Here are 100 books that The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal fans have personally recommended if you like
The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal.
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Two people (or more!) who find a home in each other when they don't have a home in the world make my heart leap. I love romance, and I've been writing and drawing them professionally for over 20 years. I got my start writing and drawing sexy comics when I was out of college, my work has been featured in the Museum of Sex in NYC and various anthologies focused on queer and intersectional feminist stories about love and sex. I love stories about queer people, or outcasts, or people who don't quite understand themselves yet.
I love stories about outcasts, persistent f*ck-ups, people who’ve been told a story about themselves their whole lives that somewhere along the line they started to believe. I love when they find someone who’s been told a similar story, and they help each other to not believe in those stories anymore.
Lawrence Browne, the Earl of Radnor, is mad. At least, that’s what he and most of the village believes. A brilliant scientist, he hides himself away in his family’s crumbling estate, unwilling to venture into the outside world. When an annoyingly handsome man arrives at Penkellis, claiming to be Lawrence’s new secretary, his carefully planned world is turned upside down.
A swindler haunted by his past . . .
Georgie Turner has made his life pretending to be anyone but himself. A swindler and con man, he can slip into an…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
Two people (or more!) who find a home in each other when they don't have a home in the world make my heart leap. I love romance, and I've been writing and drawing them professionally for over 20 years. I got my start writing and drawing sexy comics when I was out of college, my work has been featured in the Museum of Sex in NYC and various anthologies focused on queer and intersectional feminist stories about love and sex. I love stories about queer people, or outcasts, or people who don't quite understand themselves yet.
This is a book I press to my heart. The art style, the sense of humor, and the facial expressions leave me kicking my feet every time I read it, and I’ve read it quite a few times.
There is poetry in the way the world slowly unfolds. There is mystery and darkness in the vampires and the world they’ve built, there is the pressure of the Night Court and the terrifying will of the god they worship. The softness between Lucardo and Ed feels so easy and true.
Ed Fiedler is an aging scribe in a royal palace. Lucardo von Gishaupt is a forever-young aristocrat, and member of the mysterious and powerful Night Court. When the two develop feelings for one another, both are forced to contend with the culture shock of a mortal man's presence among the deathless.
Two people (or more!) who find a home in each other when they don't have a home in the world make my heart leap. I love romance, and I've been writing and drawing them professionally for over 20 years. I got my start writing and drawing sexy comics when I was out of college, my work has been featured in the Museum of Sex in NYC and various anthologies focused on queer and intersectional feminist stories about love and sex. I love stories about queer people, or outcasts, or people who don't quite understand themselves yet.
The colors and compositions sweep me off my feet, make me feel drunk. There is so much fluidity of line I can almost see the characters moving across the page.
This book is so charming, so inventive, such a lightning bolt to my heart and brain.
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
Two people (or more!) who find a home in each other when they don't have a home in the world make my heart leap. I love romance, and I've been writing and drawing them professionally for over 20 years. I got my start writing and drawing sexy comics when I was out of college, my work has been featured in the Museum of Sex in NYC and various anthologies focused on queer and intersectional feminist stories about love and sex. I love stories about queer people, or outcasts, or people who don't quite understand themselves yet.
There are so many lovely, soft moments in this book that I adore. Catherine blushed on the other side of a closed door, unable to make a decision. Best friends sitting so close, knowing each other’s secrets.
I love the subtle humor, the incredible warmth, and the depth of each character’s angst and heartache.
The whole town is whispering about how Catherine Benson lost her virtue, though they can never agree on the details. Was it in the public garden? Or a moving carriage?
Only a truly desperate man would want her now - and that's exactly what Andrew Davener is. His family's estate is in disrepair, but Catherine's sizeable dowry could set it to rights.
After the two wed, Catherine finds herself inexplicably drawn to Andrew. But could falling in love with her husband tear her marriage apart? In this richly detailed Regency romance, duty and passion collide in a slow-burn tale of…
If society considered your desires illegal, would you save records of it? As a historian of sexuality in the US and as a queer person, I’m drawn to stories about convention-defying love. We know much more about straight people’s passions because these were the socially approved ones. Learning about queer people’s desires is more challenging—and the result feels even more precious.
Katz’s book highlights the queer relationships enjoyed by some of the most famous men of the nineteenth-century United States, from Abraham Lincoln to Walt Whitman, as well as many lesser-known figures.
The book changed the way I thought about men’s friendships as part of their private lives. Katz wants to show that these relationships forged a new understanding of gay men’s sexuality as more than physical. The result is a loving portrait of men’s affections and passions.
