Notable Queer Books of 2017

The great, the good, and the prize winners, much ignored by a preoccupied media. 

      

FICTION

John Rechy, After the Blue Hour. The 86-year-old's thirteenth novel, in which a 24 year-old writer named John Rechy visits a libertine super-fan and his sexually-charged family.

 

Abdellah Taia, Another Morocco. Selected stories from a young lion of gay Arab lit. 

 

Ali Smith, Autumn. Booker finalist. The first of her seasonal quartet exploring the current state of the UK, this one through the friendship of a gayish 101 year-old songwriter and his former neighbor girl, now a 32 year-old woman.

 

Martin Poussan, Black Sheep Boy. Winner, 2017 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction. Bayou rouges and renegades.

 

Sebastian Barry, Days Without End. Winner, Costa Book of the Year (the only writer to have won it twice); Booker longlist. In the American frontier, a young Irishman finds love, fights in the Civil War, and with his partner starts a family with Sioux girl.

 

Christopher McCormick, Desert Boys. Winner, Stonewall Book Award.

 

Christopher Bollen, The Destroyers. Male bonding thriller aiming for Highsmith chills in hot Greece.

 

Roxanne Gay, Difficult Women. Hard stories from the much-praised author of Bad Feminist and Hunger.

Danez Smith, Don't Call Us Dead. National Book Award finalist. Essential dispatches.

Edouard Louis, The End of Eddy. Goncourt first novel finalist. The French sensation about growing up gay in brutal circumstances.

Laura Kaye, English Animals. For years to come you'll remember wry Mirka, a Slovak lesbian doing taxidermy in rural Britain.

Andre Aciman, Enigma Variations. From author of Call Me By Your Name, another boyhood gay crush in Italy leads to a straight romance at college and bi adulthood in New York.

Umberto Saba, Ernesto. NYRB reissue of this 1957 knockout about 16 year-old Ernesto's secret affair with an older man. 

Matthew Gallaway, #gods. Orpheus and Eurydice redone as Manhattan noir layered with myth, religion, and sex.

 

Frank Bidart, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. Winner, 2017 National Book Award for poetry.

 

John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies. Dedicated to John Irving, this big-hearted, ham-handed novel relies heavily on coincidence in covering sixty years of a gay Dubliner's life.

 

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties 2017 National Book Award finalist. Lesbian fabulism at its finest.

 

Colm Toibin, House of Names. The best part is the first section, told by Clytemnestra. The most touching part is Orestes' secluded romance with Leander and his slow understanding when the older, hotter, wiser youth is finished with him.

 

Abdellah Taia, Infidels. A prostitute's son, Jallal, comes of age in contemporary Morocco.

 

Martin Duberman, Jews Queers Germans. Historical novel about three gay men in Germany: Magnus Hirschfeld, Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, and Count Harry Kessler.

 

Andrew Sean Greer, Less. Carnegie Medal longlist. Facing fifty, fleeing his ex-boyfriend's wedding invite, Arthur Less hopscotches around the globe, all missteps and mishaps, until he finds just what he needs.

  

S.J. Sindu, Marriage of a Thousand Lies. Sri Lankan-American wife and husband are both gay and struggle with the strain of the closet.

 

Gengoroh Tagame, My Brother's Husband. Not porn! S&M king Tagame this time tells the affecting story of a Canadian man visiting his dead husband's surprised family in Tokyo.

 

Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia. Inventive but overstretched tale of a gay Yugoslav, Bekim, living in Finland, with a big snake and a talking cat, trying to make sense of his violent family's and country's past. 

 

Ross Raisin, A Natural. Unfamous gay soccer player under pressure.

 

Paul LaFarge, The Night Ocean. Possession-esque literary sleuthing about HP Lovecraft and his gay obsession.

 

Rakesh Satyal, No One Can Pronounce My Name. After the intimacy of Blue Boy, a big ambitious book about several generations of an Indian American family living in suburban Cleveland.

 

Rahul Mehta, No Other World. First novel from the author of the much-loved story collection Quarantine about Kiran Shah, a young gay man navigating the 80s and 90s in America and India.

