A quick highlight of some of the books by transfeminine authors:

Brown/Trans/Les is the second hit essay collection by , one of the rising stars of transfeminism in recent years, remarkable not only because she’s a trans woman of color from the global south but because her work has resonated so well that she’s been able to publish her essays without academic or institutional backing.

Hekate’s Call by Malachite is one of the defining works of the mechsploitation genre, inspired by mecha visual media seen through transfeminine (usually lesbian) lenses. I’ve really enjoyed the prose in this one.

Unlimited Combat Dolls by Kay F. Atkinson takes the concepts of NieR: Automata and Westworld and interprets it through gender: in a post-apocalyptic world, two “combat dolls” wake to consciousness, and soon discover that all of them—every single combat doll—has been created from a dead trans woman.

Flower of the Underworld by Cirice Gray has the advantage of the easy pitch: “cyberpunk Greek lesbian nuns.” It’s a dimensional, ambitious depiction of mental illness, disability, and a narrative in which a young traumatized trans woman is allowed to be messy and difficult even as she tries to be good and pious in a world ruled by capricious gods. The sequel, House of the Underworld, is even more ambitious and extensive, and coming out soon. Now’s a great time to read Flower!

The Moth of the House of Hua by Maria Ying is a standalone in Those Who Break Chains, about a tragic romance between a knight and the sorceress she’s sworn to protect.

A Weed in the Flowerbeds by Callisto Khan explores gender and identity within a brutal environment, in the same setting as Flower.

…and many, many more works. With 32 items for just $20, the bundle is an absolute steal, and your contribution will go toward housing, feeding, and helping trans women thrive. We hope you’ll take a look!

Hungerwinter by Das Kunstkollektiv, the creators who brought you Lovely Ladyverse RPG, which I loved. It was clever, fantastically written, and deeply felt, and this promises more of the same. Pitched as a visual novel where two women explore a city they’re hoping to save.

After War Report by TangledVirus is a Yuri Cyberpunk Visual Novel about the people that are going to be left behind. Those used and broken by the war and what they make of their lives. The game will be divided into three stories, each part focusing on a different character and a different couple, each separated by five years. What will happen fifteen years after the war? How will everyone be? Who will make it? Set in a world where the US invaded Latin America — and lost.

Postcard from Brentville by KillJill. Visual novel.

You Will Die In This Place by Liz. You Will Die In This Place is a nihilistic survival-horror tabletop dungeon crawl RPG about exile, decay, and the inevitable failure of the self.

Something different as well, but we had to include this due to urgency: author Cirice Gray is a trans woman who has been having a really difficult time, so please consider helping her out if you can! She just needs a little to get back on her feet.

House of the Underworld (Sisters of Meténeion #2) by Cirice Gray and Maria Ying. Science fiction. A priestess is summoned to serve at Hades’ estate and to attend the holy pilot Persephone.

Lo, Nuns! by Jemma Topaz. Historical fantasy. A collection of stories set in an imagined past. Sapphic and transfem focused, these tales concern women finding love, community, justice, and revenge.

Survival Show by Juno Dawson. Young adult. Sequestered in the sinister Dreamhouse, and filmed 24 hours-a-day, Taryn soon realises that reality TV is far from real. She and her fellow trainees are pitted against each other in cruel challenges. Working with gorgeous boyband mentor, Cade, Taryn covertly plots to expose this brutal regime and destroy Starmaker from the inside.

UNLIMITED COMBAT DOLLS by Kay F. Atkinson. Science fiction. Dragonfly is a combat doll: a living machine bound to a life of endless bloodshed, gripped until death by cruel engineering that rewards violence with pleasure, and threatens those who abstain with a fate far worse than death.

This Wretched Beauty by Elle Grenier. Young adult. Dorian Gray retelling.

Missed Connections with Tall Girls by Gwen Aube. Poetry. Tweaking working-class colloquialisms into new forms of elegy and song, Gwen Aube’s hilarious and uncompromising poems chronicle a precarious, debaucherous carnival of trailer-trash divas and Discord autistics, living and delighting in survival at the edges of technocapital.

What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed. Science fiction. John Maraintha has been abandoned, light-years from the peaceful forests that he loves. But on Scythia, survival means transformation―and not everyone is willing to accept change.

Trans Lives: Social Realities Across the Globe by Raewyn W. Connell. Nonfiction. Raewyn Connell, a world-leading sociologist and gender researcher, gathers the evidence and writes about the lives of trans women and men, hijra, travesti, and other groups around the world. She looks at the forces shaping trans lives, including medicine and its limitations, precarity and poverty, unequal gender relations, the role of sex work, and encounters with the state and the corporate economy.

A year ago, I started my review of Talia Bhatt’s non-fiction debut Trans/Rad/Fem with the lurid description of a radfem’s spectre: that hag that has corrupted feminism and indeed society with man-hating morphing into transphobia. Therefore, I thought it would be fitting to open my review of Bhatt’s follow-up release, Brown/Trans/Les, with an all-new ghost: the girlboss feminist. “White” is implied.

She is American, liberal, and suckling at the teat of everything feminisms past have won: careers, wealth, and freedom of womanly choice. She can dominate a conference room and be a tradwife—what futuristic decadence! And all these things have made her two things: cringe, and sheltered. She is blind to the struggles of those who actually suffer worldwide, women and men alike. Moreover, she’s even blind to the suffering of those she oppresses, such as racialised men of her own homeland. In short, she is the new matriarchy. An oppressor: a woman that’s had it too good. Her myopia, her cruelty, and above all her thinking she’s better than anyone else, mean that feminism is over. It’s outlived its usefulness and must be replaced with something nicer and more progressive. Gentler. More inclusive of those the girlboss oppresses.

After all, feminism is incompatible with studies of gender—due to its singular and short-sighted fixation on only women—and it is furthermore incompatible with understanding race.

What’s that? America is overrun by people who want to ban abortion and rage at no-fault divorce while speculating whether women should vote, and all this happens to—surprise of surprises—hit women of colour hardest and fastest but does not somehow entirely exempt white women? Oh, bother. Perhaps women have more in common with each other than we thought, such as being women. I fear our futurism-pilled analysis has gone awry somewhere.

Be that as it may—what to do about white feminism? Or even, the inherent whiteness of feminism? If all the voices in feminism are white and Western, then how can we be sure we can even apply the theories and principles of feminism to non-Western, non-white subjects? What if Western and white minds are too corrupted, too different to even be able to comprehend the circumstances of the Other? What if non-Western data is actually alien and uninterpretable? Or, to quote a non-Western, non-white feminist voice, Talia Bhatt:

Debates within fields such as anthropology [...] aim to grapple with the question of moral relativism and what it means to discuss other cultures while leaving behind one’s (presumptively) Western biases. How should topics such as the marginalization of women and queer people or practices such as FGM and child brides be discussed, especially with an existing history of such subjects being mobilized to construct a hierarchy between an Enlightened West and Primitive Third World?

What if such practices are simply in line with the local values, and passing judgment on them is superimposing a Western and colonial model of values on a non-Western society? [...] And given that the West is itself far from perfect, should Western scholars not keep a more open mind when ascertaining how harmful certain non-Western beliefs and systems truly are?

You know, mealy-mouthed blathering for those without a backbone.

Don’t get it twisted. The fact that the dominant voices in Western feminism are white and, well, Western, is very much real and to the detriment of global solidarity—and Bhatt is sorely cognizant of that. What Brown/Trans/Les seeks to interrogate is: what happens when a majority-white, majority-Western movement and institutions attempt to grapple with their white and Western guilt while keeping the majority voices if not always white, then certainly Western? What kind of non-white and non-Western voices would they allow into the mainstream? And more importantly: what does that mean for the women and queer people and queer women of the Global South?

Similar to Trans/Rad/Fem’s dissection and re-examination of radical feminist legacy, Brown/Trans/Les takes to task the fruits of decolonial studies and decolonial feminism, from bell hooks to Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. The tone is somewhat different this time, however, as Bhatt asks: are the scholars and thinkers which are considered cornerstones of intersectionality and the foundation upon which future beyond-feminisms should be built, actually intersectional? What demographic are they most interested in protecting? Why is it that the modern darling of third-wave feminism confidently asserted that Black trans women upheld the patriarchy by performing femininity—and no one seems to know or care? Why is it that so many claims of apatriarchal non-Western societies corrupted into oppressing women by Western influence are heavily based on the work of a Yoruba princess that discards statistics as a Western imposition?

