Pride Bundle: 7 LGBTQ+ Books and a Tote

They, by Kay Dick

A rediscovered, dystopian classic about a mass movement to quash individuality and art—“queer, English, a masterpiece.” (Hilton Als)

“A creepily prescient tale in which anonymous mobs target artists and destroy their art for the crime of individual vision. Insidiously horrifying!”

—Margaret Atwood

Winter Love, by Han Suyin

The stirring account of a life-altering affair in wartime London—“Han Suyin’s outstanding achievement . . . her finest novel.” (Alison Hennegan)

“[A] silvery, suggestive novella of love and friendship . . . [A] cinematic book, full of unkempt gardens and smoky cafes . . . Read if you like: Sally Rooney, E.M. Forster, the Todd Haynes film Carol.”

—Molly Young, The New York Times

Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, by Manuel Puig

Manuel Puig's “dazzling and wholly original debut” (New York Times Book Review) is a startling anatomy of a small town in thrall to its own petty lusts, betrayals, scandals, thefts, and gossip—but most of all, to the movies.

“Puig’s novels are deliberately playful and provocatively effeminate. They often ride the line between satire and sincerity, producing a result that is somehow both sincerely felt and heavily ironized . . . While Puig’s novels are entertaining—often riotously so—his formal techniques aren’t mere games, and his experimentations with dialogue still seem radical and groundbreaking decades after his death.”

—Isaac Butler, The New Yorker

The Goodby People, by Gavin Lambert

Perhaps the greatest novel ever written about post-Manson, pre-Disney Los Angeles. “His elegant, stripped-down prose caught the last gasp of Old Hollywood in a way that has yet to be rivaled.” (Armistead Maupin)

“Alive with a heightened sensitivity to scarcely articulable aspirations of the time . . . and the exhilarating, terrifying, beautiful, and pitiable weirdness of human life when it’s let off its leash. Like Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and the Bud Wiggins novels of Bruce Wagner, The Goodby People is irradiated by the inherently metaphorical properties of Los Angeles.”

—Deborah Eisenberg, New York Review of Books

Rent Boy, by Gary Indiana

A noir tour-de-force set in a world of hustlers by “a shark in US literature’s calm waters” (The Guardian).

“A relentless stream of social commentary, careening between sex, comedy, and murder, Rent Boy is a hysterical romp through the worlds of contemporary culture and crime.”

—Fantastic Fiction

A Green Equinox, by Elizabeth Mavor

The beguiling tale of a brilliant young woman who falls in love first with her lover’s wife, and then with his mother.

“A Green Equinox is a book of astounding precocity in content, imagery, character and style . . . a masterly study of pretension, hypocrisy, and the immeasurable folly of refinement.” 

—Stuart Evans, Times Literary Supplement

The Girls, by John Bowen

A wry, macabre tale of simple country living, brutal murder, and a reasonably happy couple, from our “most startlingly offbeat suspense novelist” (Gore Vidal). 

“Absolutely wicked.” 

—Armistead Maupin