Our Most Anticipated Queer Books for July 2026

Pride may be over, but y’all know the drill: Autostraddle celebrates LGBTQ+ booksall year long. And we want to keep doing that! Autostraddle x For Them memberships and subscriptions to our print magazine help us do the hard work of putting together these massive preview lists each month and also covering books on a deeper level through reviews and interviews. Love the work we’re doing? Let us know! Read our print magazine, where we’ve been featuring the work of some of the brilliant queer and trans authors who write the books we champion on these lists! Tell us about the books we may have missed! And now, here are our top picks for the month, followed by more anticipated reads to fill up your gay shelves with all July long. If something looks good but isn’t quite out yet, preorder!!! It’s so helpful for authors!

This poetry collection reveals the political and radical positioning of party spaces, challenging preconceived notions of nightlife and social gatherings. It is about queer and trans revolution making through parties, the lives of Black people in the U.S. and Cuba, and familial and geopolitical tensions that seep into everyday life. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Read more queer poetry!

Thanks to this upcoming short fiction collection from the author of the wonderful queer novels A Sharp Endless Need and I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, I keep wanting to call July: Perverts Month. June is for Pride and July is for Perverts. Crane’s tales present desire, strange, and all the strange contours of queer life, especially the parts deemed deviant—or yes, perverted—by mainstream society. Stay tuned for a more in-depth review.

We’re big fans of Fatimah Asghar here, and their latest is a poetry collection about a daughter’s love, loss, and longing in the wake of exile from ancestral homeland and estrangement from kin. Asghar’s beautiful language and expansive capacity for faith, compassion, and the concept of home are delivered through gorgeous poems. It’s likely your favorite queer poet’s favorite queer poetry collection coming out this year.

Black lesbian literature and film are at the center of this academic release, which argues “that Black lesbian cultural texts reflect creators’ lived experiences and resist the heteropatriarchal systems that deny Black lesbians visibility in popular culture.” The book creates space for Black lesbians within queer literary and film histories.

We’re BIG big fans of Priya Guns here. The capitalist hellscape of her first novel Your Driver Is Waiting is similarly evoked here through the story of a family of Tamil refugees fleeing the Sri Lankan civil war, set in Toronto during the dot com boom. Born-again Christian Mark promises to have the answers to the family’s financial woes in the form of e-trading investments. Expect punched-up humor, satire, and sharp commentary on what it takes to survive under capitalism.

Humor threads throughout the strange and delightful stories —11 in total — which include one where Ronald Reagan is reincarnated as a young girl’s new puppy. Doyle writes freaky, funny, poignant queer short fiction, and I’m so thrilled about this debut collection.

Autostraddle contribute M.K. Thekkumkattil pens this essay collection on ICU nursing, kink practices, and what we can learn from both in our pursuit of bodily autonomy and liberation. What might a future without hospitals and the medical industrial complex look like? And how can we really care for one another in a meaningful and sustainable way?

This anthology unites 21 essays that aim to understand the future of housing in America through stories of chosen family, hacking adulthood, and other lessons of communal living. It’s got an absolute banger lineup for Autostraddle fans — authors include Kristen Arnett, Sarah Thankam Mathews and Gabrielle Korn.

Based on its description, I’m pretty sure this novel falls into one of my favorite niche genres: queer art about toxic mentorship. An on-the-rise filmmaker named Ruby is welcomed into the idyllic home of her idol, the iconoclastic feminist director Ellen. Tensions and conflict ensue, flames fanned by Ellen’s mercurial daughter Lara. The novel is set during a summer heatwave.

And now enjoy the rest of the books we’re looking forward to this month!

Two ex-besties once bonded over a San Francisco treasure hunt and a shared, secret resistance to heteronormatively. Now juniors —out as a gay woman and as a trans man —they’re thrust back together as adversaries, with a chance to uncover the city’s queer past, and their own.

The ever-prolific Chuck Tingle is back with a supernatural novel that promises a mix of Drive and Beetlejuice.

A sweet summer sapphic rom-com about a girl perpetually unlucky in love and determined to reinvent herself at a new prestigious summer camp who finds her resolve against romance immediately tested by her icy, gorgeous camp roommate.

Marchbank’s author-illustrator debut is a colorful medieval romp about a plucky, tiny, untrainable knight who dreams of greatness and the icy, reluctant Best Knight Around forced to take her on as a squire.

A cozy sci-fi romance about a captain fleeing towards freedom on an abandoned moss-covered alien starship that comes with unexpected baggage: a snarky organic computer with serious abandonment issues and the immortal alien who built it.

This lyrical YA novel follows a teenager reeling from her sister’s sudden death who travels to New York, determined to understand the secret life revealed in her sister’s letters — and her own desires, sexuality, and ability to find true love for herself.

A 16-year-old comes back from juvenile detention to a new life — new stepfather, big new house, fancy new school, new besties, and maybe even a new crush. But her mother’s insistence that she keep her “bad girl” past a secret is threatened when someone from the center reaches out to reconnect.

A feminist gothic horror that finds four women — Mafalda, her secret love Lucy, Lucy’s chaperone and her cursed lady’s maid —seeking the healing waters of Transylvania, summoned to Castle Dracula. Three will become his brides, but the fourth will manage to escape

In this sapphic fantasy inspired by Korean mythology, a young woman awakens from a thousand-year sleep to heal her fractured nation and her own lost memories — and unfortunately falls for the sister of the saint she killed in a previous life.