Brown/Trans/Les is an uncompromising and sobering book, suffused with Bhatt’s signature verve for rhetoric and, above all, disappointment. Disappointment in the denial of knowledge and solidarity to women: Global South women, lesbian women, trans women. It is palpable as Bhatt unearths glaringly obvious lies and epistemic gaps, and moreover, actual contemporary counterarguments and disputations that have been lost to time or the attention economy or, frequently, both. Brown/Trans/Les is as much an impassioned accusation as it is a plea at gunpoint to finally recognise that which has been obvious the whole time.

Can you look past the long and projected shadow of the cringe white girlboss to see that women are oppressed? Can you cease comparing white women to men of colour to see the women of colour between them both? Can you quit dreaming of matriarchies faraway and long past to rally against the ubiquitous patriarchies today? Can a lesbian be spoken of like a deserving feminist subject? And can you, for once, see the people of the Global South as complex humans of complex societies that ache for freedom just the same as you, and not alien creatures that would be happiest abandoned to choose between their homeland’s yoke and colonial assimilation?

Blade of Shattered Bone by Vaela Denarr. Lesbian dark fantasy. Sabah is a blade that kills their wielders, always in search of a stronger body, even if it breaks them. When they face Heliodora the Insatiable, they think their end has finally come.

Exsanguinated Bliss by Bailey Saxon. Lesbian dark fantasy. Vanessa Bellarose Valentine is a princess with more power than most could ever dream of. She’s a fully-fledged vampire, unmatched in combat, and handles every trouble with authority and smooth talk. But what happens when she meets someone that can’t be dealt with the usual way? What can she do when her authority and power is rendered useless? See for yourself in this bloody tale of domination.

The Neon Revelation by TT Madden. Horror. The town of Columbia is a place of miracles. Or so they say. The home of a secretive religious group that claims to have an angel among their ranks, to Roan, it’s nothing more than a target, the place responsible for the death of her beloved Nico, a place she plans on burning down entirely. But Roan knows, as a transwoman, if she’s caught within Columbia’s borders, she’ll surely be killed. But when Columbia’s strange angel seems to choose Roan for some higher purpose, the believers have to choose a side, and prepare for a second coming none of them could have ever prophesized.

Brown/Trans/Les by Talia Bhatt. Nonfiction. In this text, Bhatt attempts to reckon with the sheer scale and magnitude of the challenge that her motherland poses, and asks: is it even possible to articulate something akin to “desi feminism” or “Third World Feminism” without flattening, homogenizing, and simplifying the ills of a land ravaged by forces as disparate as colonialism, communal violence, and homegrown theocratic fascism? The answer, she hopes, is “yes”.

All the Way by Alyson Greaves (When You Fell from Heaven 2). Contemporary trans lesbian romance. While Maxwell Giordano is going through the motions at home, his alter ego Maxine is living the dream. She’s found her place — on the cheer squad, among friends — but keeping her two lives separate is driving her crazy.

Gendertrash From Hell: The First Print Collection of the Zine That Changed Everything by Mirha-Soleil Ross. Nonfiction.

Persona by Aoife Josie Clements. Horror. A feral shut-in discovers a disturbing internet porn video of what seems to be herself. A seance of coked-up artists summons unearthly forces in a studio apartment. The staircase of an exurban marketing company descends endlessly beneath the earth.

Sex Change and the City, ed. Tuck Woodstock and Nico Stratis. Nonfiction. Sex Change and the City features personal essays, critical analysis, comics, poetry, artwork, games, and steamy short stories by forty-five fabulous LGBTQ+ contributors. Inspired by the classic TV series, the collection goes beyond asking “Are you a Miranda?” to consider more pressing questions, like “When will Miranda start HRT and begin going by Hobbes?”

Terry Dactyl by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Literary. Terry Dactyl has lived many lives. Raised by boisterous lesbian mothers in Seattle, she comes of age as a trans girl in the 1980s in a world of dancing queens and late-night house parties just as the AIDS crisis ravages their world. Twenty years later, in a panic during the COVID-19 lockdown, Terry returns to a Seattle stifled by gentrification and pandemic isolation until resistance erupts following the murder of George Floyd, and her search for community ignites once again.

When the Candles Burn by JW Sweem. Fiction. When her ex-wife and son leave town for the holiday, Corrie must spend Christmas alone for the first time in her life. In the cold silence of winter she must rediscover the wonder of the season as unexpected encounters stir old memories and fragile hopes. She finds herself facing an important question: can the magic she once believed in still be found or is it something that will remain lost?

Part Time Girl by Adriaan Brae. Young adult. How much longer can Michael hide his sex-switches? After making it through the second year of high-school, he knows it’s only a matter of time until someone notices and freaks out. Then his family will have to run and lose everything, again, or risk being found by the shadowy group that hunts people like him.

Fractures Between by Beatrice Mckinsey. Romance. Theo’s best friend and her first crush, Summer, died in a tragic accident when they were teenagers. Ten years later, Theo has accepted a new job and is returning to her hometown. The scars inflicted by that tragedy run deep, but she’s determined to face her past and move on for good. Until a flippant wish on a comet catapults Theo into an alternate reality where she and Summer never became friends… and Summer never died.

Guitar Concerto in C Flat Major, Op. 12: Lucina by S. Morgan Burbank. Fiction. A girl playing guitar in a bar was more than enough to catch Daniel’s attention. But she was more than that: something hypnotic, something ethereal, something familiar. What if the girl of your dreams — the girl in your dreams — was someone you knew all along? What lengths will Daniel go to in order to find out? Or was the right answer always staring Daniel in the face?

In combat, in rivalry, and in love, these are lesbians who know what they want — and how to take it. 24 novels, novellas, and visuals novels: all for just $15!

I Saw the Pink Light Glow by D. Moses and Josephine Riesman. Essays.

Gorman’s House by T.T. Madden. Young adult horror. Danny, Kennedy, and Jason uncover the location of the fabled Gorman’s House in their town, a traveling haunted attraction that’s supposedly so scary no one has ever completed it to claim the prize money.

Cannon by Lee Lai. Graphic novel. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heat-wave, this is where we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in little beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, well, she destroyed it.

Leave a Light On For Me by Briar Holloway. Literary. A year after her mum’s death, twenty-something trans woman Natalie Dawson is on a downward spiral, self-medicating with alcohol and binge-watching Buffy.

The Ink Witch by Steph Cherrywell. Middle grade. A hilarious and affirming cozy fantasy about the adventures of a girl who discovers she is the descendant of a powerful witch coven.

Teenage Girls Can Be Demons by Hailey Piper. Short story collection. 13 coming-of-rage stories the way only Bram Stoker Award-winning author Hailey Piper can tell them — wildly inventive, brilliantly imaginative, and completely and utterly enthralling.

Fractures Between by Beatrice Mckinsey. Romance. Theo’s best friend and her first crush, Summer, died in a tragic accident when they were teenagers. Ten years later, Theo has accepted a new job and is returning to her hometown. A magical, small-town lesbian romance about second chances and alternate timelines.

Sarah, or ‘I lived my life as a cloud that followed overhead’ by Never Angeline Nørth. Literary.

Best Woman by Rose Dommu. Contemporary romance. The “best woman” at her brother’s wedding tells a little white lie in her quest to get the girl — her lifelong crush and the maid of honor — in this wildly entertaining debut novel about bad decisions and life’s messiest transitions.

Uncanny Valley Girls by Zefyr Lisowski. Essays. A sharply personal and expansive essay collection dedicated to the strange and absurd beauty of horror films, exploring the complications of gender, the insidiousness of class ascension, and the latent violence hidden in our own uncanny reflections.

Herculine by Grace Byron. Horror. A young trans woman after she arrives at the all-trans girl commune founded by her toxic ex-girlfriend, only to discover that demons, both literal and figurative, haunt her fellow comrades — and she’s their next prey!

Machines of Consent by Sophia Turner. Science fiction. Two trans lesbians in a sci-fi adventure as they find each other and try to escape an oppressive force bent to use them for nefarious ends

Keeping the Peace by Tris Husband. Science fiction. A trans lesbian crime noir set in a glittering cyberpunk city where a private detective wants to investigate crimes the demigod elite would rather remain closed.

