Here are 100 books that Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have always loved history, ever since my childhood obsessions with Boudica, Anne Boleyn, and the witch trials. I love exploring different historical periods through literature, as books can help us develop real feelings of connection and empathy with people who lived in times and places very different from our own. I like to think that, in turn, this encourages us to be more empathetic with others in our own time. Since coming out as lesbian when I was 14, I have read a great deal of queer fiction, seeking to immerse myself in my own queer heritage and culture.
Jordy Rosenberg does something clever and innovative with the historical fiction genre and reimagines the historical figure of Jack Sheppard as a transgender man. This is a bit of a two-for-one as there’s also the metatextual story, told through footnotes, of a contemporary trans academic who comes across the ‘confessions’ of Jack. It’s playful, knowing, and slippery. It made me think a lot about the nature of history and what we project onto the people of the past. It pairs beautifully with the Bad Gays podcast.
I’ve never been to the marsh and fenlands of East England, but the descriptions of them in this book have made me really want to visit them!
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, 2019 Finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award, 2019
A New Yorker Book of the Year, 2018 A Huffington Post Book of the Year, 2018 A Buzzfeed Book of the Year, 2018
'Quite simply extraordinary... Imagine if Maggie Nelson, Daphne du Maurier and Daniel Defoe collaborated.' Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent
Jack Sheppard - a transgender carpenter's apprentice - has fled his master's house to become a notorious prison break artist, and Bess Khan has escaped the draining of the fenlands to become a revolutionary mastermind. Together, they find themselves at the center…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am a queer transgender woman living in the Appalachian South. When I moved here in 2015 I threw myself into doing community-based LGBTQ history. I co-founded the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, an ongoing queer public history initiative based in Roanoke, Virginia. As a historian and an avid reader, I am fascinated by how queer and trans people think about the past, how we remember and misremember things, and what role historical consciousness plays in informing the present and future.
Queer theory can sometimes be head-scratching, but the first time I readCruising Utopia (on a camping trip in the mountains), I found myself gazing anew at the trees above me and my lover by my side. The late great theorist pushes us to reconsider how queerness is experienced and remembered in quotidian times and spaces. From sharing a bottle of Coke with a lover to memorializing abandoned toilets in the New York City subway, Muñoz revels in the ecstatic potential of “queer utopian memory” and queer world-building. Cruising Utopia is a marriage of critical theory and thoughtful storytelling, giving readers a much-needed injection of hope in these thoroughly anti-queer times.
A 10th anniversary edition of this field defining work-an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars
Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Jose Esteban Munoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.
On the anniversary of its original publication, this edition includes two essays that extend and expand the…
Judith Jones became an important mentor and mother figure to me in my twenties, in the wake of my parents’ deaths. Her personal wisdom and guidance, which I received both in knowing her personally and from the incredible archive she left behind, have been invaluable to me during a particularly tumultuous and transformative decade in my own life. I wrote The Editor as I was coming into my full adulthood, and the books on this list helped shape my thinking along the way at times when I felt stagnant or stuck or needed to rethink both how to write Judith’s life and why her story is so vital to tell.
This book fundamentally reshaped my notion of how biography–especially biographies of women–can be written. Shapland felt intimately connected to McCullers as a person and as a writer and also had an inkling there was more to her personhood than previous biographical treatments suggest.
By inhabiting McCullers’s spaces and putting herself in proximity to the writer’s material past, Shapland demonstrates the ways in which convention has limited both the stories we tell and, thus, the possibilities we can envision for our lives as women.
Winner of the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and a Lambda Literary Award
Finalist for the National Book Award
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered—an icon and idol—alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.
Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a…
Separating the true stories from the myths, The Duty of Memory provides a deeper understanding of the diverse motivations that drove ordinary people to join an underground network of French Resistants despite terrible odds and horrifying consequences.
This book takes the reader inside the true story of men and women…
I am a queer transgender woman living in the Appalachian South. When I moved here in 2015 I threw myself into doing community-based LGBTQ history. I co-founded the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, an ongoing queer public history initiative based in Roanoke, Virginia. As a historian and an avid reader, I am fascinated by how queer and trans people think about the past, how we remember and misremember things, and what role historical consciousness plays in informing the present and future.
