The day after the election, November 6, having spent the previous evening cooking and consuming a healthy meal of grass-fed beef and roasted green beans and quinoa as a form of self-care, I sat at the kitchen table eating every single piece of our leftover Halloween treats. KitKats whose wrappers were red as the electoral map. Bags of popcorn labeled, preposterously, Lesser Evil. Coconut-chocolate bars called Unreal.
Around lunchtime, deep into this apathetic-apocalyptic sugar binge, I opened my email and saw a new Substack post from Patrick Nathan, an excellent writer and an especially astute critic of all the ways—both explicitly and implicitly—our country has embraced authoritarianism. America, he writes in his newsletter, not as a country but as a mythology and set of unifying ideals, is dead. It’s clearer than ever, he says, that “there is no ‘we’ on a national level, and there won’t be anytime soon.”
And yet, writes Nathan, “if America is dead, our communities survive.” If our national politics has become little more than farcical theater, our towns and city councils and neighborhoods are where real change can be enacted. There, he says, we have a voice. And while Nathan’s talking mostly about local politics, I’d like to include you all, the readers of Electric Literature, as a community that can and must survive. Our books and our bookstores, our libraries, our writing groups, our literary magazines, our review columns, our interviews. Our stories.
“Part of what’s intrigued me, over the years,” Nathan writes, “in thinking about social media, entertainment, and corporate influence, is how agency sits at the heart of it all.” There are so many forces working to pacify us, including the entertainment we often turn to; call me romantic (or delusional), but I refuse to believe that reading literature is one such force. I’m not so naive as to think that books are the way out of this or even through it, but I do think there is true power in sharing stories—not just those we’ve written but those bravely put to paper by others.
So let these new books be a reminder: even in the face of despair and erasure, we’re still here—reading, writing, and refusing to disappear.
Motherlover by Lindsay Ishihiro (May 6)
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I’ve been growing just a bit weary with the degree to which stories about queer women are centered on youth and coming of age, as if desire simply dies with time, as if we are most alive before our lives truly take shape. The cheekily titled Motherlover, from an award-winning webcomics and video game artist, is here to remedy that, placing at its center the romantic entanglement of two middle-aged women navigating motherhood and new love.
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis (May 6)
No joke: Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky, often cited as the quintessential “dad rock” record, is one of my desert island albums, a pleasurably frictionless blend of blues and alt-country centered on the difficulties of contentment (how queer!). So I was thrilled upon learning that one of the internet’s foremost commentators on the relationship between gender and music uses this much-maligned music label to explore questions of desire and transition.
Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund (May 6)
Ostlund rightfully garnered a lot of acclaim for her 2015 novel After the Parade but I first fell in love with her fiction with her 2009 collection The Bigness of the World. Happily, Ostlund, an astute chronicler of the queerness of mundanity and the mundanity of queerness, returns for her first book in ten years with a book of short stories full of “guns, god, and gays.”
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (May 13)
I remember cracking open Night Sky with Exit Wounds and secretly hoping Ocean Vuong would write a novel—not that every poet must turn to prose at some point!—and I remember getting to the end of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and hoping he’d write another. So I, for one, am glad for the existence of this follow-up, a heartwarming tale of friendship between a teen boy and the older woman who intervenes during his suicide attempt.
Love in Exile by Shon Faye (May 13)
Believe me when I tell you I was wrecked before the end of this book’s prologue. Queer and trans people are taught that our desires are private, and if that’s true, Faye laments, then “we are culpable for our own feelings of lovelessness.” We are locked out of—exiled from—the traditional realms of happiness and comfort, left alone with our unworthiness. But of course this memoir-in-essays, from the author of The Trans Issue, argues the fairly obvious but no less revelatory point that we are indeed worthy of loving and being loved.
A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane (May 13)
Sometimes the universe sends you a book written by someone else that feels like it’s been written just for you. As a former basketball player myself, Crane’s follow-up to I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is an alley-oop from the literary gods: perfectly pitched and right when it’s needed most—at a time when the profile of women’s basketball is higher than ever. Full of beauty and brawn, the book centers on Mac, a straight-shooting, Iverson-worshipping basketball star going into her senior season of high school—a year that begins with the death of her father and the arrival of an alluring and talented new teammate. Fans of films like Personal Best and The Novice shouldn’t hesitate to jump into this story about the complicated give-and-take between queerness and ambition and how, for better or worse, the body always seems to keep the score.
Checked Out by Katie Fricas (May 20)
Drawn in a style that so perfectly captures the kind of angular awe of being young in New York, indie cartoonist Katie Fricas’s debut graphic novel centers on Lou, an aspiring comics artist—her work in progress portrays a battalion of carrier pigeons that help turn the tide of World War I—whose fortunes change when she lands a dream gig at the Society Library. It’s a love letter not just to the city but to the institutions and people committed to the preservation of stories, and a deeply personal portrait of the ways in which stories can both drive us insane and save our sanity.
Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan (May 27)
After falling down the stairs during a night out, poet/lawyer Max, having just turned thirty, wakes from her hospital bed with a desire to become, for all intents and purposes, a trad wife. With her debut novel Bellies, Dinan emerged as a fresh voice on contemporary queer intimacy, the ways in which wants and needs shift, how histories can so often interfere with futures. Disappoint Me, following Max as she navigates the comforts and complications of dating a cis man with his own bumpy past, does not at all disappoint.
Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line by Elizabeth Lovatt (May 27)
I just want to take a second to shout out Autostraddle, the publication I first heard about this book from, firstly because they’ve done the (gay) Lord’s work for decades and also because it’s important to support independent media. British author Elizabeth Lovatt unearths the hidden yet undeniably significant history of the Lesbian Line, a UK-based phone line in the mid-90s that connected queer women looking for advice and kinship to one another. As Lovatt herself writes in the book: “What I am interested in is lesbians. There’s no need to play it cool. I think lesbians are worthy of our attention. I want to tell their stories, and I think they need to be heard, not just for me but for others, too. And to do that I need to share their stories, to lift them up above the noise of the world, at least for a moment.” Indeed.
The Dry Season by Melissa Febos (June 3)
Melissa Febos is straight-up one of the most essential memoirists today, each of her books a deeply profound exploration of the mind and the body and the complex relationship between them. Whip Smart, her first, more than lived up to its title and delivered a dexterous, piercing meditation on addiction and the things we sometimes do to and with our bodies, while Girlhood—genuinely one of those books that would vastly improve the world if everyone were to read it—chronicles the physical and psychological harm done to our bodies from youth to adulthood. It’s a testament to Febos’s incredible skill that a book centered on celibacy features some of the most erotic writing she’s ever put to paper—and if you’ve read any of her work you know that’s saying a lot. Of course, Dry Season is not just about celibacy; it’s a treatise on listening to and trusting our corporeal instincts, on finding authentic forms of pleasure independent from hegemonic scripts. It’s a book that is itself a pleasure.
Dining Out by Erik Piepenburg (June 3)
I’ve long followed Piepenburg’s writing for the New York Times—especially his column highlighting new-release horror movies worth streaming—and so was thrilled when I saw he had a book-length work of reportage forthcoming. Here, he dishes on the diners and dives that have kept the queer community nourished for decades, serving readers an entertaining and enlightening smorgasbord of personal and cultural history alongside the drag brunches and disco fries.
It’s Not the End of the World by Jonathan Parks-Ramage (June 3)
In an unfortunately not-at-all-distant 2044, Mason Daunt is rich enough to ignore the crumbling world outside—until an apocalyptic event threatens to crash the over-the-top baby shower he’s throwing with his partner in their LA mansion. A gore- and sex-fueled satire from the author of Yes, Daddy, this novel skewers privilege and denial with bleakness and hilarity.
A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle (June 3)
Set in 1970s Australia, this genre-defying debut asks: what happens when you choose queer desire—and what happens when you don’t? In parallel timelines, we follow two versions of the same young woman: one who’s cast out and finds chosen family in a radical queer commune, and another who buries her feelings and walks a more conventional path. Sweeping across decades and tracing love, loss, protest, and survival, A Language of Limbs is an achingly beautiful meditation on identity, fate, and the countless lives we carry within us.
Songs of No Provenance by Lydi Conklin (June 3)
After a boundary-shattering performance tanks her music career, indie folk singer Joan Vole retreats to a teen writing camp in rural Virginia, hoping to escape scandal—and herself. I adored Conklin’s short story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, which won acclaim for its emotionally honest and idiosyncratic tales of queer people just trying to make it through the day; they’re so good at laying bare the everyday chaos of queer life.
Palm Meridian by Grace Flahive (June 10)
Set against the sun- and ocean-soaked backdrop of a not-so-distant future version of Florida that’s partially underwater, Flahive’s delightfully chaotic debut novel follows a seventy-something woman over the course of her last day on Earth. She’s decided to host one final party, an occasion to revisit the highs and heartbreaks of her life, holding out hope for one last reunion with the woman whose love she lost decades ago. Steven Rowley, author of The Celebrants, calls it “A riotous novel about a farewell party that celebrates all of life’s emotions—big and small—while marking the arrival of an exciting new voice in fiction.”
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab (June 10)
No bones about it: Schwab’s 2020 novel The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is one of the best books I’ve read in the past 5 years, a fantastical and heartrendingly rich tour de force about a woman “blessed” with eternal life and cursed to be forgotten by everyone she comes into contact with. The author’s latest is just as capacious in both scope and emotionality, following three generations of women—all of whom are lady-loving vampires. Don’t wait to sink your teeth into this one.
Florenzer by Phil Melanson (June 10)
Set amidst the squalor and splendor of 15th-century Florence, Melanson’s first novel weaves the stories of young gay painter Leonardo da Vinci, a priest whose skin is deemed too dark, and a rising Medici banker into a tale brimming with art, danger, and ambition. It’s got all the gorgeous detail of a meticulously researched historical novel, but with a very contemporary pulse. In their review for the book, Kirkus called it “proudly lusty,” and honestly, sold.
