Arafat, Zaina. You Exist Too Much: A Novel. New York, New York, Catapult, 2021
When a Palestinian American girl finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the United States and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine—Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings—for love and a place to call home.

Binnie, Imogen. Nevada. New York, New York, Topside Press, 2014
Nevada is the darkly comedic story of Maria Griffiths, a young trans woman living in New York City and trying to stay true to her punk values while working retail. When she finds out her girlfriend has lied to her, the world she thought she'd carefully built for herself begins to unravel, and Maria sets out on a journey that will most certainly change her forever.

Darwish, Mahmoud, and Sinan Antoon. In the Presence of Absence. Translation, Brooklyn, New York, Archipelago, 2011
Poet Mahmoud Darwish delivers lyrical meditations on love, longing, Palestine, history, friendship, family, and the ongoing conversation between life and death, the poet bids himself and his readers a poignant farewell. Prose and poetry, life and death, home and exile are all sung by the poet and his other. On the threshold of im/mortality, the poet looks back at his own existence, intertwined with that of his people.

Emezi, Akwaeke. Freshwater. Reprint, New York, New York, Grove Press, 2018
Emezi’s award-winning semi-autobiographical novel is about Ada, who is an ogbanje, a spirit born in a human body is a term in Odinani (Igbo: ọ̀dị̀nànị̀) for what was thought to be an evil spirit that would deliberately plague a family with misfortune. Emezi embraces this “otherness”, neither male nor female, through the ogbanje protagonist of the novel. The poetic account of Ada’s gender transition, through the voices of spirits, offers a new vision of transgender spirituality through an African lens.

Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues: A Novel. 3rd Printing, Alyson Books, 2004
Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 first novel, is widely considered in and outside the U.S. to be a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. Feinberg was the first theorist to advance a Marxist concept of “transgender liberation.” In Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg’s character Jess eventually stops taking hormone replacement therapy after realizing that ze prefers to live as a gender-nonconforming person, even if it means risking violence. Jess then meets and courts a trans woman, who becomes hir partner. Neither of them is legible to the cisgender, straight world around them. Throughout hir life, Feinberg stood at the vanguard of a new movement of transgender political identity and solidarity that was taking shape in the 1990s.

Léger, Tom, and Riley MacLeod. The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (Lambda Literary Award: Transgender). Brooklyn, New York, Topside Press, 2012
Twenty-eight original stories provide differing transgender perspectives by U.S. and Canadian authors.

The collection contains stories about Yankees, Southerners, Midwesterners, and West Coasters; all colors, religions, cultures, ages, and educational levels are represented, with recurring themes of acceptance, assimilation, family ties, and the pursuit of dreams woven in and out of each story. Heroes arise from the least likely of these tales.

Machado, Carmen Maria. In the Dream House: A Memoir. Minneapolis, MN, Graywolf Press, 2020
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

Rosenberg, Jordy. Confessions of the Fox. New York, United States, Penguin Random House, 2019
Confessions of the Fox is a gender-defying exposé of Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess who were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. The true story of their adventures is unknown; their confessions were never found until a 21st-century academic, Dr Voth, discovers a manuscript that claims to be the confessions of Jack Sheppard. Reeling from heartbreak, Dr. Voth is drawn into Jack and Bess’s tale of underworld resistance and gender transformation, it becomes clear that their fates are intertwined—and only a miracle will save them all.

Peters, Torrey. Detransition, Baby: A Novel. New York, New York, Penguin Random House, 2021
Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn’t hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.

Ames isn’t happy either. He thought transitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her.

This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can’t reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.

Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language. New York, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1993
The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman’s heart and mind in language for everybody—language whose plainness, laughter, questions, and nobility everyone can respond to. . .

Selenite, Venus, et al. Nameless Woman: An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018
Nameless Woman, published by the Trans Women Writers Collective, is an expanded edition of An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color, which was originally published in 2016. Nameless Woman features the contributions of eleven more people, including Venus Selenite who served on the leadership team of Trans Women of Color Collective and visual artist Lucia Montero whose practice is based on archival and autobiographical materials.

Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel. First Edition, New York, New York, Penguin Press, 2019
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.