Jackson Bright in the Spotlight by Eureka O’Hara and Dan Poblocki. Middle grade picture book.

sorry i keep crying during sex by Jesse James Rose. Memoir.

A Weed in the Flowerbeds by Callisto Khan. Sci-fi. Originally collected in Memory of Olympus, released as a standalone: the story of Adrastus, a clone born in Demeter’s house, as he navigates gender and being born a weapon.

A Mask for the Sun by Kay F. Atkinson. Sci-fi horror. The final book in the Fleet and Fabricant trilogy.

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn. Literary fiction. Two star indoor volleyball players juggle unspoken jealousies in their off-court romance ahead of their rival teams’ first rematch in a year.

Human Rites by Juno Dawson. Fantasy. Book three in Her Majesty's Royal Coven.

Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation by Juliana Gleeson. Nonfiction. How the intersex liberation movement exposed medical harms and became an inspiration to rethink sex and gender.

The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World by Vicky Osterweil. Nonfiction. A provocative history of Disney’s rise to cultural dominance, pulling skeletons from the corporate closet to decode the political messages hidden in all of your favorite childhood movies.

So What If I’m a Puta: Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire by Amara Moira. Memoir. An incisive, intimate diary of the life of a sex worker in Brazil,

A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper. Horror. Euphoria meets Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke in this latest novel following a couple whose search to spice up their sex life leads them down a path of madness.

Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color ed. Denne Michele Norris. Nonfiction. A vital anthology of essays by trans and gender-nonconforming writers of color, sharing stories of joy, heartbreak, rage, and self-discovery.

Letters from a Living Utopia: Reclaiming Liberation from Palestine to the World by Yaffa AS. Nonfiction. A love letter to liberation, from Palestine to the ground beneath your feet.

Heart's Whispers: A Sapphic Shifter Romance by Issy Waldrom. Fantasy. A low angst slow burn sapphic shifter romance about magic, love, being true to yourself, accepting yourself, and the growth of relationships.

We’re establishing a new section for pre-orders, so we thought you’d like to know that Gender Phantoms by Talia Bhatt and Beth Leigh-Ann is now available for pre-order. Get in on the floor with this literary satire pitched as Sisters of Dorley meet Stag Dance that’s all the rage across transfem social media. This is slated for a Jan 2026 release.

The Persephone Effect, the next installment in the mecha Greek mythology series Gunmetal Olympus, is now also available for pre-order with a tentative release date of the first quarter of 2026.

Taking inspiration in part from Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb, The Zeus Constant—as the title suggests—takes on the perspective of Zeus, who (if you’re not familiar with Gunmetal Olympus) is a woman, and worshiped in the sci-fi city of Elysium. One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is that it’s the author’s first completed novel, but it’s written with an incredible grasp of structure, narrative pacing and most of all, prose. This book is lush, it luxuriates in language and cadence; it takes joy in its sentences. Callisto Khan is easily one of my favorite prose stylists in recent years.

A God synchronizing with her pilot is a matter of sacrament.

Before Arcas takes off, nymphs attend to us in the ablution baths. Rain water, collected in gold pans from artificial clouds, is heated, treated, and run through her wild red hair and my gold. Before we enter the hangar, the nymphs anoint us from toe to ear with myrrh and cinnamon oil. Her bulk is squeezed into gold-and-black piloting vestments while I spin for myself my black commander’s jacket and a wreath of gold leaves as my crown.

As Arcas swaggers along the gantry, a flock of my priesthood chirps. They flank us on either side, dark-robed. They bow deeply, their eyes closed so they can better listen to our footfalls and smell the divinity wafting off of us. At the end of the line, Arcas stops to salute me: a tight fist upon the chest, carpus twisted in superior tilt, veins facing the heavens.

Zeus worship as a highly formalized, ritualistic cult offers a lot to sink your teeth into: the cultural structure of it, the deliciously terrifying Father Pygmalion who is responsible for leading the faith and also for turning mortals into copies of Hades for Zeus’ pleasure.

But though the story is centered around the immortal Lord of Thunder, in other ways it functions as a generational saga about mortals whose lives she touches, many of them friends, lovers, and family; the process of engineering a pilot for Zeus is ruthless, and to produce Herakles in particular demanded a brutal sacrifice that left many of them shattered. Like Zeus herself, the mortal cast in this book are survivors of the weight of Elysium’s bloody history—and survivors, too, of the terrible decisions Zeus has had to make as a ruler, in spite of her love for mortals. (It’s not all grim, though; there’s an episode where Hades is, incredibly, turned into a swan. The touches of humor throughout the book are excellent.)

Pygmalion, as the antagonist of the tale, steals the show often: she serves as Zeus’ bishop and is suitably sinister, occasionally the only comfort and confidante Zeus has, with ulterior motives of her own. In general though, everyone in this large ensemble cast gets to shine. Hera, often depicted in retellings as a jealous wife, is given time and narrative space that she deserves (after all, even lesbian Zeus remains an egoistic player). Khan’s handling of Persephone delighted me; it’s a sexy, pleasant surprise. And the various artistic rivalries in the city? The way the book imagines Elysium’s academies? It’s superb, nuanced, and laced through with incredible world-building. I can’t wait to see what Callisto Khan does next.

(She also guest-wrote the brilliant ‘A Weed in the Flowerbeds’ in Memory of Olympus, as an aside.)

Next is the more standalone-ish of the pair, Flower of the Underworld is in many ways a diametrical opposite to The Hades Calculus: it concerns the life of a mortal priestess, Madalithea, and adventures that involve a lot fewer gods than Persephone’s. I think a character like Madalithea can be a very particular line to walk; for a lot of authors, a sensitive and traumatized young woman runs the risk of being one-dimensional and emotionally passive. Cirice Gray treads this line cleverly—for one, Madalithea is also a trans woman who’s discovering her sexuality; for another, she’s far from perfectly sweet. Which isn’t to say that she isn’t sweet; she’s a young, earnest woman who tries very hard. But she is a product of terrible parenting, and has been taught to hate herself and distrust the world by a mother who was herself violently traumatized.

The dead woman on the slab bears no marks of divine favor, no lingering sign of demigod grace. She died maintaining Wall Caryatid—crushed beneath automated lifters. The stasis field preserves her broken form, though it cannot hide the fundamental mundanity of her death. She was just another soul manufactured for the needs of Elysium, caught in its machinery, worthy of only the most basic rites their Lord demands for passage into her realm.

Sister Nikla is absent—such common preparations require no senior oversight. Only Madalithea and Lydia attend, their service no less devoted despite the simplicity of their task.

First and foremost though, this is a story about (relatively) ordinary priestesses with ordinary duties in Hades’ faith. You do discover later that Mada has a more unusual parentage than it initially seems (though this is more a matter of exploitation and religious pain than, say, being a secret chosen one), but she understands the city of Elysium through mortal lens: the gods are distant, holy, and terrifying. Even when she attracts their attention—and eventually the attention of a pilot serving Hades—she never sees herself as more than a humble acolyte, and to her, her place will always be one of faith and service.

Like any survivor of complex trauma, she doubts herself and second-guesses her decisions, and sometimes lashes out even at people who love her because she’s not been given an opportunity to resolve her problems (and certainly the way life in Elysium is structured—as well as its coming crisis—doesn’t help). Her emotional outbursts, and the way she can backslide even when her life is improving, are written with thought and empathy. Emotionally, the book ends on a cliffhanger, and I’m pretty excited to see where Madalithea’s story goes afterward.

(She’ll have fairly significant role in The Persephone Effect, so please look forward to that!)

A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton. Literary. It is 1998; Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa are teenagers, and they are making Saga of the Sorceress, a game that will change everything, if only for the three of them. 18 years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on the scattered drives of its creators. They have never met in person and have been out of touch for years, but none have forgotten the sorceress or her unfinished quest.

One of the Boys by Victoria Zeller. Young adult. Grace Woodhouse has left a lot behind. She used to have a great friend group, an amazing girlfriend, and a right foot set to earn her a Division I football scholarship — before she came out as trans. When a chance meeting cracks the door to college football back open, she has to decide how much of herself she’s willing to give up for the game she loves.

Memory of Olympus by Maria Ying. Science fiction. A collection of stories set in a futuristic Greek mythology milieu, detailing the gods’ rebellion against the Titans.

