Every week, for the Tuesday edition of Our Queerest Shelves, I put together a list of the most exciting new LGBTQ books coming out that week. Since I started tracking upcoming LGBTQ releases, that list has grown steadily. I follow a ton of different queer book blogs, as well as Bookstagram, BookTok, and BookTube accounts, and make note of any upcoming queer books mentioned there. I also search Amazon for upcoming LGBTQ releases the week before—I have to go through a lot of irrelevant books, but I always find some I didn’t know about before. Even outside of that, I hear about upcoming queer books all the time: from my Book Rioter colleagues, from authors, from Netgalley and Edelweiss lists. And despite the resurgence of book bans and the anti-queer, anti-trans backlash of recent years, we live in the golden age of queer literature: more new LGBTQ books are published every month than ever before.
All of this adds up to a huge spreadsheet with hundreds and hundreds of new queer books in every genre imaginable. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until this year that I thought to keep a copy of the new releases that have already come out. Before that, I would delete them as soon as I had selected the books that would appear in the newsletter that week.
Now that we’re halfway through the year, I thought this would be the perfect time to share, as bonus content for paying subscribers, my list of LGBTQ books released from January to June. Incredibly, more than 600 titles came out in the first half of 2024 alone! This isn’t an exhaustive list; I try to write down all of the biggest traditionally published releases, but there’s always the chance I’ve missed some, especially if queer representation isn’t mentioned in the description. Self-published books are trickier: there are so many coming out every day that it’s impossible to include them all, so I tend to only include the ones where I know the author… or really like the cover. All of this is to say that there were actually well over 600 LGBTQ books released this year, but this is a sampling.
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Let me know in the comments: What is your favorite LGBTQ read of 2024 so far?
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