Read With Pride: Twelve Books to Celebrate Pride Month
Happy Pride to all!🌈
In honour of Pride Month, we have assembled a reading list featuring inspiring books by LGBTQIA2S+ authors. While this list is by no means exhaustive, here are twelve essential reads, ranging from literary fiction to memoir and lyrical essays to poetry, to add to your TBR pile during Pride Month and beyond.
But first, we’re also hosting a we’re holding a 20% off sale across our online shop.
Save 20% off all available titles* from June 18 to 30, 2024. Simply use discount code PRIDE24 at checkout to redeem the 20% discount!
*Excludes forthcoming releases and already discounted subscription packages.
Read with Pride this month and always.
Without further ado, here is our Pride Month reading list:
Disobedience by Daniel Sarah Karasik
This remarkable work of queer and trans speculative fiction imagines how alternative forms of connection and power can refuse the violent institutions that engulf us. Shael lives in a vast prison camp, a monstrosity developed after centuries of warfare and environmental catastrophe. As a young transfeminine person, they risk abject violence if their identity and love affair with Coe, an insurrectionary activist, are discovered. But desire and rebellion flare, and soon Shael escapes to Riverwish, a settlement attempting to forge a new way of living that counters the camp’s repression.
Suture by Nic Brewer
Suture is a highly original meditation on the fractures within us, and the importance of empathy as medicine and glue. Brewer shares three interweaving stories of artists tearing themselves open to make art. Each artist baffles their family, or harms their loved ones, with their necessary sacrifices. Eva’s wife worries about her mental health; Finn’s teenager follows in her footsteps, using forearm bones for drumsticks; Grace’s network constantly worries about the prolific writer’s penchant for self-harm, and the over-use of her vitals for art. The result is a hyper-real exploration of the cruelties we commit and forgive in ourselves and others.
Polar Vortex by Shani Mootoo
Are we ever free from our pasts? Can we ever truly know the people we are closest to? Seductive and tension-filled, Polar Vortex is a story of secrets, deceptions, and revenge. Priya and Alexandra have moved from the city to a picturesque countryside town. What Alex doesn’t know is that, in moving, Priya is running from her past—from a fraught relationship with an old friend, Prakash, who pursued her for many years, both online and off. Time has passed, however, and Priya, confident that her ties to Prakash have been successfully severed, decides it’s once more safe to establish an online presence. In no time, Prakash finds Priya and contacts her. Impulsively, inexplicably, Priya invites him to visit her and Alex in the country, without ever having come clean with Alex about their relationship—or its tumultuous end. Prakash’s reentry into Priya’s life reveals cracks in her and Alex’s relationship and brings into question Priya’s true intentions.
The Videofag Book, edited by William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill
In October 2012, Ellis and Tannahill moved into a former barbershop in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood and turned it into an art space called Videofag. Over the next four years, Videofag became a hub for counterculture in the city, playing host to a litany of performances, screenings, parties, exhibitions, and all manner of queer fuckery. But hosting a city in their house took its toll and eventually William and Jordan broke up, closing the space for good in June 2016. The Videofag Book is a chronicle of those four years told through multiple voices and mediums.
We All Need To Eat by Alex Leslie
We All Need to Eat is a collection of linked stories from award-winning author Alex Leslie that revolves around Soma, a young Queer woman in Vancouver. Through thoughtful and probing narratives, each story chronicles a sea change in Soma’s life. Lyrical, gritty, and atmospheric, Soma’s stories refuse to shy away from the contradictions inherent to human experience, exploring one young person’s journey through mourning, escapism, and the search for nourishment.
Learned by Carellin Brooks
Set in the 90s, alternating between the storied quads of Oxford University and the dank recesses of London pubs given over to public displays of queer BDSM, Learned chronicles poet and Rhodes Scholar Carellin Brooks’ extreme explorations of mind and body. In these poems, the speaker trembles on the verge of discovery, pushing her physical limits through practices of pain, permission, and pleasure. But her inability to negotiate the unspoken elite codes of Oxford begs the question: how to unlearn a legacy of family dissolution and abuse? Bold, nuanced, and ultimately triumphant, Learned chronicles an intimate education in flesh, desire, and bodily memory.
Crying Wolf by Eden Boudreau
After a violent sexual assault, Eden Boudreau was faced with a choice: call the police and explain that a man who wasn’t her husband, who she had agreed to go on a date with, had just raped her. Or go home and pray that, in the morning, it would be only a nightmare. In the years that followed, Eden was met with disbelief by strangers, friends, and the authorities, often as a result of stigma towards her non-monogamy, sex positivity, and bisexuality. Societal conditioning of acceptable female sexuality silenced her to a point of despair, leading to addiction and even attempted suicide. It was through the act of writing that she began to heal.
Dream Rooms by River Halen
Part essay, part poem, part fever dream journal entry, Dream Rooms is a book about personal revolution, about unravelling a worldview to make space for different selves and realities. Set in the years that led up to author River Halen coming out as trans, this collection concerns itself with what sits on the surface of daily life, hidden in plain view, hungry for address. Deeply queer and trans not only in its content but in its thinking, Dream Rooms invites readers to that place in consciousness where fear and desire, hidden information and common knowledge brush up against each other and are mutually transformed.
Queers Like Me by Michael V. Smith
Confessional and immersive, Smith’s latest collection is a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life. In these poems, we are immersed in the world of a young Smith as he shares the awkward dinners, the funerals, and the uncertainty of navigating fraught dynamics, bringing us into these most intimate moments of family life while outrunning deep grief. Smith moves from first home to first queer experiences: teenage crushes, video cameras, post-club hookups, fears and terrors, closeted lovers, and daydreams of confronting your childhood bully.
War/ Torn by Hasan Namir
War / Torn is a brazen and lyrical interrogation of religion and masculinity—the performance and sense of belonging they delineate and draw together. In these poems, Namir summons prayer, violence, and the sensuality of love, revisiting tenets of Islam and dictates of war to break the barriers between the profane and the sacred.
How You Were Born by Kate Cayley
The stories in Cayley’s award-winning collection, How You Were Born, each more incisive and devastating than the last, examine the difficult business of love, loyalty, and memory. Sharing the bizarre and tragi-comic of life—whether in present-day Toronto or in small towns of the early 20th century—Cayley champions the importance of connections, even when missed or mislaid, and the possibility of redemption.
Just Pervs by Jess Taylor
In Just Pervs, Jess Taylor’s Lambda Literary Award-nominated story collection, contemporary views of female sexuality are subverted, and women are given agency over their desires. In these stories, sex is revealed to be many things at once: gross, shameful, exhilarating, hidden or open—and always complicated.
Don’t forget that all of these books are 20% off as part of our Pride Month Sale!
