From Torrey Peters Detransition, Baby to Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Bryan Washington’s Memorial there are too many recent books to list regarded as modern classics. So far, the 2000s have gifted us a plethora of amazing and award-winning novels detailing LGBTQIA+ experiences. These stories are often inspired by authors and books that did not garner the acclaim they deserved in their time due to homophobia, oppression, and the threat of violence towards their creators. These picks take a deeper dive into queer classics in fiction. From the well-known like James Baldwin, to books only now receiving the attention they deserve, this list highlights pioneering LGBTQIA+ stories.
You can sign up for a free library card here.
If you are new to our eResources, check out these tutorial videos on how to get started.
If you’re looking for more book suggestions, we’re happy to recommend them to you! Use this Book Recommendation form to send us some information about what you like to read and we’ll curate a list just for you.
If you have any additional questions, you can contact a librarian through Facebook or Instagram. You can also call us at 412-622-3114 or email us at info@carnegielibrary.org
Hardy’s debut novel about the lives of black gay men in New York City is unabashedly and unapologetically written for the African-American male.
This title is also available for checkout in eAudio on Hoopla.
Step into the Jazz Age with a novel of queer Black life, set amid the artistic rebellion of the Harlem Renaissance.
This title is also available for checkout as an eBook on Hoopla.
In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.
This title is also available for checkout as an eBook on Libby and in eAudio on Libby.
Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos from about 630 B.C. She was a musical genius who devoted her life to composing and performing songs. Of the nine books of lyrics Sappho is said to have composed, none of the music is extant and only one poem has survived complete. All the rest are fragments. In ‘If not, winter’ Carson presents all of Sappho’s fragments in Greek and in English.
Written during 1913 and 1914, immediately after “Howards End,” and not published until 1971, Maurice was ahead of its time in its theme and in its affirmation that love between men can be happy.
This title is also available for checkout as an eBook on Libby.
Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, “Nightwood” still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.
This title is also available for checkout as an eBook on Libby and in eAudio on Hoopla.
The fictional portrait of Woolf’s close friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the hero Orlando is a young nobleman in Elizabethan England, a dreamy and romantic youth who wakes up one day to find himself transformed, astonishingly, into a woman.
This title is also available for checkout as an eBook on Libby, eBook on Hoopla, in eAudio on Hoopla.
The pioneering novel of physical disability, transatlantic travel, and black international politics. A vital document of black modernism and one of the earliest overtly queer fictions in the African American tradition. Published for the first time.
This title is also available for checkout as an eBook on Libby and in eAudio on Hoopla.
In bawdy, moving prose, Rita Mae Brown tells the story of Molly Bolt, the adoptive daughter of a dirt-poor Southern couple who boldly forges her own path in America. With her startling beauty and crackling wit, Molly finds that women are drawn to her wherever she goes-and she refuses to apologize for loving them back.
This title is also available for checkout as an eBook on Libby and in eAudio on Hoopla.
“Stone Butch Blues,” Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 first novel, is widely considered in and outside the U.S. to be a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender.
Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man Jean Cocteau dubbed France’s “Black Prince of Letters” here reconstructs his early adult years — time he spent as a petty criminal and vagabond, traveling through Spain and Antwerp, occasionally border hopping across the rest of Europe, always one step ahead of the authorities.
This title is also available for checkout as an eBook on Hoopla.
“Zami: A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers.” In Lorde’s experimentally written novel, she interweaves the personal into a narrative that shares the story of how Lorde became a driving force in literature and LGBTQIA+ activism.
This title is also available for checkout as an eBook on Libby.