June 9, 2025 – June is Pride month, and the library has plenty of reads for all ages highlighting LGBTQ+ stories and voices. Check out some recently published adult fiction titles below!
"Cinema Love" by Jiaming Tang (2024)
For over thirty years, Old Second and Bao Mei have cobbled together a meager existence in New York City’s Chinatown. But unlike other couples, these two share an unusual past. In rural Fuzhou, before they emigrated, they frequented the Workers’ Cinema: a theater where gay men cruised for love.
While classic war films played, Old Second and his countrymen found intimacy in the screening rooms. In the box office, Bao Mei sold movie tickets to closeted men, guarding their secrets and finding her own happiness with the projectionist. But when Old Second’s passion for his male lover is revealed, a series of haunting events unfold, propelling these characters toward an uncertain future in America.
Spanning three timelines – post-socialist China, 1980s Chinatown, and contemporary New York – "Cinema Love" is an epic about men and women who find themselves in forbidden relationships; the weight of secrets; and the way memory forever haunts the present.
"Greta & Valdin" by Rebecca K. Reilly (2024)
It's been a year since his ex-boyfriend dumped him and moved from Auckland to Buenos Aires, and Valdin is doing fine. He has a good flat with his sister Greta, a good career where his colleagues only occasionally remind him that he is the sole Maaori person in the office, and a good friend who he only sleeps with when he's sad. But when work sends him to Argentina and he's thrown back in his former lover's orbit, Valdin is forced to confront the feelings he's been trying to ignore – and the future he wants.
Greta is not letting her painfully unrequited crush (or her possibly pointless master's thesis, or her pathetic academic salary... ) get her down. She would love to focus on the charming fellow grad student she meets at a party and her friendships with a circle of similarly floundering twenty-somethings, but her chaotic family life won't stop intruding: her mother is keeping secrets, her nephew is having a gay crisis, and her brother has suddenly flown to South America without a word.
Greta & Valdin careens us through the siblings' misadventures and the messy dramas of their sprawling, eccentric Maaori-Russian-Catalonian family. "Greta & Valdin" is fresh, joyful, and alive with the possibility of love in its many mystifying forms.
"Isaac's Song" by Daniel Black (2025)
Isaac is at a crossroads in his young life. Growing up in Missouri, the son of a caustic, hard-driving father, he was conditioned to suppress his artistic pursuits and physical desires, notions that didn’t align with a traditional view of masculinity. But now, in late ’80s Chicago, Isaac has finally carved out a life of his own. He is sensitive and tenderhearted and has built up the courage to seek out a community. Yet just as he begins to embrace who he is, two social catalysts – the AIDS crisis and Rodney King’s attack – collectively extinguish his hard-earned joy.
At a therapist’s encouragement, Isaac begins to write down his story. In the process, he taps into a creative energy that will send him on a journey back to his family, his ancestral home in Arkansas and the inherited trauma of the nation’s dark past. But a surprise discovery will either unlock the truths he’s seeking or threaten to derail the life he’s fought so hard to claim.
"Motheater" by Linda H. Codega (2025)
After her best friend dies in a coal mine, Benethea 'Bennie' Mattox sacrifices her job, her relationship, and her reputation to uncover what's killing miners on Kire Mountain. When she finds a half-drowned white woman in a dirty mine slough, Bennie takes her in because it's right – but also because she hopes this odd, magnetic stranger can lead her to the proof she needs. Instead, she brings more questions.
The woman – called Motheater – can't remember her true name, or how she ended up inside the mountain. She knows only that she's a witch of Appalachia, bound to tor and holler, possum and snake, with power in her hands and Scripture on her tongue. But the mystery of her fate, her doomed quest to keep industry off Kire Mountain, and the promises she bent and broke have followed her a century and half into the future. And now, the choices Motheater and Bennie make together could change the face of the town itself.
