Collection: Shop Lesbian

Award-winning author Anna Burke delivers the shivers in this daring queer dark fantasy romance teeming with sensuous vampires, dark academia, plant horrors, and terrifying fungal fae.

When Clara Eden is offered a job as an archivist working for eccentric estate owner Agatha Montague, she thinks her prayers have been answered. Soon, she finds herself sucked into her research world, captivated by a romantic correspondence thousands of years old. But as her feelings for her employer's assistant, Fiadh, deepen, so does her suspicion that something about Agatha Montague isn't right. Unfortunately for Clara, it is far too late to run by the time her suspicions are confirmed.

THE STUNNING SEQUEL TO THE JASMINE THRONE, WINNER OF THE WORLD FANTASY AWARD!

"Alluring, action-packed, and gut-wrenching," (Publishers Weekly, starred review), The Oleander Sword continues Tasha Suri's acclaimed Burning Kingdoms trilogy, in which a powerful priestess and a vengeful princess will change the fate of an empire.

The prophecy of the nameless god--the words that declared Malini the rightful empress of Parijatdvipa--has proven a blessing and curse. She is determined to claim the throne that fate offered her. But even with rage in her heart and the army of loyal men by her side, deposing her brother is going to be a brutal and bloody fight.

The power of the deathless waters flows through Priya's blood. Now a thrice born priestess and an Elder of Ahiranya, she dreams of seeing her country rid of the rot that plagues it: both Parijatdvipa's poisonous rule, and the blooming sickness that is spreading through all living things. But she doesn't yet understand the truth of the magic she carries.

Their chosen paths once pulled them apart. But Malini and Priya's souls remain as entwined as their destinies. And saving their kingdom from those who would rather see it burn will come at a terrible price.
Praise for the Burning Kingdoms trilogy:

"Will undoubtedly reshape the landscape of epic fantasy for years to come."--Booklist (starred review)

"Lush and stunning...this sapphic fantasy will rip your heart out." --BuzzFeed News

"Raises the bar for what epic fantasy should be." --Chloe Gong, author of These Violent Delights

"This cutthroat and sapphic novel will grip you until the very end." --Vulture (Best of the Year)

"It left me breathless." --Andrea Stewart, author of The Bone Shard Daughter

"I loved it." --Alix E. Harrow, Hugo award-winning author of The Once and Future Witches

"Suri's incandescent feminist masterpiece hits like a steel fist inside a velvet glove." --Shelley Parker-Chan, author of She Who Became the Sun

As Lucy Muchelney watches her ex-lover's sham of a wedding, she wishes herself anywhere else. It isn't until she finds a letter from the Countess of Moth, looking for someone to translate a groundbreaking French astronomy text, that she knows where to go. Showing up at the Countess' London home, she hoped to find a challenge, not a woman who takes her breath away.

Catherine St Day looks forward to a quiet widowhood once her late husband's scientific legacy is fulfilled. She expected to hand off the translation and wash her hands of the project--instead, she is intrigued by the young woman who turns up at her door, begging to be allowed to do the work, and she agrees to let Lucy stay. But as Catherine finds herself longing for Lucy, everything she believes about herself and her life is tested.

While Lucy spends her days interpreting the complicated French text, she spends her nights falling in love with the alluring Catherine. But sabotage and old wounds threaten to sever the threads that bind them. Can Lucy and Catherine find the strength to stay together or are they doomed to be star-crossed lovers?

At turns haunting and breathtaking, Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves explores the legacy of trauma and the ghostly imprint grief leaves on the world around it as three women face the ruins of an old Southern town lost deep beneath the waves.

Years ago, yellow fever gripped the small lakeside town of Prosper, Arkansas. At the height of that summer swelter, in the midst of an unexpected storm, the dam broke and the valley flooded--drowning the town and everyone trapped inside.

Some claim it wasn't an accident.

Now, decades later, three young women find themselves drawn to the land that still bears the scars. Cassie: terrified to go near the water ever since witnessing an impossible drowning. Lark: returning to her childhood home to face the anguish of her father's mental breakdown. June: caught between longing for a fresh start and bearing witness to the ghosts of the past. Bound together, all three must contend with their home's complex legacy--and with the ruins of the town lurking far beneath the watchful water.