QUEER VAMPIRE LITERARY FICTION ALERT! Queer vampire literary fiction set in Paris, 1869 alert!!!! Surely from those words alone you know if this book is for you, but I have it on good authority that this is a very good read even for those less versed in vampire literature. Perhaps it will, fittingly, turn you.

The final installment of Oseman’s classic, beloved, Netflix-adapted graphic novel finds Nick and Charlie on the precipice of change as college looms on the horizon.

Sol saved Iris, taking her in to a Kentucky mountain cabin with four other lost girls, keeping them safe from their mysterious paths in exchange for their unending loyalty. Then new girl “Rose” arrives, and Iris is rocked by her feelings for Rose, and the questions Rose starts asking about the man Iris has been so devoted to.

Utilizing history and theory, Cisgender “is the first book to trace the story of how cis entered contemporary gender lexicons.” To better understand trans life and trans identity, Zurn sorts through the origins of “cis” as a category and concept, complicating the term along the way.

This is a new translation/re-release of Colette’s seminal text from 1932, which weaves together conversations on gender, sex, desire, and attraction.

Set in Sydney across 18 years, this novel centers the “gorgeously messy friendship-feud-unrequited-love-affair” between Nell Argall and Eve Bowman, who meet at a posh all-girls school and become forever enmeshed in each other’s lives.

This work of cli-fi reimagines a Portuguese folktale as the story of a young trans woman who has to save her elder sisters.

The “high-octane sequel” finds girlfriends Tru and Lila juggling their careers, their new relationship, their dream of going on one normal date —and Lila considering breaking the rules for once after a stranger from a lawless rival agency makes her a tempting offer.

A portrait of gay life in India, this novel follows Rohit, who teaches at Delhi University and becomes entangled in a mess of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv, who he uses literature student Sayan to get over.

A lighthouse keeper makes a devil’s bargain to save her sister in this sapphic gothic horror on the harbor.

A horror story set in Vegas and the Mojave Desert, The Flayed Man follows Ellis, who works in an ER and cares for her mother who has dementia. A slight twist on the typical complicated family narrative: Ellis’s family has to feed daily on blood or otherwise will become “mindless, skinless killing machines.”

A young girl in North Carolina is kidnapped by a racist cult dabbling in the occult following the death of her sister in a tragic car accident.

This gothic Appalachian horror story is set in the small coal camp of Jubilee, West Virginia, where Phinnie “Skinny” Caldwell is haunted by nightmares of the last time she saw her mother alive. Thirteen years later, she tries to learn what really happened to her mother. Monsters emerge.

Set months after the 2008 financial crisis and its burst housing bubble, The New People finds a newly married lesbian couple moving from Chicago into a charming home in a conservative Indiana college town, hoping for a fresh start but plagued by secrets and, eventually, by the realization that the property’s former homeowners are secretly living in the attic.

What a great month it is for queer short fiction! This collection includes several standalone sapphic horror stories, a pick-your-own-adventure novelette, and a quadrilogy of connected stories.

1970s poet icon Bambi Lake’s work —much of it out of print —has been collected and reprinted here, with a foreword by Brontez Purnell.

From early lesbian radio history to contemporary queer feminist podcasting, Copeland explores the politics, aesthetics, and cultural activism behind the soundwork, united by the idea that “sound is not just heard but felt, connecting generations through shared voices and struggles.”

Nola Young and Brittney Lee are rivals on the basketball court…until they suddenly find themselves on the same team.

The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of (sapphic classic) The Hours and A Home at the End of the World builds a narrative about his own life, memories pieced together to explain his precise, dazzling approach to craft.

These stories about queer life are set in Nigeria. The ten stories explore the “complexities of identity, community and social justice.”

This poetry collection “celebrates the joys and the griefs of a life of loving wine, women, and song.”

Prom queen candidates start getting picked off one by one in this thriller about a queer Black teen at a predominantly white high school.

In a luxury fallout shelter created during the Cold War to serve the billionaires of the future, six lab-created women have spent their entire existences waiting for the Lord-anointed apocalypse refugees they’ve been programmed to serve. Now they’re here, and while Hallelujah’s devoted to providing them with concierge hospitality and comfort, her lover Anastasia isn’t quite so inclined and across the compound, violent fantasies and dreams of rebellion lurk behind the women’s subservient smiles.

This Southwest Asian-inspired epic fantasy is the sequel to The Gryphon King.

The four-person crew of a popular ghost hunting show, including secret girlfriends Georgia and Jules, broke into a haunted house to steal a priceless painting, but only three emerged alive. Months later, they’re forced to return to the scene to finish the heist, but something within those walls won’t leave them alone.

Not quite memoir, not quite self help, All My Dead Cats is more of a hybrid work of nonfiction aimed at grief, loss, and death. Interviews with death doulas, funeral home directors, therapists, psychologists, and more experts explore the various stages of grief.

Aubrey is quite literally cursed when it comes to her love life, a spell gone wrong leading all romantic situations to end awkwardly. She teams up with data analyst Lex to try to hack the hex, collecting data about dates to figure out who she needs to be with in order to break the curse.