Books like Kai Cheng Thom

Paul can change their body at will, and Lawlor treats that power not as a solemn allegory but as an invitation to erotic, intellectual, and comic adventure. Moving through 1990s queer subcultures, Paul tries on genders, desires, fashions, and stories with exhilarating nerve.

Like Thom, Lawlor understands identity as performance, survival tactic, pleasure, and unruly magic all at once. The novel’s jokes, songs, arguments, and metamorphoses create the feeling of queer oral history becoming myth in real time. Now a genuine cult classic, it offers that rarest pleasure: a trans protagonist permitted to be seductive, fallible, voracious, and free.

A grieving trans woman constructs an encyclopedia devoted to her late friend Vivian’s favorite television series—a show that does not actually exist. Through episode summaries, character entries, and fan commentary, the imaginary program gradually becomes a vessel for friendship, longing, jealousy, jokes, and everything grief cannot say directly.

Readers who loved Thom’s genre-breaking mixture of testimony and invention will recognize the same faith in storytelling as a way to keep beloved people alive. Plante’s voice is gentler but no less formally daring, and her trans characters possess the specificity of people known intimately rather than symbols designed to instruct outsiders. This Lambda Literary Award winner is funny, piercing, and quietly unlike any other novel.

Mathilda, a Black queer aesthete fascinated by the glamorous margins of modernist history, discovers traces of a forgotten Black artist and follows them toward an increasingly strange world of beauty, ritual, and secrecy. The novel makes research feel like seduction and aesthetic obsession feel like a revolutionary practice.

Its deepest kinship with Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars lies in its refusal to let excluded people remain footnotes. Von Reinhold restores them through extravagance: lush sentences, invented archives, camp comedy, gossip, and deliberate mythmaking. Winner of both the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, Lote is intellectually serious without surrendering glamour. It makes beauty itself feel clandestine, political, and necessary.