8 Great New Pride Reads for 2024

If you’re looking for a memoir to carry you through June, this is the one. It’s a beautiful, earnest book about the hard and joyful work of healing. Though Wallace touches on the traumas he experienced growing up a Black queer kid, his focus is on the moments that have sustained him since: making art, cooking, and music; romantic, sexual, and platonic connections; parenting. His raw and insightful writing often feels like prose poetry. This is a book full of the hope of collective liberation.

I’ve been waiting for another one of Villada’s books to be translated into English ever since I read and loved Bad Girls, and now the wait is over! In this book of short stories, Villada blends the mundane and the extraordinary, bringing touches of magical realism to contemporary moments. Queer and trans characters face challenging — and sometimes downright strange — situations, and the result is stories that feel alive and surprising.

A lesbian best-friends-to-lovers romance? Sign me up! Cyn is a music producer who’s always been happy to keep her flings casual. That is, until she suddenly starts seeing her best friend, Jucee, in a new way. Jucee is a talented dancer at a strip club and a single mom who, like Cyn, has never made lasting relationships a priority. But what will happen if they just kiss a little? No big deal, right? Higgins’s first romance was a delight, and I can’t wait to see what joys this one brings.

I adore queer history books, and when a queer history book is also about place, geography, and landscape? Swoon. In this blend of personal recollections and historical research, Thomas delves into queer women’s history in the second half of the 20th century through the lens of important lesbian spaces. She looks at sex toy shops, feminist bookstores, and rural communes (to name a few), exploring how these spaces helped shape lesbian culture and politics. Thoughtful, intimate, and often surprising, this is a must-read for all lovers of sapphic history.

This heartbreaking but tender coming-of-age novel follows Obiefuna, a young gay man struggling to make sense of himself and his world in mid-2000s Nigeria. When his dad catches him with another boy, he’s sent to a strict religious boarding school, where he endures years of homophobia and violence. It’s not until he finds and makes connections with other queer people in his early twenties that he’s finally able to confront the traumas of his past. This is a layered, complex novel that acknowledges queer suffering while also uplifting and celebrating queer love.

Fan of books about complicated family relationships: you’re going to want to run to this one. Santiago is a boy when he moves from Colombia to Miami with his mother and brother. As the family struggles to make ends meet, Santiago begins to explore his queerness. Over the next decades, he moves between cities, countries, and relationships, looking for belonging. This is a sharp, poignant exploration of queer immigrant experiences and the messy bonds of family and homeland.

The subtitle of this collection (Essays on Art, Collectivity, and Joy), is all I need to know to want it immediately. But everything else about it is just as tempting. Art and cultural critic Simon Wu approaches art, fashion, queer history, identity, belonging, and pop culture with an eye for how the personal is always also the collective. He infuses these essays with his own interests, longings, and experiences, even as he stretches them beyond himself, asking what it means to love and create in such a fraught and constantly changing world.

Did I actually scream when this anthology was announced? I did! Metonymy Press hasn’t published a bad book yet. This collection brings together an eclectic array of queer Arab and Arabophone writing from both new and established writers. The diverse styles bridge genres, generations, and nations, highlighting the multifaceted and nuanced realities of queer Arab lives. I can’t wait to dig into what I know will be an incredibly rich and creative collection of world-opening work.