Volume 3, No. 50: My Favorite Fiction of 2023

Greetings, book and treat people! Today’s Best Of list is by far the most ridiculous, by which I mean the most wonderful, abundant, and full of beauty—65 works of fiction I read and loved this year.

You’ll hear from me one more time on Friday. In the meantime, don’t forget to submit your final Queer Your Year game cards, and keep calling your reps.

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My Favorite Fiction of 2023

Some notes on the list:

• It includes the best fiction I read in 2023, not just books published in 2023.

• It’s organized by moods and themes.

• It includes 60 books. Because maximalism.

• You can browse through all the books via this handy list on Bookshop.

• Books marked with an asterisk are ones I loved on audio.

• Credit to my friend Grey for the phrase “relational snarls”.

• Clicking on a title will bring you to Bookshop. Clicking on linked text in the description will bring you to my review (either in the newsletter or on Instagram).

• It’s only December 6th, so this list is not definitive. It also doesn’t include rereads. If it did, A Minor Chorus, Giovanni’s Room, All This Could Be Different, The Other Mother, and The Thirty Names of Night would be on it.

Queer and Trans Futurity

Uranians by Theodore McCombs (2023): This whole collection is wonderful, and then there’s the titular novella: an incandescent opera of queer liberation, a philosophy of queerness as infinite shapeshifting travel, a thorny ode to world-building, the work of it, the kind we do every day with the people we love and live with. It’s a hard, messy, tangled dream of a queer anti-utopia, a celebration of imperfection, a microcosm of how communities tear and implode and rebuild, an intimate love story, a parenthood story, a queer heartbeat flung out into the cold universe, demanding life, demanding to be heard.

Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner (2023): This book is a counter-reality, a magical conjuring of expansive futures. It’s not logical, it’s not linear, it’s not ordered. It’s a wildly fun and spacious queer universe. It’s about queer and trans abundance. It’s about the world-expanding possibilities of queer friendship. It’s about mundane transformations—the perfect outfit, great set design, a beautiful football game—and the sacredness of those small, beautiful moments, especially in a world intent on policing and destroying queer and trans joy.

Future Feeling by Joss Lake (2021): What a weird and beautiful book. I didn’t understand half of it, and who cares, because it’s not about the future, and it’s not about hexes and magic and world-building. It’s a story about trans brotherhood, loneliness, alienation, trying to find your way to self-worth under capitalism, queer abundance, the inherent strangeness of certain queer feelings.

Books of My Life

Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo (1996): This book broke open for me everything I thought I knew about what makes a queer novel. It explodes all the labels and expands the possibilities of storytelling. It doesn’t stay inside the lines

Any Other City by Hazel Jane Plante (2023): Oh, my heart. Oh, my hurt and healing heart. I don’t know how to write about Tracy St. Cyr and her punk music and her yearning and her deep heartbreak and her sharp music and her silliness and her trans joy and her softness and her art-making. How do I write about a feeling translated so beautifully? How do I write down the queer mysteries of this novel, the trans heart of this novel, the beating rhythms of a life, written down in words?

*Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas (2023): This book hurt so much. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that so viscerally captures what it felt like to be queer in high school in 2001-2003. The ending destroyed me. I had to lie on my kitchen floor crying for a while. I haven’t properly reviewed it yet. I need to reread it first.

*Bellies by Nicola Dinan (2023): I loved this book so much I’ve already read it twice. It isn’t a romance. It’s not exactly about friendship, and it’s not exactly about found family, although it does encompass both. Most truly, most beautifully, it’s a queer love story about shared history.

Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang (2023): Sometimes I can feel my heart beating while I’m reading. I become acutely aware of myself as a physical being—my skin, my breath. It’s a visceral reaction, this noticing-of-self, to words that feel like they’ve been carved from the bedrock of the earth, drawn up and translated out of the sticky, impossible center of human experience. It doesn’t happen very often. It happened while I was reading this extraordinary novel.

20th Century Queer Lit Forever and Ever Amen

I Want What I Want by Geoff Brown (1966): This remarkable book is about a 21-year-old trans woman, Wendy, trying to make a life for herself in the city of Hull, in Yorkshire. There are two important things to know about this novel. One: it is full of queer suffering, and it does not have a happy ending. Two: Wendy is a complicated, nuanced human being—she is not a trope, a stereotype, or a villain. She is far from perfect, but she has agency.

