Collection: Shop Gay

A 2023 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Nonfiction

An Electric Literature "Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of 2022" Selection

A love letter to the legendary Black and Latinx LGBTQ underground subculture, uncovering its abundant legacy and influence in popular culture.

What is Ballroom? Not a song, a documentary, a catchphrase, a TV show, or an individual pop star. It is an underground subculture founded over a century ago by LGBTQ African American and Latino men and women of Harlem. Arts-based and intersectional, it transcends identity, acting as a fearless response to the systemic marginalization of minority populations.

Ricky Tucker pulls from his years as a close friend of the community to reveal the complex cultural makeup and ongoing relevance of house and Ballroom, a space where trans lives are respected and applauded, and queer youth are able to find family and acceptance. With each chapter framed as a "category" (Vogue, Realness, Body, et al.), And the Category Is . . . offers an impressionistic point of entry into this subculture, its deeply integrated history, and how it's been appropriated for mainstream audiences. Each category features an exclusive interview with fierce LGBTQ/POC Ballroom members--Lee Soulja, Benjamin Ninja, Twiggy Pucci Garçon, and more--whose lives, work, and activism drive home that very category.

At the height of public intrigue and awareness about Ballroom, thanks to TV shows like FX's Pose, Tucker's compelling narratives help us understand its relevance in pop culture, dance, public policy with regard to queer communities, and so much more. Welcome to the norm-defying realness of Ballroom.

Is their real-life love story doomed to be a tragedy, or can they rewrite the ending?

London, 1883

Finely dressed and finely drunk, Charlie Price is a man dedicated to his vices. Chief among them is his explicit novel collection, though his impending marriage to a woman he can't love will force his carefully curated collection into hiding.

Before it does, Charlie is determined to have one last hurrah: meeting his favorite author in person.

Miles Montague is more gifted as a smut writer than a shopkeep and uses his royalties to keep his flagging bookstore afloat. So when a cheerful dandy appears out of the mist with Miles's highly secret pen name on his pretty lips, Miles assumes the worst. But Charlie Price is no blackmailer; he's Miles's biggest fan.

A scribbled signature on a worn book page sets off an affair as scorching as anything Miles has ever written. But Miles is clinging to a troubled past, while Charlie's future has spun entirely out of his control...

Carina Adores is home to romantic love stories where LGBTQ+ characters find their happily-ever-afters.


Lucky Lovers of London
Book 1: The Gentleman's Book of Vices

"A case study in elegant, honest tragicomedy...by the genuinely hilarious Paul Rudnick" (Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author) that follows the decades-long, rule-breaking romance between the son of one of America's wealthiest families and a middle-class aspiring author.

Devastatingly handsome and insanely rich, Farrell Covington is capable of anything and impossible to resist. He's a clear-eyed romantic, an aesthete but not a snob, self-indulgent yet wildly generous. As the son of one of the country's most powerful and deeply conservative families, the world could be his. But when he falls for Nate Reminger, an aspiring writer from a nice Jewish family in Piscataway, New Jersey, the results are passionate and catastrophic.

Together, the two embark on a unique romance that spans half a century. They are inseparable--except for the many years when they are apart. Moving from the ivy-covered bastion of Yale to New York City, Los Angeles, and eventually all over the world, Farrell and Nate experience the tremendous upheaval and social change of the last fifty years. From the freedom of gay life in 1970s Manhattan to the Hollywood closet, the AIDS epidemic, and the profound strides of the LGBTQ+ movement, this witty and moving novel shows how the world changes around us while we're busy doing other things.

Written with "engaging wit, side-eyed perceptiveness, and barbed elan" (Michael Chabon), this modern classic proves that style has its limits, love does not.

David Sedaris, the "champion storyteller," (Los Angeles Times) returns with his first new collection of personal essays since the bestselling Calypso

Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask--or not--was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes.

But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he's stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine.

As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger's teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone's son. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter.

In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.

The second book in the delightfully sweet Heartstopper series, featuring beautiful two-color artwork!

Now streaming on Netflix!

Nick and Charlie are best friends, but one spontaneous kiss has changed everything. In the aftermath, Charlie thinks that he's made a horrible mistake and ruined his friendship with Nick, but Nick is more confused than ever.Love works in surprising ways, and Nick comes to see the world from a new perspective. He discovers all sorts of things about his friends, his family... and himself.

Named Book of the Month Club's Book of the Year, 2017
Selected one of New York Times Readers' Favorite Books of 2017
Winner of the 2018 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award

From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Boy In the Striped Pajamas, a sweeping, heartfelt saga about the course of one man's life, beginning and ending in post-war Ireland

Cyril Avery is not a real Avery -- or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he?

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from - and over his many years, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more.