Somewhere in their fourteen-page digression on the 18th-century non-binary American prophet Universal Publick Friend did I realize—once again—that I was nearly done with T Fleischmann’s enchanting book-length essay on transness, time, and art. I have read it three times! As a trans person, I love this book for its meditations on the transitioning body and its sexy tales of intimate encounters. It also offers a critical engagement with the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work, as well as a memoir of discovery that, like Fleischmann themself, bounces from New York City to rural Tennessee and back again, charting a geography of queer friendship and memory.
How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzales-Torres's artworks-piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles-as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality. From the back porches of Buffalo, to the galleries of New York and L.A., to farmhouses of rural Tennessee, the artworks act as still points, sites for reflection situated in lived experience. Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity…
I was an odd kid—a bookworm worried about why I was different from others. Luckily, my family continuously reminded me that I belonged. Once out of the closet, I was able to appreciate the importance of families, both chosen and unchosen. I became a writer because I was compelled to articulate that importance and maybe help others understand how knowledge, trauma, emotions, and love move between the generations. Queer and family histories have inspired a lot of my journalism and fiction, but especially my new novel, This Is It. I hope it fits alongside these recommendations that explore queer multi-generational stories with wit, intelligence, and wisdom.
This novel was like gravity; I felt like the author dropped me into the 70-year storyline, and I was powerless to stop myself from falling through its many layers. Each character was so vivid and whole that I cared deeply for each of them.
The connections between the different generations of gay men made me feel like I—a queer author myself—was part of a spanning, meaningful history full of ache, loss, love, and humor.
“Call Me By Your Name meets Evelyn Waugh in a gorgeous novel about the generations-long aftershocks of a youthful tryst.” —Esquire
From the winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly novel that spans seven transformative decades as it plumbs the complex relationships of a remarkable family.
In 1940, David Sparsholt arrives at Oxford to study engineering, though his sights are set on joining the Royal Air Force. Handsome, athletic, charismatic, he is unaware of his powerful effect on others—especially on Evert Dax, the lonely and romantic son of a celebrated novelist who is destined to become a writer…
I’ve always loved fairy tales, but it was only when I got to Leeds University that I discovered you could enjoy them as an adult. I remember enthusiastically signing up for the “Romance, Ballad and Fairy Tale” module with the inimitable Professor Wawn. I’m now a keen amateur folklorist with an ever-growing collection of books. I use them A LOT in my own writing, and enjoy connecting with my fellow enthusiasts, particularly at the Todmorden Folklore Centre, Yorkshire.
As a Yorkshire lass, how could I not love a book of tales from my native soil and stones? I actually helped crowdfund this book, so was one of the first to read it.
I love that many of the tales are associated with real local places. I get very excited when it mentions somewhere I know well. I was especially happy to find a gender-reversed Rapunzel (or "Man In A Tower") story in here. You don’t normally get many of those.
A collection of rarely heard fairy tales from across Yorkshire, plus some local folklore. It has around fifty tales of dragons, giants, hobs, fairies, witches and other folk, or fairy, tales based in Yorkshire.
Most of these are unchanged, or with very minor changes, to the versions found in old (out of copyright) books, though I've tended to soften the dialect to make them easier to read. A few, however, have had slightly more significant changes as the older versions I found were a little brief, and I took a mixture of these and newer versions to retell the story.…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
Growing up in New Orleans, my love of all things magical is the native fruit of the culturally rich soil I was planted in. Witches both fascinate and scare me a little. Reading and writing fiction helps me process what’s hiding behind those fears. My debut novel, Mind Like a Diamond explores thirteen of the most common fears in the form of a competition-style haunted house. Like many of the books on this list, it might give you nightmares. But sometimes being scared is so wonderfully thrilling, you can’t put the book down. For more book recommendations from me, bookish memes, and writing tips follow me on Instagram.
My favorite thing about The Near Witch is that the protagonist makes terrible choices. I find characters who always do the “right thing” boring, and their growth arcs less satisfying. Be prepared not to understand Lexi at first, but I promise she’s endearing in the end.
I’ve read negative reviews that everything isn’t wrapped up perfectly in The Near Witch, but I enjoyed the story’s sense of realness. My preference is for a captivating story, not always one with every answer. The Near Witch is notably different compared to Schwab’s later works, but as someone with a growth mindset, this only makes me love this book more. If you’re a big fan of her work, go into her debut novel expecting something quieter and I bet you’ll be delighted.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S BEST YA OF THE DECADE * NEW YORK TIMES bestseller * Brand new edition of Victoria Schwab's long out-of-print, stunning debut
The Near Witch is only an old story told to frighten children.
