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Recommendations based on Stone Butch Bluesby Leslie Feinberg
* statistically, based on millions of data-points provided by fellow humans
Written on the Body
by Jeanette Winterson
A genderless narrator recounts their passionate love affairs with a married woman, exploring the complexities of desire and identity.
Written on the Body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I ... (Goodreads)
Bastard Out of Carolina
by Dorothy Allison
A young girl's coming of age amidst poverty, abuse, and a broken family.
The book opens with Bone relating the details of her birth. Bone's 15-year-old mother Anney gives birth to her after being seriously injured in a car accident. Anney, who is comatose during the ... (Wikipedia)
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
A haunting story of loss and resilience in the aftermath of slavery.
Beloved begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio , where the protagonist Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, has been living with her eighteen-year-old daughter Denver at 124 Bluestone Road. The book ... (Wikipedia)
Tipping the Velvet
by Sarah Waters
A coming of age story of a young woman's queer journey through Victorian England.
Nancy "Nan" Astley is a sheltered 18-year-old living with her working-class family and helping in their oyster restaurant in Whitstable, Kent. She becomes instantly and desperately enamoured with a ... (Wikipedia)
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
by Jeanette Winterson
A young girl's journey of self-discovery, navigating the boundaries between religion, sexuality and identity.
Alternate cover edition for 9780802135162 This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a ... (Goodreads)
The Well of Loneliness
by Radclyffe Hall
A novel about a young girl named Stephen who struggles with her sexual identity and societal expectations in early 20th century England.
The book's protagonist, Stephen Gordon, is born in the late Victorian era , to upper-class parents in Worcestershire who are expecting a boy and who christen her with the name they had already ... (Wikipedia)
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
by Alison Bechdel
Collection of comics exploring the lives of queer women in all their complexity.
From the author of Fun Home – the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others For twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes ... (Goodreads)
The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Coming of age story of a young Black girl dealing with prejudice and racism in 1940s Ohio.
In Lorain, Ohio , nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her 10-year-old sister Frieda live with their parents, a tenant named Mr. Henry, and Pecola Breedlove, a temporary foster child whose house was ... (Wikipedia)
Jitterbug Perfume
by Tom Robbins
A journey through time and space, exploring the mysteries of life, death, and the pursuit of immortality.
A powerful and chiseled 8th-century king named Alobar narrowly escapes regicide at the hands of his own subjects, from a custom of killing the leader at the first sign of aging. After fleeing, no ... (Wikipedia)
Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
A man's struggle for identity and acceptance amidst a tumultuous romantic relationship.
David, a young American man whose girlfriend has gone off to Spain to contemplate marriage, is left alone in Paris and begins an affair with an Italian man, Giovanni. The entire story is narrated by ... (Wikipedia)
Push
by Sapphire
A harrowing tale of a young girl's journey through poverty, abuse, and illiteracy in Harlem.
Claireece Precious Jones is an obese, illiterate 16-year-old girl who lives in Harlem with her abusive mother Mary. Precious is a few months pregnant with her second child, the product of her father ... (Wikipedia)
The Passion
by Jeanette Winterson
A story of love, loss, and enduring passion between two people across time and space.
Jeanette Winterson’s novels have established her as one of the most important young writers in world literature. The Passion is perhaps her most highly acclaimed work, a modern classic that confirms ... (Goodreads)
Preludes & Nocturnes
by Neil Gaiman
A dark fantasy adventure, exploring a world of dreams, magic, and mystery.
In 1916, the magician Roderick Burgess attempts to attain immortality by capturing the embodiment of Death . Mistakenly, he binds Death's brother Dream instead. Fearing retribution, Burgess keeps ... (Wikipedia)
The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
A diplomat's mission to a distant planet, exploring themes of gender and identity.
The protagonist of the novel is Genly Ai, a male Terran native, who is sent to invite the planet Gethen to join the Ekumen, a coalition of humanoid worlds. , Ai travels to the Gethen planetary system ... (Wikipedia)
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler
A post-apocalyptic story of survival, hope, and the power of community.
