The 27th Annual Lambda Literary Award finalists were announced yesterday in 24 categories. The organization received a record-breaking 818 submissions from 407 publishers.

Read the full list, AFTER THE JUMP…

The winners will be announced at a ceremony on June 1.

Said Lambda Literary Board President, S. Chris Shirley in a press release: “Each year, the Lammys bring national attention to the best LGBTQ books, which are often overlooked by the mainstream media and might otherwise be forgotten. This critical program of Lambda Literary not only recognizes the outstanding work of these talented authors, but also underscores the importance of LGBTQ stories, which are fundamental to the preservation of our culture.”

We also like to bring attention to LGBT books here at Towleroad and our book reviewer Garth Greenwell turned in reviews last year for 8 of the books that are among the nominees. We would like to highlight some of those reviews here.

 

For Today I Am a Boy, Kim Fu (nominated in Best Transgender Fiction).

From Garth’s review:

“Structured in short, intense fragments and poetic scenes, Kim Fu’s novel follows Peter’s life over three decades, and one of its strengths is that Peter’s coming of age doesn’t fit into any easy narrative of liberation. Even when he does fall in with a group of young people who seem entirely comfortable with their queer identities, with rich lives and loving relationships, Peter’s response, at least at first, is to feel less relieved than enraged…For Today I Am a Boy is an extraordinarily accomplished first novel, and Fu is a thrilling new voice. She’s at once compassionate toward her characters and uncompromising in her refusal of the usual novelistic resolutions of questions that remain intractable in lived experience. Lyrical, sometimes brutal, always beautiful, this is a brilliant book.”

 

Second Avenue Caper, Joyce Brabner (nominated in Best LGBT Graphic Novels)

From Garth’s review:

“Joyce Brabner’s nonfiction graphic novel recounts the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a tight-knit circle of “gay artists, writers, actors, musicians, dyke activists, drag queens,” who respond to the devastation of the disease with acts of remarkable daring and generosity…These early pages of the book are exuberantly joyful, as Ray’s apartment is packed with friends eating and drinking and smoking together, playing games and singing songs, throwing out ideas for plays and musicals, and above all gossiping, cattily and lovingly. Mark Zingarelli’s direct and emotive illustrations capture beautifully the intimacy and trust between these queer outsiders, who create a rich and sustaining family for themselves.”

New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, Shelly Oria (Nominated in Best Lesbian Fiction)

From Garth’s review:

“Disorientation afflicts nearly all of the characters in Shelly Oria’s nimble and disarmingly moving debut collection of stories. Many of them are (like Oria herself) Israeli immigrants in New York City, navigating multiple cultures and languages; others find themselves in worlds where the usual rules (of weather, say, or time) break down; all of them are bewildered by desire…Oria’s characters are often stripped of the usual, prefabricated categories of identity: “I think, Who is this person?” the narrator of the title story wonders, “That me who isn’t Israeli and isn’t American, isn’t gay and isn’t straight–who is she?” This disorientation makes them profoundly vulnerable, able to ask with a sometimes devastating bluntness the most dangerous questions: “I think: This is what there is, this is my life. I think: Do I want it or not?” In Oria’s excellent collection, these questions result in stories that are heartbreaking, inventive, and almost miraculously alive to the subtleties of feeling.”

 

Prelude to Bruise, Saeed Jones (Nominated in Best Gay Poetry)

From Garth’s review:

Saeed Jones begins this electrifying book—one of the most exciting debut collections I’ve read in years—with a quotation from Kafka’s notebooks: ‘The man in ecstasy and the man drowning—both throw up their arms.’… These poems bear witness to the fact that to be black and gay in America—and especially in the American South—is to be confronted with violence from every side: on the street and in the home; from strangers and friends alike; most painfully, from within the self…Like the great poets his lines recall—Whitman, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, James Baldwin, to name just a few of the voices that inform this book—Jones makes a music that feels adequate to rage and grief on both a personal and a national scale. Prelude to Bruise is more than a promising debut; it’s the rare book of poetry that urgently speaks—and will continue to speak, I suspect, for a long time—to the intractable griefs of our present moment.”

 

Little Reef and Other Stories, Michael Carroll (Nominated in Best Gay General Fiction)

From Garth’s review:

“The unpredictable drift of southern conversation may lie behind the unconventional shape of many of these stories. In an interview with the writer Andrew Holleran, Carroll speaks about his desire to break free of the traditional structure of the short story, in which rising action leads to climax, resolution, and epiphany or realization. Instead, he allows his stories to find their way in a looser, less predetermined way, allowing for sudden juxtapositions and unexpected turns and constant, vivifying surprise…It also allows for the emergence of what may be Carroll’s greatest strength, his ability to inhabit the deep consciousness of his characters. “What was writing except a direct line into someone’s head,” the wife in “Referred Pain” muses, and what makes Carroll’s characters so vivid is the access we’re given to their experience of their own lives.”