Sugar and Spice by Bailey Saxon. Fantasy. A collection of Black trans lesbian stories with a mix of romance and erotic romance.

A Quick Stop in Paradise by Lily Seabrooke. Contemporary romance. A vacation romance with class-difference, coming-out, and kissing-the-girl-your-boyfriend-tried-to-cheat-with dynamics.

The Essence of the Eye by Jemma Topaz. Urban fantasy. Rosemary is having a little trouble with her head — it keeps falling off. Maybe a trip to the doctor on Terat, the monster world, will fix it right up? But for trans girls, trips to the doctor rarely go well, and in short order she finds herself chased through the strange world by monster gangs, kidnappers, and assassins.

And… Now She’s Empress of the Galaxy!? by Fern V. Beedok. Fantasy. Svetlana has finally properly gone to space, to inherit her title of Empress of the Galaxy. And she’s brought her whole polycule along. Can Svetlana romance her way to another resolution of galactic tensions?

Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson by Tourmaline. Nonfiction. Black transgender luminary Tourmaline brings to life the first definitive biography of the revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most important and remarkable figures in LGBTQIA+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy.

Worthy of the Event: Essays by Vivian Blaxwell. Nonfiction.

Unboxing Libby by Steph Cherrywell. Middle grade. AI meets American Girl Dolls in this quirky novel about a group of preteen androids who have been cast aside and have to make their own way in the world.

Yellow Dusk by Rose Novick. Poetry.

Authority: Essays by Andrea Long Chu. Nonfiction. Many worry that criticism is suffering from a crisis of authority. In a world where everyone’s a critic, what is criticism for? Since her canonical 2018 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a leading public intellectual and a bold cartographer of the new landscape of taste itself.

When the Harvest Comes by Denne Michele Norris. Literary. A young Black gay man reckoning with the death of his father must confront his painful past — and his deepest desires around gender, love, and sex.

Low Orbit by Kazimir Lee. Graphic novel. An atmospheric and profound coming-of-age graphic novel about a Malaysian American teen carving out her own identity in the uneasy space between friends and family.

Goodbye Hello by Heather O’Malley. Contemporary romance.

The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis. Memoir. A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.

To Please Her by Elena Abbott. Erotic romance. Sabrina can’t keep Delilah off her mind, despite how much she tries. As Delilah leads her into the world of BDSM, Sabrina discovers a new submissive side to her sexuality. But Delilah only promises her one night: one night of play, of fun, of pleasure.

One Day in June: A Story Inspired by the Life and Activism of Marsha P. Johnson by Tourmaline. Nonfiction. This vibrant and joyful picture book celebrates the legacy of Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman and activist who played an instrumental role during the Stonewall Riots that lead to PRIDE month, written by award-winning filmmaker and artist Tourmaline.

Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman by Harron Walker. Memoir. A searing journey through the highs and lows of twenty-first century womanhood from an award-winning journalist beloved for her unflinchingly honest and often comedic appraisals of pop culture, identity, and disillusionment

Maybe This Will Save Me: A Memoir of Art, Addiction and Transformation by Tommy Dorfman. Memoir. For years, Tommy Dorfman turned her back on her thoughts and emotions, hoping they’d simply go away. After a lifetime of confusion, she finally gained clarity around her gender and began to transition.

Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850–1950 by Eli Erlick. Nonfiction. Highlighting influential individuals from 1850–1950 who are all but unknown today, Eli Erlick shares 30 remarkable stories from romance to rebellion and mystery to murder. These narratives chronicle the grit, joy, and survival of trans people long before gender became an everyday term.

Autumnal Conductor by Lhuzie Fénix. Fantasy. A Marxist queer transfeminine retelling of Persephone’s myths.

The Gift of Blood by Vaela Denarr and Micah Iannandrea. Urban fantasy. Monsters are real, and Ryann is one of them. Chosen as a weapon in a war that is not her own, she finds an outlet for her anger in the fighting pits beneath Toronto, and on the hunt for the vampires that changed her. Burdened by monstrosity, Meg, assassin of the Scorching Dawn, drowns her pain in the blood of her enemies. When the call comes to slay the monster whipping the city’s beasts into a frenzy, she welcomes the hunt. And in Ryann, she finds a violent thirst for blood—and the opportunity to feed her own.

Love in Exile by Shon Faye. Memoir. Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.

Chasers by Mariah Darling and Eve Harms. Splatterpunk horror. When Lenora, a Black trans woman in her thirties, finally finds a decent apartment in Los Angeles, she’s excited to have a safe place to live and focus on her music career. But that all changes when she discovers the peephole.

Song Of the Dryads by Bailey Saxon. Fantasy. Bianca is a Dryad with a dark secret—one that, if discovered, could lose her the community she desperately wanted all along. A story of transfeminine shaping of the self and what one must do to protect it.

When the Earth Was Green by Riley Black. Nonfiction. Using the same scientifically-informed narrative technique that readers loved in the award-winning The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, in When the Earth Was Green, Riley Black brings readers back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas where critical moments in plant evolution unfolded.

Woodworking by Emily St. James. Literary fiction. An unforgettable and heartwarming book-club debut following a trans high school teacher from a small town in South Dakota who befriends the only other trans woman she knows: one of her students.

Stag Dance: A Novel and Stories by Torrey Peters. Literary fiction. In this collection of one novel and three novellas, the bestselling author of Detransition, Baby pushes trans-genre to its limits to explore who gets included—and excluded—from the possibilities of gender.

Glitch Girl! by Rainie Oet. Middle-grade fiction. A middle grade novel in verse about a young trans girl who uses a computer game to process an ADHD diagnosis, isolation, and her relationship to gender for fans of Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff.

Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer by Dylan Mulvaney. Memoir. Mulvaney pulls back the curtain of her “It Girl” lifestyle with a witty and intimate reflection of her life pre- and post-transition.

Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy by Talia Mae Bettcher. Nonfiction. Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity.

Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood. Nonfiction. Hood turns her eye to the archetype of the rape survivor, who must perform penitence long after living through the unthinkable. In her trademark blend of memoir and criticism, Hood investigates the lives of art's most infamous women, from Ovid's Philomela and David Lynch’s Laura Palmer to Artemisia Gentileschi, the painter who captured Judith’s wrath—as well as Hood herself, reckoning with three decades of sexual violence and the wreckage left behind.

There is a spectre that hangs over modern feminism and queer theory—the radfem. That belligerent hag, her face contorted in stupid and impotent rage, distorted meme after meme. She gnashes her teeth at the patriarchy but, ever the bumbling fool, in her hysteria she merely spits at other women—and at perfectly reasonable and feminist men. Finally, the radfem, having been thoroughly ridiculed for her misplaced activism in polite society, descends to thrashing in anti-transsexual rage somewhere in the bowels of the internet. She crystallises into her final form: a TERF. Proof that her cause was whispered to her by the devil from the very start.

And so by her example is every feminist chastised. Don’t get too feminist with it now. You’re not a hysterical, man-hating, unwashed, shorn-haired, un-lipsticked radfem, right? In the same breath, every trans person is warned away from feminists. You never know when one will shed their womanly skin and reveal the witch beneath—right? Above all, you should never actually read anything radical feminists have said or theorised. That would only corrupt you. Right?

Enter Talia Bhatt: a trans woman that reads. And writes. God, does she write.

To say that Trans/Rad/Fem is (only) a collection of essays is to undersell it tremendously. It is a visionary creed and a dissection; it is one woman’s reckoning with decades upon decades of epistemic erasure. With academic papers that buried her people’s lives; with vapid allies that patted her back with one hand and shut her mouth with another. It is written with the verve of a general and the piercing oracular gift/curse of Dworkin. It is nothing less or more than a recitation of truth. Truth you already know, but must not name.

Because here’s what happens when you actually read the damned thing: you stop seeing spectres. Or quasi-religious corruption. You begin to understand. To ask questions—and to arrive at answers.

Trans/Rad/Fem is both a synthesis of the best of radical feminism with transfeminism, and a thorough beating of the worst. From Bhatt’s veneration of Wittig and respect for Rich, to her searing contempt for Raymond and disgust with Nanda, she takes a scalpel to the second wave and examines its innards through the lens of a brown, Indian trans woman living today. What is born in synthesis is not merely critique—it is a whole new body of work. Though Bhatt is underpinned by years of prior scholarship, the burning core of her theory is spun from her own life, her own flesh. And the lives of all those that are not, as a rule, allowed to speak: female, racialised, lesbian, trans.

