Books like Stone Fruit — picked by fans

This queer memoir takes us to New York City to explore the unfolding queer life of a child of Bengali immigrants in her difficult decision to divest from parents, colleagues, and friends’ expectations for her life. After taking up architecture as a career and attending Harvard to the delight of her parents, Anjali realizes that her real interest lies in creating graphic literature. This coincides with another journey away from the expected future marriage and family toward exploring and affirming her sexuality and attraction to women. In often spare and simple settings with clean lines that let readers fill in the gaps – for example, with picture frames containing blank canvasses rather than pictures – Anjali creates her own pictures, both as a graphic artist and in imagining her own life. 

Love lies at the heart of this fictionalized memoir. A full recipe from Anjali’s father’s repertoire, a culinary interest… show more.

I love this brightly colored collection of short stories, Gumballs. The author Erin Nations writes about situations and scenarios that explain a lot of the daily troubles in a trans person's life. The comics are in part autobiographical about his current life, in part about his childhood experience of being a triplet, and in part about fictional characters. The many different stories that range from serious to very funny, never get boring and are easy and fun to read. I recommend it for queer people to relate to and people who want to learn about being queer while also having a good laugh. As a trans person, reading the comic shows me I am not alone with those daily problems. 

This book impressed me because it doesn't shy away from its subject matter. The author tells about her journey and the struggles that pile up when she seeks professional help to transition but meets instead with a therapist who quickly becomes overwhelmed as they unpack trauma and dissociative identity disorder. With a whopping 904 pages, it's intense, but never gets dense. Entry is low-threshold and the quirky characters drew me in in no time. So much so that even when I didn't know who to believe, I was ready to believe anyone. This book perfectly illustrates the problems around gatekeeping of transgender healthcare and its complex intersections with mental health.

Body Music is a lyrical compilation of short stories that play in the city life of Montreal. Each story is a small insight into the intimacy shared between two or more people. Very tenderly the author shows how love and connection are as unique and personal as people are different. It was heart-warming to read trans characters who were just one more way in the myriad of ways of being human. 

Elevation grabbed me from its starting premise until its last memorable scene. A flabby protagonist reveals to a doctor friend that his weight, as shown on his scale, is steadily dropping despite his unchanged appearance. In effect, he is less and less affected by gravity. Because his muscles have adapted to manage his large size, as his gravitational weight decreases he gains disproportionate agility and stamina, to the extent that he becomes a formidable marathon runner which amazes everyone who sees him. He develops close bonds with two women with whom he previously conflicted and they and his doctor friend help him to deal with his situation which becomes perilous as his weight approaches zero. 

One thing about being adopted is you have an in-built radar to seek out others who are too. I read Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit when I was a teenager, and since then, I have been in awe of her as a writer and her ability to eloquently describe her personal experience as an adoptee. 

This book is her autobiography, and there were occasions while reading it that I had to stop and cry. Finally, someone else had written about what I had kept holed up inside me. Her final chapter, "The Wound," speaks so profoundly to me as an adopted adult. It is honest, sharp, and fierce.

Melissa Scott takes worldbuilding to fascinating extremes in her 1995 novel, Shadow Man. Due to changes in human biology, there are five recognised sexes in Scott’s far-flung society, with man and woman joined by fem, herm, and mem – yet despite the variety in body types, the isolated and backward planet of Hara forces its residents to choose between a simple binary. With its bold depictions of gender discrimination and violence, Shadow Man is relevant to our own social battles while also indulging in a fast-paced plot and thought-provoking speculation, all while being just different enough from our own world that it scratches that escapist itch.

I always love finding work that challenges how I see things and shifts my perspective in some way. This is one of those books!

Even better, whenever I teach a group about this book and the arguments it makes about games a handful of people have a deep transformation about their understanding of games.

Reading this book will shake up how you think about video games, what they do, and how they work. And you might be in that group of people who can’t stop seeing the world in a different way because of your new perspective!

I don’t know if most librarians would understand or shelve this as YA, but Lowrey’s cast of eighteen-year-old trans punks and squatters have more in common with most trans kids, in 2006 or the present day, than many YA-marketed idyllic stories about teens with accepting families and limited substance use issues.

From nonprofits where suburban children pick fights with homeless teens to squats where young punks pressure each other into conforming to their own specific dysfunctional microculture in Portland, Oregon, this book resonates for me as tracking a moment in history—the youth of all the trans people who were in their twenties when I came out in my early teens, and were trying to devote themselves to the same community projects they had benefited from when they were runaways and train-hoppers.

River McIntyre is a swimmer; at least that’s one element of their identity that’s safely and publicly established. But when he ends up “swimming” in the wrong place—a shark tank—it kicks off a journey of self-discovery that will change them forever. It’s such a brilliant path, taking place over the course of years and through different IDs and realizations, and I love the way everything—including River’s chosen name—always comes back to the water.