Book picks similar to
Otros valles by Jamie Berrout
fiction
trans
queer
lgbt
That Could Be Enough
Alyssa Cole - 2018
Serving as a maid to Eliza Hamilton, and an assistant in the woman's stubborn desire to preserve her late husband's legacy, has driven that point home for Mercy—as have her own previous heartbreaks. When Andromeda Stiel shows up at Hamilton Grange for an interview in her grandfather's stead, Mercy's resolution to live a quiet, pain-free life is tested by the beautiful, flirtatious, and entirely overwhelming dressmaker. Andromeda has staid Mercy reconsidering her worldview, but neither is prepared for love—or for what happens when it's not enough. This is an angsty but fluffy F/F novella with a happy ending for both of our intrepid heroines.
A Burning
Megha Majumdar - 2020
PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely--an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor--has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning has the force of an epic while being so masterfully compressed it can be read in a single sitting. Majumdar writes with dazzling assurance at a breakneck pace on complex themes that read here as the components of a thriller: class, fate, corruption, justice, and what it feels like to face profound obstacles and yet nurture big dreams in a country spinning toward extremism. An extraordinary debut.
The Chosen and the Beautiful
Nghi Vo - 2021
Socialite. Magician.Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer, Asian, adopted, and treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.Nghi Vo’s debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice.
The Roommate
Brandy Bush - 2020
& Mrs. Yu, while spending the holiday break at their house, but I’ve never felt anything like it before and I’m certain that I never will again.So, maybe this is the point of being young, experiencing new things because I can, and I want to. And I do…want to…have one night fulfilling my ultimate fantasy, so I know just how good it can be getting everything I want.That's what my roommate's parents give me, and I don't regret a thing.
Like Son
Felicia Luna Lemus - 2007
Finalist for the 2008 Ferro-Grumley Awards for LGBT Fiction.Set amidst the outsider worlds of New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City, Like Son is the not-so-simple story of a father, a son, and the love blindness shared between them.Meet Frank Cruz: a post-punk thirty-year-old who unwittingly inherits his dead father's legacy. Born a bouncing baby girl named Francisca to parents tangled in a doomed love affair, Frank grows up in both the poorest barrios and poshest hills of Southern California. At the age of eighteen, Frank leaves for the big city, but is pulled back into helping his estranged and blind father navigate an untimely death. Upon his death, Frank's father leaves his only child a mysterious crumbling photograph of a woman with a stunning gaze: Nahui Olin, a captivating member of the early 20th century Mexican avant-garde who once brought tragedy upon the Cruz family.Punctured to his core by Nahui, Frank takes her portrait and flees to New York City to start anew—this time for real. There he meets fiery and eccentric Nathalie. The two fall in love, but after seven years of happy-go-lucky life together, in September 2001 the New York skyline tumbles, and Frank finds himself smack in the middle of his predestined fate.
Waiting on a Bright Moon
J.Y. Yang - 2017
When a dead body comes through her portal at a time of growing rebellion, Xin is drawn deep into a station-wide conspiracy along with Ouyang Suqing, one of the station’s mysterious, high-ranking starmages.
The Weight of the Stars
K. Ancrum - 2019
But a career in space isn’t an option for a girl who lives in a trailer park on the wrong side of town. So Ryann becomes her circumstances and settles for acting out and skipping school to hang out with her delinquent friends. One day she meets Alexandria: a furious loner who spurns Ryann’s offer of friendship. After a horrific accident leaves Alexandria with a broken arm, the two misfits are brought together despite themselves—and Ryann learns her secret: Alexandria’s mother is an astronaut who volunteered for a one-way trip to the edge of the solar system. Every night without fail, Alexandria waits to catch radio signals from her mother. And its up to Ryann to lift her onto the roof day after day until the silence between them grows into friendship, and eventually something more . . . In K. Ancrum’s signature poetic style, this slow-burn romance will have you savoring every page. An Imprint Book
The Politics of Love
Jen Jensen - 2020
Everything's totally fine, except that it really isn't. Shelley manages depression and crippling anxiety because of the secret she can never reveal: she's gay.Rand Thomas is a psychotherapist, transgender rights activist, and political liberal. Widowed and struggling with her wife's toxic parents, Rand isn't going to allow herself to love again.When Shelley and Rand meet in Manhattan, neither one expects to find that the other is exactly who they need.
The Deep
Rivers Solomon - 2019
Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one—the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu.Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities—and discovers a world her people left behind long ago.Yetu will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past—and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity—and own who they really are.Inspired by a song produced by the rap group Clipping for the This American Life episode “We Are In The Future,” The Deep is vividly original and uniquely affecting.
the earthquake room
Davey Davis - 2017
When k realizes that she has infected her girlfriend, bea, with a disease, she loses herself in a masochistic quest for atonement, leaving bea to contend with her fears about an increasingly precarious world by herself. Literary and adventurous, lyrical yet anchored, Davey Davis’ work explores the meanings of responsibility, romantic love, and queer resistance in a late-capitalist hellscape where futurity is always in question.
The Price of Salt
Patricia Highsmith - 1952
They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover. With this reissue, The Price of Salt may finally be recognized as a major twentieth-century American novel.
Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives
Nia King - 2014
Mixed-race queer art activist Nia King left a full-time job in an effort to center her life around making art. Grappling with questions of purpose, survival, and compromise, she started a podcast called We Want the Airwaves in order to pick the brains of fellow queer and trans artists of color about their work, their lives, and "making it" - both in terms of success and in terms of survival.In this collection of interviews, Nia discusses fat burlesque with Magnoliah Black, queer fashion with Kiam Marcelo Junio, interning at Playboy with Janet Mock, dating gay Latino Republicans with Julio Salgado, intellectual hazing with Kortney Ryan Ziegler, gay gentrification with Van Binfa, getting a book deal with Virgie Tovar, the politics of black drag with Micia Mosely, evading deportation with Yosimar Reyes, weird science with Ryka Aoki, gay public sex in Africa with Nick Mwaluko, thin privilege with Fabian Romero, the tyranny of "self-care" with Lovemme Corazon, "selling out" with Miss Persia and Daddie$ Pla$tik, the self-employed art activist hustle with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, and much, much more. Welcome to the future of QPOC art activism.
Labyrinth Lost
Zoraida Córdova - 2016
Even gods make mistakes.Alex is a bruja, the most powerful witch in a generation…and she hates magic. At her Deathday celebration, Alex performs a spell to rid herself of her power. But it backfires. Her whole family vanishes into thin air, leaving her alone with Nova, a brujo she can’t trust, but who may be Alex’s only chance at saving her family.
The Rain God
Arturo Islas - 1984
Set in a fictional small town on the Texas-Mexico border, it tells the funny, sad and quietly outrageous saga of the children and grandchildren of Mama Chona, the indomitable matriarch of the Angel clan who fled the bullets and blood of the 1911 revolution for a gringo land of promise. In bold creative strokes, Islas paints on unforgettable family portrait of souls haunted by ghosts and madness--sinners torn by loves, lusts and dangerous desires. From gentle hearts plagued by violence and epic delusions to a child who con foretell the coming of rain in the sweet scent of angels, here is a rich and poignant tale of outcasts struggling to live and die with dignity ... and to hold onto their past while embracing an unsteady future.
Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across
Mary Lambert - 2018
In verse that deals with sexual assault, mental illness, and body acceptance, Ms. Lambert's Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across emerges as an important new voice in poetry, providing strength and resilience even in the darkest of times.