Books like Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Paul’s transformations make gender feel less like a secret essence than a mixtape: embodied, promiscuous, culturally saturated, and always open to revision. These novels share its restless intelligence, erotic candor, and refusal to make queer life respectable before making it vivid.
If you liked Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, and we tell you exactly what.
Waidner offers the closest equivalent to Lawlor’s exhilarating sense that identity can mutate faster than realism can contain it. Sterling, a nonbinary migrant in London, moves through a world of sudden persecution, queer comradeship, pop-cultural debris, and gloriously inexplicable transformations. The language is compressed, funny, confrontational, and energized by theory without ever becoming a lecture.
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, the novel turns formal experimentation into a survival tactic. If Paul’s shape-shifting picaresque made you want fiction queerer not merely in subject but in its physics, Sterling Karat Gold is essential.
An academic discovers a mysterious manuscript claiming to tell the true story of notorious eighteenth-century thief Jack Sheppard—and begins annotating it with increasingly personal, unruly footnotes. Rosenberg builds a seductive double narrative out of outlaw adventure, trans embodiment, archival fraud, political rage, and exuberantly learned jokes.
Like Lawlor, Rosenberg treats queer theory as something lived through bodies, sex, clothing, danger, and fantasy. The novel keeps asking who gets to manufacture history and whose desires official records erase. It is intellectually audacious but also filthy, tender, suspenseful, and genuinely fun: a rare book in which scholarship itself becomes an erotic and rebellious art.
Maria Griffiths is intelligent enough to analyze every failure in her Brooklyn life and far too self-sabotaging to analyze her way out of any of them. Binnie’s great achievement is Maria’s voice: abrasive, hilarious, defensive, observant, and allergic to the tidy narratives imposed on trans people.
Where Paul turns instability into magical possibility, Nevada shows its messier emotional cost. Both novels understand queer subculture from inside—its language, poses, arguments, loyalties, and humiliations—and allow their protagonists to be selfish, horny, perceptive, and wrong. First published by a small press, Nevada became a fiercely loved cult novel and a formative influence on contemporary trans fiction. Its honesty still feels bracingly undomesticated.