Here are 100 books that Spellbound fans have personally recommended if you like
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I'm a cartoonist with a transgender-biography and I write trans characters into my stories. Even though I value the growing awareness of transgender representation by all writers, those that were written by people with trans-experience carry special significance. I've written a graphic novel and many autobiographical, fictional, and documentary short stories. These works have centered on the themes sexual identity, gender roles, youth culture, family, social structures, and social history. With my work I aim to shed light on issues that are lesser known, with a strong social focus and the intention of using the storytelling medium and the comic format as a way of making the complex understandable.
I love this brightly colored collection of short stories, Gumballs. The author Erin Nations writes about situations and scenarios that explain a lot of the daily troubles in a trans person's life. The comics are in part autobiographical about his current life, in part about his childhood experience of being a triplet, and in part about fictional characters. The many different stories that range from serious to very funny, never get boring and are easy and fun to read. I recommend it for queer people to relate to and people who want to learn about being queer while also having a good laugh. As a trans person, reading the comic shows me I am not alone with those daily problems.
Gumballs dispenses an array of bright, candy-colored short comics about Erin's gender transition, anecdotal tales of growing up as a triplet, and fictional stories of a socially inept love-struck teenager named Tobias. The wide-ranging series is filled with single-page gag cartoons, visual diaries of everyday life, funny faux personal ads, and real-life horror stories from customers at his day job. Gumballs offers a variety of flavors that will surely delight anyone with a taste for candid self-reflection and observations of humanity. This book collects Gumballs #1-4, plus 32 pages of brand-new content! Gumballs tips its hat to the classic alt-comic…
I'm a cartoonist with a transgender-biography and I write trans characters into my stories. Even though I value the growing awareness of transgender representation by all writers, those that were written by people with trans-experience carry special significance. I've written a graphic novel and many autobiographical, fictional, and documentary short stories. These works have centered on the themes sexual identity, gender roles, youth culture, family, social structures, and social history. With my work I aim to shed light on issues that are lesser known, with a strong social focus and the intention of using the storytelling medium and the comic format as a way of making the complex understandable.
This book impressed me because it doesn't shy away from its subject matter. The author tells about her journey and the struggles that pile up when she seeks professional help to transition but meets instead with a therapist who quickly becomes overwhelmed as they unpack trauma and dissociative identity disorder. With a whopping 904 pages, it's intense, but never gets dense. Entry is low-threshold and the quirky characters drew me in in no time. So much so that even when I didn't know who to believe, I was ready to believe anyone. This book perfectly illustrates the problems around gatekeeping of transgender healthcare and its complex intersections with mental health.
A boldly drawn, unforgettable memoir about trauma and the barriers to gender affirming health care. In the winter of 2004, a shy woman named Emma sits in Toby s office. She wants to share this wonderful new book she s reading, but Toby, her therapist, is concerned with other things. Emma is transgender, and has sought out Toby for approval for hormone replacement therapy. Emma has shown up at the therapy sessions as an outgoing, confident young woman named Katina, and a depressed, submissive workaholic named Ed. She has little or no memory of her actions when presenting as these…
I'm a cartoonist with a transgender-biography and I write trans characters into my stories. Even though I value the growing awareness of transgender representation by all writers, those that were written by people with trans-experience carry special significance. I've written a graphic novel and many autobiographical, fictional, and documentary short stories. These works have centered on the themes sexual identity, gender roles, youth culture, family, social structures, and social history. With my work I aim to shed light on issues that are lesser known, with a strong social focus and the intention of using the storytelling medium and the comic format as a way of making the complex understandable.
Stone Fruit is such a pleasure to flip through and enjoy for its beautiful drawings and line work. In the story the main character works through reconciling their relationship with their partner and themselves and their identity. The bond that they have with their niece is about ways of connecting, facing reality, and the cathartic potential of our creative minds. As a queer parent I really connected with how the relationship between the characters is about what we gift each other between generations or among peers, transcending the traditional family structures.
Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray’s niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seeded personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties ― Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn’t fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and…
I'm a cartoonist with a transgender-biography and I write trans characters into my stories. Even though I value the growing awareness of transgender representation by all writers, those that were written by people with trans-experience carry special significance. I've written a graphic novel and many autobiographical, fictional, and documentary short stories. These works have centered on the themes sexual identity, gender roles, youth culture, family, social structures, and social history. With my work I aim to shed light on issues that are lesser known, with a strong social focus and the intention of using the storytelling medium and the comic format as a way of making the complex understandable.
Body Music is a lyrical compilation of short stories that play in the city life of Montreal. Each story is a small insight into the intimacy shared between two or more people. Very tenderly the author shows how love and connection are as unique and personal as people are different. It was heart-warming to read trans characters who were just one more way in the myriad of ways of being human.
Julie Maroh's first book, Blue Is the Warmest Color, was a graphic novel phenomenon; it was a New York Times bestseller and the controversial film adaptation by French director Abdellatif Kechiche won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013. Maroh's latest book, Body Music, marks her return to the kind of soft, warm palette and impressionistic sensibility that made her debut book so sensational.
Set in the languid, European-like neighborhoods of Montreal, Body Music is a beautiful and moving meditation on love and desire as expressed in their many different forms?between women, men, and gender non-conformists alike,…
I am Sonora Reyes, author of The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School. As a queer Mexican-American, I’ve only ever written (and probably only ever will) write stories about queer characters of color like myself. Growing up, I never had access to books that represented people like me, and it fills me with so much joy to see all the representation that exists today. I write for the queer kids of color who desperately need to see themselves in fiction. I write for my teenage self. For the kids who think they’re alone. For the kids who want to see joy in their own stories. And, most importantly, for myself, as I am today.
