Celebrate Pride Month this year by reading a new fiction book or memoir! These suggestions are just a small selection of recent LGBTQ+ releases available at CCPL.
Too many books on your TBR list? Use your library card to watch movies on Kanopy, such as Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Cuckoo, and many more!
Book Recommendations:
Model Home by Rivers Solomon
The Maxwell siblings return to their childhood home in the Dallas suburbs after the shocking news of their parents’ deaths. They return to find the house, and the family itself, haunted by strange, inexplicable terrors.
I Think They Love You by Julian Winters
When Denzel ‘Denz’ Carter’s workaholic father and CEO of 24 Carter Gold unexpectedly announces his retirement, the competition is on for who will become his successor. To convince his family members that he’s capable of commitment, Denz impulsively lies about being in a serious relationship. Now he needs to find a fake boyfriend to seal the deal on the CEO position. Denz is forced to turn to the last person he wants to be in a pretend (or any) relationship with: Braylon, the man who broke his heart. Braylon’s sudden reappearance in Denz’s life turns everything upside down. But, apparently, he needs Denz’s connections to the mayor to win his own promotion. So, they strike a deal. It’s all business until the funny texts and the confusing kisses leave Denz struggling to separate this temporary arrangement from the affairs of his heart.
Private Rites by Julia Armfield
A speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world. It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself, and arcane rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time since their father died. An architect as cruel as he was revered, his death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will. More estranged than ever, the sisters’ lives spin out of control. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.
The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill
A whimsical and healing novel about a trans man in New York who, almost 30, laid off, broke–moves back to his small Illinois hometown, walks into the bookstore he worked at in high school, and slips through time to come face-to-face with his pre-transition, teenage self.
Aunt Tigress by Emily Yu-Xuan Qin
Tam hasn’t eaten anyone in years. She is now Mama’s soft-spoken, vegan daughter–everything dangerous about her is cut out. But when Tam’s estranged Aunt Tigress is found murdered and skinned, Tam inherits an undead fox in a shoebox and an ensemble of old enemies. The demons, the ghosts, the gods running coffee shops by the river? Fine. The tentacled thing stalking Tam across the city? Absolutely not. And when Tam realizes the girl she’s falling in love with might be yet another loose end from her past? That’s just the brassy, beautiful cherry on top. No matter how quietly she lives, Tam can’t hide from her voracious upbringing or the suffering she causes. As she navigates romance, redemption, and the end of the world, she can’t help but wonder… Do monsters even deserve happy endings?
Loca by Alejandro Heredia
It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years. Her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escape in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition. Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: ‘Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones’ imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In ‘The Chaser,’ a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, ‘The Masker,’ a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides.
How to Live Free in a Dangerous World by Shayla Lawson
Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self.
Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays by Edgar Gomez
In Florida, one of the first things you’re taught as a child is that if you’re ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It’s a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez’s life. Zig. Zag. Gomez survived this way as long as his legs carried him. Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. For those chasing the American Dream and those jaded by it, Gomez’s unforgettable story is a testament to finding love, purpose, and community on your own terms, smiling with all your fake teeth.
