Here are 9 books that Hijab Butch Blues fans have personally recommended if you like
Hijab Butch Blues.
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Kevin Baker is one of America's premier historians as well as one of our finest writers. He delights in language, and it shows in every sentence. Here, he combines the history of the greatest city in the world with the history of baseball. This is a perfectly researched, wonderfully written, thoroughly entertaining book that should be read by all.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Taylor Broby's opening is a thing of brilliance. His insights into his own gayness, as it relates to the extraction economy, is as breathtaking as it is informing about the mighty nation that is America. Sentence by sentence, Brorby informs us about how place shapes people, wonderfully inviting us to consider what ground under our own feet shaped us, as well.
This book takes you to places where its cold, or hot, or humid in a way so that you can actually feel the wind and the rain. You move along with the characters in their lives into some worlds that will probably feel unfamiliar, but somehow quickly feel like home. There is a lot of cooking involved to welcome you, but there are no appologies and there is no guilt.
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award, Governor General's Literary Award, and Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Spanning three continents, Butter Honey Pig Bread tells the interconnected stories of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye. Kambirinachi believes that she is an Ogbanje, or an Abiku, a non-human spirit that plagues a family with misfortune by being born and then dying in childhood to cause a human mother misery. She has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family but lives in fear of the consequences of her decision. …
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
A quirky story of AI and counter-revolution set in a vivid jungle scenario. The main character relies on motherly love to survive, but it seems like things are not quite right in paradise...
'Stylish, beautiful and strange' Jessie Greengrass
As featured on BBC Open Book: 'poses questions about whether we can love AI and whether AI could love us ... I couldn't help but develop a soft spot for Mother' -- Johny Pitts
Lena has always lived in the jungle with Mother. There they look after a holiday home in surroundings that burst with colour and crawl with danger. Lena's only other friend is Isabella, who once visited regularly with her wealthy parents and security drone, Anton. But Isabella and her family haven't been seen…
I’m a queer, nonbinary, Muslim, immigrant writer who has been reading their whole life and writing for part of it. I learned to write by reading–by devouring all kinds of books across different genres and paying attention to how words create feelings, worlds, and chronologies. I also learned to live by reading–I didn’t grow up with models of how to live a life that was true to my identities and so I read everything I could find about experiences that were adjacent to my own. The emergence of queer Muslim literature has been exciting to follow, and I try to read everything in the field.
This was the first novel I read about immigration, queerness, and Muslimness, the complex reasons why people choose to live in the Global South, and the complex reasons why people choose to leave.
I love the writing: it is lyrical and intimate, and the characters have stayed with me long since.
"Freewheeling and incendiary." - London Review of Books
"...vibrant, wrenching debut novel...sensuous and caustic, full of smoke and blood." - The New Yorker
A Middle-Eastern capital caught in the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. A day in the life of a young man disillusioned with both East and West and struggling to find a place for himself in a society ruled by hypocrisy and contradictions. Rasa works as an interpreter for Western journalists by day and divides his nights between the Guapa, an underground…
I’m a queer, nonbinary, Muslim, immigrant writer who has been reading their whole life and writing for part of it. I learned to write by reading–by devouring all kinds of books across different genres and paying attention to how words create feelings, worlds, and chronologies. I also learned to live by reading–I didn’t grow up with models of how to live a life that was true to my identities and so I read everything I could find about experiences that were adjacent to my own. The emergence of queer Muslim literature has been exciting to follow, and I try to read everything in the field.
At its core, this book is a mystery: a trans Syrian-American’s journey to find out what happened to his mother and how she was connected to an artist whose journal he finds.
But what I loved most about this book is the meditations on gender, on spirituality, and on birds. This book is an ornithologist’s dream.
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction Winner of the ALA Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award Named Best Book of the Year by Bustle Named Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Millions, Electric Literature, and HuffPost
From the award-winning author of The Map of Salt and Stars, a new novel about three generations of Syrian Americans haunted by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they carry close to their hearts—a “vivid exploration of loss, art, queer and trans communities, and the persistence of history. Often tender, always engrossing, The Thirty Names of…
Almost Home is a fictional retelling of the last great tragedy of the Civil War.