I may be biased about this book because I happened to read it during a really dark time in my life. It was exactly what I needed to get me back on my feet and lighten my mood. I loved being able to escape into Noah’s messy and hilarious love story and forget about the world around me. 10/10 I highly recommend this book!
Felix Ever After meets Becky Albertalli in this swoon-worthy, heartfelt rom-com about how a transgender teen's first love challenges his ideas about perfect relationships.
Noah Ramirez thinks he's an expert on romance. He has to be for his popular blog, the Meet Cute Diary, a collection of trans happily ever afters. There's just one problem-all the stories are fake. What started as the fantasies of a trans boy afraid to step out of the closet has grown into a beacon of hope for trans readers across the globe.
When a troll exposes the blog as fiction, Noah's world unravels. The…
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 queer, nonbinary, Muslim, immigrant writer who has been reading their whole life and writing for part of it. I learned to write by reading–by devouring all kinds of books across different genres and paying attention to how words create feelings, worlds, and chronologies. I also learned to live by reading–I didn’t grow up with models of how to live a life that was true to my identities and so I read everything I could find about experiences that were adjacent to my own. The emergence of queer Muslim literature has been exciting to follow, and I try to read everything in the field.
At its core, this book is a mystery: a trans Syrian-American’s journey to find out what happened to his mother and how she was connected to an artist whose journal he finds.
But what I loved most about this book is the meditations on gender, on spirituality, and on birds. This book is an ornithologist’s dream.
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction Winner of the ALA Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award Named Best Book of the Year by Bustle Named Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Millions, Electric Literature, and HuffPost
From the award-winning author of The Map of Salt and Stars, a new novel about three generations of Syrian Americans haunted by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they carry close to their hearts—a “vivid exploration of loss, art, queer and trans communities, and the persistence of history. Often tender, always engrossing, The Thirty Names of Night…
I’m a queer writer whose latest novel explores destiny’s role in love, and what it means for love to triumph. I’m completely addicted to reading queer romances, and my favourite dynamics are always couples whose love beats the odds. I am a queer Australian writer of fantasy, as well as a video game designer. I live in Sydney with my partner and our two furry children.
This book was a wonderful queer reimagining of the story of Peter Pan.
A friend lent me this book years ago and I devoured it. Many of Disney’s villains are queer-coded, and Hook in particular seems to embrace femininity—but his cultured dandyism only hides his evil.
Moreover, the original story of Peter Pan grapples with the desire for childhood immortality and the lack of adult responsibility, but Chant’s Peter is a trans man: not only is he avoiding his adulthood, but also the expectations of his gender.
The rivalry between Hook and Peter becomes something more, blurring into sensuality. But both Hook and Peter have to figure out what they mean to one another outside of the roles of Neverland. Such a gripping story!
A queer, transgender retelling of Peter Pan in which Pan returns to Neverland after a decade in the real world.
The Lost Boys say that Peter Pan went back to England because of Wendy Darling, but Wendy is just an old life he left behind. Neverland is his real home. So when Peter returns to it after ten years in the real world, he's surprised to find a Neverland that no longer seems to need him.
The only person who truly missed Peter is Captain James Hook, who is delighted to have his old rival back. But when a new…
I am a queer writer whose early love of science fiction and fantasy gave me an outlet for my creativity and new ways of seeing myself in the world. It was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and Timeline by Michael Crichton that first introduced me to time and space travel in fiction, but it was the new Doctor Who and shows like Twelve Monkeys that made me realize how mad and wonderful stories about time and space travel could be. And once I came to terms with my own queer identities, I saw an obvious space for my own contribution to the time travel canon.
The Light From Uncommon Stars is, at its sci-fi core, a story about being human and all of the messiness that comes from that state of being.
Even the aliens share a sweet humanness – a desire to find home, to find love, to find family. Plus, you can never go wrong with a donut-shop setting. This book is queer and gender-expansive, with all the beauty and trauma that comes with each.
I wouldn’t call this book cozy – and it’s worth noting that not all of the queer characters are “good queers”, but it isn’t gritty or dark – it is what it is, and isn’t that the most beautifully human thing it could be?
Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts.
Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six.
When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She's found her final candidate.
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which Time Magazine listed as one of the hundred best fantasy novels of all time. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night, Victories Greater than Death, and Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. She organizes the long-running spoken word series Writers With Drinks, helps to organize tours of local bookstores, and also co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, Slate, and the Boston Review.
This book of speculative short fiction includes some of the best queer representation I've seen in ages. "A Silly Love Story" includes a gender-fluid character named Merion, and "Before We Disperse Like Star Stuff" includes a trans grad student named Min. Cipri manages to combine the surreal and illogical with a pervasive sense of warmth and humanity, which is a nearly impossible feat, and they make it look easy. Each story will leave you wondering what happens next, but the characters will also live on in your imagination long after you've turned the page.
Dark, irreverent, and truly innovative, the speculative stories in Homesick meditate on the theme of home and our estrangement from it, and what happens when the familiar suddenly shifts into the uncanny. In stories that foreground queer relationships and transgender or nonbinary characters, Cipri delivers the origin story for a superhero team comprised of murdered girls; a housecleaner discovering an impossible ocean in her least-favorite clients' house; a man haunted by keys that appear suddenly in his throat; and a team of scientists and activists discovering the remains of a long-extinct species…