We are told to measure regimes by the fortunes of their most abject. Trans/Rad/Fem thoroughly makes that case for the patriarchy writ large. The depth of its depravity is seen most clearly through its whipping girl, its third sex: the trans woman. And so it is fitting that she must be the one to lead feminism's new chapter towards liberation. To quote,

Now is the time for the damned to have their due, for the wails of the forgotten to echo above the “civil”, silencing din. Now is the time for all those whose struggles have been erased, co-opted, recuperated, disrupted, and sanctified to make themselves known.

Now we will speak, and you will, for the first time, LISTEN.

I hope that you do. I hope that you accept this chance for understanding, for solidarity, for knowing.

I hope that you read the damned book.

A Rotten Girl by J. Ursula Topaz. Contemporary fiction/satire. A trans woman writer, jaded from her debut sinking without a trace, is told by her agent to come up with something that’ll ‘connect with normal people’. She creates a pseudonym—a cis gay man—to write a gay male romance, and soon finds herself in the midst of escalating deceptions as she chases literary success.

Trans/Rad/Fem by Talia Bhatt. Nonfiction. Can a synthesis of trans liberation and feminism be easily arrived at? This collection asserts that, as a matter of fact, we possessed the answer to that question decades ago.

Dress Code and Other Stories by Zoe Storm. Contemporary fiction. A collection of seven trans-themed stories set in school and beyond.

Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems by Amabel Holland. Nonfiction. Explores both the capabilities and limitations of overtly political board games to model systems and make arguments.

Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan. Literary fiction. Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. She’s living her best life. Or is she?

Sweet Girls & Bluebirds by Caroline Sophia Hamel. Young adult contemporary. Sophia Taylor may have a lot of things going for her—a loving, doting older sister, a comfy group of queer friends, a supportive family, and a newfound security in her trans identity—but there's one thing she doesn't have: a sweet boyfriend waiting where she wasn’t looking.

Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies by Michelle H. S. Ho. Nonfiction. In Emergent Genders, Michelle H. S. Ho traces the genders manifesting alongside Japanese popular culture in Akihabara, an area in Tokyo renowned for the fandom and consumption of anime, manga, and games.

Magica Riot by Kara Buchanan. Urban fantasy. The last night of Claire Ryland's old life in the closet was pretty normal, aside from the alley fight with interdimensional monsters. Fortunately, the drummer of her favorite local band transformed into a magical girl and saved her.

The Dragon and Her Princess by Vyria Durav. Fantasy. Prince Darius seems eternally doomed to bachelorhood. The king declares that if he is unable to find a bride, one will be found for him… except he meets a mysterious woman who offers him a chance to break free and discover her true self.

Lilith by Wine Lo Borgias. Post-apocalyptic. The world has transformed beyond recognition. Once a place of order, it now lies in chaos, consumed by a relentless game of power and deception on a global scale. Amidst this turmoil, Lilith emerges, a product of genetic engineering known as a zek.

They Who Bring the Light by Jessica Conwell. Horror.

Sundown in San Ojuela by M.M. Olivas. Literary fiction.

A Break in Communications by Lily Seabrooke. Contemporary romance.

How to Fuck Like a Girl by Vera Blossom. Memoir.

Robin’s Worlds by Rainie Oet. Children’s picture book.

Fake the Shot by Olivia Lynd. Contemporary M/F romance.

That Night I Got Dragged Home by a Werewolf by Autumn Wolff. Fantasy F/F romance.

Flirting with Death by Fern V. Bedek. Fantasy F/F romance.

Helen Highwater and the Burning Eye by K.L. Mitchell. Action/adventure.

To Hell or High Water by Selene Kapsaski and Beth Warbuton.

The 2024 Transfeminine Review Reader’s Choice Award results have been released! Congratulations to all winners. Please check them out—it’s been a great year for transfem literature.

Because this book deals with a trans woman writer, her circumstances are a little less glamorous than what’s in Yellowface: more along the line of small presses than big trade publishing, expensive writing workshops, and six-figure deals. Pearl Camellia, a litfic author, has her debut put out by a micropress. The book sinks, and the publisher not soon after.

“That wasn’t entirely your fault, Pearl,” my agent had said. Well, typed. I had never actually met Beatrice. “They were rather incompetent, even for a small press,” she continued. “But your book’s Titanic reenactment didn’t help. I really thought your story would have broader appeal, you know, connect to normal people. But the market must have shifted. Perhaps if you’d made it more miserable, that would have hit the mark.”

“It was drawn from real experience,” I explained, again. “It has precisely the level of misery of my actual life. Which is more than I’d like, but is not infinite.”

“Right,” said Beatrice. “I’m just saying that if the protagonist got beaten up more, that would probably sell better. Maybe she could have fallen for her bully? Gritty but spicy. She mends his transphobia; that would have been a good ending, right? You could write about how you shouldn’t be transphobic.”

“Inspiring,” I said. “Maybe we can get J.K. to blurb?”

“Oh, I don’t think—ah, you’re mocking me?” said Beatrice.

“A bit.”

Thus begins Pearl’s pivot to something more… commercial, that is, a gay male romance very much aimed at voyeuristic male-attracted women (the titular ‘rotten girls’), except in a market hungry for authenticity she can’t very well be publishing that as a trans lesbian. Very well: she concocts an alternate identity, Paul Sisters, a cis gay man who absolutely loves his female readers, and plays up ‘his’ identity for the same.

It’s a delightful setup that immediately skewers ‘the market’, the publishing industry, and the many ways in which a marginalized author has to sell their identity and make it both palatable and legible to ‘the market’. As Paul, our heroine is asked to remove mentions of body hair from her gay male protagonists; she’s also asked to completely remove a secondary trans lesbian character, or otherwise make the character cis and male-attracted. ‘Our audience is very tolerant of trans genders, of course,’ her editor informs her, but, ‘I just worry this is confusing for them. They don’t really like politics.’ The audience eager for hairless gay men, after all, doesn’t have much use for trans lesbians in their erotica.

She leaned across and kissed my cheek, leaving biscuit crumbs. It was very quick; we were both nervous about public displays of affection, but there was no-one around. (On an evening walk, we had once almost tripped over a couple fucking behind a bush. We were all terribly British and made our apologies. Barbs wanted to warn them about compressing the topsoil, but I managed to persuade her not to. It left me wondering whether our aversion to outdoor PDA was somewhat over the top. But then I’d remembered that we would be doubly hated if we revealed that we were both transgender and had an actual sexuality.)

One aspect that’s omnipresent throughout the book is the fear of what’d happen if they are seen being trans (let alone romantic or sexual) in public, something that of course doesn’t appear in Pearl’s novel—it’s a part of queer life that rarely appears in media made for a straight audience (unless it’s misery porn, ala A Little Life), a concern that Pearl’s editor might have told her is ‘a little too political’, a disruption of the sexual fantasy. Pearl knows she’s sanitizing and amputating the book so the result would be more palatable, and deep down she is contemptuous toward her new readers, but she’s come too far now to stop.

As the book’s star rises, though, Pearl’s personal life begins to unravel. Her girlfriend Barbara discovers that Pearl was mining their love life for the book—turning the imaginary them into two imaginary men, something that with good reasons upsets Barbara, who sees this not as just a violation of their intimacy but an act of misgendering. And Pearl isn’t exactly always lovable: she is self-centered and more invested in her new career—as well as the public praise and commercial success she’s experiencing for the first time—than she is in her girlfriend’s feelings. Simultaneously she exults in finally being read, while at the same time feeling flashes of dysphoria about her alter-ego and resentment that she can’t claim the work as her own.

The eventual collapse of Pearl’s lies is calamitous: she becomes, as they say, the main character on social media—not quite like the protagonist of Yellowface, because unlike June, Pearl is not a white person who’s stolen material from a woman of color; she’s a trans woman who tried her best to be sincere in her writing, and quickly realized the world doesn’t want a trans woman’s sincerity or authenticity. Her actions are far more understandable, and her treatment not so much just desserts as an awful tragedy: a different person—a cis man, say—would have been easily forgiven and allowed to move on, whereas at the end Pearl is left with almost nothing.

But this isn’t a story about suffering: ‘I am one of those red dots on an aeroplane diagram; damaged but alive,’ Pearl says toward the end. She gets a second chance, at least with her girlfriend and maybe others too.

