Happy Pride Month! Celebrate Pride with these short story collections that show some of the many dimensions of LGBTQ life. Join the Library in celebrating Pride Month throughout June with book recommendations, free online events, resources, and more.

I Know You Know Who I Am by Peter Kispert

In the linked and tightly thematic stories of I Know You Know Who I Am, Kispert explores deception, performance, and the uneasiness of reconciling a queer identity with the wider world, with characters who try to navigate that dissonance by acting like another person for someone else. Throughout the collection we meet gay characters who have created sometimes elaborate falsehoods and who now must cope with the way that those deceptions eat at the very fabric of their lives and relationships. 

 

 

The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostund

In Lori Ostlund's award-winning debut collection, people seeking escape from situations at home venture out into a world that they find is just as complicated and troubled as the one they left behind. In prose highlighted by both satire and poignant observation, The Bigness of the World contains characters that represent a different sort of everyman; men and women who poke fun at ideological rigidity while holding fast to good grammar and manners, people seeking connections in a world that seems increasingly foreign. 

 

 

We Had No Rules by Corinne Manning

A defiant, beautifully realized story collection about the messy complications of contemporary queer life. Spanning the years 1992 to 2019, and moving from New York to North Carolina to Seattle, the eleven first-person stories in We Had No Rules feature characters who feel the promise of a radically reimagined world but face complicity instead.

 

 

Stella Maris & Other Key West Stories by Michael Carroll

When Cuban fishermen first spotted the Key West lighthouse floating in Florida waters, they called her Stella Maris, Star of the Sea. It’s a beacon that draws people from everywhere seeking the end-of-the-line bohemian oasis that can still be found amidst the condo share towers, chain stores, and Redneck Riviera clientele. And it’s a mecca for gay men and the women who love them. Stella Maris is about the verities of illness and death. The past and its prisoners, AIDS, the young and not so young man’s realization of his own mortality. It’s about the unpredictable nature of life, and of survival. It’s about new beginnings and final recognitions.

 

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies .Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

 

 

 

100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell

Transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure—from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama—Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it—or perhaps because of it—they shine.

 

 

 

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Have trouble reading standard print? Many of these titles are available in formats for patrons with print disabilities.

Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.