The day after the election, November 6, having spent the previous evening cooking and consuming a healthy meal of grass-fed beef and roasted green beans and quinoa as a form of self-care, I sat at the kitchen table eating every single piece of our leftover Halloween treats. KitKats whose wrappers were red as the electoral map. Bags of popcorn labeled, preposterously, Lesser Evil. Coconut-chocolate bars called Unreal.
Around lunchtime, deep into this who-cares sugar binge, I opened my email and saw a new Substack post from Patrick Nathan, an excellent writer and an especially astute critic of all the ways—both explicitly and implicitly—our country has embraced authoritarianism. America, he writes in his newsletter, not as a country but as a mythology and set of unifying ideals, is dead. It’s clearer than ever, he says, that “there is no ‘we’ on a national level, and there won’t be anytime soon.”
And yet, writes Nathan, “if America is dead, our communities survive.” If our national politics has become little more than farcical theater, our towns and city councils and neighborhoods are where real change can be enacted. There, he says, we have a voice. And while Nathan’s talking mostly about local politics, I’d like to include you all, the readers of Electric Literature, as a community that can and must survive. Our books and our bookstores, our libraries, our writing groups, our literary magazines, our review columns, our interviews. Our stories.
“Part of what’s intrigued me, over the years,” Nathan writes, “in thinking about social media, entertainment, and corporate influence, is how agency sits at the heart of it all.” There are so many forces working to pacify us, including the entertainment we often turn to; call me romantic (or delusional), but I refuse to believe that reading literature is one such force. I’m not so naive as to think that books are the way out of this or even through it, but I do think there is true power in sharing stories—not just those we’ve written but those bravely put to paper by others.
“Eight years ago I despaired,” Nathan writes at the end of his newsletter. “I panicked. I grieved. I binged the news and waited for something to happen, for someone to stop it. This morning, I woke up ready to act. This isn’t to condemn or belittle grieving, nor panic nor despair. But I do hope, after you take the time you need, that you find it in your heart to shut off the stream, to go out into your community, to find out what people need, and to do whatever you can.”
I’m writing this little intro on November 7 with no idea of what’s to come. But what I do know is that what I can do right now, what I need to do, is share some of the stories that other brave, brilliant people have shared.
How to Sleep at Night by Elizabeth Harris (Jan 7)
At the table one evening Ethan declares to his very liberal husband, Gabe, that he is planning to run for Congress…as a Republican. Just as his campaign is set to begin, Ethan’s sister Kate, a reporter at a top-tier newspaper who’s grown tired of covering America’s madcap political arena, comes back into contact with the ex-girlfriend who broke her heart. For years Elizabeth Harris has been one of the most vital journalists covering the publishing industry for the New York Times, and now we get to enjoy her engaging storytelling from the other side.
Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett (Jan 7)
Haslett follows his Pulitzer Prize finalist Imagine Me Gone with another largehearted family saga, this one centered on Peter, a gay immigration lawyer, and his estranged mother Anne, the founder of a feminist “intentional community.” Peter’s latest case involves a young queer Albanian seeking asylum and brings to the fore the source of his and Anne’s estrangement.
The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan (Jan 7)
Fagan, the bestselling author of What Made Maddy Run and the equally heartrending memoir All the Colors Came Out, turns her prodigious talents to fiction with this epic and intimate saga of a famous writer whose identity has been kept hidden…until now. Evelyn Hugo vibes abound.
The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf by Isa Arsén (Jan 7)
In this intriguing debut, two Shakespearean actors enter a lavender-ish marriage of convenience—one of them is a gay man evading the House Un-American Activities Committee, the other a woman in the midst of a crack-up—a roleplaying arrangement made all the more complicated when they’re invited to participate in a makeshift Globe Theater in the middle of the New Mexican desert.
Hello Stranger by Manuel Betancourt (Jan 14)
Betancourt has for many years now been one of the best cultural writers around; I’ll echo author and editor Matt Ortile, who calls Betancourt “a dream critic—as in, a fabulous scholar of dreams, of the desirous imagination.” In The Male Gazed, Betancourt wove biography and pop culture to explore modern masculinity, and here he examines the agony and ecstasy of intimacy in the digital age.
