Books

By: Aricka Alexander (Author), 2024, Paperback (The BR Bayou Series Book 1)

Life is flipped upside down for Cheyenne Haney when her fairytale-like relationship of 5 years suddenly ends the day her boyfriend finally proposes to her. She’s heartbroken and storms out of the apartment seeing nothing but red. She’s so distracted that she doesn’t see the car hurling toward her. Right before the worst outcome could happen, she’s pulled away just in time by a mysterious, yet gorgeous person who introduces themself as Harley.

Harley Dunn is every bit of cool, funny, and gorgeous. As a beloved member of the local WNBA team, the Baton Rouge Bayou it’s easy to see how outgoing she is. She loves to joke and have fun, but when it comes to relationships, she’s never had much luck. That is until she crosses paths with Cheyenne again at one of her basketball games.

After some mild flirting on both of their parts, Cheyenne and Harley begin a steamy friends-with-benefits relationship that was meant to be just that. However, when they start catching feelings for one another, things start to get a bit complicated. From annoying exes to traumatic past experiences to unwanted surprises, will their relationship be able to withstand the chaos? Or will their worst fears of heartbreak be reinforced?

By: Leslie Feinberg, 2006, Paperback

From award-winning and best-selling author, Leslie Feinberg, comes Drag King Dreams, the story of Max Rabinowitz, a butch lesbian bartender at an East Village club where drag kings, dykes dressed as men, perform.

A veteran of the women's and gay movement of the past 30 years, Max's mid-life crisis hits in the midst of the post-9/11 world. Max is lonely and uncertain about her future — fearful, in fact, of America's future with its War on Terror and War in Iraq — with only a core group of friends to turn to for reassurance. Max is shaken from her crisis, however, by the news that her friend Vickie, a trans woman, has been found murdered on her way home late one night. As the community of cross-dressers, drag queens, lesbian and gay men, and "genderqueers" of all kinds stand up together in the face of this tragedy, Max taps into the activist spirit she thought had long disappeared and for the first time in years discovers hope for her future.

How did you grow to be who you are? What loves nurtured you into becoming? What seeds have been sown within you to nurture hope? Which avenues through life have allowed you to expand your self and transform in myriad ways? I am not one thing. Drag Queen Preacher is a reflection of being and a revelation of love. In poetic snapshots, R. R. Tavárez--pastor, urban farmer, artist, advocate, drag queen--reveals the complexities and rich beauties of a multi-faceted identity. Drag Queen Preacher is a memoir-in-poetry about culture, family, queerness, resistance, and faith.

By: Laurie Greene (Author), 2020, Paperback

The Miss America pageant has been held in Atlantic City for the past hundred years, helping to promote the city as a tourist destination. But just a few streets away, the city hosts a smaller event that, in its own way, is equally vital to the local community: the Miss’d America drag pageant.
 
Drag Queens and Beauty Queens presents a vivid ethnography of the Miss’d America pageant and the gay neighborhood from which it emerged in the early 1990s as a moment of campy celebration in the midst of the AIDS crisis. It examines how the pageant strengthened community bonds and activism, as well as how it has changed now that Rupaul’s Drag Race has brought many of its practices into the cultural mainstream. Comparing the Miss’d America pageant with its glitzy cisgender big sister, anthropologist Laurie Greene discovers how the two pageants have influenced each other in unexpected ways. 
 
Drag Queens and Beauty Queens deepens our understanding of how femininity is performed at pageants, exploring the various ways that both the Miss’d America and Miss America pageants have negotiated between embracing and critiquing traditional gender roles. Ultimately, it celebrates the rich tradition of drag performance and the community it engenders.

By:  Frank Decaro (Author) & Bruce Vilanch (Foreword), 2022, Hardcover

Drag celebrates the fabulous current and historical influence of drag, and its talented and inspiring performers.

