As long-time readers of Our Queerest Shelves know, I keep a giant spreadsheet of upcoming queer book releases. I use it to make monthly new queer book roundups, like 11 Must-Read New Queer Books Out in March 2025. Some of the biggest releases I hear about six months or even more than a year before the publication date (shout out to Cemetery Boys: Espíritu by Aiden Thomas, which won’t come out until September 2026). Others I only discover days before their pub date or, sadly, afterward, which means it missed its window to be featured in these roundups.

Currently, I have more than 500 queer books out in 2025 on this spreadsheet, and it will only grow, especially as we learn more about fall new releases. Today, I thought I’d share five of the most recent additions to the spreadsheet. They have pub dates ranging from April to October. There’s a gay middle grade fantasy book in the world of Percy Jackson, an essay collection about horror movies and trans narratives, nonfiction about the “myth of LGBTQ+ solidarity” by a Black feminist writer, a collection of LGBTQ fairy tale retellings, and a sapphic gothic retelling.

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What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl’s diary, with its tiny lock and key, testifies to the impulse to keep parts of ourselves hidden, but it’s impossible to look at a locked diary without imagining breaking it open.

What to do then, with the published diary? With its lock removed, its interior offered to the world not only as exposure but as form: a genre beholden to the insight that rises from immediacy rather than retrospection. Many writers’ diaries have been published, but far fewer have been published in their lifetimes—and none carry the singular acuity, wit, and electric grace of Helen Garner’s. An Australian national treasure known for her novels of domestic nuance and entanglement (Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach) and journalism of grand sorrow and fierce controversy (The First Stone, This House of Grief), Garner has given us diaries that read like they are inventing a new language made from utterly familiar materials: fresh, raw, vibrating with life. “Like being given a painting you love gleaming with the still wet paint,” as the writer Helen Elliott put it. They are seductively loose and nimble, delivering shards of experience rather than an overdetermined narrative, pivoting from sharpened skewers of observation (“The writers’ festival. It’s like being barbecued”) to a clear-eyed claiming of pleasure (“tear meat off a chicken and stuff it into her mouth”), swerving from deep reckonings with romantic intimacy and dissolution to sudden, perfect aphorisms hidden like Easter eggs in the grass: “Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.”

The writer Catherine Lacey once brilliantly described the difficulty of writing about experiences you’re still living as “trying to make a bed while you’re still in it,” but as I read Garner’s diaries, I kept thinking that perhaps not every bed needs to be made. Sometimes we want the unmade beds, with messy sheets and sprawled out bodies stretching and spooning, the fossils of curled hairs on the pillow, the faint salt of dried sweat.

Far from reading like B-roll footage, these diaries feel magnificent and sui generis, beholden to no rhythms or logic but their own, simultaneously seductive and staggering, a blend of pillow talk, bar gossip, and eavesdropping on therapy. They offer an intoxicating, astute account of the deep emotional movements of Garner’s life over two decades— two marriages and divorces, the flowering of her literary career, and her daughter’s coming-of-age—but they always live in the weeds, built of the grain and texture of her days. No small part of their brilliance stems from their faith that there is no meaningful separation between these realms of inquiry: that reckoning with human purpose and the anguished possibilities of human love always happens within, and not above, the realm of “trivial” daily experience. Which is to say: in their form as well as their content, they reveal where meaning dwells in our lives (everywhere), and how we might excavate it. “In my heart,” Garner has said, “I always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote.”

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

From William Stixrud and Ned Johnson’s The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child: A Workbook (Penguin Life):

Below we’ve listed some research-backed statements about what an accurate model of reality looks like:

    …

We are delighted to announce that Elijah Bailey will receive this year’s George Plimpton Prize and that Julien Columeau and Sana R. Chaudhry will receive the Susannah Hunnewell Prize. The prizes will be presented at our annual Spring Revel on April 1 in New York, cochaired by Laurie and Oskar Eustis and MCed by Lena Dunham. We’ll also be honoring Anne Carson with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature, which will be presented by Ben Whishaw. Prizewinners are selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors.

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent by recognizing an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Jesse Ball, Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Yiyun Li, and Ottessa Moshfegh.

Elijah Bailey’s story “Social Promotion,” published in issue no. 247 (Spring 2024), follows a girl who performs in an original, half-improvised school play written for her Great Black Women of History class. Bailey was a John and Renée Grisham Fellow in fiction at the University of Mississippi. The Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

“Social Promotion” by Elijah Bailey is laugh-out-loud funny, narrated by Derajanae in a voice full of comedy, pathos, and joy. She is at an awards ceremony at a “last-chance alternative school” in a former office space with “one of them spinning doors you can trap people in,” sitting behind her teacher who makes “a bigger deal out of everything than it is” and next to her mother and baby sister, Racey, who wears a onesie with cars on it. Derajanae has written a play to be performed at the ceremony, but first she has to listen to a boy who can’t read call out the names of the winners. “Sound it out,” she thinks. “Guess better.” He has yet to say her name.

Derajanae got kicked out of her last school “for fighting too good,” and she’s due at the park for a fight right now—but first she has to star in her play as Sojourner Truth. “Me and Miss Marie had to compromise on the play,” she says. “She ain’t want no foul language and no making light of violence. During rehearsal she kept pecking at it and pecking at it until it was only kind of mine.” We watch the play unfold as a raucous farce; naturally, Derajanae manages to make it more hers. During the applause, she thinks, “I had done something big and good, and my ears were burning hot.” But the story isn’t over yet. Keeping the reader in what feels like a gentle suspense until the end, Bailey has the last word, a surprise that resonates in layers—it’s first funny, then more and more profound.