In late April 1865, almost 2,000 newly freed Union prisoners of war are packed onto the steamer Sultana, in poor repair and with a listed capacity of 376 passengers. Among them are four Indiana soldiers…
I’m a queer, nonbinary, Muslim, immigrant writer who has been reading their whole life and writing for part of it. I learned to write by reading–by devouring all kinds of books across different genres and paying attention to how words create feelings, worlds, and chronologies. I also learned to live by reading–I didn’t grow up with models of how to live a life that was true to my identities and so I read everything I could find about experiences that were adjacent to my own. The emergence of queer Muslim literature has been exciting to follow, and I try to read everything in the field.
I love the way Bushra Rehman writes about immigrant New York in the 80s – in vignettes that thread together to convey a sense of time, place, and geography.
All her characters are portrayed sensitively and complexly: from the main protagonist Razia coming into her queerness, to Pakistani aunties with their own histories and trauma, to friends who grow further apart.
I love how much this story is about women as the cornerstones of community.
Razia Mirza grows up amid the wild grape vines and backyard sunflowers of Corona, Queens, with her best friend, Saima, by her side. When a family rift drives the girls apart, Razia's heart is broken. She finds solace in Taslima, a new girl in her close knit Pakistani-American community. They embark on a series of small rebellions: listening to scandalous music, wearing mini skirts, and cutting school to explore the city.
When Razia is accepted to Stuyvesant, a prestigious high school in Manhattan, the gulf between the person she is and the daughter her parents want her to be, widens.…
I’m a queer, nonbinary, Muslim, immigrant writer who has been reading their whole life and writing for part of it. I learned to write by reading–by devouring all kinds of books across different genres and paying attention to how words create feelings, worlds, and chronologies. I also learned to live by reading–I didn’t grow up with models of how to live a life that was true to my identities and so I read everything I could find about experiences that were adjacent to my own. The emergence of queer Muslim literature has been exciting to follow, and I try to read everything in the field.
From the first page, Fatimah Asghar’s writing pulled me in. It is poetic, playful, and vulnerable.
The story is about three orphaned sisters living under the care of their uncle and figuring out how to relate to each other and the world. I loved the candid explorations of childhood, gender, and, most of all, sisterhood.
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2022 WINNER OF THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023
'A grief-soaked and gorgeous debut novel . . . A poet first, Asghar picks up on the themes of her debut collection If They Come for Us - partition and fragmentation, borders and bodies - and plays with space and silence on the page . . . this fragmentary form has the effect of ephemerality - much like life' Sana Goyal, Guardian
In this heartrending, lyrical debut work of fiction, Fatimah Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after…
I’m a queer, nonbinary, Muslim, immigrant writer who has been reading their whole life and writing for part of it. I learned to write by reading–by devouring all kinds of books across different genres and paying attention to how words create feelings, worlds, and chronologies. I also learned to live by reading–I didn’t grow up with models of how to live a life that was true to my identities and so I read everything I could find about experiences that were adjacent to my own. The emergence of queer Muslim literature has been exciting to follow, and I try to read everything in the field.
For me, this book of short stories is all about unforgettable characters: queer, Muslim on a spectrum between practicing and not, of various ethnic backgrounds. I love that the characters have complicated lives and make not easily understood decisions.
I love that the characters struggle against, with, and towards their identities. And: it’s really funny!
Award-winning novelist Randa Jarrar's new story collection moves seamlessly between realism and fable, history and the present, capturing the lives of Muslim women and men across myriad geographies and circumstances. With acerbic wit, deep tenderness, and boundless imagination, Jarrar brings to life a memorable cast of characters, many of them "accidental transients"a term for migratory birds who have gone astrayseeking their circuitous routes back home. Fierce and feeling, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a testament to survival in the face of love, loss, and displacement.
Randa Jarrar is the author of a highly successful novel, A Map of Home, which…
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
by
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted repartee…