From award-winning and best-selling author, Leslie Feinberg, comes Drag King Dreams, the story of Max Rabinowitz, a butch lesbian bartender at an East Village club where drag kings, dykes dressed as men, perform.

A veteran of the women's and gay movement of the past 30 years, Max's mid-life crisis hits in the midst of the post-9/11 world. Max is lonely and uncertain about her future -- fearful, in fact, of America's future with its War on Terror and War in Iraq -- with only a core group of friends to turn to for reassurance. Max is shaken from her crisis, however, by the news that her friend Vickie, a trans woman, has been found murdered on her way home late one night. As the community of cross-dressers, drag queens, lesbian and gay men, and "genderqueers" of all kinds stand up together in the face of this tragedy, Max taps into the activist spirit she thought had long disappeared and for the first time in years discovers hope for her future.

*Recommended by Reese Witherspoon's Book Club!

*Voted One of Book Riot's Most Influential Queer Books & Horror Novels of All Time!

Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler's Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, Jewelle Gomez's sexy vampire novel.

This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who "shares the blood" by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story.

"The Gilda Stories is groundbreaking not just for the wild lives it portrays, but for how it portrays them--communally, unapologetically, roaming fiercely over space and time."--Emma Donoghue, author of Room

"Jewelle Gomez sees right into the heart. This is a book to give to those you want most to find their own strength."--Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out Of Carolina

Jewelle Gomez is a writer, activist, and the author of many books including Forty-Three Septembers, Don't Explain, The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears, and Oral Tradition. The Gilda Stories was the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards, and was adapted for the stage by the Urban Bush Women theater company in thirteen United States cities.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs was named one of UTNE Reader's 50 Visionaries Transforming the World, a Reproductive Reality Check Shero, a Black Woman Rising nominee, and was awarded one of the first-ever "Too Sexy for 501c3" trophies. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Named Most Anticipated of 2021 by Oprah Magazine * Marie Claire * Ms. Magazine * E! * Parade Magazine * Buzzfeed * Cosmo * The Rumpus * GoodReads * Autostraddle * Brit & Co * Refinery29 * Betches * BookRiot and others!

A LibraryReads Pick

"HONEY GIRL is an emotional, heartfelt, charming debut, and I loved every moment of it."
-- Jasmine Guillory, New York Times bestselling author of The Proposal

When becoming an adult means learning to love yourself first.

With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls' trip to Vegas to celebrate. She's a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn't know...until she does exactly that.

This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father's plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn't feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her parent's expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.

In New York, she's able to ignore all the constant questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she's been running from all along--the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.

Winner of the ADCI Literary Prize
Winner of the L.A. Times Ray Bradbury Prize

Finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
Finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel
Finalist for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel
Finalist for the HWA Gold Crown Award for Historical Fiction

"[A] queer Arthurian masterpiece for the modern era."--Los Angeles Times

"A pleasure to follow [and] a lovely flexing of Griffith's strengths in short form." --The New York Times Book Review

"Spectacular--I've been waiting years for this book to exist." --Maria Dahvana Headley, author of Beowulf: A New Translation

"If Le Guin wrote a Camelot story, I imagine it would feel like Spear: humane, intelligent, and deeply beautiful. It's a new story with very old bones, a strange place that feels like home." --Alix E. Harrow, author of A Spindle Splintered

A Shelf Awareness Best of the Year pick
A Vulture Best Fantasy of the Year pick

She left all she knew to find who she could be . . .

She grows up in the wild wood, in a cave with her mother, but visions of a faraway lake drift to her on the spring breeze, scented with promise. And when she hears a traveler speak of Artos, king of Caer Leon, she decides her future lies at his court. So, brimming with magic and eager to test her strength, she breaks her covenant with her mother and sets out on her bony gelding for Caer Leon.

With her stolen hunting spear and mended armour, she is an unlikely hero, not a chosen one, but one who forges her own bright path. Aflame with determination, she begins a journey of magic and mystery, love, lust and fights to death. On her adventures, she will steal the hearts of beautiful women, fight warriors and sorcerers, and make a place to call home.

