As an academic researcher, I’ve taken the plunge into areas that others often fear to tread to trace something of the hidden erotic history of Britain. In this stretch of experience, you’ll find crystalized the changes of manners and mores, emerging fronts against reactionary governments, world-making among communities marginalized, ostracised, and endangered, censorship and legislation and debate, and the long tail of civil upheavals around the Summer of Love, gay rights, trans rights, and more. This is often the history of the suburbs, of dreams and imaginations, of reprehensible interlopers, of freethinking paradigm-breakers, and the index of what British society offered its citizens.
This was only published way after Forster’s death–and I can quite see why: it would have whipped up a storm of unimaginable controversy with its story of homosexual love between two Cambridge students and then (steady yourself!) one of those students in later life and a rough-and-ready groundsman.
Forster wrote this in 1913/14, revised it in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, died in 1970, and Maurice finally appeared in 1971. So the book, which concerns hiding, was deeply hidden for over half a century. Forster is sentimental in terms of love and brutal in terms of fate.
Love bucks polite society’s norms in the face of the danger of arrest, public scandal, and disgrace. But such love is so delicate and dangerous that any affront to it has to be met with the most decisive action to protect everyone involved–even if the price is loneliness and a life-long…
As Maurice Hall makes his way through a traditional English education, he projects an outer confidence that masks troubling questions about his own identity. Frustrated and unfulfilled, a product of the bourgeoisie he will grow to despise, he has difficulty acknowledging his nascent attraction to men.
At Cambridge he meets Clive, who opens his eyes to a less conventional view of the nature of love. Yet when Maurice is confronted by the societal pressures of life beyond university, self-doubt and heartbreak threaten his quest for happiness.
I’m a writer who grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Austin, Texas. Though I haven’t lived in Massachusetts for over a decade now, I find myself drawn back to the state’s coast in my fiction. My novel, Women and Children First, takes place in a fictional town south of Boston called Nashquitten. I’m obsessed with how where we’re from shapes who we become and the ways we use narrative to try and exert control over our lives.
This is a book about many things—guilt, artmaking, and love among them—but when I think of it, I think of a novel that depicts the complexities of making and sustaining a life more deftly than anything else I’ve read. How things like cruelty and beauty, innocence and evil, truth and lies all coexist. How we move forward despite this uneasy balance.
The novel follows Fee, a boy who grows up in Maine and sings in an all-boys choir. The choir director turns out to be an abuser, and his actions haunt Fee and the other boys in the choir into adulthood.
On a prose level alone, Chee’s writing is unparalleled, his sentences sharp enough to cut glass. I don’t see how anyone could read this book and come away unchanged.
A poignant work of mature, haunting artistry, Edinburgh heralds the arrival of a remarkable young writer. Fee, a Korean-American child growing up in Maine, is gifted with a beautiful soprano voice and sings in a professional boys' choir. When the choir director acts out his paedophilic urges on the boys in the choir, Fee is unable to save himself, his first love, Peter, or his friends.
The Sweetness of Water is historical fiction that captures the reality of the human issues – the opportunities, the hopes and fears, the dreams and taboos – of life in the American South in the years just after the Civil War.
The characters are complex, the history solid, the writing gorgeous. It is rare that one encounters historical fiction that is truly fictional and yet also “fictionally true” – that is, accurate to small historical details even though the story is made-up. But this book is that, and I’m glad to have it part of me not only as a historian of the nineteenth century, but also for what it brought me and taught me.
An Instant New York Times bestseller / An Oprah’s Book Club Pick
In the spirit of The Known World and The Underground Railroad, an award-winning “miraculous debut” (Washington Post) about the unlikely bond between two freedmen who are brothers and the Georgia farmer whose alliance will alter their lives, and his, forever
In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry—freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping…
I’m a writer and also a history nerd. I love historical fiction—learning about the past through a story just makes the world come alive in a way that non-fiction doesn’t. As I child, I was entranced by middle-grade historical novels like The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle and The Shakespeare Stealer. But I also love fantasy novels and how they use magic to make the truths of our world bigger and bolder, turning the elephant in the room into a dragon that can’t be ignored. Mixing history and fantasy together is my book version of peanut butter and chocolate.
