Books to Celebrate in December 2025 https://ift.tt/houicXC
This has been a year marked by attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, but it has also been a year of incredible queer media, including a deluge of wonderful books. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of queer Southern books published in the second half of 2025.
Random House: “Where do you get an abortion in 1960 Georgia, especially if your small town’s midwife goes to the same church as your parents? For seventeen-year-old Doris Steele, the answer is Atlanta, where her favorite teacher, Mrs. Lucas, calls upon her brash, wealthy childhood best friend, Sylvia, for help. While waiting to hear from the doctor who has agreed to do the procedure, Doris spends the weekend scandalized by, but drawn to, the people who move in and out of Sylvia’s orbit. … These Heathens is a funny, poignant story about Black women’s obligations and ambitions, what we owe to ourselves, and the transformative power of leaving your bubble, even for just one chaotic weekend.”
One World: “With tender reverence, powell meditates on the deaths of her own beloveds while considering the multiple stages, both in private life and performance, that compose the fullness of a starlet’s legacy. How did these women challenge conventional representations of Black femininity and friendship, and forever transform the musical landscape? How did they navigate scrutiny and alienation in the limelight, often in the same industry as their abusers? How were their lives and deaths mythologized by those who survived them, and how do these archives establish afterlives of queer femme possibility?”
Ecco: “Magnetic, haunting, and tender, Extinction Capital of the World is a stunning portrait of Hawai’i — and a powerful meditation on family, queer love, and community amid imperialism and environmental collapse. Linked by both place and character, Rigg’s stories illuminate the exotification and commodification of Hawai’i in the American mythos. Extinction Capital of the World is an environmental love letter to the Hawaiian Islands and an indelible portrayal of the people who inhabit them — marking the arrival of an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.”
Black Lawrence Press: “In Shedding Season, nature threatens to overwhelm those who would keep it in check. Instead, Morton explores what it means to refuse the language of dominance, to recognize oneself as a small part of an impossibly complex ecosystem. From this vantage, insect legs form a chorus and violence is worked like a bow against an instrument, attempting beauty. In turn, a house becomes a trap, a family a threat, and the notion of salvation something you can drown in. In these poems, a broken narrative follows cycles of violence and ecological degradation across generations, illuminating the ways in which our relationships — with others, our environments, and ourselves—define us even as we define them.”
University Press of Florida: “Other People’s Mothers is a collection of interconnected, autobiographical essays that explore the relationship between a daughter, her mother, and the other mothers present in their lives. In this coming-of-age memoir, Julie Marie Wade traces a nexus of female influences on her formative years in the ’80s and ’90s. Through words and actions, the women around her communicate powerful and often contradictory messages about class, religion, education, and morality, holding enormous power over Wade’s journey toward adulthood.”
Saga: “Festering masses of worms and flies have taken root in dark corners across Appalachia. In exchange for unwavering loyalty and fresh corpses, these hives offer a few struggling humans salvation. A fresh start. It’s an offer that none refuse. You Weren’t Meant to Be Human is a deeply personal horror; a visceral statement about the lives of marginalized people in a hostile world, echoing the works of Stephen Graham Jones and Eric LaRocca.”
Blair: “Silas House is known throughout the South as a quintessential person of letters — a novelist, music journalist, environmental activist, columnist, and the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky. His first full-length collection of poetry blends his Appalachian upbringing with his ongoing relation to the natural world. Poems of praise for community and the collective appear alongside others tinged with nostalgia and grief when House keenly observes the loss of rural America as he once knew it. Returning to his touchstone subjects, Silas recalls wild places, echoes stories from a lingering and living past, and explores an abiding connection to family, friends, and fellow artists.”
University Press of Kentucky: “In Nobody’s Psychic, Dani Lamorte sets out to define his sense of self and the world in a discordant collection of memories both vivid and surreal. Raised in a church driven by apocalyptic paranoia and homophobic fear, Lamorte had an upbringing marked by a unique tension between wanting to remain invisible and needing to be observed. These competing desires pushed him toward performance, drag, and gardening, each a reflection of the struggle to find and maintain an image. With every encounter, whether in religion, gender roles, or the natural world — from a prophetess predicting destruction to the kaleidoscope of a drag queen’s sequins — Lamorte delves into what it means to have an image inside and outside the gaze of others.”
Quirk Books: “Ruth is trapped. She’s stuck in her small, religious hometown of Kill Devil, Kentucky, stuck in the closet, and stuck living paycheck to paycheck. After her manager finds out that she lives with her girlfriend, Ruth is fired from her job at New Creations — a craft store owned by the church that dominates life in Kill Devil. In an act of revenge, Ruth attempts to shoplift some yarn but is caught red-handed. Instead of calling the police, the employees lock her in the store—and attack her. As Ruth fights for her life using only the crafting supplies at hand, she plunges deeper into the tangled web of the New Creationists, who are hiding a terrible secret that threatens not only her but the entire town.”
Harper Perennial: “In these wide-ranging essays, Lisowski weaves theory and memoir into nuanced critiques of films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Saint Maud. From fears about sickness and disability, to trans narratives and the predator/victim complex, to the struggle to live in a world that wants you dead, she explores horror’s reciprocal impact on our culture and—by extension — our lives. Through it all, Lisowski lays bare her own complex biography — spanning from a trans childhood in the South to the sweaty dancefloors of Brooklyn — and the family, friends, and lovers that have bloomed with her into the present.”
Riverhead: “A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It’s challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist’s block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make – in art and in life.”
Queer Communion
Edited by Davis Shoulders
Published October 21, 2025
University Press of Kentucky: “Queer Communion is a collection of twelve essays, poems, and stories that follows and fractures the expectations surrounding LGBTQIA+ Appalachians and their religious beliefs. Gathered by Davis Shoulders, the pieces delve into themes of chosen family, loss, congregation, and alternative expressions of faith. Set against the backdrop of Christian cultural mores and a region considered to be deeply pious, these writings offer diverse perspectives on religion, queerness, and growth.”
The New Press: “Our country stands at a critical cultural crossroads, with a wave of anti-trans legislation emerging at unprecedented levels, targeting trans children, in particular, who face increasing stigmatization and erasure. Sim Butler’s And the Dragons Do Come is a poignant account of one family’s experience of parenting and supporting a trans child against this nightmarish backdrop. Serving both as a compassionate story of one family’s struggle for acceptance and as a window onto a fraught issue that parents, grandparents, other family members, and friends are confronting across the nation, And the Dragons Do Come provides a firsthand perspective on the human cost of anti-trans sentiment.”
Palaver
By Bryan Washington
Published November 4, 2025
FSG: “In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor, drinking his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his family in Houston, particularly his mother, whose preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they’ve last seen each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep. … Sharing meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, mother and son try the best they can to define where “home” really is—and whether they can find it even in each other.”
Ecco: “Most days, Magda is fine. … She’s mourning the recent loss of her best friend, Sara, but has brokered a tentative truce with Sara’s prickly widower as she helps him sort through the last of Sara’s possessions. She’s fine. But in going through Sara’s old journal, Magda discovers her friend’s last directive: plans for a road trip they would take together in celebration of Magda’s upcoming seventieth birthday. So, with Sara’s urn in tow, Magda decides to hit the road, crossing the country and encountering a cast of memorable characters—including her sister, from whom she’s been keeping secrets. Along the way she stumbles upon a jazz funeral in New Orleans and a hilarious women’s retreat meant to “unleash one’s divine feminine energy” in Texas, and meets a woman who challenges her conceptions of herself — and the hidden truths about her friendship with Sara.”
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