Skip To Content

    21 Books Queer Women (And Everybody Else) Should Read

    Some eye-opening, radical, and unputdownable books about gender, bodies, and identity.

    1. Felt in the Jaw by Kristen Arnett

    2. When Katie Met Cassidy by Camille Perri

    3. Spinning by Tillie Walden

    4. Passage by Gwen Benaway

    5. A Handbook of Disappointed Fate by Anne Boyer

    6. Mean by Myriam Gurba

    7. The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers

    8. A Body Undone: Living On After Great Pain by Christina Crosby

    9. Large Animals by Jess Arndt

    10. Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

    11. Fen by Daisy Johnson

    12. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor

    13. Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall by Suzette Mayr

    14. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell

    15. Some Animal by Ely Shipley

    16. Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

    17. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

    18. Sphinx by Anne F. Garréta

    19. The Estrangement Principle by Ariel Goldberg

    20. Autumn and Winter by Ali Smith

    21. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

    Kit Haggard teaches at Emerson College. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and The Masters Review, among other places. She is the recipient of the St. Botolph Emerging Artists Award, the Rex Warner Prize, and the Nancy Lynn Schwartz Prize for Fiction. She can be found on Twitter @kithaggard.

    Alanna Duncan is a writer whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Electric Literature, Entropy, and Five2One, among others. She lives in Brooklyn with her bicycle and tweets @acdunc.