Pride Month Recommendations

Cantoras     In defiance of the brutal military government that took power in Uruguay in the 1970s, and under which homosexuality is a dangerous transgression, five women miraculously find one another--and, together, an isolated cape that they claim as their own.

Arribada     Arribada is the story of a well-to-do woman pushed to confront her role in environmental and social injustice. It is the saga of a family faced with the realization that their comfortable position rests, beyond a strong work ethic, on crimes against what they hold dearest: the natural world, their town, and their loved ones.

High Risk Homosexual     This witty memoir traces a touching and often hilarious spiralic path to embracing a gay, Latinx identity against a culture of machismo--from a cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to cities across the U.S.--and the bath houses, night clubs, and drag queens who help redefine pride

I'm Not Hungry But I Can Eat     Long nights, empty stomachs, and impulsive cravings haunt the stories of I'm Not Hungry But I Could Eat. 

Chulito     Set against a vibrant South Bronx neighborhood and the queer youth culture of Manhattan's piers, Chulito is a coming-of-age, coming out love story of a sexy, tough, hip hop-loving, young Latino man and the colorful characters who populate his block.

Kiss of the Spider Woman     In an Argentine prison, two men share a cell: Molina, a gay window dresser who is self-centered, self-denigrating, yet charming as well; and Valentin, an articulate, fiercely dogmatic revolutionary haunted by memories of a woman he left for the cause. Both are gradually transformed by their guarded but growing friendship and by Molina's obsession with the fantasy and romance of the movies.

When I Was Puerto Rican     In a childhood full of tropical beauty and domestic strife, poverty and tenderness, Esmeralda Santiago learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs, the taste of morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. But when her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually a new identity.

The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School     A sharply funny and moving debut novel about a queer Mexican American girl navigating Catholic school, while falling in love and learning to celebrate her true self.

So Far From God     Tome is a small, outwardly sleepy hamlet in central New Mexico. In Ana Castillo's hands, though, it stands wondrously revealed as a place of marvels, teeming with life and with all manner of collisions: the past with the present, the real with the supernatural, the comic with the horrific, the Native American with the Hispano with the Anglo, the women with the men. 

In the Dream House     Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

Yerba Buena     At once exquisite and expansive, astonishing in its humanity and heart, Yerba Buena is a love story for our time and a propulsive journey through the lives of two women trying to find somewhere, or someone, to call home.

Postcolonial Love Poem     An anthem of desire against erasure, Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages--bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers--be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: "Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden." In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Gordo      Shedding profound natural light on the inner lives of migrant workers, Jaime Cortez's debut collection ushers in a new era of American literature that gives voice to a marginalized generation of migrant workers in the West.