This highly acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from award-winning author Octavia E. Butler "pairs well with, 1984, or, The Handmaid's Tale," (John Green,, New York Times,)–now with a ... (Barnes & Noble)
The Price of Salt
by Patricia Highsmith
Two women build a relationship against all odds, navigating a taboo romance.
Therese Belivet is a lonely young woman, just beginning her adult life in Manhattan and looking for her chance to launch her career as a theatre set designer . When she was a small girl, her widowed ... (Wikipedia)
Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
A young Native American man's healing journey, reclaiming cultural roots and identity.
Ceremony follows a half- Pueblo , half-white man named Tayo after his return from World War II . His white doctors say he is suffering from "battle fatigue," which would be called post-traumatic ... (Wikipedia)
Blankets
by Craig Thompson
A young man's journey of faith, love, and growing up in a rural Wisconsin town.
Wrapped in the landscape of a blustery Wisconsin winter, Blankets explores the sibling rivalry of two brothers growing up in the isolated country, and the budding romance of two coming-of-age lovers. ... (Goodreads)
The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
A moving story of two siblings growing up in India, exploring love, politics, and class.
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car ... (Goodreads)
The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros
A young girl navigates life in a poor Latino neighborhood, dreaming of a better future and finding her voice through writing.
The bestselling coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world from the winner of the 2018 ... (Barnes & Noble)
The Doll's House
by Neil Gaiman
A dark fantasy exploring the cruelty and power of fairy tales, and the consequences of secrets.
As part of a manhood ritual, an old man in the desert tells a younger man an ancient story, detailing the tragic love between Dream and Queen Nada. Fearing the consequences of loving an immortal, ... (Wikipedia)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz
An exploration of love, identity, and the power of fate in a family's struggles and triumphs.
Oscar de León (nicknamed Oscar Wao, a bastardization of Oscar Wilde ) is an overweight Dominican growing up in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar desperately wants to be successful with women but, from a ... (Wikipedia)
My Ántonia
by Willa Cather
A young man's reminiscences of his childhood in rural Nebraska, and of his friendships with the immigrants he met there.
Orphaned Jim Burden rides the trains from Virginia to Black Hawk, Nebraska, where he will live with his paternal grandparents. Jake, a farmhand from Virginia, rides with the 10-year-old boy. On the ... (Wikipedia)
The Bone People
by Keri Hulme
A story of three damaged individuals who come together in a remote coastal community in New Zealand, and their journey towards healing and redemption.
The Bone People is an unusual story of love. What makes it unique are the way of telling, the subject matter, and the form of love that the story narrates. This is not a romance, but a story filled ... (Wikipedia)
Annie on My Mind
by Nancy Garden
A tender story of two teenage girls falling in love and finding their place in the world.
Liza Winthrop first meets Annie Kenyon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a rainy day. The two become fast friends, although they come from different backgrounds and have differing levels of ... (Wikipedia)
No One Belongs Here More Than You
by Miranda July
Short stories of everyday people struggling to find their place in the world.
Screenwriter, director, and star of the acclaimed film Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection. ... (Goodreads)
Autobiography of Red
by Anne Carson
A modern retelling of Greek myth, exploring the intersections of love, art, and identity.
The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red , a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a ... (Goodreads)
Rubyfruit Jungle
by Rita Mae Brown
A coming-of-age story of a young girl's journey of self-acceptance and finding her place in the world.
The novel focuses on Molly Bolt, the adopted daughter of a poor family, who possesses remarkable beauty and who is aware of her lesbianism from early childhood. Her relationship with her mother is ... (Wikipedia)
Sula
by Toni Morrison
Story of two childhood friends, exploring social and racial issues in a small Ohio town.
The novel begins when the construction of a golf course is announced, the site being the destroyed remnants of what used to be the Bottom. The Bottom is a black neighborhood on the hill above the ... (Wikipedia)
Geek Love
by Katherine Dunn
A family of self-made circus freaks navigates love, loyalty, and morality in a world that shuns them for their differences.
The novel takes place in two interwoven , time periods: the first deals with the Binewski children's constant struggle against each other through life. They especially have to deal with the ... (Wikipedia)
