Here are 100 books that All The Things She Said fans have personally recommended if you like
All The Things She Said.
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I have been writing about LGBTQ+ culture for magazines and newspapers for almost a decade, and am a voracious consumer of queer stories. Queer literature makes our various needs and desires as a community come alive on the page, and helps us to connect with and understand one another. Reading LGBTQ+ books is a way to learn about contemporary queer life, and work out what more we can be doing to help those more marginalised than us.
This book is written with the utmost clarity – making an incisive and digestible argument why liberation for trans people fits into wider fights for socialism and justice for minorities. With chapters on why “T” belongs in “LGBT” and why trans inclusion should be core to feminist movements, it’s an essential read for LGBTQ+ people and their allies.
'Few books are as urgent as Shon Faye's debut ... Faye has hope for the future - and maybe so should we' Independent
'Unsparing, important and weighty ... a vitally needed antidote' Observer
'Takes the status quo by the lapels and gives it a shaking' Times Literary Supplement
Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war 'issue'. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized 'debate' which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals…
I’m a 54-year-old gay man who has led my own messy life here in New York City, marked as much by sex, romance, friendship, and culture as by drug addiction, relationship drama, mental illness and youthful trauma. I’ve published five novels, all of which contain queer characters who’ve not exactly been poster children for mainstream-world-approved LGBTQ behavior. I’m drawn to novels like the ones I’ve mentioned because they show queer people not as the hetero world often would like them to be—sanitized, asexual, witty and “fabulous”—but as capable of dysfunction, mediocrity, unwise choices and poor conduct as anybody else.
Like a hipster Brooklyn transgender Sex and the City, this novel is a chatty, hilarious, and moving look at queer folks grasping for parenthood and family in a world where all the rules have been thrown out.
The book’s narrator, transwoman Reese, takes us on this ride with such sardonic, poignant insight about the world she lives in that we begin to feel like we live in it, too. When Reese’s ex, Ames—who has detransitioned from his former transwoman identity, Amy—gets his straight female boss pregnant, the three of them begin negotiating how they might raise the child together.
But the novel’s true power lies in how Reese explains her life and her friends to us—bravely refusing to portray trans people as angelic role models and instead offering something deeper and more endearing: showing them as real people.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires in “one of the most celebrated novels of the year” (Time)
“Reading this novel is like holding a live wire in your hand.”—Vulture
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by more than twenty publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Vulture, and Autostraddle
PEN/Hemingway Award Winner • Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Gotham Book Prize • Longlisted for The Women’s…
I have been writing about LGBTQ+ culture for magazines and newspapers for almost a decade, and am a voracious consumer of queer stories. Queer literature makes our various needs and desires as a community come alive on the page, and helps us to connect with and understand one another. Reading LGBTQ+ books is a way to learn about contemporary queer life, and work out what more we can be doing to help those more marginalised than us.
Gay Bar is an imaginative history of gay bar culture in London, San Francisco, and LA – where the author has lived, over several decades. It is both personal and more widely historical, blending anecdotes and “overheard” with in-depth research to uncover the importance and also problems that come with these spaces, which are increasingly becoming extinct, as gay bars in major cities struggle to stay in business.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The New York Times * NPR * Vogue * Gay Times * Artforum *
“Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force.” –Maggie Nelson
"Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex.” –New York Times Book Review
As gay bars continue to close at an alarming rate, a writer looks back to find out what’s being lost in this indispensable, intimate, and stylish celebration of queer history.
Strobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first…
I have been writing about LGBTQ+ culture for magazines and newspapers for almost a decade, and am a voracious consumer of queer stories. Queer literature makes our various needs and desires as a community come alive on the page, and helps us to connect with and understand one another. Reading LGBTQ+ books is a way to learn about contemporary queer life, and work out what more we can be doing to help those more marginalised than us.
