Here are 100 books that In the Lives of Puppets fans have personally recommended if you like
In the Lives of Puppets.
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One of my favorite bits of praise for my books was Michael Silverblatt, of KCRW, saying, "There is no one else like her—she invents a new improvised form for her fiction." The last five books of fiction I’ve written (my total is nine) have been webs, spinning out from one character to another, across different times and places. It lets me be intimate and distant both at once. So I’ve naturally loved reading writers who’ve done this in various ways. People like to quote John Berger saying, “Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one,” and I’m in line with that.
The novel is set in three end-of-century time-frames—1893, 1993, and 2093. In the opening, set in a mansion on Washington Square in New York, we discover we’re in an America where same-sex marriage has been legal for a long time, and a young man is about to run off with a suitor his father distrusts (a new version of a Henry James plot). The next section is in Hawaii, the colonized Paradise, where descendant characters (with the same set of names, juggled) stumble and grab what they can of freedom and love. My favorite section is the last, where characters with those recurring names are in a New York of “cooling suits” and “decontamination chambers” and totalitarian rule. This is a wild and really quite brilliant book, whose sprawling parts are fueled by a searing vision.
'This magisterial follow-up to A Little Life offers three books in one . . . Yanagihara weighs up damage and privilege - social, emotional, political, colonial in a gripping, immersive ride through alternative Americas.' - The Guardian 'Best Reads For Summer'
'After the painfully affecting [A Little Life] To Paradise gives us three stories far apart in space and time but each unique in their power to summon the joy and complexity of love, the pain of loss. I'm not sure I've ever missed the world…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I've been aware since childhood how people are battered by political and social forces. My family lived in Taiwan in the 1950s, when it was an impoverished, insecure place. Later, back in D.C., the Civil Rights movement and nascent counterculture and my mother's death deepened my conviction that conflict and fragility are facts of life. Novels like these five, whose characters face overwhelming situations, nurture our reserves of empathy. In my memoir of adolescence, I reexamined how, at 16, I tried to handle the jigsaw pieces of looming adulthood, gay panic, family tragedy, and social upheaval. That needed all the empathy—for myself—that I could muster.
I was captivated by the central relationship, a love affair between two grunt soldiers in World War I. That's quite unlikely, but it hints at a positive outcome or dangles a thread of something hopeful. And that kept me hooked through the decades-long saga of war, displacement, exile, and loss from Europe across the Middle East to China—in a refugee caravan, on foot!—ending in the present, in Israel.
Hemon, an immigrant to the U.S. from Sarajevo, writes in English, his second language, which, for me as a writer, makes this kaleidoscopic story an even more dazzling achievement. He's playful with language, too, not unlike Joyce. And playful with the possible; there's magic realism, but with a light touch. An all-time fave. I'm going to read it again.
'This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon's masterpiece' - David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
The epic, cross-continental tale of a love so strong it conquers the Great War, revolution, and even death itself.
As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies can't put in perspective.
I became aware of the struggles of the LGBTQ community as a 22-year-old touring the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, where hundreds of gay men were imprisoned—my mother was a Holocaust survivor who survived Auschwitz. A month later, in October 1978, after I returned to San Francisco, Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were murdered. As a hippie, San Francisco seemed extremely tolerant, but after the murders, I realized there was a monumental struggle for “unalienable rights” in the LGBTQ community. I started photographing LGBTQ political events and, for six years, documented the “gay liberation movement” as it exploded across the streets of New York and San Francisco.
I was mesmerized by this masterfully written and engrossing page-turner that emotionally landed me in the intimate orbit of Anthony Malone and Andrew Southerland, the book’s two main characters.
Honest and unflinching, it describes a life and culture unknown to me in such a beautiful, romantic way that, although intrinsically tragic, I regretted not being a part of it.
Holleran illuminates a period essential to understanding LGBTQ history, “Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with a moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after what you have dreamed, long for, the face shatters every time.”
'Astonishingly beautiful... The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation' Harpers
'A life changing read for me. Describes a New York that has completely disappeared and for which I longed - stuck in closed-on-Sunday's London' Rupert Everett
Young, divinely beautiful and tired of living a lie, Anthony Malone trades life as a seemingly straight, small town lawyer for the disco-lit decadence of New York's 1970's gay scene. Joining an unbridled world of dance parties, saunas, deserted parks and orgies - at its centre Malone befriends the flamboyant queen, Sutherland, who takes this new arrival under his preened wing.…
A human child raised by the fae is an uncommon thing. But Rafi was such a child.