In this, Boyne's most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.

A haunting debut that is simultaneously dreamlike and visceral, vulnerable and redemptive, and risks the painful rewards of emotional honesty.

Discover They Both Die at the End, the year-long #1 New York Times bestseller, and The First to Die at the End from critically acclaimed author Adam Silvera in this hardcover box set. Just in time for holiday gifting!

They Both Die at the End

"Extraordinary and unforgettable." --ALA Booklist, starred review

"Adam Silvera uses his ample skill to force readers to examine how they live life now and how they want to live it." --Teen Vogue

"Gorgeous writing and wonderful storytelling will wreck you in the very best possible way." --BuzzFeed

On September 5, a little after midnight, Death-Cast calls Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio to give them some bad news: They're going to die today. Mateo and Rufus are total strangers, but, for different reasons, they're both looking to make a new friend on their End Day. The good news: There's an app for that. Through it, Rufus and Mateo are about to meet up for one last great adventure--to live a lifetime in a single day.

The First to Die at the End

Adam Silvera revisits the world of Death-Cast 7 years before the events of They Both Die at the End in this story about the lasting impact that people have on each other.

It's the night before Death-Cast goes live, and there's one question on everyone's mind: Can Death-Cast actually predict when someone will die, or is it just an elaborate hoax? Orion Pagan has waited years for someone to tell him that he's going to die, but Valentino Prince only just registered for Death-Cast, prompted in part because his twin sister nearly died.

When the first round of End Day calls goes out their lives are forever changed--and, through one unforgettable day together, they learn how life is always worth living to the fullest.

It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a "sissy." Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. "Sinister and strangely alluring" (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving--and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche--as ever.

The first novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's bestselling San Francisco saga, and inspiration for the Netflix original series, Tales of the City

"A consummate entertainer who has made a generation laugh. . . . It is Maupin's Dickensian gift to be able to render love convincingly."-- Edmund White, Times Literary Supplement

For almost four decades Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture--from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of ten novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

A queer historical romantic suspense novel about a young engineer working for Gustave Eiffel caught in a web of deceit that could destroy both him and the famous tower.

Fin Tighe is clinging to respectability by his nail-bitten fingers. He may be the illegitimate son of an English earl, but he hasn't spoken to his father in a decade, and his engineer's salary is barely enough to support him and his cousin Aurelie. A dancer in the corps de ballet, Aurelie is at constant risk from groping, leering men who assume any dancer is a prostitute in training. And Fin's evenings spent in the clandestine gay community may be legal through a loophole in the Napoleonic Code, but they leave him vulnerable.

So, when Fin's employer, Gustave Eiffel, announces that he needs additional investors to pay for his pet project, a 300-meter tower that will dominate the city's skyline, Fin jumps at the chance. If he raises enough money, the commission will earn him a fortune, and hopefully, some protection.

Capricious stranger Gilbert Duhais appears to be a boon from the gods. Gilbert is handsome, wealthy, connected, and somehow privy to Fin's background. Gilbert persuades Fin to masquerade as his father's heir--which couldn't be further from the truth--and introduces him to every nouveau riche speculator in the city. Each provocative interaction heightens Fin's risk of exposure. But also brings Fin closer to his dream of financial security.

When a dear friend of Fin's is murdered above a clandestine gay club, the stakes rise even higher. Fin must untangle the disparate threads of his past--and his current romantic gamble--before they become his noose.

This hilarious, touching debut novel by Aaron Foley, author of How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass, follows three Black gay millennial men looking for love, friendship, and professional success in the Motor City.

Suddenly jobless and single after a devastating layoff and a breakup with his cheating ex, advertising copywriter Dominick Gibson flees his life in Hell's Kitchen to try and get back on track in his hometown of Detroit. He's got one objective -- exit the shallow dating pool ASAP and get married by thirty-five -- and the deadline's approaching fast.

Meanwhile, Dom's best friend, Troy Clements, an idealistic teacher who never left Michigan, finds himself at odds with all the men in his life: a troubled boyfriend he's desperate to hold onto, a perpetually dissatisfied father, and his other friend, Remy Patton. Remy, a rags-to-riches real estate agent known as "Mr. Detroit," has his own problems -- namely choosing between making it work with a long-distance lover or settling for a local Mr. Right Now who's not quite Mr. Right. And when a high-stakes real estate deal threatens to blow up his friendship with Troy, the three men have to figure out how to navigate the pitfalls of friendship and a city that seems to be changing overnight.

Full of unforgettable characters, Boys Come First is about the trials and tribulations of real friendship, but also about the highlights and hiccups --late nights at the wine bar, awkward Grindr hookups, workplace microaggressions, situationships, frenemies, family drama, and of course, the group chat -- that define Black, gay, millennial life in today's Detroit.