Like a lot of people, I read The Great Gatsby in high school. I really loved it, which is why I was thrilled when one of my favorite authors did her own fantasy re-imaging of this classic.
The Chosen and the Beautiful is set in an alternate universe where magic flows as easily as champagne. It centers on Jordan Baker, a side character in the original book, and reimagines her as a Vietnamese orphan who was adopted as a baby into a wealthy white family.
I loved how this book managed to take a classic and cast it in a totally new light: it makes you think about who and what gets left out of the history books.
An Instant National Bestseller! An Indie Next Pick!
A Most Anticipated in 2021 Pick for Oprah Magazine | USA Today | Buzzfeed | Greatist | BookPage | PopSugar | Bustle | The Nerd Daily | Goodreads | Literary Hub | Ms. Magazine | Library Journal | Culturess | Book Riot | Parade Magazine | Kirkus | The Week | Book Bub | OverDrive | The Portalist | Publishers Weekly
A Best of Summer Pick for TIME Magazine | CNN | Book Riot | The Daily Beast | Lambda Literary | The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | Goodreads | Bustle | Veranda…
As a writer of gay mystery, I try to read as widely as I can—both to learn from writers who have gone before me and for the pleasure of the books themselves. I’m always thrilled when I find writers like the ones I’ve shared in this list: people who think deeply and carefully about the complexities (and, occasionally, the agonies) of being a gay man, while, at the same time, weaving in the suspense and puzzles inherent in mysteries.
The first book in Nava’s best-known series, Lay Your Sleeping Head introduces defense attorney Henry Rios. Rios is struggling with addiction and an existential crisis; when he is drawn into investigating the murder of a young man he loved, he finds he is the only one willing to dig for the truth. Nava’s books are lyrical, intricate, and intensely thoughtful about what it means to be a gay man.
Set in the summer of 1981, in a university town 30 miles south of San Francisco. Henry Rios, a gifted and humane lawyer driven to drink to by personal and professional demons, meets Hugh Paris, a charming junkie struggling to stay clean. Hugh tells Rios an improbable tale of long-ago murders in his wealthy family. Rios disbelieves him but the erotic spark between the two men ignites an obsessive affair that ends only when Hugh is discovered with a needle in his arm on the campus of the great university founded by his ancestor. Rios refused to believe Hugh’s death…
Ever since I was a little guy, I've been told that I complicate things unnecessarily. I overthink and over-communicate, and often, my feelings are outsized to the situation. These are not things I do on purpose, but involuntary, like a sneeze or the way you reflexively clench with cuteness aggression when you see a grizzly bear’s little ears, even though you know it can hurt and eat and kill you. I love to find books with narrators who seemingly share this affliction. It makes me feel less alone, but more importantly, I love to see how other people's Rube Goldberg machines function.
This book made me dizzy with love. This memoir is overflowing with love. Love of the self, love of language, romantic love, familial love, pet love, fear of love, unrequited love, tough love, tender love.
Perhaps most of all, I was taken with the way the author navigates the world so internally, a very solitary yet romantic pursuit of belonging. I kept catching myself leaning forward while reading, propelled through the nonlinear story of Stewart's life by the swelling emotions and incredible control of language.
I spent two weeks reading this book on repeat because the powerful, poetic prose kept inspiring me to write. If this book were a cake, I would eat it forthwith.
From an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up. Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee--and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet--he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix…
During the years that I have been writing ghost stories, many of them collected in The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, I have read a variety of classic and contemporary ghost stories, horror anthologies, and novels that included gay characters, written by authors who are also openly gay or whose legacy has identified the writer as homosexual. While there are a number of short stories that are personal favorites, this list focuses on novels.
Set in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Corpus Calvin brilliantly unravels the haunting of the Cloverkist Inn from several points of view, including a gay visitor from Amsterdam, a sensitive ten-year-old boy, the diary of a Union Soldier, and the inner thoughts of a dog named Calvin. Things ramp up with the unexpected arrival of a psychic, but it’s the marvelous puzzle of the mysteries—Who painted the unsigned painting? Where is Room 13? Who are the Pumpkin People?—that propel this thrilling exploration into local legends.