Since man first walked the Earth...in heels, no other art form has wielded as unique an influence on pop culture as Drag. Drag artists have now sashayed their way to snatch the crowns as the Queens of mainstream entertainment.
Through informative and witty essays chronicling over 100 years of drag, readers will embark on a Priscilla-like journey through pop culture, from television shows like The Milton Berle Show, Bosom Buddies, and RuPaul's Drag Race, films like Some Like It Hot, To Wong Foo..., and Tootsie, and Broadway shows like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, La Cage aux Folles, and Kinky Boots.
With stops in cities around the globe, and packed with interviews and commentaries on the dramas, joys, and love that "make-up" a life in wigs and heels, Drag features contributions from today's most groundbreaking and popular artists, including Bianca del Rio, Miss Coco Peru, Hedda Lettuce, Lypsinka, and Varla Jean Merman, as well as notable performers as Harvey Fierstein and Charles Busch. It includes more than 100 photos--many from performers' personal collections, and a comprehensive timeline of drag "herstory."

My arch nemesis is my new fake boyfriend. Can you say drama?

I should be a glitter bomb of excitement about my college friends getting married. But all I can think about is running into my uber-successful ex and his new boyfriend at the wedding…while I’m flying painfully solo.

I need a plus one, stat. Enter Raleigh Marshall.

As luck (or misfortune) would have it, a picture of me and South Rock High’s too-blessed-to-be-stressed football coach accidentally finds its way on social media, making people believe we’re an item.

Raleigh is hot, charming, and one of South Rock’s most popular teachers. The problem is that he knows it. He also seems to derive a twisted pleasure from getting under my skin.

Yet once we stop bickering long enough to have a conversation, I have a hard time remembering what I hated about him.

Pretending to be in love with Raleigh Marshall will be my toughest role to date. But…am I still pretending?

By: Poppy Z. Brite (Author), 1994, Paperback

Escaping from his North Carolina home after his father murders their family and commits suicide, Trevor McGee returns to confront the past, and finds himself haunted by the same demons that drove his father to insanity.

By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Author), 2025, Hardcover

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A publishing event ten years in the making—a searing, exquisite new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires

A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Elle, Oprah Daily, Readers Digest, The Seattle Times, LitHub, The Chicago Review of Books, BET, and Radio Times

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.

A small-town waitress and a Hollywood star’s worlds collide in this new romance by Ashley Herring Blake, USA Today bestselling author of Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date.

Once upon a time, Ramona Riley was a student at a prestigious art school, with dreams of landing in Hollywood as a costume designer to the stars. But after her father’s car accident, she had to quit and return to her small New Hampshire town, Clover Lake, to help take care of her younger sister. Twelve years later, Ramona is still working at the town’s café, all but given up on her dream. But when a big-budget romantic comedy comes to Clover Lake to film, she wonders if this could be her chance. There’s only one problem—Dylan Monroe, her first kiss and Hollywood’s favorite wild child—is the star.

Dylan Monroe has always lived an unconventional life, having famous rock icons for parents. But she wants to prove that she’s not some chaotic, talentless nepo baby, that she has actual skills, that she’s just a normal person. To do that, Dylan takes on a project at a charming lake town—she even works at the town’s café (very quaint), shadowing a local waitress there (very cute), and asks her to take Dylan around to do Normal People Things.

But Dylan soon realizes it’s not just some small-town waitress she’s getting to know—Ramona Riley is someone she’s met before, someone who remembers her even more vividly. Before long, however, reality hits them, and both women must decide if the spark between them can fan the flames of their individual dreams, or if it will extinguish their light.

By: Charlie Jane Anders (Author), 2023, Paperback (Unstoppable, 2)

From the international bestselling author of All the Birds in the Skycomes Charlie Jane Anders's Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, the sequel to Victories Greater Than Death in the thrilling adventure series, Unstoppable.

They'll do anything to be the people they were meant to be ― even journey into the heart of evil.

Rachael Townsend is the first artist ever to leave Earth and journey out into the galaxy ― but after an encounter with an alien artifact, she can't make art at all.

Elza Monteiro is determined to be the first human to venture inside the Palace of Scented Tears and compete for the chance to become a princess ― except that inside the palace, she finds the last person she ever wanted to see again.

Tina Mains is studying at the Royal Space Academy with her friends, but she's not the badass space hero everyone was expecting.