 

Lovers At The Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, Francine Prose (Nominated in Best Lesbian General Fiction)

From Garth’s review:

“Francine Prose’s engrossing, virtuosic new novel uses a fictional version of Brassaï’s photograph to create a moving narrative of a group of friends and associates over two decades, as Paris devolves from the 1920s bohemian paradise of expatriate artists to the nightmare of rising fascism and Nazi occupation. In Prose’s version, the suited woman of the photograph is Lou Villars, a desperately unhappy former athlete who will become, thanks to the people she meets over the course of the novel, a nightclub performer, a racecar driver, a Nazi spy, a torturer. More than anything, she will be a tool, forever shaping herself to what she thinks are others’ wishes, manipulated in ways she never fully sees….This ambitious novel paints a wide canvas, and doesn’t shy away from the familiar figures and events of the Second World War—there’s even a wonderful scene, at once chilling and ridiculous, with Hitler himself, who infects Lou with his crazed messianic fervor. But the real achievement of the book is that the intimate dramas of its characters’ lives remain our chief concern, the medium through which we understand the horrors of war.”

 

Bitter Eden, Tatamkhulu Afrika (Nominated in Best Gay General Fiction)

From Garth’s review:

“On the first page of Tatamkhulu Afrika’s intense and passionate novel, the narrator, Tom Smith, receives a package from a man he hasn’t seen in half a century. What it contains will send him back to the years he spent in Italian and German POW camps during the Second World War, camps that, for all their horror, Tom remembers as a “Bitter Eden.” Bitter EdenThe book’s depiction of the day-to-day life in those camps is extraordinary. Captured in Northern Africa, Tom finds himself in a desperate world of starvation and ingenuity, of lice and cigarette economies and amateur entertainments. It’s “a place where anything unclaimed is everyone’s prey,” and where in their hunger men become nothing more than “meat wanting more meat so that it can go on being meat.” It is a brutal place, and yet it allows for intimacies and affections the broader world prohibits.”

 

Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, Edmund White (Nominated in Best Gay Memoir/Biography)

From Garth’s review:

“Reading Edmund White’s fascinating, vital new memoir, which covers the fifteen years he spent in France in the 1980s and 90s, feels a little like attending the world’s most fabulous cocktail party. The pages are filled with impossibly glamorous people doing impossibly glamorous things, from literary lights like Susan Sontag and Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst, to celebrities of a different stratosphere, like Lauren Bacall and Tina Turner and Yves Saint Laurent. At the center of it all is White, who for four decades has been, in both fiction and nonfiction, our preeminent chronicler of gay life. When the period covered by Inside a Pearl begins, in 1983, White has just published his classic novel A Boy’s Own Story, and he arrives in Paris armed with that success, as well as high school French and sixteen thousand dollars from a Guggenheim Fellowship…Inside a Pearl is a beautiful, hugely endearing, often brilliant book, a worthy record of White’s attempt to be true to what he sees as the several purposes of his life: ‘to teach, to trick, to write, to memorialize, to be a faithful scribe, to record the loss of my dead.'”

 

READ THE FULL LIST OF LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDS FINALISTS, AFTER THE JUMP…

 

27th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalists

Note: The number of finalists in a category is determined by the number of submissions in that category.

 

BISEXUAL FICTION

• Best Bi Short Stories: Bisexual Fiction, Sheela Lambert, editor, Gressive Press, an imprint of Circlet Press
• Extraordinary Adventures of Mullah Nasruddin, Ron J. Suresha, Lethe Press
• Finder of Lost Objects, Susie Hara, Ithuriel’s Spear
• Give It to Me, Ana Castillo, The Feminist Press
• She of the Mountains, Vivek Shraya, Arsenal Pulp Press

BISEXUAL NONFICTION

• Fire Shut Up In My Bones, Charles M. Blow, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Not My Father’s Son, Alan Cumming, HarperCollins Publishers/Dey Street Books
• Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men, Robyn Ochs & H. Sharif Williams, editors, Bisexual Resource Center

GAY EROTICA

• Bears of Winter, Jerry Wheeler, Bear Bones Books
• Incubus Tales, Hushicho, Circlet Press
• The King, Tiffany Reisz, MIRA Books
• Leather Spirit Stallion, Raven Kaldera, Circlet Press
• The Thief Taker, William Holden, Bold Strokes Books

GAY GENERAL FICTION

• All I Love and Know, Judith Frank, HarperCollins/William Morrow
• Barracuda, Christos Tsiolkas, Hogarth
• Bitter Eden: A Novel, Tatamkhulu Afrika, Macmillan/Picador USA
• The City of Palaces, Michael Nava, University of Wisconsin Press
• I Loved You More, Tom Spanbauer, Hawthorne Books
• Little Reef and Other Stories, Michael Carroll, Terrace Books, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
• Next to Nothing: Stories, Keith Banner, Lethe Press
• Souljah, John R Gordon, Angelica Entertainments Ltd/Team Angelica Publishing

GAY MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

• Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival, Sean Strub, Scribner
• Charles Walters: The Director Who Made Hollywood Dance, Brent Phillips, University Press of Kentucky
• Closets, Combat and Coming Out:  Coming Of Age As A Gay Man In The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Army, Rob Smith, Blue Beacon Books by Regal Crest
• Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, Edmund White, Bloomsbury
• Letter to Jimmy, Alain Mabanckou, translated by Sara Meli Ansari, Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press
• The Prince of Los Cocuyos, Richard Blanco, HarperCollins/Ecco
• Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, John Lahr, W. W. Norton & Company
• Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, Philip Gefter, W. W. Norton & Company/Liveright

