If anything good came out of 2020, it’s the diverse array of queer and trans books published this year. With such a rich literary landscape to choose from, we felt compelled to narrow the criteria to represent what we craved most from our reading this year. Across genres and themes, all five titles will no doubt leave their mark on the queer literary canon.
Most urgent debut novel
Real Life, Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor’s poignant and semi-autobiographical debut novel Real Life was born partly out of a desire to tell stories that make visible the experiences and realities of queer Black students on college campus, and in the process offer a nuanced look at race in academia. The novel follows Wallace, an introverted queer Black biochemistry student from Alabama, as he finds his way and attempts to carve out space among his peers in a predominately white PhD program. Taylor, who was raised in Alabama and studied biochemistry before turning to writing (he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop), incisively renders the experience of not fitting in and feeling like an outsider, even in those progressive and presumably-accepting spaces where we feel we’re supposed to belong.
Most intersectional memoir
Fairest, by Meredith Talusan
In her memoir Fairest, Meredith Talusan describes her encounter with a cis man after transitioning and arriving in the U.S. from the Philippines: “Barrett’s words kept playing in my head, ‘I don’t see you as trans,’ coupled with ‘I can’t tell you’re Asian.’ The way he looked at me was exactly what I’d honed over many years, this trick of perception, and it puzzled me that I was dissatisfied over having accomplished it, a state of being so many trans women sacrifice so much to achieve.” In richly layered writing, Talusan, a contributing editor of them., explores her identity as a trans Filipino-American with albinism by crafting a gripping account of a childhood spent revered as a golden white boy in the Philippines, where whiteness is revered due to the country’s colonial legacy. Upon arriving in the U.S. as an adult, she is met with discrimination as a trans woman of colour. She captures the feeling of being seen as neither white enough nor feminine enough. The memoir effectively guides its readers through the intersections between race, gender and sexuality from the unique vantage point of a white person of colour.
Most transportative novel
The Thirty Names of Night, Zeyn Joukhadar
The novel’s unnamed protagonist, who eventually gives himself the name Nadir, is a trans Syrian American artist navigating how to live in his body. Nadir’s story is interwoven with that of another artist, Laila Z, a Syrian immigrant from half a century earlier. It’s not every day we see trans characters and refugees appear together in one story, and Joukhadar, a trans writer and the author of The Map of Salt and Stars, does a beautiful job of allowing these two identities to exist side by side on the page. Through these woven narratives, The Thirty Names of Night explores the weight of history and lineage, and how we carry and manifest them.
Most introspective essay collection
Tomboyland, Melissa Faliveno
In her deeply personal debut essay collection, Melissa Faliveno explores the in-between spaces that she inhabits, along with the experience of being misgendered and misunderstood. “Uncertainty is hardly unique among those of us born into female bodies,” she writes, “but as my own body moves through the world, it is marked by one common question: What are you? And the honest answer is—I don’t really know.” Faliveno, who is the former senior editor at Poets & Writers and the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC Chapel Hill, weaves together personal essay and reportage to explore her Midwestern background (and the misperceptions and assumptions toward Midwesterners that she’s encountered over a decade of living in New York City), gender identity, femininity and class dynamics, along with the intersections between anger, rage, gender and violence. The resulting work is a deep investigation of self and the places and experiences that shape us.
Best love and sex scenes
Cleanness, Garth Greenwell
In this breathtaking collection of nine linked stories set in Sofia, Bulgaria, Garth Greenwell—an alumnus of and professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a 2020 Guggenheim fellow—explores the search for love through romantic and sexual encounters, along with self-abnegation and the line between sexual pleasure and danger. The sex scenes interspersed throughout are transportative and varied, but never vulgar. In the novel’s middle section, “Loving R,” Greenwell gorgeously renders a relationship between the narrator—a young American teacher—and R, a Portuguese student. The fleeting moments the two spend together are joyous and love-filled, and subvert the trope of queer narratives ending in tragedy.
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