"Oye" by Melissa Mogollon (2024)
When Miami residents are ordered to evacuate before a hurricane, everyone in Luciana's family complies, except for her beloved yet batty grandmother, Abue. But it turns out the storm isn't the real crisis: Abue, normally glamorous and full of energy, is given a devastating medical diagnosis once danger passes. Luciana, and the rest of the family, are heartbroken, but Abue is about as interested in getting treatment as she was in evacuating. She'd rather charm the hospital staff, and then turn around and torture her family by threatening suicide if they let any more relatives come see her.
Soon, Abue moves into Luciana's bedroom to recuperate, and though their approaches to life couldn't be more different, their complicated bond intensifies. Luciana would rather be roller skating, getting high, or sneaking out to Ladies Night to meet girls, but her grandmother's wild stories and unpredictable antics are a welcome distraction from her mother's conservative beliefs and obsession with appearances, or her sister Mari pulling away from the family in favor of a wealthier, whiter collegiate social circle. Forced to step into the role of caretaker, translator, and keeper of the generational secrets Abue starts to share, Luciana finds herself reluctantly facing down adulthood and rising to the occasion in her own unique way.
"Small Rain" by Garth Greenwell (2024)
A medical crisis brings one man close to death — and to love, art, and beauty — in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell. A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.
This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value — art, memory, poetry, music, care — are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. "Small Rain" surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.
"Spent: A Comic Novel" by Alison Bechdel (2025)
In Alison Bechdel's hilariously skewering and gloriously cast new comic novel confection, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont, is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a citizenry on the brink of civil war. She wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathingly self-critical memoir about her own greed and privilege?
Meanwhile, Alison's first graphic memoir about growing up with her father, a taxidermist who specialized in replicas of Victorian animal displays, has been adapted into a highly successful TV series. It's a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group (recognizable as characters, now middle-aged and living communally in Vermont, from Bechdel's beloved comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For").
As the TV show "Death and Taxidermy" racks up Emmy after Emmy, and when Alison's Pauline Bunyanesque partner Holly posts an instructional wood-chopping video that goes viral, Alison's own envy spirals. Why couldn't she be the writer for a critically lauded and wildly popular reality TV show, like "Queer Eye" ... showing people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?!!
"Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories" by Torrey Peters (2025)
In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters's keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.
In "Stag Dance," the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.
Three startling stories surround "Stag Dance": "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones" imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In "The Chaser," a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, "The Masker," a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.
"Stop Me if You've Heard This One" by Kristen Arnett (2025)
Cherry Hendricks might be down on her luck, but she can write the book on what makes something funny: she's a professional clown who creates raucous, zany fun at gigs all over Orlando. Between her clowning and her shifts at an aquarium store for extra cash, she's always hustling. Not to mention balancing her judgmental mother, her messy love life, and her equally messy community of fellow performers.
Things start looking up when Cherry meets Margot the Magnificent – a much older lesbian magician – who seems to have worked out the lines between art, business, and life, and has a slick, successful career to prove it. With Margot's mentorship and industry connections, Cherry is sure to take her art to the next level. Plus, Margot is sexy as hell. It's not long before Cherry must decide how much she's willing to risk for Margot and for her own explosive new act-and what kind of clown she wants to be under her suit.
"This Love" by Lotte Jeffs (2025)
When Mae and Ari meet outside a crowded gay bar during their final year of university, their connection is instant, sparking a lifetime friendship. Stubborn and no stranger to breaking hearts, Mae needs Ari's bright light to guide her out of her self-centered ways. Reeling from a scandal in New York, vibrant, charming Ari sees Mae as an anchor keeping him grounded.
Though they are young, ambitious, and queer, both Mae and Ari secretly daydream about settling down somewhere with a garden, children, and dogs, building a life that feels like home. They make a pact: somehow, some day, they will have a child together.
In the decades that follow, Ari and Mae realize that fulfilling their promise will not be as simple as they once hoped. Navigating toxic partners and hidden secrets, combatting the heavy weight of grief, and relishing the spoils of flashy media careers, the two struggle to reconcile their ever-diverging paths. Although nothing goes quite to plan, Ari and Mae – alongside their dearest friends and lovers – come to realize that the messy, devoted, tight-knit family they could build together might be better than anything they could have ever imagined.