 

Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. 1993 in Iowa City, Chicago, Provincetown, and San Francisco through the eyes of a shapeshifter.

 

Jonathan Strong, Quit the Race. Piercing study of a longterm gay couple by an American master. 

 

Taylor Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Unabashed romp through old Hollywood, including much gayness, as aging actress tells all.

 

Damian McNicholl, A Son Called Gabriel. In the spirit of At Swim, Two Boys, the story of a gentle gay Ulster kid bullied by his peers.

 

Alan Hollinghurst, The Sparsholt Affair. What poetry was to The Stranger's Child, painting is to this splendid gay novel spanning WWII to the present.

  

Neel Mukherjee, A State of Freedom. Immigration and dislocation through five narratives from India and beyond.

  

Gabe Habash, Stephen Florida. Vividly told account of damaged college wrestler's final season in Oregsburg, North Dakota.

 

Keezy Young, Taproot. Life is hard for a dead guy in love with his best friend, who, luckily, can see ghosts.

 

Cathleen Schine, They May Not Mean To, But They Do. Winner, 2017 Ferro-Grumley award. A smart, funny look at the current state of wifehood, from a lesbian couple in Los Angeles to the newly widowed matriarch of a Jewish family in Manhattan.

 

Chavisa Woods, Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country. Rural queerdom in eight stories with shades of Shirley Jackson.

 

Jane Easton Hamilton, Weekend. The fraught overlap between two queer couples who each built a vacation cottage on a small island.

 

     

 

 

YA

 

Emma Donoghue, The Lotterys Plus One. Two queer couples raise a brood.

 

Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue. 18th-century bi swashbuckler beds men & women across Europe.  

Adam Silvera, History Is All You Left Me. Young, gay, grieving, and OCD.

Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End. Gay teens meet and fall in love during their final 24 hours.

Nick White, How to Survive a Summer. Gay teen sent to conversion therapy camp.

Misa Sugiura, It's Not Like It's a Secret. Sana, a Midwestern Japanese-American lesbian transplanted to SF, falls for a Mexican-American classmate, Jamie.

 

 

 

    

 

NONFICTION

 

Melissa Febos, Abandon Me

 

Nicholas Hynter, Balancing Acts: Behind the Scenes at London's National Theatre

 

Tom Sancton, The Bettencourt Affair: The World's Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris

 

Deborah Blum, Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead

 

Matt Bellassai, Everything Is Awful

 

Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Winner, National Book Award for Nonfiction.

 

Daniel Murtaugh, Good Night, Beloved Comrade: The Letters of Denton Welch to Eric Oliver

 

Amy de la Haye & Martin Pel, Gluck: Art and Identity

 

Gregory Woods, Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World

 

Benjamin Taylor, The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered

 

Bill Hayes, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

 

Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On: Diaries and Essays

 

Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci

 

The Baggs, Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur

 

Armistead Maupin, Logical Family: A Memoir

 

Nagata Kabi, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

 

Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

 

Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years

 

Richard McKay, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic [and Kindle]

 

Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

 

Karin Roffman, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life

 

Michael Ausielo, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies

 

Joe Hagan, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine

 

David Sedaris, Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)

 

Clare Barlow, Queer British Art: 1867-1967

  

Simon Goldhill, A Very Queer Family Indeed: The Bensons in Victorian Britain 

 

 

 

INCLUSIVITY: The best non-gay novels of the year.

 

Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour

 

Elif Batuman, The Idiot 

 

Jon McGreggor, Reservoir 13

 

Mohsin Hamid, Exit West 

 

Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone  

Comments

[John Zinsmeister]

OMG! Thank you, thank you, thank you. What a joy to have your recommendations.

[Chris Phillips]

Welcome back! Thank you for this amazing list. I hope you and your family are well.

[Glenn I]

Thanks for the list!

[Richmond]

What they said!!!

[solitasolano]

Glad I checked in. I was looking for some new reading (new to me at least) so I thought I'd check back here for something from previous years. Lucky me. A new list from just this newly past year. Thanks.
Hope you and your family is doing well. Happy New Year.

[Philip F Clark]

Wonderful titles -- but where are the poets! From last year and this coming year.