The follow-up to his acclaimed book What Belongs to You, Cleanness is a relatively short but gorgeously executed novel about an American teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria. It gives snapshots of his relationship, as well as dating app hooks ups – for better or worse. Greenwell is one of the greatest writers of our time, and he turns each sentence beautifully.
Longlisted for the Prix Sade 2021 Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A New York Times Critics Top Ten Book of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by over 30 Publications, including The New Yorker, TIME, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and the BBC
In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire
Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval.…
I’ve struggled with mental health for most of my life, as have family members and friends I love. It’s extremely important to me that we normalize discussions of mental health so that we can find the best solutions. Anxiety and depression have been major themes in all of the young adult novels I’ve written; it’s my little way of furthering these conversations with the people who need them. I hope you’ll find these suggestions relatable, enjoyable, and question-inducing!
Anna Birch’s I Kissed Aliceis an enemies-to-lovers story about two gifted artists, Rhodes and Iliana, at a school for the arts who despise each other in person but fall hard for each other’s online fanfiction personas. Rhodes’s depression and anxiety consume her in the race to win a prestigious scholarship and navigate a complicated dynamic with her alcoholic mother. I found Rhodes’s on-page therapy sessions incredibly refreshing and relatable, something I don’t see enough of in YA fiction. The characters in this story are unlikeable and flawed—extremely so—but for that reason, my heart clenched often at their actions, assumptions, and reactions. Bonus points for the beautiful fanfiction graphics illustrated by Victoria Ying.
Rhodes and Iliana couldn't be more different, but that's not why they hate each other. Hyper-gifted painter Rhodes has always excelled at the Alabama Fine Arts Academy despite a secret bout of creator's block, while transfer student Iliana tries to outshine everyone with her intense work ethic. But since only one of them can get the coveted Capstone scholarship, and the competition between them grows fierce. They both escape the pressure on a fanfic site where they are unknowingly collaborating on a webcomic. Their anonymous online identities I-Kissed-Alice and Curious-in-Cheshire begin to fall in love, despite being worst enemies in…
Judith Jones became an important mentor and mother figure to me in my twenties, in the wake of my parents’ deaths. Her personal wisdom and guidance, which I received both in knowing her personally and from the incredible archive she left behind, have been invaluable to me during a particularly tumultuous and transformative decade in my own life. I wrote The Editor as I was coming into my full adulthood, and the books on this list helped shape my thinking along the way at times when I felt stagnant or stuck or needed to rethink both how to write Judith’s life and why her story is so vital to tell.
This book fundamentally reshaped my notion of how biography–especially biographies of women–can be written. Shapland felt intimately connected to McCullers as a person and as a writer and also had an inkling there was more to her personhood than previous biographical treatments suggest.
By inhabiting McCullers’s spaces and putting herself in proximity to the writer’s material past, Shapland demonstrates the ways in which convention has limited both the stories we tell and, thus, the possibilities we can envision for our lives as women.
Winner of the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and a Lambda Literary Award
Finalist for the National Book Award
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
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…
I started in publishing at the Advocate magazine, twenty years ago in its heyday, then moved to Alyson Books, who first published Emma Donoghue among many others, offering a place for queer writers showcasing queer stories to find their audience. Afterwards, I became involved with Gertrude literary journal, a beloved, 25-year-old non-profit, LGBTQA journal that has now evolved to The Gertrude Conference. All the while, I read, wrote, and supported queer stories, like these gems!
This one was made into a long-short documentary (38 minutes) called Jeanne Cordova: Butches, Lies & Feminism that won the Grand Jury Prize at Outfest 2017 for Best Documentary Short, now I’d love to see this as a biopic feature!
Let’s watch Jeanne Cordova come to life—her old school get-er-done butch energy out there in the 1970s fighting for lesbian rights, starting the West Coast Lesbian Conference in 1971 and the first National Lesbian Conference in 1973. Imagine the drama bringing people together and setting the platform for lesbian rights when many were fired if outed.
Maybe Fortune Feimster could play a role!? Oh yes, yes she could.