This Love by Lotte Jeffs (Jan 14)
A critic in the UK called Jeffs’s debut a kind of queer One Day, following university students Mae and Ari over the course of a decade, ten years of triumphs and turmoil and intimacies gained and lost. A book about the wondrous possibilities of queer family-making.
The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White (Jan. 28)
No blurb I write could be a better sell for this book than its subtitle. Edmund White has been a candid pioneer of erotic writing for a long time and this autobiography not only distills the raw sagacity of his work but becomes a breathing, throbbing document of gay love throughout the past century.
We Could Be Rats By Emily Austin (Jan 28)
With her highly venerated debut Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead, Emily Austin emerged right away as a vibrantly unique storyteller, one capable of laying bare the delirium and delight of being a queer woman. Her books are often cheekily funny but never shy away from heavier things, especially the mental health struggles of neurodivergent people. She continues that work here, in a moving tale of two sisters desperate to (re)connect to each other and to the good parts of their shared childhood.
(Bonus: I’ll be in conversation with Austin for this book’s launch on January 27th at Watchung Books in Montclair, NJ.)
Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (Feb 4)
Hernan Diaz’s Trust but make it gay? Narrated in the sly-eyed style of Plain Bad Heroines? I am absolutely buying what this book is selling, an epic and intimate tale of three secretly queer aspiring business titans who band together—and in the case of two of them, marry—to build an empire.
Reading the Waves By Lidia Yuknavitch (Feb 4)
A memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch is never just a memoir. In The Chronology of Water, the Poet Laureate of Misfits embraced corporeal nonlinearity as a truer form of autobiography. Here, she retells some of the most significant moments of her life not purely as fact but as passages of fiction, “a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from literature: how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions.”
Song So Wild and Blue by Paul Lisicky (Feb 4)
In all but a few of her songs, Joni Mitchell employed alternate and abnormal guitar tunings, reportedly to assuage discomfort in her left hand as a result of childhood polio. I didn’t actually know this until I cracked open Paul Lisicky’s new memoir, which weaves Mitchell’s music through his own autobiography and vice versa. It explains why her songs feel at once otherworldly and intimately familiar, a slightly left-of-center lilt that Lisicky himself often taps into in his incantatory books.
Loca by Alejandro Heredia (Feb 11)
Pitched as Pose by way of Junot Diaz, Heredia’s debut follows two Dominican best friends navigating New York City’s queer underbelly at the dawn of the new millennium, a time and place full of promise and pitfalls. Adam Haslett calls it a “remarkable” book that captures “the pain and power of friendship that extends across seas, and borders, and the struggle of working people to survive in America.”
Girl Falling by Hayley Scrivenor (Mar 11)
Dirt Creek, Hayley Scrivenor’s 2022 debut, was a national bestseller but still criminally underdiscussed, a small-town mystery that’s sort of Mare of Eastown meets Sharp Objects. Her follow-up centers on an intense friendship and love triangle that ends in tragedy when a girl falls to her death. But was it an accident?
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters (Mar 11)
How does an author follow a blockbuster, game-changing debut novel like Detransition, Baby, a book the New York Times hailed as one of the best of the twenty-first century? Peters continues to fearlessly push the envelope in this genre-bending, darkly comic collection of novellas, including one about a cadre of cold and lonely lumberjacks who hold a makeshift fete during which any of them can attend and be courted as a woman, and another set in a speculative world in which bodies stop producing hormones, forcing everyone everywhere to choose their gender.
Rehearsals for Dying by Ariel Gore (Mar 11)
“Imagine everything you can imagine,” Mary Oliver wrote, “then keep on going.” It’s a line that shows up in this book by writer and teacher Ariel Gore about her wife’s cancer diagnosis and what it means to be a queer caretaker in America’s labyrinthine medical system, a book that lays bare everything you might imagine about breast cancer and then keeps going. Because what else is there? “Breast cancer is no joke,” comedian Tig Notaro says in her blurb for the book, “but sometimes finding the humor shifts the story into something you can tell. Rehearsals for Dying will help many.”