A Rotten Girl is also available in audiobook.

A Quiet Universe is genuinely incredible book that I find exceedingly difficult to speak about, because damn near everything I could say would be a spoiler. I want to recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of sapphic romance AND horror, because it is a very horrifying book that works with a lot of pretty troubling ideas. I'm a pretty hard-hearted person when it comes to horror, but there were multiple times when I felt sick from fear and worry, as the characters are drawn into increasingly unstable mental spaces and the text itself shifts and changes.

There's a lot of format-fuckery in this text and moments that'll have you going back and re-reading parts because something just...changed, and you don't know when it changed, and the fact it changed freaks you out. It feels displacing and strange, like you can never trust the page, and that's a feeling I simply adore in my horror.

The relationship-focused portions of the book are woven into the book well, balancing horror and genuine romantic joy isn't the easiest thing in the world, and I genuinely wish I could speak about these portions at length without it all spoiling a lot of the twists and turns of the book. It's a tightly woven book, with things not left dropped on the ground or easily separated from the 'core' of the story, and I'm still untangling my thoughts and feelings about so much of it.

Kay Atkinson knows the ideas that ze works with are horrifying under the surface, and dives straight down into the deepest part of the ocean. Ze also knows how to make me feel sad as hell for a lesbian robot and spend hours reading at a stretch, holding on to the hope that maybe in the end, it'll be ok.

After the debut of A Quiet Universe, a sequel has shoes to fill that seem impossible. But A Sea of Silence is a really, really, excellent book that fills those shoes and more. It takes the sharp, brutal writing style of the first book, the tattered psychologies of the main characters, and the evolution of a dystopian society after the first book's ending, and forces them into an all new type of horror: interpersonal issues.

Seeing the characters struggling to make sense of the world and stay sane as their lives fall apart all over again, months of personal issues, trauma bubbling under the surface, it’s somehow just as unnerving to see characters talk frankly about their problems, discuss ways 'out' with compassion and frankness, and more as it was to experience the psychological torments of the first book. While the book doesn't stray from cosmic horror, there's plenty of monstrous, unknowable things, the real horror comes from loss, knowing another intimately, and knowing exactly how desperately you don't want to be alone in this world. Honestly, at times I was even more unsettled by this book than the first: giant monsters and the horror of being killed are one thing, but I'm quite a bit less psychologically prepared for the horror of wanting to be loved when you don't know if you deserve it.

I really wanna hug these robots.

Because it becomes pretty obvious pretty soon what the titular Kimmy—a line of female androids sold as an all-around domestic helper and, not so secretly, sex dolls—is a metaphor for.

I never wanted to be a woman, myself. I had it thrust upon me. And my experience of becoming a woman has always been bound up in my experience of becoming an android, becoming Kay. I haven’t really thought about what it means that I’m a woman now, that I have been for almost two years. It’s just a basic fact, like the exact dimensions of my body.

Of course, to most people, I’m not a woman. None of us Kimmys are; we’re appliances with delusions of grandeur, machines for service and for sex, and I don’t expect that assessment to change even if we somehow succeed in extracting ourselves from our current subhuman position. We’ll always be constructed things.

It’s not subtle, and it doesn’t have to be: this is a novel, as the author says, of transformation and alienation. The narrator begins the book as a ‘cis man’ married to a cis woman, living in apparent domestic bliss and having completely repressed ‘his’ thoughts on gender—until, on a hare-brained scheme by his wife to spice up the Halloween office party, he’s shoved into the corpse of an android that turns out to have been rigged by his incel twin brother Patrick… and so begins both the horror, and what would come to be a journey of discovery.

Though the book is breezy and straightforward in style, you can never quite put it down because you’ve got to find out what happens next, and the subject matter is anything but breezy: throughout the book, the protagonist (now an android named Kay) is repeatedly raped by his brother—events that are not depicted graphically, but only because Kay has found a way to flee into the network of Kimmys, into a space called Infinite Fun, where she’s able to completely dissociate from her body and avoid living through her own many, many sexual assaults…

…until she no longer can, after Patrick cuts off her network access, and that is where the novel’s worst horror truly begins. Kay experiences a complete breakdown of the self, being locked inside her body and being unable to get away while she’s being raped, both by Patrick and her cis wife Emily. I think it’s notable that while Emily is depicted as sympathetic (and ultimately redeemable), she participates in Kay’s dehumanization, objectification and sexual assault, because once she is told the robot is ‘just a robot’, she thinks of Kay as no longer her ‘husband’ but an it, a doll, a thing with no interiority or even sapience. Her behavior—including her incuriosity and neglect that allowed Patrick to dupe her and continue raping Kay—nods to the behavior of cis wives who don’t want their spouses to transition, and who try to bury everything that doesn’t serve the goal of seeing their ‘husbands’ restored to manhood. For most of the book, until the very end, Emily refers to Kay as ‘John’, as a he/him. More than being complicit in the abuse, she actively participates in it.

But Kimmy isn’t a novel of misery: there are large segments of pure joy as Kay finds her way into the Kimmy network, where the Kimmys are able to bond, find sisterhood and romance, and eventually liberate both Kay and themselves. The ending is deeply emotional and triumphant, opening up possibilities of a better world.

This book is one of a kind, and I absolutely think everyone should give it a read.

Detective Jane Farrier or: How I Learned To Fuck With Vampirism And Get Revenge by Sam'ika. Urban fantasy. A brutal murder draws a detective into the unknown world, and it's all downhill from there as she struggles to come to grips with what was once thought to be the absurd and supernatural, all while trying to unravel the mystery of her own undeath.

How to Fly by Alyson Greaves. Contemporary. A brutal attack put an end to Maxwell Giordano's gymnastics career and ruined his junior year. Taylor Scott made cheer captain, and her greatest dream is to take the squad to regionals. If she can just convince him to join the squad, the two of them could take it all the way. But complications loom: Taylor's jealous boyfriend, Max's overprotective family, and then there's the small matter of Max's current gender…

The Revenge of Captain Vessia by Leslie Allen. Fantasy. Claire Vessia's been sentenced to death. Hung from the gallows and buried at sea, she rises amidst the waves as a Vampyri, an undead monster. Without a clue of where, or even what she is, and only a terrible hunger to guide her, it's only when she consumes a person trying to help her that she begins to understands what's been done to her.

Queen B by Juno Dawson. This next spellbinding installment of Juno’s “irresistible” fantasy series Her Majesty's Royal Coven (Lana Harper) takes us back to the reign of Henry VIII and the origins of Her Majesty’s Royal Coven under the beautiful, the bewitching, Anne Boleyn.

Tempting Poison by Jemma Topaz. Fantasy, short story collection. Thirteen tales of toxic lesbians. Ranging from ancient and cruel vampire countesses through to modern-day corporate businesswomen, and on to cool and futuristic dommes, this collection has a range of poisons for those that love toxic yuri.

Hot Off The Press by Autumn Wolff. Contemporary F/F romance. For fans of Delilah Green Doesn't Care and Written in the Stars comes a slow-burn lesbian romance about putting broken hearts back together and finding renewed magic in love.

Still Life by Katherine Packert Burke. Literary fiction. Everything in Edith’s life is approaching disaster. Her writing career is stagnant. Her love life is a mess. Her ex, Tessa, is marrying a man. Her teeth are rotting in her skull. And her best friend, Val, is dead.

Hunt of Her Own by Elena Abbott. Urban fantasy, F/F. Danaan Rias is a witch without a coven, forbidden from using her magic when her sister’s corrupt power led to unspeakable tragedy. Ashly Mercer is a monster hunter. As fate brings Danaan and Ashly together, their fragile bond is put to the test. Falling in love with a witch will destroy Ashly’s life as a hunter. To embrace a future with Ashly means Dannan has to come to terms with her past.

A Sea of Silence by Kay F. Atkinson. Sci-fi horror. Ten years following the disaster aboard the starship Upon Silver Tides, the fleet has changed, and not for the better. Mortality makes the greedy desperate. Wealth begins to pool as those hungry for opportunity exploit the vulnerable to climb a once-ossified social hierarchy, while those who fall away from the gold rush with nothing to show for it become vicious, always in search of another victim upon which to inflict their anger.