Midnight at the Cinema Palace by Christopher Tradowsky (June 10)
It’s 1993, and film geek Walter has kinda-sorta followed his kinda-sorta lover from Ohio to the gay Mecca of San Francisco. The undefined “friendship with benefits” leads to him feeling adrift—that is, until he meets a gender-bending couple with whom he forms a kinda-sorta throuple. Winner of the 2023 J. Michael Samuel Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Tradowsky makes an auspicious debut with this tenderhearted coming-of-age story that is both a love letter to the pre-internet Bay Area and to the personal and communal power of movies.
Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski (June 10)
Personal note: I’m a sucker for a second-chance romance. It’s my narrative weakness, especially when it’s done with the kind of lucid dreaminess Rutkowski taps into here. Emily has the perfect Upper East Side life, at least on paper, but when her high school girlfriend—now a world-famous Olympian—reappears, old wounds and long-buried feelings come rushing back. What follows is an emotionally rich story of rekindled first love, personal risk, and the fragile line between who we were and who we’re allowed to become.
Girls Girls Girls by Shoshana von Blanckensee (June 17)
In the summer of 1996, best friends—and secret lovers—Hannah and Sam hit the road, leaving behind Long Beach, New York, and the heavy grip of Hannah’s devout Orthodox Jewish mother for the queer promise of San Francisco. But freedom, of course, isn’t so simple. To pay their way, they start stripping, a job Hannah comes to hate until she meets an older butch who might whisk her away from it all—including Sam—and both girls are forced to reckon with their own desires and identities.
These Heathens by Mia McKenzie (June 17)
From the two-time Lambda Award-winning author of the charmingly fun Skye Falling comes another heartfelt romp, this one about a religious seventeen-year-old in 1960s Georgia, Doris Steele, who flees to Atlanta, at the suggestion of her favorite teacher, in order to get an abortion. She gets swept up in a whirlwind weekend full of queer joy and civil rights icons who’ve become celebrities, people unapologetically living their truth. And now Doris needs to learn what hers is.
I’ll Be Right Here by Amy Bloom (June 24)
Amy Bloom has practically patented this kind of grand dreaminess, her stories—including White Houses, which fictionalized and brought to vivid life the love between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok—epics spun out of intimate memories. Her latest is a sweeping, decades-spanning novel about love in all its unruly forms and the ways in which families are made and remade.
The Original by Nell Stevens (July 1)
Grace has always been an outsider in her crumbling Oxfordshire estate, but she’s quietly mastered the art of painting—and forgery—while dreaming of a life far from her chilly family and their secrets. When a long-lost cousin resurfaces and claims a stake in the family fortune, Grace is pulled into a gothic swirl of deception and inheritance. Stevens’s first novel, Briefly, a Delicious Life, was a haunting yet lovely novel about a teenage ghost who watches over and falls for the writer George Sand, known also as the partner of Chopin. It’s a fun and exquisite novel, quite…um, well, original. The author’s followup promises even more candlelit suspense.
Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy by Andréa Becker (July 15)
“This book is dedicated to the uterus,” writes Becker, a medical sociologist, in the author’s note to this incisive exploration of bodily autonomy. “Though only the size of a fist, it’s been turned into a capacious receptacle, forced to hold impossibly large societal questions and controversies.” Get It Out is appropriately capacious, an excoriation of the ways in which America’s healthcare system—not to mention the culture’s preoccupation with policing “right” and “wrong” expressions of gender—deprives both cis and trans people of the fundamental right to control their own bodies.
Trying by Chloe Caldwell (August 5)
In this sharply honest memoir, Women author Chloe Caldwell sets out to write about infertility—but ends up charting a far messier, more unexpected transformation. What begins as a chronicle of trying to conceive becomes a reckoning with betrayal, queer desire, and the question of what it actually means to build a life.
Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color by Denne Michele Norris, Electric Literature (August 12)
Electric Literature’s first book is a must-read. Edited by Editor-in-Chief Denne Michele Norris, the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication, the anthology features unforgettable essays from seventeen trans and gender nonconforming people of color, from major voices in literature like Akwaeke Emezi and Meredith Talusan to activists and celebrities such as RuPaul’s Drag Race star Peppermint to up-and-coming literary talent. Inspired by EL’s groundbreaking essay series, Both/And is full of essential and transformative trans stories that we need now more than ever.
Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (August 19)
James Baldwin wasn’t just one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century—he was a moral force, a cultural critic, and a voice of searing clarity on race, sexuality, and power. In this richly intimate biography, Nicholas Boggs brings Baldwin’s private world into sharper focus, tracing the relationships that helped shape his singular voice—from lovers and muses to artistic collaborators. Drawing on new archival material, Baldwin: A Love Story deepens our understanding of a towering figure whose work remains urgent and relevant.
Don’t forget to check out the Most Anticipated Queer Books for Spring 2025 for books published January through April!