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One by Kristen Arnett (Mar 18)
Most likely Kristen Arnett needs no introduction to readers here but what she probably does need is a beer—probably several, and probably at some airport bar somewhere—so let’s all raise a glass to one of the wittiest, most warmhearted writers around and her new novel. Stop Me, her third, follows Cherry Hendricks, a clown down on her luck but high on balloon-animal helium and birthday-party laughter. Cherry’s still figuring things out when she meets Margot the Magnificent, an older magician who dazzles Cherry and offers to show her the ropes of their chosen professions. But like silks up the sleeve, questions of how to build an authentic life through performance never end.
Cover Story by Celia Laskey (Mar 25)
Laskey’s previous two books–Under the Rainbow and So Happy for You–brimmed with hilarity and heart, featuring witty, willful characters. Her sensibilities then are perfectly tailored for a contemporary romance, and this, her first foray into the genre, comes with an attention-snatching hook: a publicist doing PR for a high-profile actress very much in the closet must make sure the starlet’s sexuality stays hush-hush…all the while trying to keep from falling in love with her.
Ecstasy by Alex Dimitrov (Apr 1)
Dimitrov’s previous volume of verse, 2021’s Love and Other Poems, was a fiercely poignant look at the ways in which solitude can be a shared experience. Expect no less from Ecstasy, a collection in part about how the memories of pleasure can be as immediate as the experiences themselves.
Authority by Andrea Long Chu (Apr 8)
Prizes as big and important as the Pulitzer are often cause to argue over the value of arts and letters in American culture, as well as the individuals and institutions who get to say what that value is, but the committee’s 2023 selection in the criticism category provoked perhaps more debate than usual. Past winners like Emily Nussbaum, Hilton Als, and Wesley Morris haven’t just critiqued art, but changed the conversations about how art is created and consumed; indubitably added to that list is Andrea Long Chu, whose book and television reviews astutely examine some of the most fraught topics of our current cultural moment in often breathtaking ways. Authority, her first book since winning the award, explores the role of serious criticism in a world of unadulterated bullshit opinions.
Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory (Apr 8)
One of the biggest names in contemporary romance returns with a sweet and fizzy f/f pairing set in Napa Valley. Avery is a newly single event planner with limited dating experience but an interest in exploring her sexuality. Taylor is a classic rake, her insecurities masked by bravado, who offers to help Avery learn how to flirt. Guillory’s books always go down smooth but they never lack complexity.
Lonely Women Make Good Lovers by Keetje Kuipers (Apr 8)
The latest collection from Poetry Northwest editor Keetje Kuipers embodies the erotic desolation of its title and is also so much more: a book about trying and failing to love men, a book about trying and sometimes failing to love herself, about how the present makes sense of the past, about motherhood and wifedom and all the quiet, surprising desires that resound throughout a full house.
Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt (Apr 15)
Irish poet Seán Hewitt makes his prose debut with a novel about a young man looking back two decades in his past at the year his life changed, when as a sixteen year old in a remote English village he met a boy like him, torn between the stability of home and the promise of elsewhere. Martyr! author Kaveh Akbar calls Open, Heaven a “searching novel orbiting pleasure, loss, and the ecstatic release of both; which is to say it’s a novel about time. Which is to say it’s a novel about us.”
When the Harvest Comes by Denne Michele Norris (Apr 15)
On my best days, I’m a bit of a cynical grinch. But when I had the chance to read an early version of Denne Michele Norris’s debut novel I honestly felt my cold, cold heart grow several sizes with each turn of the page. Norris is, of course, the editor in chief of this very website, and has led Electric Lit splendidly into a new golden era, but she is also an immensely talented writer in her own right. Harvest follows Davis, a musician, who learns during his wedding ceremony that his estranged father, a venerated pastor, has died in a car accident. The complexity of the loss threatens to upend not only his fledgling marriage—to a white man—but his own sense of self, his dreams and desires.
Separate Rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli (Apr 22)
Look, I’ll be honest: the pitch for this book came with the information that Luca Guadagnino is planning to adapt it to film and that Challengers actor Josh O’Connor is on board to play its protagonist, a young German musician who tries to distance himself from the impending death of his lover by traveling across Europe. Yet it’s also worth recognizing that Tondelli’s novel, originally published in 1989, is considered a classic of contemporary Italian literature, having arrived just two years before the author’s death due to AIDS.