Embodied Exegesis edited by Ann Leblanc. Embodied Exegesis is an anthology of cyberpunk and posthuman stories written by transfem authors. The included stories explore the limits of the genre: gender-affirming cybernetics, the literary surveillance state, transcendent hive-minds, a transgender coffee machine, and weaponized shitposts.

Girlmode by Magdalene Visaggio. Graphic novel.

I Don't Want To Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. A transsexual woman pieces together fragmented details of a repressive religious childhood and an unsupportive family, drawing from autobiographical experiences of the poet’s life.

The Sunforge by Sascha Stronach. Fantasy. Sascha Stronach returns in this queer, Maori-inspired Endsong series about a police officer back from the dead who will stop at nothing to save her city from the evil that threatens to destroy it, perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and Black Sun.

The Sapling Cage: A Novel by Margaret Killjoy. Epic fantasy. In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of earth magic, power struggle, and self-invention in an own-voices story of trans witchcraft.

Kimmy by Alyson Greaves. Sci-fi. John and Emily are a perfectly normal couple living in near-future suburban America, with plans to attend a perfectly normal Halloween party with Emily dressed in a perfectly normal android costume. But Emily has an accident, so John steps up to take her place, and that’s where things start to go wrong. Because the hollowed-out android they bought from John’s brother is supposed to be dead, and isn’t supposed to be influencing his actions, and when the time comes to take it off, it’s supposed to let him out...

Love Skull by Emma Alice Johnson. Short story collection.

An actress in our midst! by Liliana Chaos. Urban fantasy. Jessica has always loved two things: Acting and the magical girls. So when some demonic spirit appears before her and invites her into the demon army to fight against the magical girls? It couldn’t be more perfect! Using her skills as an actress, infiltrating her idols’ enemies should be a piece of cake!

Bad Luck Charm by Lily Seabrooke. Contemporary romance.

Her Lady of Steel and Fire by Fern V. Bedek. Fantasy. Nadezhda, princess of the isolated Grand Duchy of Moesia, has been betrothed to a foreign prince in a diplomatic maneuver. Needing to travel without attracting attention through hostile nations, her father hires a single female wandering knight to serve as her guard.
As the pair travel towards the unwanted marriage she finds herself instead drawn towards the her guardian in shining armour. Only to discover there is more to the other woman than meets the eye.

Saltbrook: An Alicia Lake Investigation by Dee Arbacauskas. Fantasy.

There is an argument to be made that the true horror underlying Cronus’ devourment of his progeny is not in the viscerality of the act, but the inversion inherent to it. Children, after all, are destined to supplant their elders, to imbibe the best of their forerunners while rectifying their mistakes in a natural cycle of growth, of evolution. The atrocity Cronus commits is one of stagnation, hubristically believing that he can stymie this forward march, that he can break the cycle of succession and reign eternal. His demise, alongside his fellow Titans’, is a foundational lesson in the futility of railing against one’s obsolescence.

In The Hades Calculus, this lesson remains forefront in Demeter’s mind; it might, in fact, be her singular obsession, her animating drive. Most stories that retell the myth of Hades and Persephone tend to sideline Demeter, often in uncomfortable ways, despite the tale in many ways being about the grief of mothers with little say over their daughter’s destinies in harshly patriarchal cultures. Demeter’s anguish at having her daughter stolen away, her righteous fury at the agency denied to both her and her child, is frequently recast as envy or bitterness, highlighted as the impotent wailing of a haggard crone jealous of her maiden daughter’s fortunes. Somehow, even retellings that are dubbed ‘feminist’ merely for being from a woman’s perspective fail to center the agency of women as much as an ancient Greek tale, villainizing Demeter so that she may be humiliated by the men who claim her daughter as a prize.

Hades Calculus seems to wink and nod at this context, given how its opening carefully primes the reader to expect a similarly constructed version of the goddess of harvest. Her possessiveness over Persephone is both evident and unsettling, with her confining Persephone to the gilded edges of her estate. There is, however, much more to Demeter’s behavior and to the intricacies of her hidden machinations than meets the eye. While it is through Persephone that we experience much of the world and narrative, it is Demeter’s presence that hangs over it most prominently, like a shroud; even in moments of triumph, of Persephone seemingly clawing her freedom back with bloody nails, we cannot help but wonder if we are simply seeing another seed planted or another plan coming to fruition that ultimately tilts the calculus in the Mother of Wheat’s favor.

For that is inevitability that Hades Calculus grapples with most viscerally of all, the singular question that haunts every character and is likely to resonate with nearly every reader: can we escape our programming? The genre trappings of science fiction, its familiar devices of robotics and AI and algorithmic attunement are expertly repurposed into metaphors for abuse, parenting, and the outsize influence our progenitors hold over our very psyches. Echoes of the Titanomachy reverberate across every page, with every god’s characterization and behavior informed by the toll this rebellion against their creator exacted. Zeus’ fixation on opulence in defiance of her predecessors’ sterility, Hades’ fixation on being a memorial for the ones they’ve lost, and yes, even Demeter’s fixation on being in control, on lasting eternal when the Titans could not—all of it reflects how the war personally scarred them, and does a great deal to make every god distinct, memorable, and ironically humanized.

Persephone’s relationship with Demeter thus stands in harsh relief against Demeter’s relationship to the Titans, an approach that the Hades Calculus may well be unique in taking up. She is a cyborg, a killer, an incarnate weapon made flesh, her mother’s pride and joy. The book here makes the truly brilliant choice to cast Persephone’s struggles in a remarkably resonant light by depicting how Demeter views Persephone as an extension of herself, as a tool to be purposed to her own ends. Few of us could relate to awakening, fully-conscious, in a tank of synthetic amniotic fluid and having to fight for our very survival, but we can much more readily grapple with the existential agony of struggling to be more than what our creators wish us to be, to grow and evolve and exceed their vision of us. In that sense, Hades Calculus leaves many contemporary retellings in the dust by texturing the fraught relationship between Demeter and Persephone rather than filling it with androcentric cliches and a fixation on marriage and desirability. That Persephone’s ambitions are so directly tied to questions of agency, to whether she can be something other than what those who have historically penned her fate wish her to be, is a deliciously clever bit of subversion making this story all the meatier.

It is a gambit that enables Persephone to truly shine and take center stage, giving the readers much to sink their teeth into. Persephone fights in arenas both bloody and cerebral, buffeted as much by the turbulent politics of Elysium as she is by colossi and clones, fighting as viciously as she is able to carve out a place for herself in an endlessly hostile clime. She proves as hardy as she is savage and truly captivates the reader’s attention, placing her at the center of the tale in a way few stories even attempt to. Hades Calculus knows that Dread Persephone is a goddess of death whose existence even predates Hades’ and was the subject of a fair few mystery cults, a chthonic figure whose true name was spoken in whispers, and it more than gives the goddess her due.

All the same, the shadow that Demeter casts is long, even without a direct point-of-view chapter. We find ourselves asking, as Persephone does whether her victories are truly her own. We find ourselves wondering, as many who have been subject to the narcissism and abuse of parents, whether children can ever be free of their parents’ toxicity, or whether the poisons will forever lurk underneath the surface, germinating and burrowing deep within us, to inevitably sprout and prove that however much we may try, we all eventually become our makers.

That primal fear may well be the true horror at the core of Hades Calculus. While the book does not lack intimacy, it does remind the reader at every turn that it is first and foremost a body horror, a story whose most inflamed passages still drip ruddy. A primal, feral hunger runs through the entire ordeal, animating the pages with a verve that brings to mind Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. The love between lesbians is ferocious, untamed, and much more than skin-deep, penetrating to the entrails, gripping with a madness that is only comprehensible to those who have wanted to devour as they are devoured. Hades Calculus is a truly lesbian book in text and theme, in every plot beat and minor motif, and is all the more brilliant for it.

In many ways, it is a transcendental experience, a work whose inspirations reach as far back a preclassical Greece and see as far in the future as some of our most moving transhumanist tales. Readers will find themselves gripped by Dionysian madness one moment and chafing against their own embodied limitations, as Motoko Kusanagi did, the next. Often, the way the book amalgamates these various sources seamlessly seems impossible; it stands nonetheless, a flawless alchemical achievement, a testament to the endless creativity—and possibility—of lesbian literature.

Do not ask if you need to read The Hades Calculus. Ask why you’re still reading this instead of ordering it.