A sweeping memoir, a raw and intimate chronicle of a young activist torn between conflicting personal longings and political goals. When We Were Outlaws offers a rare view of the life of a radical lesbian during the early cultural struggle for gay rights, Women’s Liberation, and the New Left of the 1970s.
Brash and ambitious, activist Jeanne Córdova is living with one woman and falling in love with another, but her passionate beliefs tell her that her first duty is to the revolution” to change the world and end discrimination against gays and lesbians. Trying to compartmentalize her sexual life,…
My newest YA novel, Home Field Advantage, is your typical cliché sports romance between a high school quarterback and aspiring cheer captain…except that they’re both girls. Sports is such a fascinating setting for queer YA to me, because it adds a whole extra social dynamic of being teammates and how that can work for or against you, depending on the culture and who you are. It’s also a great venue for subversion of gender norms, which is always welcome to me! And in general, I really just love protagonists who are really passionate about what they do. If they happen to be queer as well, that’s just a nice bonus!
Dugan is one of my absolute favorite authors of queer YA, and this romance between out-and-proud track star Morgan and closeted Ruby is a perfect illustration why, merging a fun high school setting and passionate main characters with the very relevant situation of managing your public level of queerness. It’s thoughtful and sweet, romantic and funny, and above all, real.
In this YA contemporary queer romance from the author of Hot Dog Girl, an openly gay track star falls for a closeted, bisexual teen beauty queen with a penchant for fixing up old cars. Now available in paperback!
Morgan, an elite track athlete, is forced to transfer high schools late in her senior year after it turns out being queer is against her private Catholic school's code of conduct. There, she meets Ruby, who has two hobbies: tinkering with her baby blue 1970 Ford Torino and competing in local beauty pageants, the latter to live out the dreams of her…
Two facts about me as a reader: I like books that deal with difficult issues, and I like reading a lot of them. There’s something about watching teens, for whom everything feels new, deal with the toughest stuff imaginable and come out the other side. I love a protagonist who has been through the wringer. Some people call these stories dark or morbid. I prefer to think of them as hopeful. My own writing history is as diverse as my reading habits. I’ve published in poetry, romance, and criticism, but these days I’m all about YA, like the politically-charged thriller I’m querying or my queer New Orleans ghost story, The Women of Dauphine.
What’s more all-consuming than being in love with your best friend? An uncontrolled fire, maybe–or a few of them. This turbulent romance between two teenage girls is told in prose poetry, and like the best novels in verse, every carefully formatted word carries weight. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, and it dives into the (main) narrator’s mind so intimately you’ll forget you don’t even know her name.
From New York Times bestselling author Ashley Woodfolk, Nothing Burns as Bright as You is an impassioned stand-alone tale of queer love, grief, and the complexity of female friendship.
Two girls. One wild and reckless day. Years of tumultuous history unspooling like a thin, fraying string in the hours after they set a fire.
They were best friends. Until they became more. Their affections grew. Until the blurry lines became dangerous.
Over the course of a single day, the depth of their past, the confusion of their present, and the unpredictability of their future is revealed. And…
I’ve been a part of the LGBTQ+ community my whole life and have always been passionate about advocating for the people who identify as such. Furthermore, I have always had a fascination with emotional stories and the combination of a lack of many LGBTQ+ books with an abundance of romance and emotional thrillers out there makes it a ripe topic for stories. As a lesbian myself, it is very hard to write stories that don’t have those kinds of couples, so I tend to stick to that genre and I’m absolutely addicted to lesbian books.
By inserting the book into a time when the very essence of the story is dangerous, the people are made to be in a situation where I was turning one page after the next to find out what would happen to them.
Each question that arose in my mind made me urgently attempt to find answers and the smile that came to my face at each happy moment felt amazing. The emotions that echoed through the book found their way into me and made me feel as if I was along for the ride as well right beside the characters.
"That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other." And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: "Have you ever heard of such a thing?"
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.
America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall…