Now grown, half-fae but mortal, he lingers on the edge of human society in Miryoku, a nearby town sharing a border with fae territory. He doesn’t want to join the human world properly;…
Sylvia Barry is our invention, a solitary witch who writes queer romance from her lighthouse keep. As a pair of co-authors, one of us grew up with the dry humor of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, and the other grew up with fanfiction and romance tropes. We came together to write quirky, queer romances that are playful and ironic but also deal with deeper themes of self-discovery, trauma healing, and community. Rivals-to-lovers and grumpy/sunshine are our favorite tropes to write, especially in dual (or more!) POV, because the Yearning is always juicy, and we play off each other’s energy as we write our opposing characters.
It’s Oscar Wilde and the cast of Monty Python having an orgy on the set of Bridgerton–what’s not to love?
Alexis Hall is an auto-buy author for us, and Something Fabulous is one of our favorites. It’s a hysterical romp–sexy and romantic but also deeply irreverent and laugh-out-loud funny. Chock full of shenanigans, relatable and diverse characters, and a fresh reimagining of Regency romance.
We love a grumpy duke. We love a chaotic, wide-eyed ward. We LOVE Sir Horley Comewithers and his questionable cabin in the woods. There’s a scene with a bee that has caused irreparable damage to our lungs and ribs.
From the acclaimed author of Boyfriend Material comes a delightfully witty romance featuring a reserved duke who’s betrothed to one twin and hopelessly enamoured of the other.
Valentine Layton, the Duke of Malvern, has twin problems: literally.
It was always his father’s hope that Valentine would marry Miss Arabella Tarleton. But, unfortunately, too many novels at an impressionable age have caused her to grow up…romantic. So romantic that a marriage of convenience will not do and after Valentine’s proposal she flees into the night determined never to set eyes on him again.
Arabella’s twin brother, Mr. Bonaventure “Bonny” Tarleton, has…
On paper, it would be easy to think I’m the wrong person to recommend these books and write my own, which would fit easily onto this list. But as a lover of love and someone who has always enjoyed the company of men, particularly gay men, this is an area I have passion for - seeing hopeful and authentic love stories written for the masses.
This is another book with a very relatable main character. I’ve been in Dom’s shoes, trying to navigate complicated friendships while also dealing with my own life struggles and insecurities.
Being able to connect with the main character so deeply made the payoff at the end incredibly satisfying. And his love interest, Bucky, was truly swoon-worthy.
He's always been the token gay best friend. Now, stuck between a warring bride and groom hurtling toward their one perfect day, he's finally ready to focus on something new: himself.
Domenic Marino has become an expert at code-switching between the hypermasculine and ultrafeminine worlds of his two soon-to-be-wed best friends. But this summer-reeling from his own failed engagement and tasked with attending their bachelor and bachelorette parties-he's anxious over having to play both sides.
The pressure is on. The bride wants Dom to keep things clean. The groom wants Dom to "let loose" with the guys. And Dom just…
Incarceration is a gigantic problem in the US, especially because of its connection to racial injustice. I have no firsthand experience with prison or the system, and yet it looms large in my imagination and my deepest fears. That should not be the case merely because I’m a Black gay American, but here we are. I feel that with the help of my mother and others, I have managed to sidestep a lot of the potential pitfalls of people’s misguided perception of my identity, but I have an active, paranoid imagination and profound survivor guilt, so I gravitate toward stories about people at who are odds with our society in ways that reflect that precarious status which allows me to explore a wide range of human experiences.
This book has a provenance that’s almost like a prison
sentence: released in 1953 under the title Cast the First Stone, it
would have been Himes’ first novel, but its frankness about homosexual
relationships in prison and the fact that a Black writer had written white
main characters, made publishers shit their pants and doctor the life out of it
to make it conform to 50s market expectations. Of course, in the process, they
ruined it.
But in 1998, Old School Books released Himes’ "director’s cut,” a much different, more beautiful, raw, and thoughtful book that’s as much about prison life as it is about the prison of masculinity. Paradoxically, prison
seems to be a place where people indulge homosexual desires, though the
atmosphere somehow remains homophobic.
Reading this book could foster more
compassion for queer desires, whether those of prisoners who identify as
LGBTQIA+, or those who claim…
A classic restored-the complete and unexpurgated text of a great African-American writer's brutal and lyrical novel of prison life. First published in reduced and bowdlerized form in 1952 as Cast the First Stone, Yesterday Will Make You Cry was Chester Himes's first, most powerful, and autobiographical novel. This Old School Books edition presents it for the first time precisely as Himes wrote it, a sardonic masterpiece of debasement and transfiguration in an American penitentiary and one of his most enduring literary achievements.
A heartfelt romantic fantasy set in a whimsical traveling theatre troupe—where the newest member is fleeing home, and the lead actor is hiding a dangerous fae curse.
Vai Delvecchio, escaping a family scandal, joins the eccentric Quicksand Theatre Company, where magic fuels both stage tricks and real-world consequences. As they…
I grew up feeling invisible in media, and absent in history. My Iranian history was hidden from me by a culture that believed shielding young people from trauma was the right thing to do, and my queer history was hidden from me by a homophobic time. I’m passionate about the power of seeing yourself represented in storytelling and in history, and have devoted much of my life to telling queer stories, and queer historical stories. As a parent, as a queer Iranian storyteller, as a passionate believer in art as a tool for empathy, these are books I think will both entertain readers and inspire them to love their fellow humans a little more.
