The discourse around American Dirt, finding gay hope in The Bluest Eye, what it’d be like if books had smells and more.

2020 was terrible in every way except for queer books. There were so many amazing queer books published this year! Here are 67 of the best of them.

Conflict is meant to happen. Relationships are strengthened by conflict. What are our capacities to engage with conflict in a way that doesn’t destroy us, but help us better understand each other?

Trying desperately to want less than what one truly requires — and the goodness that comes from giving up that ghost — is a prominent theme in “Something That May Shock and Discredit You,” Daniel Lavery’s new collection of essays, out Feb. 11.

“Transformative justice”—the idea that communities can resolve and repair harm and abuse, as well as transform the conditions that led to them, on their own without the necessity of State intervention or by replicating the State’s carceral form of justice—looks good on paper, but there are still so many big questions.

Maybe that’s why black women love Toni Morrison. She laid bare the kind of secrets that we barely even whispered to each other, the shames that we buried underneath our quick tongues and sisterhood hugs and fashion slays. She wrote for us, and for that she is ours.

Topics include picking/pulling/not coming, the gay neighborhood of Montrose, the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, non-profits, gay men walking fast, Bennington in the ’80s, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” abortion and Grease.

It’s June, it’s June, we’re living, it’s June. Do you feel our powers rising with the heat, our stares lengthening with the daylight, our desires coming on like freak lightening?

Writing and money, machines learning from our texts (and replicating our power structures), whether books are clutter and more.

Pleasure Activism offers up a multitude of tactics for which to embody pleasure, claim it as a central and essential liberatory practice, and a sustainable one for the long-term road trip of justice work.

You’d be surprised the kind of memories that can be sparked by a simple phrase or even by the look and feel of a book.

If I could have willed a book into existence, that book would be Stray City — so I talked to Chelsey Johnson about her debut novel and what it’s like to render queer community so intimately for the public.

Topics include The National Enquirer, Anne Frank, Larry Nasser and USA gymnastics, how to save a life, our lives on a mattress, food writing, ballet, teen tv dramas and The Oregon Trail.

“I was going to do a story about trans women arming themselves? And all the edits we got back were like, ‘Can your characters look directly at the reader and quote trans murder statistics from last year?'”

A true map, it never says: this is the way to go, what to do. Instead, Piepzna-Samarasinha tells us what has worked for some people at some times, what could be done better, and also what went super wrong.

Drive Here and Devastate Me, queer femme author Megan Falley’s fourth collection of poetry, is a love letter to the queer community. We talked with Megan about her writing process, femme invisibility, body politics, and of course, love.

Topics include weight loss surgery, murder, writer’s block, algorithms for style, David Foster Wallace, The Grenfell Tower fire, how bad Troy sucks in “Reality Bites,” deaf culture and so much more!

Here, thought you might need this.

In an unsafe world, we have to make our own survival packs. Carry the words of these 100 fierce poets in yours.

Topics include Tiffany Haddish, Lena Waithe, swear words in poetry, pain patients suffering due to crackdowns against opioid addicts, Disney/MGM Studios Backlot Tour, Cambridge Analytica, Hollywood child molesters, why the subway is late and so much more!