Jason Dekker doesn’t believe in ghosts but is haunted by memories of Amsterdam. A move to the White Mountains of New Hampshire with his dog, Calvin, promises a fresh start. College friend Tessa Bernstein enlists his help at Cloverkist Inn, where strange occurrences are scaring off customers and staff. Is someone trying to drive Tessa out of business, or are darker forces at work? Does an enigmatic boy who bonds with Calvin hold the key to a secret dating back to the Civil War? The unsolicited arrival of psychic medium Valraven creates further turmoil when his investigation into paranormal activity…
I’ve been writing stories and poems with erotic themes since I first entered the spoken word scene in 1980s San Francisco. As a young queer boy, raised in the highly eroticized Catholic Church, I was actually comfortable talking about and writing about sex and eros as I’d been stigmatized by it, and it got me fascinated with what the big deal was and why writers were afraid to approach it or why they did so in a corny/predictable/idealized and/or often dishonest and clumsy way. Soon I was teaching erotic writing and have been integrating it into my writing in honest, fresh, and enlivening ways—and helping others do so—ever since.
This book is probably the single most praised underground gay novel of my generation, and deservedly so. It’s so many things—beautiful writing, an old west setting in all its ugliness and adventure and hope, and a highly original narrative voice in the bisexual native orphan, Shed, who is being raised in a bordello. All the characters are well-drawn and as odd as the narrator, and the erotic journey, if I can call it that, is one of the most original, thought-provoking, and beautiful expressions of the possibilities of queer I’ve ever encountered. Spanbauer has helped me to write more skillfully about class and race and sexuality and how they are everywhere and how they can warp—and sometimes, oftentimes—set people free.
The cult gay classic of the early 1990s, reissued to mark the year of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots
Between nights, earning his keep at Excellent, Idaho's outrageously pink whorehouse, Shed or, Duivichi-un-Dua - lives a life of drinking, talking and smoking opium stardust with his eccentric family. But soon, he will leave this tiny turn-of-the-century town in search of the true meaning of his Shoshone name - and in search of himself.
Along the way Shed will fall in love with the philosophical, green-eyed, half-crazy cowboy Dellwood Barker, a man who talks to the moon, on a…
If you follow me, you know I’ve written a novel about a
girl who has died for the third time and is stuck in the afterlife. The
afterlife in my novel is modeled after Mohonk Mountain
House.
TJ Klune’s afterlife is a completely different world than
mine and it fascinates me. I know the complexity of imagination and emotion
that went into my story, so it’s always intriguing to be inside someone else’s
head the same way.
Hugo’s tea shop and the cast of characters that cross its
threshold are interesting, complex, relatable, and they will touch your heart.
Klune has written an uplifting story about our greatest fears and one of our
deepest mysteries, reminding us that death is only the beginning. You don’t want
to miss this one.
When a reaper comes to collect Wallace Price from his own funeral, Wallace suspects he really might be dead. Instead of leading him directly to the afterlife, the reaper takes him to a small village. On the outskirts, off the path through the woods, tucked between mountains, is a particular tea shop, run by a man named Hugo. Hugo is the tea shop's owner to locals and the ferryman to souls who need to cross over. But Wallace isn't ready to abandon the life he barely lived. With Hugo's help, he finally starts to learn about all the things he…
I’ve been writing queer historical romances/murder mysteries since the third grade when I accidentally wrote a pretty homoerotic Sherlock Holmes fanfiction despite being too young to know what any of those words meant. I’m now both a writer and reader of the genre and while I’m delighted that so many other people love gay historical romance as much as I do, I feel like I always see the same few books recommended. I wanted to share some of my lesser-known favorites so that they can get the love they richly deserve and so that there are more people who can geek-out about them with me!
A fun, festive little romance that I re-read any time of the year when I need a little more warmth in my heart.
Honestly, I could go on about the fun country manor setting, the delightful side characters, or the sweet relationship between the two leads, but all I’m going to say is that it has one of the most amazing, over-the-top romance novel covers ever and it is 1000% worth checking out for that reason alone.