Soon Rachael is journeying into a dark void, Elza is on a deadly spy mission, and Tina is facing an impossible choice that could change all her friends lives forever.

What does masculinity mean to you?

Whether the answer is "toxic" or something more aspirational, speculative fiction can help you find the language to talk about it. The stories in this anthology visualize all the different ways masculinity might look in a world different than our own, for better or worse.
Imagine living in a universe where you'd feel safe telling your best friend you've always loved him, or where smoking hot demons exist to indulge all your worst impulses. From buff aliens to gender-affirming werewolf bites, Dudes Rock is about celebrating everything that queer masculinity can become beyond the confines of a single world, and we want you to rock with us.

Featuring stories by Chase Anderson, Johannes T. Evans, Oliver Fosten, Jonathan Freeman, Rick Hollon, Sam Inverts, S. C. Mills, Franklyn S. Newton, Jay Kang Romanus, Aubrey Shaw, Simo Srinivas, Candy Tan, and Scott Vaughn.

In the highly-anticipated follow-up to Putting Out: Essays on Otherness, Samantha Mann turns her keen insight to Dyke Delusions: Essays & Observations. A mix of personal history and pop culture, Dyke Delusions is a mix of body politics, motherhood, and feminine sexuality that showcases some of Samantha Mann's published work and brand new essays. Told in her signature humor and pitch-perfect observations, Dyke Delusions is a collection of desire, yearning, and a search for more. This collection is an important reminder that our journeys deserve to be acknowledged even as the endpoint is ever-changing.

By: Jenny Fran Davis, 2023, Paperback

Named one of the Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2023 by Vogue • Named a Best Book of 2023 (So Far) by Cosmopolitan • Named a Best Book of Spring 2023 by Esquire • Named a Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of 2023 by Buzzfeed, Electric Lit, and Them

An addictive, absurd, and darkly hilarious debut novel about a young woman who embarks on a ten-day getaway with her partner and two other queer couples

Sasha and Jesse are professionally creative, erotically adventurous, and passionately dysfunctional twentysomethings making a life together in Brooklyn. When a pair of older, richer lesbians―prominent news host Jules Todd and her psychotherapist partner, Miranda―invites Sasha and Jesse to their country home for the holidays, they’re quick to accept. Even if the trip includes a third couple―Jesse’s best friend, Lou, and their cool-girl flame, Darcy―whose It-queer clout Sasha ridicules yet desperately wants.

As the late December afternoons blur together in a haze of debaucherous homecooked feasts and sweaty sauna confessions, so too do the guests’ secret and shifting motivations. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple’s future.

Unfolding over ten heady days, Dykette is an unforgettable love story at the crossroads of queer nonconformity and seductive normativity. With propulsive plotting and sexy, wickedly entertaining prose, Jenny Fran Davis captures the vagaries of desire and the many devastating places in which we seek recognition.

By: Frances Wren (Author), Mia LaPine (Illustrator), 2024, Paperback (The Anatomy of Water)

Featuring over 60 illustrations, Earthflown is "a mesmerizing blend of sci-fi, fantasy, and crime noir that transcends genres," (Aiden Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of Cemetary Boys).

Where there's desperation, there is profit.

When Ethan saves the life of a firestarter, it's nothing unusual. He's the only healer on call at the hospital – and that gunshot wound isn't going to regenerate itself. But his patient turns out to be Corinna Arden, heiress to a pharmaceutical empire controlling Britain's water supply. Her twin, Javier, is a man who (a) starts sending Ethan flowers at work, (b) seems terrified of a secret, and (c) has the cheekbones and earnestness to make up for both.

Ethan indulges in (what he thinks will be) a brief, harmless romance – but is swept up in a deadly collusion over Project Earthflown: the largest reconstruction tender since London clawed its way out of the rising sea.

Determined to follow the money, Ollie is a journalist who finds a corpse at the end of a too-convenient tip. The fate of water – and who profits – might depend on the perennial question: has Ethan lost his mind, or is he just an idiot?

Earthflown is a love story that tries – and fails – to leave the water crisis behind. Set in post-flood London, futuristic medicine meets a bit of magic in this bittersweet scifi-fantasy debut.