong
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
About the Book:
Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes: “The poems in Mr. Vuong’s new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds…possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words…There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.”
About the Author
Tucker Lieberman talks about gender in his nonfiction books Painting Dragons, Bad Fire, and Ten Past Noon. He also writes fiction, and he has a bilingual poetry collection, Enkidu Is Dead and Not Dead / Enkidu está muerto y no lo está. He trained as a life coach in a cohort with other gay men. Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, he now lives with his husband in Bogotá, Colombia. www.tuckerlieberman.com
Thank you for reading “25 LGBTQ Books We Think You’ll Love from Indie Presses” by Tucker Lieberman! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.
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No. 26 on your list should be “The Sower’ by Rob Jung, published by Hawk Hill Literary, LLC