Alexis by Marguerite Yourcenar, tr. by Walter Kaiser (1929): This is a 105-page miracle of a novel. The eponymous Alexis, a musician, has just left his wife, because he’s realized he cannot continue to lie to himself, and therefore to her, about his queerness. So he writes her a letter explaining his actions. It is a stunningly beautiful book. It complicates, and ultimately rejects, this trajectory of progress, this idea that once upon a time queer people suffered, and their suffering was the whole of them. I wrote a whole essay about this novel (for paying subscribers, FYI).

Olivia by Dorothy Strachey (1949): This short and powerful novel is about sixteen-year-old Olivia, who arrives at a finishing school in France and immediately falls into intense lust/love/infatuation with her teacher, Mlle. Julie. It’s one of the most brilliant depictions of teenage sapphic desire I’ve read. It inspired me to wrote an essay about queer desire in books and life (paywalled).

Imre: A Memorandum by Edward Prime-Stevenson (1906): This is the sort of book I didn’t even realize existed before this year, mostly because of what I have been taught about queer lit—that happy queer stories are a new invention. How freeing it has been to discard this ghastly misconception. Imre is a short, elegantly plotted, deeply moving, often funny love story. (Note: the edition I’ve linked to on Bookshop is backordered, but I highly recommend trying to find it—my library had it!—because the back matter is incredible.)

Quicksand by Nella Larsen (1928): Why does everyone talk about Passing and not this incredible gut punch of a novel? I adored this book and its brilliant, hurting, hilarious, striving protagonist Helga Crane. Also, PSA: All of Nella Larsen’s books are hella queer, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I have a review of this written that I’ll share at some point!

Labels!?! What Labels!?!

My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel, tr. by Katherine Silver (2001): What struck me most about this beautiful little novel, set in Santiago in 1986, is how funny and joyful it is, despite the dire times and constant danger it portrays. It’s about queer pleasure, and the power of queer imagination.

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid (1985): There is so much going on in this brilliant 150-page book: identity formation, grief, queer self-discovery, the ways that culture, geography, and family shape (and sometimes warp) a person’s understanding of the world. Annie is a fierce mess who speaks her mind, who knows herself, who wants and longs and struggles.

*Chlorine by Jade Song (2023): Would you rather be a mermaid than a girl? Would you build yourself new out of chlorine and salt, out of longing and loss, if you could? Would you turn your body into violence, rather than bear the violence done to it? This is a raw and rushing book about a queer Chinese American teenager who’s a competitive swimmer, and a mermaid—or in the process of becoming one.

On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer, tr. by Lucy Scott (1982, English translation 2023): Set in Suriname, this book follows Noenka, a Black queer woman who, after leaving an abusive marriage, flees her small hometown and stitches together a life for herself in the capital. At least, that’s what it’s about on the surface, its bones stripped and bled down to a sentence. It’s hard to explain the wildness of the structure of this novel, the way it refuses ease and simplicity.

For Joy

*We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian (2023): My favorite Cat Sebastian to date. And that’s sayin something, but I have read (and loved) her entire catalog.

Snapdragon by Kat Leyh (2020): Do you need more queer grandmas in your life? Of course you do. Do you need more queer witchy magic in your life? Obviously. Do you need more prickly and joyful queer teenage friendship in your life? Yes.

Garlic and the Vampire and Garlic and the Witch by Bree Paulsen (2021 & 2022): The coziest. The charming-est. The most hugs. Yes, both books. You’re welcome.

*The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers (2021): A bunch of aliens get stranded at a galactic truck stop and spend a week…talking. Nothing happens, and it’s perfect. It’s basically an encyclopedia of ailen culture, except it’s not boring, and also you might cry a little, and also it’s very funny and just a teeny tiny bit profound.

The Prospects by KT Hoffman (2024): Trans joy. Minor league baseball. Romance. What else do you want from me?

