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2SLGBTQI+ Topics Novemeber 2025 |
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Minor Black Figures
by Brandon Taylor
From the Booker Prize finalist and bestselling author: a perceptive novel about a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It's challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist's block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make - in art and in life. As he did so adeptly in Booker finalist Real Life and the bestselling The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor brings to life in Minor Black Figures a fascinating set of characters, this time in the competitive art world, and the lives they lead with each and on their own. Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of friendship, creativity, and the connections between them.
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Crafting for Sinners
by Jenny Kiefer
When Ruth is caught shoplifting from the megachurch-owned craft store in her small hometown, she is locked in and attacked by employees who seem to have a secret and sinister plan for her.
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Ghost Fish [eBook]
by Stuart Pennebaker
Autostraddle's Most Anticipated Queer Books for August 2025 Goodreads's 2025 Debut Novels to Discover Now A tender coming-of-age novel about a young woman haunted by her sister's death, who starts to believe that her beloved sibling has returned to her--in the form of a ghost fish, for fans of Sweetbitter and Our Wives Under the Sea. Alison is mired in loneliness and grief. Freshly twenty-three and mourning the loss of her younger sister, who has drowned at sea, she's moved out of her hometown and into a cramped apartment on New York's Lower East Side. Now she's living the cliché, barely making rent as a restaurant hostess and avoiding her roommates, while watching the bright, busy passersby from her bubble of grief. She doesn't need originality; she just needs to be alive. Then, late one night, she rounds the corner and sees a shape in the air--a ghost. And how strange, it looks like a fish. What is it? Alison knows, without hesitation: it is her beloved sister, finally returned to her side. Safe in a pickle jar filled with water, the ghost fish goes wherever Alison does: in an alcove at the restaurant; in a tote bag on the subway; in her room at night as her roommates chatter outside. She knows she has to keep her safe from the world, the way she didn't before. She knows that, together, they will never be lonely again. But as Alison's new life in New York begins to grow, and as she navigates the murky waters of dating, friendship, and desire, she must ask: what if her sister is keeping her away from a life outwardly lived? With tenderness and heart, stretching from New York City to Key West, Ghost Fish is a meditation on grief and loneliness, and the strange, kaleidoscopic ways we help ourselves--and those we love--through them.
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Hot Wax
by M. L. Rio
Hot Wax is a propulsive father-daughter story (Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad) and a journey of self-discovery that captures the joy and danger of rock 'n' roll (Publishers Weekly) through one woman's reckless mission to make sense of the events that shattered her childhood.Summer, 1989: ten-year-old Suzanne is drawn like a magnet to her father's forbidden world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills' wild ride to glory. But fame has sharper fangs than anybody realized, and as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning--one shrouded in mystery and lore for decades to come. The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next twenty-nine years trying to disappear. She trades the music and mayhem of her youth for the quiet of the suburbs and the company of her mild-mannered husband Rob. But when her father's sudden death resurrects the troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she leaves it all behind and hits the road in search of answers. Hitching her fate and Gil's beloved car to two vagabonds who call an old Airstream trailer home, she finds everything she thought she'd lost forever: desire, adventure, and the woman she once wanted to be. But Rob refuses to let her go. Determined to bring her back where she belongs, he chases her across the country--and drives her to a desperation all her own. Drenched in knock-down drag-out rock and roll, Hot Wax is a raucous, breakneck ride to hell and back--where getting lost might be the only way to find yourself and save your soul.
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Three Parties
by Ziyad Saadi
Queer Palestinian refugee Firas Dareer has planned his 23rd birthday party meticulously, setting it up to be his opportunity to come out to his friends and family. But despite his best efforts, things are already falling apart, with several scandals amongst the guests threatening to overshadow his day—and that’s not to mention the love triangle he’s currently in. This novel takes place over the course of a single day, a la Mrs. Dalloway.Book Annotation
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When They Burned the Butterfly
by Wen-Yi Lee
In this fierce, glamorous adult fantasy debut, Silvia Moreno-Garcia meets Fonda Lee, with the feverish intensity of R.F. Kuang's Poppy War trilogy. Singapore, 1972: Newly independent and grappling for power in a fast-modernizing world. Here, gangsters in Chinese secret societies are the last conduits of their ancestors' migrant gods, and the back alleys where they fight are the last place magic has not been assimilated and legislated away. Loner schoolgirl Adeline Siow has never needed more company than the flame she can summon at her fingertips. But when her mother dies in a house fire with a butterfly seared onto her skin and Adeline hunts down a girl she saw in a back-alley barfight--a girl with a butterfly tattoo--she discovers she's far from alone. Ang Tian is a Red Butterfly: one of a gang of girls who came from nothing, sworn to a fire goddess and empowered to wreak vengeance on the men that abuse and underestimate them. Adeline's mother led a double life as their elusive patron, Madam Butterfly. Now that she's dead, Adeline's bloodline is the sole thing sustaining the goddess. Between her search for her mother's killer and the gang's succession crisis, Adeline becomes quickly entangled with the girls' dangerous world, and even more so with the charismatic Tian. But no home lasts long around here. Ambitious and paranoid neighbor gangs hunt at the edges of Butterfly territory, and bodies are turning up in the red light district suffused with a strange new magic. Adeline may have found her place for once, but with the streets changing by the day, it may take everything she is to keep it.
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Girl Dinner
by Olivie Blake
Every member of The House, the most exclusive sorority on campus, is beautiful, high-achieving, and respected. Sophomore Nina Kaur knows being accepted into The House is the first step in her path to the brightest possible future. Adjunct professor Dr. Sloane Hartley is struggling to return to work after 18 months at home with her newborn daughter. When invited to be The House's academic liaison, Sloane enviously drinks in the way the alumnae seem to have it all. As Nina and Sloane get drawn deeper into the sisterhood, they learn that living well comes with bloody costs, and they will have to decide just how much they can stomach in the name of solidarity and power--
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