If the wind calls at night, you must not listen. The wind is lonely, and always looking for company.
There are no strangers in the town of Near.
These are the truths that Lexi has heard all her life. But when an actual stranger, a boy who seems to fade like smoke, appears outside her home on the moor at night, she knows that at…
One of my favorite sections in the library is the collections of folk and fairy tales. Especially the lesser-known tales. My novel, Vasilisa, is inspired by the Russian folktale Vasilisaand Staver, plus my question of “how did Vasilisa get so strong?” I love combining folk tales with extensive research of the culture and history of their settings, as well as delving into characters who have vastly different experiences than mine. And I love reading character and detail-rich novelizations of traditional tales. It was difficult to pick only five novels based on lesser-known fairy tales. Enjoy, then go find some others!
This was one of my first introductions to novel-length fairy tales. Shadow Spinner influenced the first stories I made up as bedtime tales for my little sisters. Like Marjan, I love playing with the many threads of traditional tales, weaving them together with my own threads of imagination. I still have folders with my first attempts at writing the thousand-and-second tale of Arabian Nights.
Every night, Shahrazad begins a story. And every morning, the Sultan lets her live another day -- providing the story is interesting enough to capture his attention. After almost one thousand nights, Shahrazad is running out of tales. And that is how Marjan's story begins.... It falls to Marjan to help Shahrazad find new stories -- ones the Sultan has never heard before. To do that, the girl is forced to undertake a dangerous and forbidden mission: sneak from the harem and travel the city, pulling tales from strangers and bringing them back to Shahrazad. But as she searches the…
I read all kinds of thrillers, but the ones that intrigue me the most are those where you’re not only uncertain of who murdered who, or what happened when, but of whether what you’re reading is real or not. For me, those kinds of mysteries elevate the genre to something profound – philosophical problems worked out through the medium of murder and mayhem. Covering both conspiracy narratives and those strange stories where everything feels like a dream, here are some of my favourites.
A short, mind-bending novel about a young woman writing a story who starts to encounter incidents from her story in real life. This book is a delight. From that intriguing opening, it evolves into a tale of sadness and isolation, set against the backdrop of a fading British seaside town.
With an abandoned degree behind her and a thirtieth birthday approaching, amateur writer Bonnie Falls moves out of her parents' home into a nearby flat. Her landlady, Sylvia Slythe, takes an interest in Bonnie, encouraging her to finish one of her stories, in which a young woman moves to the seaside, where she comes under strange influences. As summer approaches, Sylvia suggests to Bonnie that, as neither of them has anyone else to go on holiday with, they should go away together - to the seaside, perhaps.
The new novel from the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse is…
Pioneer Paddles of the Colonial South
by
William D. Auman,
Award-winning novelist William Auman, author of If Trees Could Testify..., takes the reader on a time-traveling odyssey featuring 345 bodies of water in six states within the historical context through which they unfold.
Journey into remaining Colonial-era wilderness with stories of pirate treasure, epic frontiersmen, Indigenous Peoples, and Revolutionary…
I’m an author of spy and treasure-hunting books! As a Christian, I’m always looking for mysteries and adventures of all kinds that leave my heart pounding, but the story itself contains high morals and justice. I love a dash of mystery, a cup of comedy, a sprinkle of romance, and a dollop of drama. These are some of my favorite picks. They’re all incredibly different too, so if you like variety, this is the list to be visiting. The order was automatically randomized—they’re all fantastic! The authors all have true hearts of gold, so definitely go out and support their amazing work today! God bless!
This book mixes realistic elements with fantasy. These YA characters are incredibly intriguing and there's always a sense of mysteriousness as you read it. This book teaches about friendship and investigating the unknown. It felt truly magical, as the main character, Allie Jo Jackson, and her friend, explore a mystical event that happened at The Meriwether Hotel.
At The Meriwether, Florida's famous antebellum hotel off of Hope Springs, nothing is quite as it seems. Secret staircases give way to servants' quarters and Prohibition-era speakeasies make for the perfect hide-and-seek spot. Allie Jo Jackson knows every nook and cranny of The Meriwether-she's lived there her whole life-and nothing surprises her, until the first time she spots the enigmatic and beautiful Tara emerging from the springs. Tara's shimmery skin, long flowing hair, and strange penchant for late moonlight swims disguise a mysterious secret-and once Allie Jo and her friend Chase discover Tara's secret, nothing will ever be the same. …