Queerness Is a Healing Force

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter (2024): I’ll be writing a longer review soon, but for now: preorder, preorder, preorder this gorgeous novel. It’s so Jewish and queer and strange, full of mysteries and knots and folklore and trees. Bursting with sadness, rich and tangled. Do not come to it for answers or ease. Come to it for questions, belly laughs, intergenerational wonder and loss, expansive prayers, the work that is memory, that is looking into the rupture and letting the hurt and healing in.

Notes on Her Color by Jennifer Neal (2023): I read this book in a weekend back in February and felt unsettled and upset and tangled up about it. I wanted not to like it, I wanted it to be dramatic and forgettable. But I have not been able to stop thinking about it. It’s a weird, hard novel, but it’s inside me now.

*Small Joys by Elvin James Mensah (2023): The queer friendship book of my dreams, and maybe yours, too.

*Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee (2023): A beautiful character study about a Black queer woman fighting for her place in the world, determined to choose herself, over and over again, despite the endless racist systems and intersecting oppressions trying to crush her, demean her, make her smaller. Also, trees. Also, rivers of queer healing.

Narrative Acrobatics

*O Beautiful by Jung Yun (2021): This is a beautiful, haunting book about a biracial Asian woman who returns home to North Dakota to write a magazine feature about how the oil boom has transformed a formerly small town. It’s deceptively simple, and brilliant, how Yun tells this story—so many stories, really, about misogyny and race and power and homecoming and womanhood—through the lens of a woman trying, desperately, to tell a story.

Variations by Juliet Jacques (2021): A fictional queer and trans archive of UK history, in the form of stories, letters, interviews, academic papers, plays, articles, news clippings. Inventive and gorgeous and expansive. Note: This hasn’t been published in the US, but it’s really worth buying from the UK, I promise.

Em by Kim Thúy, tr. by Sheila Fischman (2021): This is a haunting and gorgeous book about language, home, memory, and war. The narrative itself felt like a poem or a translation—something slippery and hard to define.

1,000 Coils of Fear by Olivia Wenzel, tr. by Priscilla Layne (2020): Is it possible to translate what it feels like to think onto a written page? Is it possible to capture the weirdness of living inside our own heads in words that other people can read? These, to me, feel like the questions Wenzel is trying to answer. The book doesn’t answer them, really—the best books never answer questions—but it grapples with them, beautifully.

*Stars in Your Eyes by Kacen Callender (2023): This isn’t as narratively wild as the other books in this section, but Callender does work some narrative magic. It’s a romance, but it’s also a book about trauma. The way Callender braids these two things together, avoids trope traps, and crafts a believable happily ever after—it’s amazing. This is a very hard read and also a very fun read.

Home / Land

Fire Song by Adam Garnet Jones (2018): This is a bleak and sometimes devastating novel. It’s set on a reservation in Northern Ontario, and it’s about Shane, a queer Anishinaabe teenager, who’s dealing with a lot. To me it felt like a kind of prayer.

*Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius, tr. by Rachel Willson-Broyles (2023): This is a beautifully tangled novel about a Sámi reindeer herder and her family and community. It’s infuriating to read, and very sad. The ending is gorgeous. There’s so much going on under the surface, simmering. Quiet, layered, stark.

*Bad Cree by Jessica Johns (2023): I loved this sad, warm, haunting book about going home, about land-love and belonging and the stories woven in and of place. It’s about grief and sisterhood and Cree kinship and aunties and how one Cree family holds each other and breaks apart and stitches themselves back together despite ongoing colonial violence.

Dry Land by B. Pladek (2023): Oh, this queer nature book of my heart. This is a novel about wildness and forests and the danger of made-up ideas like wilderness. It’s about what is natural and what isn’t and who decides. It’s about what happens when you allow yourself to be dazzled by an easy solution, and about how much work it actually takes to know—or change—something. I love it with every fibre of my being. If you pick one book off this list to buy—support a little university press and buy this bit of magic.

Much Weeping, Many Kinds

Family Meal by Bryan Washington (2023): This book destroyed me and then wove me back together. It hurts. But along with all that hurt is a gorgeous, healing story about friendship and family and people taking care of each other, which is the only thing, maybe, the only important thing.