In "Love Stories" Jonathan Ned Katz presents stories of men's intimacies with men during the 19th century - including those of Abraham Lincoln - drawing flesh-and-blood portraits of intimate friendships and the ways in which men struggled to name, define and defend their sexual feelings for one another. In a world before "gay" and "straight" referred to sexuality, men like Walt Whitman and John Addlington Symonds created new ways to name and conceive of their erotic relationships with other men. Katz, diving into history through diaries, letters, newspapers and poems, offers us a clearer picture than ever before of how…
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…
Resonant Blue and Other Stories
by
Mary Vensel White,
The first collection of award-winning short fiction from the author of Bellflower and Things to See in Arizona, whose writing reflects “how we can endure and overcome our personal histories, better understand our ancestral ones, and accept the unknown future ahead.”
I grew up in a time when it was nearly unheard of to be out in high school. This led to a very lonely and isolating childhood, with few role models and almost no queer fiction. I'm dedicated to making it easier for the next generation by providing joyful stories about queer people living their best lives. My stories feature proud queer people, where being queer is simply an aspect of their personalities and doesn't dominate the plot. People imitate art, and by providing positive examples of happy queer people, I hope to make the world a more accepting place, one story at a time.
This book was a fascinating, humorous, and emotional look inside the reality TV industry while also being a wonderful queer romance and serious look at mental health and overworking.
I particularly liked that the main characters were flawed and fallible but also loveable, a hard mix to achieve. The story features a bisexual awakening, which is often tricky to pull off well in queer fiction but was handled in an excellent and believable way. While queerness does come up as an issue, since the Bachelor-like contestant is supposedly straight, the topic is handled with grace and rarely dominates the story.
A MOST ANTICIPATED ROM-COM SELECTED BY * BUZZFEED * LGBTQ READS * BUSTLE * THE NERD DAILY * ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT * FROLIC MEDIA * AND MORE!
A BEST BOOK PICK BY * HARPER' S BAZAAR * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
"The Charm Offensive will sweep you off your feet." -PopSugar
In this witty and heartwarming romantic comedy-reminiscent of Red, White & Royal Blue and One to Watch-an awkward tech wunderkind on a reality dating show goes off-script when sparks fly with his producer.
Dev Deshpande has always believed in fairy tales. So it's no wonder then that he's spent his career crafting…
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.
I love puzzles. I’ve made a career of tackling hard puzzles—from aerospace engineering to climate change policy (and now novel writing). A good mystery that keeps me turning pages is a joy, but a good mystery with an unusual investigator is awesome. I think seeing through the eyes of someone unexpected can let us appreciate new perspectives and see the world afresh. I wrote a climate fiction mystery with an amnesiac main character investigating because, in the context of adapting to climate change, perhaps it’s helpful to be less attached to the way things used to be; perhaps an investigator with no memory is just what we need.
As an aerospace engineer, I have a soft spot for aviation-related tales. The idea of a pilot crashing a commercial flight (with some cryptic final words caught on the flight recorder) terrified and intrigued me. The investigator for this one is the heartbroken fiance of the pilot who has to navigate the mystery while processing his own grief.
This intriguing queer story is the type I love where one mystery solved begets a bunch more, and the author expertly unfolds answers when the time is right. This isn’t an action-packed thriller; it’s a quiet, perfectly paced story about guilt, grief, and finding the courage to seek the truth.
2021 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction - Finalist
A modern queer tragedy about a pilot's last words, an interrupted celebration, and the fear of losing everything.
"Utterly engrossing. Coen is a hero for our era, darkly struggling amid the aftershocks of loss, but doing so with dignity, humanity, and passion." - Timothy Taylor, author of The Rule of Stephens
When the airplane piloted by Elias Santos crashes one week before their wedding day, Coen Caraway loses the man he loves and the illusion of happiness he has worked so hard to create. The only thing Elias leaves behind is…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
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’m always a sucker for something sweet, wholesome, and low-to-no stakes when it comes to my gay manga.
It’s a sweet and wholesome story about a mom who realizes her eldest son is gay, but gives him the space, respect, and privacy to come out in his own time. She also makes a point to defend her son’s sexuality without outing him to others. It made me crack up because I remember being that eldest son - thinking I was slick at hiding my sexuality, when I really wasn’t.
I also love how the mom gives her son the space he needs and respects his privacy. A super mom, for sure!
A doting mother and her two beloved sons, one of whom she thinks is probably gay, go about their daily lives in this hilarious and heartwarming LGBTQIA+-friendly family comedy!
Despite belonging to a family of four, the Aoyama residence is typically home to three, with Dad away for work. Mom Tomoko and her two darling sons, Hiroki and Yuri, go about their everyday lives with little to disturb their gentle routines.
But as Hiroki begins his first year of high school, Tomoko can’t help but wonder if her eldest has fallen for another boy. Though Tomoko is content to cheer…
