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August’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books

Sarah Donnelly
Features
15 min read
Sarah Donnelly

Recently, and while compiling this list of forthcoming LGBTQ books, I’ve found myself struck again and again by the realization that the rest of the world doesn’t stop during moments of historical significance. When we talk about history in textbooks it is often as discrete events, cordoned off from both each other and the rest of the universe, but that isn’t how that works. The COVID-19 pandemic rages on. Across the country, people protest for racial justice. And, too, people make art. People publish books. These things are not in contradiction.

The summer is approaching its end, and another set of amazing LGBTQ literature is upon us. There is, I think, still time in the day to appreciate them.

So let us momentarily rejoice, because this month sees an abundance of challenging and inspiring new books from some of our must beloved LGBTQ authors. This August, Edmund White, Ali Smith, Eduardo C. Corral, Bill Hayes, Peter Cameron, Sarah M. Sala, and francine j. harris are all releasing books! Take a deep breath and check out more of this month’s publishing highlights below.

In their new book The Death of Vivek Oji, Akwaeke Emezi explores familial relationships, friendship, and loss.

From the publisher:

One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son’s body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious.

Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek’s closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens—and Osita struggles to understand Vivek’s escalating crisis—the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.

In the new short story collection If I Had Two Wings, author Randall Keenan mixes playfulness with pathos to create deeply felt tales of humanity.

In Kenan’s fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high-school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans.

Shot through with humor and seasoned by inventiveness and maturity, Kenan riffs on appetites of all kinds, on the eerie persistence of history, and on unstoppable lovers and unexpected salvations. ‘If I Had Two Wings’ is a rich chorus of voices and visions, dreams and prophecies, marked by physicality and spirit.

Artist Bishakh Som illuminates her own personal narrative in Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir.

This exquisite graphic novel memoir by a transgender artist, explores the concept of identity by inviting the reader to view the author moving through life as she would have us see her, that is, as she sees herself. Framed with a candid autobiographical narrative, this book gives us the opportunity to enter into the author’s daily life and explore her thoughts on themes of gender and sexuality, memory and urbanism, love and loss.

Lyricism alert! Poet and Lambda Literary Fellow Benjamin Garcia has a new book coming out entitled Thrown in the Throat.

 And Benjamin Garcia makes a stunning debut with Thrown in the Throat. In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with.

Ash Van Otterloo’s Cattywampus is a middle-grade romp about witchcraft and an unexpected friendship.

In the town of Howler’s Hollow, conjuring magic is strictly off-limits. Only nothing makes Delpha McGill’s skin crawl more than rules. So when she finds her family’s secret book of hexes, she’s itching to use it to banish her mama’s money troubles. She just has to keep it quieter than a church mouse — not exactly Delpha’s specialty.

Trouble is, Katybird Hearn is hankering to get her hands on the spell book, too. The daughter of a rival witching family, Katy has reasons of her own for wanting to learn forbidden magic, and she’s not going to let an age-old feud or Delpha’s contrary ways stop her. But their quarrel accidentally unleashes a hex so heinous it resurrects a graveyard full of angry Hearn and McGill ancestors bent on total destruction. If Delpha and Katy want to reverse the spell in time to save everyone in the Hollow from rampaging zombies, they’ll need to mend fences and work together.

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger is a young adult fantasy novel full of magic and mystery.

Imagine an America very similar to our own. It’s got homework, best friends, and pistachio ice cream. There are some differences. This America has been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and those not. Some of these forces are charmingly everyday, like the ability to make an orb of light appear or travel across the world through rings of fungi. But other forces au are re less charming and should never see the light of day.

Seventeen-year-old Elatsoe (“Ellie” for short) lives in this slightly stranger America. She can raise the ghosts of dead animals, a skill passed down through generations of her Lipan Apache family. Her beloved cousin has just been murdered, in a town that wants no prying eyes. But she is going to do more than pry. The picture-perfect façade of Willowbee masks gruesome secrets, and she will rely on her wits, skills, and friends to tear off the mask and protect her family.

If you looking for more LGBTQ books to close out your summer make sure to check out the new young adult novels from authors Alicia Jasinska, Brandy Colbert, and C.M. McGuire.

As always, if our list of LGBTQ releases missed an author or book, or if you have a book coming out next month, please email us.

Fiction

Non-Fiction

LGBTQ Studies

Bio/Memoir

Romance

Mystery/Thriller

Fantasy/Horror

Young Adult and Children’s Literature 

Poetry 

Purchase more LGBTQ books on Bookshop

Check out July’s LGBTQ books here.

Check out June’s LGBTQ books here.