The legendary author of Hild returns with an unforgettable hero and a queer Arthurian masterpiece for the modern era. Nicola Griffith's Spear is a spellbinding vision of the Camelot we've longed for, a Camelot that belongs to us all.

"Haunting, immersive, and seething with dark magic."―Alexis Henderson

"Brimming with romance and gilded with danger." ―Hannah Whitten, New York Times bestselling author

Oprah Daily Top 25 Fantasy Book of 2022!

In the 1920s, a decadent gothic tale unfolds as a young woman slips into a glamorous world filled with magic, romance, and murder. On Crow Island, people whisper that real magic lurks just below the surface.

But magic doesn't interest Annie Mason. Not after it stole her future. She's on the island only to settle her late father's estate and, hopefully, reconnect with her long-absent best friend, Beatrice, who fled their dreary lives for a more glamorous one.

Yet Crow Island is brimming with temptation, and the most mesmerizing may be her enigmatic new neighbor.

Emmeline Delacroix is an alluring figure shadowed by rumors of witchcraft. Soon, Annie is drawn into a glittering, haunted world. A world where the boundaries of wickedness are tested, and the cost of illicit magic might be death.

To those who are bright and young; to those who are wild and wicked; welcome to Crow Island.

Praise for Wild and Wicked Things:

"A deep, sensuous exploration of the bonds between three very different, complex women that readers won't soon forget." --Gwenda Bond, New York Times bestselling author

"Viciously enchanting, with a spell woven onto every page." --Heather Walter

WINNER OF THE 2018 LUCIEN STRYK ASIAN TRANSLATION PRIZE



The English-language premiere of Qiu Miaojin's coming-of-age novel about queer teenagers in Taiwan, a cult classic in China and winner of the 1995 China Times Literature Award.

An NYRB Classics Original
Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.

Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.

Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.

With beguiling wit and undeniable passion, Lush Lives is a deliciously queer and sexy novel about bold, brilliant women unafraid to take risks and fight for what they love

An unabashedly charged love story set in the evocative and high-stakes world of art and auction in New York City, Roxane Gay Books' second title is a crowd-pleaser in the vein of Jasmine Guillory's The Wedding Date and Helen Wan's The Partner Track.

For Glory Hopkins, inheriting her Aunt Lucille's Harlem brownstone feels more like a curse than a blessing. As a restless artist struggling to find gallery representation, Glory doesn't have the money, time, or patience to look after the aging house of an aunt she barely knew. But when she stumbles into Parkie de Groot, a savvy, ambitious auction house appraiser on the verge of a coveted promotion, her unexpected inheritance begins to look more promising. Glory and Parkie form an unlikely alliance and work to unearth the origins of a rare manuscript hidden in the brownstone's attic. In doing so, they uncover not only the well-kept secrets of Lucille's life but also the complex relationships between Harlem and its distinguished residents.

Undeniable as their connection may be, complications arise that threaten to tear apart their newly forged relationship. Between Parkie's struggle to overcome the heartache of past romances and professional problems that threaten to end her rising career, and Glory's unbridled and all-consuming ambition, they begin to keep secrets from each other. The deeper they dig into the mysteries of the Harlem brownstone, the more fraught their relationship becomes.

Lush Lives is an unforgettable novel of queer love, ambition, and the forgotten histories that define us.

The debut novella from the Elgin Award winning author of Elegies of Rotting Stars.

After the death of her estranged father, artist Rita struggles with grief and regret. There was so much she wanted to ask him-about his childhood, their family, and the Mi'kmaq language and culture from which Rita feels disconnected. But when Rita's girlfriend Molly forges an artist's residency application on her behalf, winning Rita a week to paint at an isolated cabin, Rita is both furious and intrigued. The residency is located where her father grew up.

On the first night at the cabin, Rita wakes to strange sounds. Was that a body being dragged through the woods? When she questions the locals about the cabin's history, they are suspicious and unhelpful. Ignoring her unease, Rita gives in to dark visions that emanate from the forest's lake and the surrounding swamp. She feels its pull, channelling that energy into art like she's never painted before. But the uncanny visions become more insistent, more intrusive, and Rita discovers that in the swamp's decay the end of one life is sometimes the beginning of another.

