QueeReaders Book Club

AUGUST 2023

The Library of the Unwritten
By: A.J. Hackwith

Many years ago, Claire was named Head Librarian of the Unwritten Wing—a neutral space in Hell where all the stories unfinished by their authors reside. Her job consists mainly of repairing and organizing books, but also of keeping an eye on restless stories that risk materializing as characters and escaping the library. When a Hero escapes from his book and goes in search of his author, Claire must track and capture him with the help of former muse and current assistant Brevity and nervous demon courier Leto.

Tags: Fantasy, Pansexual

JULY 2023

You Exist Too Much
By: Zaina Arafat

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.

Tags: Fiction, Bisexual

JUNE 2023

Guillotine
By: Eduardo C. Corral

Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself—great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?

Tags: Poetry, Gay

APRIL 2023

Sorrowland
By: Rivers Soloman

Vern – seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised – flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

Tags: Fantasy/Horror, Intersex

MARCH 2023

The Wrong End of the Telescope
By: Rabih Alameddine

Mina Simpson is a successful surgeon and an out trans woman and lesbian. She’s also alienated from her family and has avoided her home country of Lebanon for decades. But when she gets a desperate call from a friend at an NGO in Lesbos, Greece, Mina leaves her job, home, and wife behind to treat Syrian refugees. Although the journey takes her closer to her home country than she prefers, Mina hopes to make a difference during a humanitarian crisis — and she may walk away changed as well.

Tags: Novel, Trans, Lesbian, Immigrant

FEBRUARY 2023

SPEAR
By: Nicola Griffith

“If you think you didn’t need a queer retelling of Arthurian legend in your life, think again. This quiet reimagining of the story of Percival the Knight is about Peretur, a fiery young woman raised by her mother in a cave in Wales. Longing for something beyond the life she knows, she sets out to find glory. She ends up finding a lot more than that, including the home she’s always longed for. This novella is full of soft magic, queer family, sapphic love, and fierce women wielding swords.”  – Book Riot

Tags: Novel, Fantasy, Queer Family, Sapphic Love

DECEMBER 2022

GENDER QUEER
By: Maia Kobabe