Andrea Lawlor lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College. Lawlor is a fiction editor for Fence and the author of a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016). Paul Takes The Form of A Mortal Girl is their debut novel.
Waiting on a Friend (2026) Natalie Adler "Adler gets the feeling of the time more right than almost any historical fiction I've read about the early-middle height of AIDS in NYC."
Crawl (2025) Max Delsohn "Young melancholy trans guys & various masc-gendered people behaving badly in early adulthood - I mean, you knew I was going to love this & I do! There's a bit of a transmasc Mary Gaitskill vibe to the stories if that makes any sense. It's a pleasure to have some transmasc literary realism for once in our lives. I am going to write a proper blurb but you heard it hear first. Watch this guy. Max Delsohn."
Hot Girls with Balls (2025) Benedict Nguyễn "Benedict Nguyen's Hot Girls with Balls is literal genius: nailbiter sports fiction meets Kathy Acker on EMDR meets our shiny screentime moment, with all the desire & denial & overwhelm & the queer Asian trans girls at the heart of everything that matters. I love this book! It's so observant & emotionally intelligent & moving & shot through with clarity. SO SO GOOD! & I like volleyball now!"
City of Laughter (2024) Temim Fruchter "Temim Fruchter's debut novel is moving, funny, beautifully crafted, rich with insight, and wildly gripping. The queer Jewish femme multi-generational family saga I didn't know I needed!"
Ponyboy (2023) Eliot Duncan "Eliot Duncan's melancholic transboy swagger sparkles in this classic story of a dissolute bookish Midwesterner who crashes through Europe, falling in and out of love, in and out of despair, adventuring through the nights, and stargazing from the gutter. An astonishing first novel."
Open Throat (2023) Henry Hoke "My favorite book of this century so far! I keep putting off writing this blurb because every time I pick up Open Throat I re-read it and fall back in love with this gay-ass big cat and then I have to spend the whole rest of the day thinking about mountain lions and humans and sex and bodies and death and climate change and bad dads and NY v. LA and what is even possible in this world. Henry Hoke is a magician."
Mrs S (2023) K Patrick "I've completely fallen for the astonishing Mrs. S - K Patrick's watchful measured prose simmers, edging the reader along, asking Will I get what I want? and What then?"
Dykette (2023) Jenny Fran Davis "Jenny Fran Davis is a real troublemaker, and Dykette is my favorite kind of trouble--sexy, messy, full of gossip and glitter, and cunning, and thus of course profoundly revealing about our strange times. Text me when you finish!"
Love in the Big City (2021) Sang Young Park "Sang Young Park’s sharp, funny picaresque follows Young, our charming hero, through his rakish college days and into his still-insouciant thirties, as he drifts through boyfriends, jobs, friends, and most of all, through Seoul. Among the many pleasures of this wonderful novel are Young’s running commentaries about work, class, sex, queer domestic life, contemporary Korean family dynamics, and the literary world he finds himself in. I’m obsessed with this book."
Summer Fun (2021) Jeanne Thornton "In Summer Fun, Jeanne Thornton, that slow-burn superstar, has dropped a punk’s pop masterpiece—a compulsively readable novel that somehow also reinvigorates the form of the epistolary novel, dives into the deepest reflective waters of fandom, observes trans-cis relations with social-realist precision and generosity, and recovers the trans throughline that was always there. We are so lucky to live now, when we get to read this book."
Detransition, Baby (2021) Torrey Peters "Riveting, insightful, and very funny ... an unforgettable portrait of three women, trans and cis, who wrestle with questions of motherhood and family-making. Destined to be a 21st century classic, Detransition, Baby will definitely keep you up late and might destroy your book club, but in a good way."
Pizza Girl (2020) Jean Kyoung Frazier "Jean Kyoung Frazier, a blazing new voice in fiction, has given us a sly, poignant glimpse into the wilds of suburbia, where intergenerational queer love and alienation from labor go hand in hand. And who doesn't want to read about that?"
Nevada (2013) Imogen Binnie "Imogen Binnie's gimlet-eyed prose is raw, funny, and then devastating. I can't get Maria Griffiths out of my head: she's an edgy heroine, a new archetype-the quintessential late 20s punk rock trans girl blowing up her life and making friends on the road (or in the parking lot)."
Tramps Like Us (2001) Joe Westmoreland "Joe Westmoreland's Tramps Like Us is irresistible: a spare, unflinching, generous & lusty masterpiece of adventure writing, that great adventuring queer quest for sex & friendship & love & home."