A new male / male hockey romance from 24-time USA Today bestseller Sarina Bowen!

My name is Hudson Newgate, but my teammates call me New Guy.

That was my nickname in Chicago, too. And Vancouver. That's what happens when you keep getting traded. Brooklyn is my last chance, especially after my poor performance last season.

But I can make this work. The new guy knows to keep his head down and shoot the puck. The new guy puts the game first.

What he doesn't do is hook up with the other new guy-a hot athletic trainer who lives in my building. Gavin needs this job with my team. He's a single dad with responsibilities.

We can't be a couple. My arrogant agent-who's also my father-will lose his mind if I'm dating a dude. And my team needs me to score goals, not whip up a media circus.

Too bad Gavin and I are terrible at resisting each other...

Nineteen-year-old hockey phenom Alexander Price is the youngest-ever captain in the NHL. With a polarizing social media presence and a predilection for dirty play, he typifies the stereotype of young, out-of-control athlete. But away from the cameras, Alex is a kid with an anxiety disorder and the expectations of an expansion franchise on his shoulders. And maybe he tries too hard to fit the part of asshole playboy, but it's better than the alternative; in his line of work, gay is the punchline of an insult, not something he can be.

Eighteen-year-old vlogger Elijah Rodriguez is a freshman in college recovering from an injury that derailed his Olympic figure-skating dreams. Mixed-race, disabled, and out of the closet since he was fourteen, Eli is unapologetically himself. He has no qualms about voicing his disapproval of celebrity jocks who make homophobic jokes on Twitter and park their flashy cars in the handicapped spaces outside of ice rinks.

After an antagonistic introduction, Alex and Eli's inexplicable friendship both baffles and charms the internet. But navigating relationships is hard enough for normal teenagers. It's a lot harder when the world-much of it disapproving-is watching you fall in love with your best friend.

'A soul-satisfying love story that is both sublimely romantic and splendidly sexy.' Booklist (starred review)

'Road trips and secret identities...a beautifully thoughtful and deliciously sweet romance about getting lost in order to find oneself. I loved every moment spent with Penn and Raff.'
Freya Marske, International bestselling author of A Marvellous Light

Oxford 1360

When his sister's betrothed vanishes the night before her politically arranged marriage, Raff Barden must track and return the elusive groom to restore his family's honour.

William de Foucart -- known to his friends as Penn -- had no choice but to abandon his fiancé, and with it his own earldom, when he fled the night before his enforced marriage. But ill-equipped to survive on the run he must trust the kindness of a stranger, Raff, to help him escape.

Unaware their fates are already entwined, their unexpected bond deepens into a far more precious relationship, one that will test all that they hold dear. And when secrets are finally revealed, both men must decide what they will risk for the one they love...

Readers LOVE One Night in Hartswood

'A thrilling, heart-stealing historic romp and achingly romantic.'
M.A. Kuzniar, bestselling author of Midnight in Everwood

'A heartwarming tale of forbidden love that captured my heart from its opening page... Unputdownable'
Sunday Times bestselling author Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York

'Beautiful, endearing and completely stole my heart from the very beginning.'

'This book is EVERYTHING!! I cannot explain how much I loved it.'

'I absolutely love this book.'

'This was the queer historical romance I didn't know I needed!'

One of the Best Books of 2022
NPR - Them - Lit Hub - CrimeReads - Book Riot - Chicago Review of Books

"A one-of-a-kind queer horror comedy for people who watch The Bachelor and The X-Files back-to-back." --Kirkus Reviews

On this season of The Catch, contestants must compete for love. And their lives.

When the final four women in competition for an aloof, somewhat sleazy bachelor's heart arrive on a mysterious island in the Pacific Northwest, they prepare themselves for another week of extreme sleep deprivation, invasive interviews, and, of course, the salacious drama eager viewers nationwide tune in to devour. Each woman came on The Catch for her own reasons--brand sponsorships, followers, and, yes, even love--and they've all got their eyes steadfastly trained on their respective prizes.

Enter Patricia, a temperamental and woefully misunderstood local living alone in the dark, verdant woods, and desperate for connection. Through twists as unexpected as they are wildly entertaining, the self-absorbed cast and jaded crew each make her acquaintance atop the island's tallest and most desolate peak, finding themselves at the center of an action-packed thriller that is far from scripted--and only a few will make the final cut.

A whirlwind romp careening toward a last-girl-standing conclusion, and a scathing indictment of contemporary American media culture, Patricia Wants to Cuddle is also a love story: between star-crossed lesbians who rise above their intolerant town, a deeply ambivalent woman and her budding self-actualization, and a group of misfit islanders forging community against all odds.