My father has crossed many borders. Born in northern Việt Nam under French rule in 1933, he was educated in a French Catholic school. More than eighty years later, a widower, he could still sing fragments of French songs when we sat together at the dining table. The meal I could prepare which he most enjoyed was filet mignon, medium rare, with a glass of red wine. He had a cupboard full of Louis Jadot Beaujolais, for when he liked something, he bought it in bulk. When he stopped being able to eat meat and drink wine, I took the last two bottles of Louis Jadot and brought them home with me, where they remain untouched. Perhaps I will drink one when he passes away. Perhaps I will open the second decades from now and see what I remember when I taste it, even if all I will taste is spoilt wine. 

By then, my father will have long ago passed across the last border any of us will see. I know of at least two other borders that he crossed during his life. In 1954, as a newlywed at twenty-one with his seventeen-year-old wife, my father left his childhood home and moved south across the border, where Việt Nam had been partitioned into a communist north and anticommunist south following the defeat of French colonizers by Vietnamese revolutionaries. My mother’s entire family chose to leave the north, along with eight hundred thousand other Vietnamese Catholics fearing communist persecution. My father’s family chose to stay, so my father left behind his parents, his younger sister, and three younger brothers. He would not see them again for forty years. Ulysses was away from home for only twenty years. Does my father’s journey away from home and back to it four decades later deserve the name of an epic? If not, what form should my father’s story take?

The question of form and its relationship to a life lived interests me as a writer and as a border crosser, as my father’s son and as a father myself. A half century after my father left his childhood home, I visited the compound. My aunt had married and moved out long ago, but my three paternal uncles still live there, along with many of their children and grandchildren. From my youth until my visit and past then until the present, my parents have sent home money to the relatives every year to help them survive. On this visit, I gave all the adults envelopes of cash, the amounts determined by my father, and thought about what my life would have been like if my parents had never left in 1954, or in 1975, when they fled from Sài Gòn and crossed yet another border to the United States. If I am inclined to see the journeys of my parents as heroic, the writer Amitava Kumar pushes back against the praise for those who cross borders: the immigrants, the refugees, the undocumented, the expatriates, the tourists, the settlers, the conquerors. He writes that “It is not the immigrant but the ones who stay behind who are the true unvanquished.”

It is safe to say that perceptions of migrants are contradictory. In their countries of origin, they are sometimes celebrated for having embarked on adventures and sometimes criticized as having abandoned their homes. In the countries of their arrival, they can appear as terrifying threats in another people’s history or be welcomed as fresh blood. If they face hostility and suspicion, migrants might feel the need to insert themselves into their new nation’s chronicles of conquest. The migrant’s heroism can then harmonize with their host nation’s self-image, as well as affirming that nation’s hospitality and generosity.

Valentine’s Day is over, which means we’re no longer in the throes of Cuffing Season. But some of us—including the characters in this book—are desperate for love all year round.

I picked up this thriller the day after Valentine’s Day, and it was the perfect post-love season read. Forget about pure love and romance. None of these characters can be trusted, there are surprises around every turn, and nothing is what it seems.

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Sorting through library news (or any news, really) feels a little like sticking your hand into a pit of hungry alligators. It’s mass firings of federal workers, bad management strategies from someone who isn’t authorized to manage anything at the federal level, book ban legislation…the list goes on. I’ve waded through the chaos and found a few news stories that managed to stand out from the blaring cacophony of WTF-ery. Time to pay attention.

In a shady-ass move, the Library of Congress released a list of proposed subject heading changes on February 18th, which included changing “Mexico, Gulf of” to “America, Gulf of” and changing Denali to Mount McKinley. They also set February 18th as the deadline for public comment submissions, even though the list was only posted earlier that day. When you consider how long it normally takes to make changes to existing subject headings, this rapid turnaround is hella sus.

Hoopla Cuts Back on “AI-Generated Slop”

Hoopla has announced it will do more to prevent the spread of low-quality AI-generated books on its platform. Although the exact details of the plan are unclear, hoopla has already implemented measures like revising its collection development policy, giving librarians a way to contact hoopla directly to better manage the catalog, and removing “summary titles” from all vendors, with the exception of series like CliffNotes. This is all well and good, but considering the sheer number of low-quality and AI-generated titles already in their catalog, hoopla has its work cut out for them.

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day and here in the U.S., it’s Women’s History Month all March long. In that spirit, let’s spotlight some graphic novels and comic books that feature fascinating, beautiful, and badass trans girls and women!

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Here’s a look at all the news Book Riot covered this week.

Ensuring that information being shared is coming from a valid and reliable source has always been crucial. But for many, this hasn’t been especially important for a variety of factors—it’s easy to believe what’s posted if the person posting is one you generally trust; some information being shared feels intuitive and thus is likely not wrong (or if it is wrong, it won’t cause actual harm); media literacy skills are generally not a cultural strong suit; and, frankly, not caring for any number of reasons.

But in an era where our information is continuing to be skewed by those with power, it is well beyond time to begin asking questions about the information you’re reading. We know that we can no longer rely on some of the basic media literacy skills once taught. Websites with a .gov address after them are no longer going to provide the breadth and depth of information they once did. With one executive order, any and all history related to trans people in America has been erased.

Turning to the 5Ws, 1H, and TOADSRIG, as outlined in this piece, can be helpful tools for navigating information you’re presented. But how do you begin to even assess whether the information is worth assessing? You have to begin with the source of that information.

It’s your responsibility to explore whether information is reliable and whether it is valid. These are two separate, but related, concepts. Reliability is about consistency. With information, reliability applies to whether what you’re reading is consistent across sources. There will certainly be differences in slant, but at heart, the information being shared is the same from outlet to outlet. Validity is about accuracy. With information, validity is about where something falls on the spectrum of fact to fiction.

Here’s an example.