*And Then He Sang a Lullaby by Ani Kayode (2023): This is a beautiful, devastating book about two gay men in Nigeria who meet and fall in love at university. It’s about how queer people survive after tragedy. It’s about how we go on living in the wake of each other. It’s about the sometimes painful and catastrophic ways that lineages of love, resistance, and liberation are passed from one queer to another, often through death. I wrote an essay about this novel and queer grief (paywalled).

*In Memoriam by Alice Winn (2023): This is a book about empire, and it broke me. This is a book about love, and it stitched me up.

Quietly Perfect

*I Will Greet the Sun Again by Khashayar J. Khabushani (2023): This quiet, beautiful, heartbreaking book is a collection of good scenes, one stacked on top of the next. There’s very little exposition. There’s not even much reflection, despite the first person POV. It’s scene after scene after scene, intimate, visceral, immediate.

When We Were Alone by David A. Robertson & Julie Flett (2016): This is a perfect picture book. I knew it was about residential schools, and because I know how unspeakably horrific those schools were, when I saw the title—When We Were Alone—I associated it with all the atrocities an isolated child could have experienced there: alienation, dehumanization, violence, abuse. What a wonder to discover the true meaning of the title—a celebration of Indigenous resistance.

Boulder by Eva Baltasar, tr. Julia Sanches (2022): What a surreal book. The haunting, impenetrable distance at which the narrator holds herself apart from everyone and everything (including the reader) paired with the intensity of how she thinks about the world—nothing about it feels real. I did not like it. I cannot stop thinking about it.

The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr (2022): Close, intense, terrifying. The writing is unbearably detailed. I could not look away. A triumph of a historical novel.

Queer Humor: Hurts, Shines, Lightens, Teaches

*When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb (2022): What a blessing of a book! Do you need something warm and funny and full of hope? Do you need a book full of witty dialogue that will make you cackle? Do you need something very tender, very sweet, like the first taste of apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah, like the best raisin challah? You’re welcome!

Darryl by Jackie Ess (2021): I read this over the summer and I haven’t written about it anywhere because I don’t know how to. It’s so unsettling and weird and funny, but it’s also one of the most moving books about queer and trans loneliness that I’ve read in a while. It is uniquely absurd and true.

Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, tr. by Tiffany Tsao (2023): These are mostly unhappy stories, and yet I did not find them bleak, there’s even a lightness to some of them. They are mostly about queer people but often told from the POV of others—a university student who struggles to understand what his gay friend is going through; a mother grieving her gay son’s suicide; another mother witnessing the dissolution of her son’s relationship.

*The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (2022): This novel is playful and campy and tender, which is kind of unbelievable because it’s about the Sri Lankan civil war, and the main character is trying to solve his own murder. Karunatilaka doesn’t gloss over or make light of the violence and horror. And, also: it's so funny and gay and whimsical. It made me think about queer resilience and queer joy and all the ways queerness intersects with everything else Maali is, how his queerness makes him so specifically suited to solve his own murder after he dies. I cried a lot. I thought about how the closet is a construct. I didn't follow every twist of the plot and who cares. What a book.

I Fell in Love with Some Women

Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika (2017): What a treat! After a fall, a Nigerian woman in her 70s slowly leans into interdependence among a community of friends, neighbors, strangers, and caretakers in San Francisco. Morayo is so funny! She loves books and has strong options about them! Also about her house, her ex-husband, men, sex, relationships, food.

North Woods Girl by Aimee Bissonette and Claudia McGehee (2015): It’s me in book form. My soul is in this beautiful and prickly ode to the north woods (and winter).

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid (1990): Kincaid’s fiction is incandescent. The way she writes interiority onto the page. The way she writes Black womanhood, the way her characters are unbearably specific, only themselves, so deeply realized I’m sure they are out there in the world. This is a perfect novel.

The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid (1996): Yes. Another Kincaid. Are you ready for Xuela? I’ll be reading Kincaid and her heroines for the rest of my life.

Big Queer Relational Snarls

Mimosa by Archie Bongiovanni (2023): One of the truest and most painfully (and sometimes joyfully!) visceral books I’ve ever read about being queer in your thirties.

Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens (2023): A queer western! With adventure! Betrayal! Heartbreak! Also: the quiet everyday moments that define our lives. It’s deeply rooted in a different time and place, but it’s about enduring human messes: who and how we love, and how the loving changes us.

The Call-Out by Cat Fitzpatrick (2022): A novel in verse about a group of trans women in New York City and all their messy entanglements. It’s so funny and so smart. I will never be done with it.

Complicated Love Notes to Complicated Places

The Philistine by Leila Marshy (2018): This is a beautiful queer coming-into-self book about Nadia, a Palestinian Canadian twenty-something whose world cracks open on a visit to Cairo in the 1980s. Marshy writes brilliantly about context and setting and how much it matters.

The Sea Cloak by Nayrouz Qarmout, tr. by Perween Richards (2019): This is short, sharp, powerful collection of stories by Gazan writer Nayrouz Qarmout. She was born in Damascus, and moved back to Gaza as a child in the 1990s. Many of her characters also move through place and time in complicated ways. Qarmout masterfully uses shifts in time and POV to create a sense of movement. It’s devastating and poignant.

The Dreaming by Andre Bagoo (2022): This is a collection of stories about (mostly) gay men in Trinidad, living their lives. It’s one of my favorite kinds of queer fiction: stories about ordinary life. Queer men navigating relationships, loss, family, jobs. There’s a quiet sureness underpinning the whole book—in the prose, in the specificity of the scenes, in the dialogue.

We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds (2022): A wonderful YA novel about family secrets and legacies, place-based memory, and matrilineal knowledge, silence, and wisdom. Queer, messy, joyful.

Zonia's Rainforest by Juana Martinez-Neal (2021): Zonia is a young Asháninka girl who lives with her mother and baby brother in the Amazon Basin in Peru. Every day, her beloved rain forest calls to her, and she answers. She walks through her home, visiting her friends: giant anteaters, river dolphins, two-toes sloths. This is a simple, straightforward book, but for me it evokes a bedrock truth: all liberation work comes from an ethos of love.

*Ander and Santi Were Here by Jonny Garza Villa (2023): This queer love story/love letter to San Antonio filled me up. It’s heartbreaking, and warm, and full of art. I loved the ending.

This Broken World, At a Slant

Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed (2023): This brilliant book is about ordinary, complicit people wrestling with hard decisions in this broken world of ours. They’re looking for happiness, peace, stability, money, forgiveness, moral certainty. How do you ask for any of that? What happens if you get it? And who does it affect?

Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky (2023): Brilliant and earnest. Funny and dark. It plays with creature horror, it’s devastating at times, and there’s so much smart commentary. The horror is patriarchy, cishet bros, capitalism, transphobia, "nice" guys. So it's a lot. But interspersed with all of that some of the most tender and moving scenes of queer and trans joy I’ve encountered in any book I’ve read this year. The ending is perfect, 100/10, I wept.

*The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia (2022): Oh, this soft little fantasy novella broke me right open. It’s about the ordinary life of a refugee, a person living in a hostile and unfamiliar world, a person who loves their family, who loves their work, who longs for justice, whose back aches, who is pouring themself into a place they want to make into a home.

Intergenerational Salves

My Powerful Hair by Carole Lindstrom and Steph Littlebird (2023): This is an incredible book about a young Native girl who is working on growing her hair long. Every page is stunning.

What Willow Says by Lynn Buckle (2010): This is a quiet love song of a novel, a beautiful meditation on trees and language and open space, bogs and rocks and frogs, bodies and the ways they become words. It’s about a grandmother and her Deaf granddaughter, who live together in a small Irish town, each of them dealing with their own challenges and griefs.

Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine by Hannah Moushabeck and Reem Madooh (2023): In this beautiful story, three sisters listen to their dad’s bedtime stories about their homeland, Palestine, where they have never been. He tells them about visiting with his sido and teta as a child, and about the sights and sounds and scents and tastes of Jerusalem, where their family lived before the Nakba. The story is so warm. The illustrations are vibrant and joyful, full of the thrum of everyday life.

Wow! You made it all the way down here. I’ll be back on Friday with the last newsletter of the year—a little treat. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about the best fiction you read this year!