10 Queer Books From Indie Presses You Definitely Don’t Want to Miss This Year

Like many others, I devoured the TV show Pose, which often feels like a love letter to Ballroom culture. So I’m excited to read this book, which looks at the complex history of Ballroom culture and community, its influence on pop culture, the ways it’s been appropriated, and its relevance today. A blend of history and interviews, this book is a celebration of Ballroom, and the Black and Latine LGBTQIA+ people who created it.

I’ve already had the pleasure of reading this one, and all I can say is get ready. It’s a tender, funny, and heartbreaking exploration of pandemic life, queerness across time, disability, and the ups and downs of community. Set in New York in the spring of 2020, it follows Orpheus, a queer disabled woman who bikes around the city, reflecting on her life and trying to hang on to human connection in a world increasingly devoid of it.

In this academic work, Hil Malatino acknowledges and makes space for the negative feelings that can come with being trans and living in a transphobic world — exhaustion, alienation, burnout. He posits that these bad feelings are rarely talked about because talking about them can be seen to reinforce transphobia, but that talking about them is not only necessary, it can provide new possibiltles for thriving trans futures. I love a book that challenges me, and this one sounds like a worthy challenge.

In rural South Korean in the 1970s, a girl named San has a close friendship with Namae. But after a moment of intimacy, Namae rejects her. Years later, in her early 20s, San is working in a flower shop, where she interacts with customers and coworkers, including a photographer with whom she becomes obsessed. As she goes about her days, San is haunted by the memory of Namae. This quiet, powerful novel explores violence, girlhood, young womanhood, desire, and queerness.

There’s nothing I love more than a queer family saga, so I can’t wait to get my hands on this one! Jenry was raised by a single mother in Miami. Wanting to know more about the father he never knew, he enrolls at Brown, where his grandfather, Winston, is a professor. But instead of encouraging Jenry’s search for his father, his grandfather tells him that he should be looking for Winston’s daughter Juliet, his mother’s lover. Slowly, Jenry begins to unravel all the unknown pieces of his family’s history.

In this collection of essays, Lori Fox confronts the capitalist patriarchy and all of its violences. Drawing on their experiences as queer, nonbinary, and working class, they examine capitalism through both personal and political lenses — proving how the personal is always political. The essays explore the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and geography, bearing witness to the ways capitalism harms the most marginalized among us, and offering a vision for a different future.