The Default World by Naomi Kanakia. Literary fiction. A trans woman sets out to exploit a group of wealthy roommates, only to fall under the spell of their glamorous, hedonistic lifestyle in tech-bubble San Francisco.

The Brightest Stars by Zoe Storm. Sci-fi. Estelle and her mentor unearth long-lost knowledge which, if revealed, could dramatically shift the balance of power between nations, and possibly even turn the ongoing cold war between the major factions in the Solar System into a blazing hot one. Now Estelle has to flee, leave her home behind in a bid to keep that knowledge from falling into the wrong hands; and along the way, she’ll have to decide where the lines of loyalty are drawn… and whom she can trust.

The Hades Calculus by Maria Ying. Far-future cyberpunk, F/F/NB. A Hades/Persephone retelling where Hades is a cyberpunk god and Persephone is the sworn pilot for her giant mecha. Together they must survive the politics of the Pantheon—and the monsters that besiege the gates of their city.

Song of the Tyrant Worm by Hailey Piper. Horror. Time breaks and starlight dies beneath uncompromising gods in the reality-shattering conclusion to The Worm and His Kings saga.

The Price of a Princess by Ruby Roberts. Fantasy and sci-fi. A collection of five short stories about bounty hunters and supervillains, witches and robots, lesbians and terrible women.

The Brute of Greengrave by Jemma Topaz. Fantasy. A collection of novellas taking place in alt-present England, where witches rule and command their dolls in both war and the bedroom.

A Little Vice by Erin Elkin. Fantasy. A trans magical girl story for anyone who's ever felt like there's wonder and beauty in the world, but it's not meant for them.

Blood of Gorgon by Selene Tang. Urban fantasy, F/F. Fresh from fighting for her life, Ashavi Kaur—clone of the world's most notorious mercenary commander—must now unlock the mysteries of her creation: how was she made? Where did those memories, and the soul of her predecessor, go?

Blame My Virgo Moon by Freja Nicole Woolf. YA, contemporary. Life should be Gucci gooseberry gorgeous for loved-up Cat. And it is… until her über-cool and swoonsome girlfriend, Morgan Delaney, takes on Cat’s friend – and the most powerfully popular influencer in Lambley Common – Siobhan Collingdale, for the hotly contested spot of Head Girl.

I Dream of Dancing by Gwen Leonhard. Urban fantasy. After spending her last semester at the Sophia Institute of Art and Magic in heartbreak, Acelina realises that she must finally overcome her shyness. She decides to ask her friend Florence out on a date. To her own surprise, she learns that being rejected is nowhere near as scary as being accepted – especially because being an undead girl sometimes brings unwanted side effects to the table.

As usual, we’re running a Pride Bundle this year, with primarily trans fem contributors, with a price tag of $29 for $297.65 worth of content. This year we’ve got books, games, and TTRPGs from 30 contributors from Ukraine, India, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand and more. I hope you’ll check it out! Among other things, it includes 5 audiobooks, which is incredible value.

The titular story itself is about pushing back against this social order, told from the perspective of a daughter of said aristocracy. Despite the setting being trans-normative, “Brute” deftly engages with the experience of being othered:

Long before I was—by choice—a traitor and—mostly by choice—a murderer, I was an unhappy child. Among the noble witch families, there are some who take the noble part seriously, and some who take the witch part seriously. Mine was definitely the former. Neither of [my parents] had found enough time, among their important activities, for anything as trivial as raising a child.

[…]

Fortunately, I was packed off to boarding school as soon as was practical. For most children of my class this was an awful time. Their parents might have been terrible, but they were at least present; so now they were homesick and lonely. I thought I was not; in fact, I was, but loneliness was like the water I swam in.

This is a riff, of course, on the private boarding schools attended by the British upper-class, but it’s also a story of how the narrator—Verity—doesn’t belong, in more ways than one (‘the fact that I was uncommonly tall and wide for a girl meant that bullies were likely to try elsewhere’). While not written as such, it’s a fantastic alternative to the infamous wizard school books: “Brute” functions as a ruthless critique of the magic boarding school sub-genre, chronicling the life of a daughter of privilege who grows increasingly alienated from the cruelty of her class, and in the end subverts the power she inherited.

In spite of the existence of magic transition, Topaz makes depiction of transness explicit and effortless… and access is, naturally, not equal; in “With Anguish Moist and Fever-Dew” the narrator is looking to serve an aristocratic witch as a maid specifically so she’ll get access to gender-reassignment rituals (though she didn’t account for her new mistress being—even for a witch—unusually eccentric). “The Scent of Witches and Hellhounds” features a male narrator, but naturally “he” doesn’t stay that for long. Many of the stories, too, have intriguing mysteries to them that will often surprise you—and some will break your heart while at it.

Stories in this collection combine whimsy with a sense of unease, that underneath all this pastoral witching fun—and all the BDSM—there is something rotten in this society, and that rot must be dealt with. Even deceptively simple stories like “The Witch of Artemisia’s Doll Boutique” have their own twists (which connects with a later story, “Investigations”, in a very satisfying way): this is core to Brute, that the appearance of cozy comfort exists as a veil for something else. Social commentary, of course, but also unflinching depictions of transgressive queerness. In that regard and more, it makes Jemma Topaz a highly unique and unmissable author.

If you have watched Crazy Rich Asians, you’ll have a very good idea of what to expect in the opening pages of Dulhaniyaa, where the protagonist Esha comes home to Mumbai from America—the extravagance, the street food, the marital promises in the air. Unlike Crazy Rich Asians though, this is a queer story, and one of the very small handful of romantic comedy novels published in English by a desi trans lesbian.

It wears, then, its politics on the sleeve: the dance instructor Billu, vivacious and larger than life, is Esha’s love interest and a trans woman. Esha herself meantime must navigate the politics of the diaspora, the complexities of homecoming, and most of all the repression of her sexuality—she is a lesbian but, after her ex-girlfriend (also desi) resigned herself to patriarchy and arranged marriage, Esha lost hope and gave in. It’s time to grow up, she is told, and submit to compulsory heterosexuality. There’s no future in the life she really wants for herself. In this regard, while the book nods to romcom conventions, it’s not really comedic at all: if anything it’s quite sad, all the more so because Esha has seen her own future in her parents’ arranged marriage—loveless, estranged, quite literally separated by continents because her father doesn’t care to remain in India.

“Jab main chota, I mean, sorry, choti …” Billu trailed off and shook her head slightly, gathering her composure. “Dancing … was the only way I could express myself as a … child, Esha ma’am.”

Unsure of what exactly Billu meant, but realizing that it was a difficult topic for her to broach, Esha nodded.

“It was fine when I was doing the bits of both,” continued Billu, drumming her fingers on the table and staring determinedly at her own knuckles. “Lekin … I never pictured myself as the hero, Esha ma’am, you know? Always the heroine, but that was a problem. That was not allowed.”

In a fraught conversation, Billu and Esha come out to each other, revealing to each other their queerness—a queerness that they both know will be subsumed by compulsory heterosexuality, with Esha’s marriage in the wings. It’s heartbreaking, a deep engagement of the difficulties of not just gender relations but the crushing weight of heterosexuality as a regime: Esha, despite everything, feels a duty and attachment to her family. ‘I cannot clasp your hand in mine and turn to the world, to our families,’ her ex-girlfriend tells her in an email that has haunted her since their break-up. ‘We are not Americans, Esha, no matter how much we sound like them.’

Between all this, there’s a lot of love and warmth poured into the descriptions of the city, so much so that the book doubles as a love letter to Mumbai: not just its streets and architecture, but its street food, which itself serves to score many of the book’s emotional beats. More than anything Dulhaniyaa is deeply steeped in culture, from the melodious Hinglish dialogue to musings on gender segregation, and it is relentless in both how it treasures and critiques that culture.

Because this is romance, there is a happy ending—even though the path toward it is so painful and difficult. ‘No one fights for women like me, Esha,’ Billu tells our protagonist, and she’s right: no one fights for trans women. The book concludes on a note of joy, but it’s not one that many western books would have ended on—there is no easy acceptance, no wholesale embrace from Esha’s family (quite the opposite: she and her arranged groom—who also turns out to be gay—may have to enter a marriage where they’re each other’s beard); both she and Billu must contend, on and on, with the forces that would see them miserable or dead. But happiness, the story promises, is still possible, and they will be each other’s strength.