If you’re not getting enough book recommendations from this Substack, you should subscribe to his Substack,
, or follow him on TikTok. I’ve taken several of his recs and can confirm he has excellent taste.In June, he published The Gayest Thing, an anthology featuring several amazing queer writers (including friend of the ‘stack
!)Read his list, and then read his other work! You won’t be disappointed.
Future Queer Classics
I’d like to think I read very widely, but when push comes to shove, I will never miss an opportunity to recommend queer books. Queer people see the world through a very special lens, and magic happens when that is translated to the written form. Each one of these books invites us into queer lives and shows us the expanse of that experience, chiseling down the idea that there is a queer monolith.
While ‘classics’ is not a term I particularly love––there can be something very elitist, sinister, white, cis, straight, and male about it––I’m calling these books Future Queer Classics because I believe they will stand the test of time and be part of defining queer literature from the last decade. This could also be a short selection of contemporary books that have inspired my own writing.
Picking just five was an impossible task. There are many more where this came from and I hope you feel inspired to seek them out. Enjoy!
The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela
A gay Latine professor returns to his suburban hometown to visit his aging parents, and that visit coincides with his high school’s twenty year reunion. Past and present collide as he navigates what it means to go back home when you intentionally left it behind.
This novel is a brilliantly complex coming-of-age from the perspective of a middle aged person reckoning with their younger self. Our narrator faces trauma, grief, family, first love, but does it twenty years later. This isn’t a coming out story, it tackles the realities of growing up queer and brown after the fact.
Another strength of this book is the way it dissects suburbia with scientific precision. How these neighbourhoods came to be, migration patterns, gentrification, how it has all changed over time. So much of it is mapped out through different characters and vignettes that complete the tapestry of this novel.
I first read this when it came out in 2022 and I have not stopped recommending it since.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
A genre-defying memoir that tells the story of a queer woman going through an abusive relationship. Machado tracks the history of bad queers and queer-coded baddies while writing through a harrowing time in her life. She uses tropes, fairy tales, horror themes and more in this inventive book illustrating her journey of healing.
This might seem hyperbolic, but my entire life changed when I read this book. It is the book that diverted my trajectory towards writing in a major way and it is my favorite book.
In the Dream House showcases a queer person reclaiming their story, their pain, their past, and turning it into a beautiful piece of art. It allowed me to envision a world where I could do the same.
Machado sharply writes about her own life through pop culture and different genre tropes to comment on the cultural and the personal. She does this so well that these seemingly disparate vignettes weave together to paint the full picture of her experience and what she wants to say about the world.
It is entirely singular, devastating, brilliant, and I can never find words that feel big enough to express how reading it impacted me.
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Real Life is the story of Wallace, a black queer academic on a predominantly white Midwestern campus. We watch him navigate the various facets of his life, from work to friends to lovers, as he experiences others othering him at every turn.
This slice of life reads like a play because the book is happening in slow motion without ever dragging. There are these long stretches of dialogue and everything feels like we, the audience, are waiting with bated breath to see how the narrator interprets what is unfolding around him.
We get an intimate proximity to this moment for Wallace as he faces his impending future, constant microaggressions, tenuous friendships, and as he finds a way to truly let someone in.
The writing in this is impeccable, it brought me into my body in a vivid way while also giving my mind so much to chew on once I put it down. I’m convinced Brandon Taylor’s pen could slice diamond like a hot knife through butter.
Lie with Me by Philippe Besson (tr. by Molly Ringwald)
In this work of autofiction, a writer meets the son of his former lover years after they’ve parted ways. It is a heart wrenching coming-of-age that captures the magnetic, yet fickle nature of first love.
This book is a reflection, a confession, and an author seeking closure. Autofiction is a longstanding tradition of writing your life into a story, not to turn into something else, but to make your life more accessible to the reader. In Lie with Me, Besson excavates his deepest cut (the first) and lays himself bare.
There’s a shimmering quality to this honesty that I don’t encounter often. It doesn’t shy away from embarrassment or shame, it’s more concerned with a complete portrayal than a flattering one.
The novel is devastating, there’s really no way around that, but I do think it’s worth every tear. It felt like an important part of this list for me because I am a French person and a sentimental person and a queer person with trauma and a person who loves to cry––Lie with Me nails each one of those points.
Destransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
This novel is about three people with different relationships to their gender as their lives intersect in a complex dynamic of parenthood and partnership. An unexpected pregnancy and a desire to queer the family nucleus makes these flawed characters address questions of sex, gender, desire and identity.
I considered not including this book because it feels so ubiquitous, but having just reread it, I can attest that it deserves all the attention it gets. It is planted firmly on this list in case someone somewhere has yet to give it a whirl.
Torrey Peters writes about queers––complicated, messy, bad, good, full ones. Her stories don’t shy away from showing the jagged edges of people, in fact that’s the best part of this book. These characters aren’t always likable, but they feel real and they’ve clawed their way into me. All these years later, I still think about them.
The writing in Detransition, Baby washes over you in such a way that you don’t even realize you’ve waded into the deep end without floaties on. I love that this book tackles big topics and even some taboos, but it does it with ease. This will leave any reader better than how it found them.
Some honourable mentions that almost made it on this list:
Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero (tr. by Mara Faye Lethem), The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin, Bellies by Nicola Dinan, Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski, A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Valid by Chris Bergeron (tr. by Natalia Hero).
Thank you, Nic!
Liz
Whenever Nic goes, I follow.
Will be adding The Town of Babylon to my list! Will forgive you for adding Real Life Nic xox
loved reading this, so many good recs! i can’t believe i still haven’t read ‘real life’……going to pick it up asap