My personal wish is that Americans start reading a whole lot more books from other countries, especially books that shine a light on the queer experience around the world.
Ours is a global community, and we can’t fall into the trap of thinking diversity only exists in our own country and language. Lucas Rocha’s novel tells the story of three Brazilian teens who are dealing with the impact of HIV in their own unique ways. It’s engrossing, tender, and transporting.
Anyone who loves this should also seek out the work of Vitor Martins, and should demand more books in translation so we can travel through literature.
Henrique has had HIV for three years. Ian has just tested positive. Victor got with Henrique last night and thinks he might have it.
Ian, Victor and Henrique must navigate treatment, friendship and love, and eventually learn to trust each other.
Because with judgement and ignorance lurking round every corner, the real challenge isn't the disease - it's other people.
Brazilian author Lucas Rocha unveils the common misconceptions and prejudices that still surround HIV in the twenty-first century, showing how far we've come while shining a light on just how far we have yet to go.
I grew up in a culture that both fears and embraces spirits or outrightly rejects the idea that spirits live on beyond death. I grew up on stories of rolling calves and duppies that caused havoc among the living. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by what haunts us—whether it be our familial spirits that float among the living and continue to play a role in our lives, our memories, or our past actions. I’ve written three books that play with this idea of past actions lingering long into the characters’ lives and returning in unexpected ways.
Sri Lankan photojournalist Maali Almeida is stuck in purgatory and determined to find out how he died. Maali is no saint, and his questionable antics—both his sexual exploits and the questionable work he took on during Sri Lanka’s civil war—come back to haunt him as he slips in and out of places he had been when he was alive.
I loved the irreverence, the humor, and the insights into a civil war I knew little about and I was endlessly fascinated by the portrayal of purgatory and the afterlife.
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida-war photographer, gambler, and closet queen-has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to…
I’ve always loved cartoons and anime. I’m also bisexual and non-binary. Growing up, gay representation was hard to come by, so when we did get it, we were always super excited, whether it was good or not so good. Luckily, I’ve gotten to watch the world change and grow more accepting, but sometimes it’s still difficult to find good rep when you don’t know where to look. I try to fill my books with good representation so that my readers can feel seen in a way I didn’t, and I want to spread the word about some great LGBT manga that I love and made an impact on me.
I still remember when this book came out my senior year of high school, and how ridiculously excited my friends and I were to find out about it. It was probably one of my first times finding some good, wholesome gay representation in manga.
An unknown brother-in-law traveling from Canada to Japan to meet his husband’s family, with personal character growth about gay acceptance? Sign me up!
I feel like I’m always down to read more about family dynamics that aren’t your typical nuclear setup, so this is just a win-win for me.
One of Amazon.com's Top 10 Graphic Novels of the year
'[My Brother's Husband] arrives in the UK garlanded with praise from, among others, Alison Bechdel. It's not hard to see why. Not only is it very touching; it's also, for the non-Japanese reader, unexpectedly fascinating' Rachel Cooke, Observer, Graphic Novel of the Month
'When a cuddly Canadian comes to call, Yaichi - a single Japanese dad - is forced to confront his painful past. With his young daughter Kana leading the way, he gradually rethinks his assumptions about what makes a family. Renowned manga artist Gengoroh Tagame turns his stunning…
We are all surrounded by darkness. And we are all drawn to the light.
The Orkney Islands north of Scotland are steeped in stories of selkies, seal folk who swim in cold ocean waters and shed their skins to sing and dance on land.
On paper, it would be easy to think I’m the wrong person to recommend these books and write my own, which would fit easily onto this list. But as a lover of love and someone who has always enjoyed the company of men, particularly gay men, this is an area I have passion for - seeing hopeful and authentic love stories written for the masses.
I loved this book from page one because I instantly wanted to be the main character, Max Moody’s, friend. He’s incredibly relatable and has impeccable taste in music.
His love interest, Chasten, was charming and sweet, and the combination of their personalities made them easy to root for. Plus, I laughed out loud and smiled all the way through their love story.
"Bursting with laughs and so much love, Sidney Karger's debut novel delivers a truly refreshing spin on the romantic comedy…A big-hearted, feel-good summer escape."—Anderson Cooper, #1 New York Times bestselling author and journalist
When two best men in a wedding party fall for each other, they realize love isn’t a piece of cake in this hilarious and heartfelt romantic comedy debut by screenwriter Sidney Karger.
Max Moody thought he had everything figured out. He’s trying to live his best life in New York City and has the best friend a gay guy could ask for: Paige. She and Max grew…