Awakened by A.E Osworth (Apr 29)
I’m almost tempted to say that the world is not ready for this novel but hot damn this is the novel we need right the hell now. One day, a gig-working loner in Brooklyn, Wilder, is struck suddenly with the mystical ability to understand and speak any and every language. Before they know it, a ragtag group of magically-inclined beings has come to claim Wilder as one of their own. To call Awakened the queer and trans answer to a certain fantasy series that shall not be named would be both a gross oversimplification and a disservice to the anarchic wonderland Osworth has conjured. It’s thrilling and riotous and magical af.
The Lilac People by Milo Todd (Apr 29)
Whenever I put together this list, there’s inevitably that one work of historical fiction that almost threatens to become more relevant by the time it publishes, and Milo Todd’s elegiac debut—about a vibrant queer community in prewar Berlin pushed into survival mode–might be it. As a fan of Cabaret I was sold immediately on this tale of a trans man who finds love and solace in an underground club only to be forced into fleeing as the Nazis ascend to power. Not only is The Lilac People a moving story, it might also be a roadmap of how we move forward.
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis (May 5)
No joke: Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky, often cited as the quintessential “dad rock” record, is one of my desert island albums, a pleasurably frictionless blend of blues and alt-country centered on the difficulties of contentment (how queer!) So I was thrilled upon learning that one of the internet’s foremost commentators on the relationship between gender and music uses this much-maligned music label to explore questions of desire and transition.
Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund (May 5)
Ostlund rightfully garnered a lot of acclaim for her 2015 novel After the Parade but I first fell in love with her fiction with her 2009 collection The Bigness of the World. Happily, Ostland, an astute chronicler of the queerness of mundanity and the mundanity of queerness, returns for her first book in ten years with a book of short stories full of “guns, god, and gays.”
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (May 13)
I remember cracking open Night Sky with Exit Wounds and secretly hoping Ocean Vuong would write a novel–not that every poet must turn to prose at some point!—and I remember getting to the end of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and hoping he’d write another. So I, for one, am glad for the existence of this follow-up, a heartwarming tale of friendship between a teen boy and the older woman who intervenes during his suicide attempt.
Love in Exile by Shon Faye (May 13)
Believe me when I tell you I was wrecked before the end of this book’s prologue. Queer and trans people are taught that our desires are private, and if that’s true, Faye laments, then “we are culpable for our own feelings of lovelessness.” We are locked out of–exiled from–the traditional realms of happiness and comfort, left alone with our unworthiness. But of course this memoir-in-essays, from the author of The Trans Issue, argues the fairly obvious but no less revelatory point that we are indeed worthy of loving and being loved.
A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane (May 13)
Sometimes the universe sends you a book written by someone else that feels like it’s been written just for you. As a former basketball player myself, Crane’s follow-up to I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is an alley-oop from the literary gods: perfectly pitched and right when it’s needed most—at a time when the profile of women’s basketball is higher than ever. Full of beauty and brawn, the book centers on Mac, a straight-shooting, Iverson-worshipping basketball star going into her senior season of high school—a year that begins with the death of her father and the arrival of an alluring and talented new teammate. Fans of films like Personal Best and The Novice shouldn’t hesitate to jump into this story about the complicated give-and-take between queerness and ambition and how, for better or worse, the body always seems to keep the score.
The Dry Season by Melissa Febos (June 1)
Melissa Febos is straight-up one of the most essential memoirists today, each of her books a deeply profound exploration of the mind and the body and the complex relationship between them. Whip Smart, her first, more than lived up to its title and delivered a dextrous, piercing meditation on addiction and the things we sometimes do to and with our bodies, while Girlhood–genuinely one of those books that would vastly improve the world if everyone were to read it–chronicles the physical and psychological harm done to our bodies from youth to adulthood. It’s a testament to Febos’s incredible skill that a book centered on celibacy features some of the most erotic writing she’s ever put to paper–and if you’ve read any of her work you know that’s saying a lot. Of course, Dry Season is not just about celibacy; it’s a treatise on listening to and trusting our corporeal instincts, on finding authentic forms of pleasure independent from hegemonic scripts. It’s a book that is itself a pleasure.
The post The Most Anticipated Queer Books For Spring 2025 appeared first on Electric Literature.
