LGBTQ Literature

... Read What If It's Us Summary

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (2015) is a collection of nine short stories written by Helen Oyeyemi. The stories feature some recurring characters, and all contain a literal or metaphorical key. Oyeyemi is a popular British author whose works include Mr. Fox (2011) and Boy, Snow, Bird (2014). She does not consider her works to be “magical realism,” but that is the genre where they are most often placed, as they tend to... Read What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Summary

Published in 2003, Carla Trujillo’s novel What Night Brings is set in the late 1960s in a town outside San Francisco. The novel centers on Marcía Cruz, an 11-year-old Chicana girl struggling with her sexual orientation and domestic abuse amidst a larger backdrop of the Vietnam War and a crisis of faith in America.What Night Brings is Trujillo’s first novel, but not her first published work relating to its central themes. She edited an anthology... Read What Night Brings Summary

... Read What the Living Do Summary

What We All Long For, written by Dionne Brand and published in 2005, tells the overlapping stories of four friends in their early- to mid-20s as they navigate Toronto as queer people, people of color, and children of immigrants.Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain instances and discussions of suicide, racism, and abuse.Tuyen is a queer woman and the daughter of Vietnamese immigrant refugees. When her parents fled Vietnam, they were separated from... Read What We All Long For Summary

... Read When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities Summary

... Read When the Angels Left the Old Country Summary

... Read When the Moon Was Ours Summary

... Read When Women Were Dragons Summary

... Read When You Were Everything Summary

... Read Where Sleeping Girls Lie Summary

White Is for Witching, published in 2009, is Helen Oyeyemi’s third novel, for which she received the Somerset Maugham Award. A finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, White Is for Witching explores both traditional horror and the horrors of racism. Oyeyemi’s novels often center the experience of historically marginalized groups, which perhaps reflects her own background as a Nigerian-born English citizen who attended Cambridge University. White Is for Witching frames histories of racism as supernatural... Read White Is for Witching Summary

... Read Wild Nights Wild Nights Summary

Wild Seed is a science fiction novel written by Octavia Butler in 1980. It is sequentially the first book in a sequence of “Patternist” books written by the same author, though it was the fourth book published in that series. These include Mind of My Mind (1978), Clay’s Ark (1984), Survivor (1977), and Patternmaster (1976). Wild Seed takes place over different centuries and continents, beginning in Africa in 1690 and ending in America just before... Read Wild Seed Summary

Winger is a young adult novel written by American author Andrew Smith and first published in 2013. It belongs to the genre of contemporary early 21st century teen fiction and garnered recognition from the American Library Association (ALA), Publishers Weekly, and the Junior Library Guild. Because of Winger’s storyline involving LGBTQIA+ issues, it was also chosen as part of the ALA’s 2014 Rainbow List in 2014, made up of books for children and young adults... Read Winger Summary

... Read Wow, No Thank You. Summary

Written on the Body is a short novel by British author Jeanette Winterson. Several international publications followed the original 1992 publication of the book. The text, which is a first-person narrative, is directed at an adult reading audience. The narrative, which presents accounts of numerous love affairs, also ruminates on the nature of love, fidelity, spirituality, and death. Winterson, who was raised by members of a Pentecostal Church, trained as a missionary and started to... Read Written On The Body Summary

... Read You, Again Summary

... Read You Are Jeff Summary

... Read You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty Summary