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God's elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age, and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles.

"What a beautifully imagined and important narrative. Sanders' clear-eyed and powerful writing made this a hard one to stop reading!"
--Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-Winning Author

"This is a novel to cherish and share. And this is a history to sing about and affirm -- to proclaim."
-- Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, New York Times Bestselling author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, an Oprah Book Club Novel

Named a Most Anticipated Book of Summer by Ms. Magazine, PopSugar, Lambda Literary, and many more!

Inspired by true events, Women of the Post brings to life the heroines who proudly served in the all-Black battalion of the Women's Army Corps in WWII, finding purpose in their mission and lifelong friendship.

1944, New York City. Judy Washington is tired of having to work at the Bronx Slave Market, cleaning white women's houses for next to nothing. She dreams of a bigger life, but with her husband fighting overseas, it's up to her and her mother to earn enough for food and rent. When she's recruited to join the Women's Army Corps--offering a steady paycheck and the chance to see the world--Judy jumps at the opportunity.

During training, Judy becomes fast friends with the other women in her unit--Stacy, Bernadette and Mary Alyce--who all come from different cities and circumstances. Under Second Officer Charity Adams's leadership, they receive orders to sort over one million pieces of mail in England, becoming the only unit of Black women to serve overseas during WWII.

The women work diligently, knowing that they're reuniting soldiers with their loved ones through their letters. However, their work becomes personal when Mary Alyce discovers a backlogged letter addressed to Judy. Told through the alternating perspectives of Judy, Charity and Mary Alyce, Women of the Post is an unforgettable story of perseverance, female friendship and self-discovery.

"A moving and compelling tribute to the lives and legacy of Black women in the American military during World War II that feels especially poignant in this moment." -- The Boston Globe

The Crawford and Hugo Award-Winning Series

Shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award, the Ignyte Award; One of Book Riot's Best Fantasy Debuts of All Time; A Milwaukee Journal Best of 2023 Pick; A Powell's Best of 2023 Pick

"Both tear-jerking and gut-punching. . . . Entirely accessible on its own, it is an excellent place to start if you haven't read any of Vo's novellas yet."--The Washington Post

The wandering Cleric Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey for the first time in almost three years, to be met with both joy and sorrow. Their mentor, Cleric Thien, has died, and rests among the archivists and storytellers of the storied abbey. But not everyone is prepared to leave them to their rest.

Because Cleric Thien was once the patriarch of Coh clan of Northern Bell Pass--and now their granddaughters have arrived on the backs of royal mammoths, demanding their grandfather's body for burial. Chih must somehow balance honoring their mentor's chosen life while keeping the sisters from the north from storming the gates and destroying the history the clerics have worked so hard to preserve.

But as Chih and their neixin Almost Brilliant navigate the looming crisis, Myriad Virtues, Cleric Thien's own beloved hoopoe companion, grieves her loss as only a being with perfect memory can, and her sorrow may be more powerful than anyone could anticipate. . .

"A remarkable accomplishment of storytelling."--NPR on The Empress of Salt and Fortune

"Nghi Vo is one of the most original writers we have today."--Taylor Jenkins Reid on Siren Queen

The Hugo Award-winning Singing Hills Cycle

The Empress of Salt and Fortune
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
Into the Riverlands
Mammoths at the Gates
The Brides of High Hill

The novellas of The Singing Hills Cycle are linked by the cleric Chih, but may be read in any order, with each story serving as an entrypoint.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Today, Electric Literature, Alta, the Chicago Review of Books and The Millions

"Told by machines from the future, Blackburn's idiosyncratic grief novel is as freshly devastating as they come." --The New York Times Book Review

"You can try bracing yourself for the ride this story takes you on, but it's best to just surrender. Your wig is going to fall off no matter what you do." --Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives

A gut-busting and heartbreaking descent into one woman's fraying connection to reality, from a soon-to-be superstar.

Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay's dead body in the wake of his suicide. There's no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother.

Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles --and triples--down on posing as her brother, risking not only her own sanity but her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadijah. As Coral's swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed in her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present.

A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn's debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind's capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.