GAY MYSTERY

• Blackmail, My Love: A Murder Mystery, Katie Gilmartin, Cleis Press
• Boystown 6: From the Ashes, Marshall Thornton, MLR
• Calvin’s Head, David Swatling, Bold Strokes Books
• DeadFall, David Lennon, BlueSpike Publishing
• Fair Game, Josh Lanyon, Carina Press
• A Gathering Storm, Jameson Currier, Chelsea Station Editions
• Moon Over Tangier, Janice Law, Open Road Media
• The Next, Rafe Haze, Wilde City Press

GAY POETRY      

• [insert] boy, Danez Smith, YesYes Books
• Clean, David J. Daniels, Four Way Books
• Don’t Go Back To Sleep, Timothy Liu, Saturnalia Books
• ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, CAConrad, Wave Books
• The New Testament, Jericho Brown, Copper Canyon Press
• Prelude to Bruise, Saeed Jones, Coffee House Press
• This Life Now, Michael Broder, A Midsummer Night’s Press
• This Way to the Sugar, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Write Bloody Publishing

GAY ROMANCE

• The Companion, Lloyd A. Meeker, Dreamspinner Press
• Everything’s Coming Up Roses: Four Tales of M/M Romance, Barry Lowe, Lydian Press
• Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction, Timothy Lambert and R.D. Cochrane, Cleis Press
• Like They Always Been Free, Georgina Li, Queer Young Cowboys
• Message of Love, Jim Provenzano, Myrmidude Press/CreateSpace
• The Passion of Sergius & Bacchus, A Novel of Truth, David Reddish, DoorQ Publishing
• Pulling Leather, L.C. Chase, Riptide Publishing
• Salvation: A Novel of the Civil War, Jeff Mann, Bear Bones Books

 LESBIAN EROTICA

• All You Can Eat. A Buffet of Lesbian Erotica and Romance, Andi Marquette and R.G. Emanuelle, Ylva Publishing
• Forbidden Fruit: stories of unwise lesbian desire, Cheyenne Blue, Ladylit Publishing
• Lesbian Sex Bible, Diana Cage, Quiver Books

LESBIAN GENERAL FICTION

• Adult Onset, Ann-Marie Macdonald, Tin House Books
• Last Words of Montmartre, Qiu Miaojin, Translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich, New York Review Books
• Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, Francine Prose, Harper Collins/Harper
• Miracle Girls, MB Caschetta, Engine Books
• New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, Shelly Oria, FSG Originals / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• The Palace Blues, Brandy T. Wilson, Spinsters Ink
• The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters, Riverhead Books, Penguin Random House
• Yabo, Alexis De Veaux, RedBone Press

LESBIAN MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

• Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith, Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks, with Barbara Smith, SUNY Press
• Cease – a memoir of love, loss and desire, Lynette Loeppky, Oolichan Books
• Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger, Kelly Cogswell, The University of Minnesota Press
• The End of Eve, Ariel Gore, Hawthorne Books
• Under This Beautiful Dome: A Senator, A Journalist, and the Politics of Gay Love in America, Terry Mutchler, Seal Press

LESBIAN MYSTERY

• The Acquittal, Anne Laughlin, Bold Strokes Books
• Done to Death, Charles Atkins, Severn House Publishers
• The Old Deep and Dark-A Jane Lawless Mystery, Ellen Hart, Minotaur Books
• Slash and Burn, Valerie Bronwen, Bold Strokes Books
• UnCatholic Conduct, Stevie Mikayne, Bold Strokes Books

LESBIAN POETRY

• Haiti Glass, Lenelle Moïse, City Lights/Sister Spit
• Janey’s Arcadia, Rachel Zolf, Coach House Books
• Last Psalm at Sea Level, Meg Day, Barrow Street Press
• Like a Begger, Ellen Bass, Copper Canyon Press
• MxT, Sina Queyras, Coach House Books
• Mysterious Acts by My People, Valerie Wetlaufer, Sibling Rivalry Press
• Only Ride, Megan Volpert, Sibling Rivalry Press
• Termination Dust, Susanna Mishler, Red Hen Press/Boreal

LESBIAN ROMANCE

• Christmas Crush, Kate McLachlan, Regal Crest
• The Farmer’s Daughter, Robbi McCoy, Bella Books
• The Heat of Angels, Lisa Girolami, Bold Strokes Books
• Jolt, Kris Bryant, Bold Strokes Books
• Nightingale, Andrea Bramhall, Bold Strokes Books
• Seneca Falls, Jesse J. Thoma, Bold Strokes Books
• Tangled Roots, Marianne K. Martin, Bywater Books
• That Certain Something, Clare Ashton, Breezy Tree Press

LGBT ANTHOLOGY

• Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call, Charles Stephens and Steven G. Fullwood, Vintage Entity Press
• A Family by Any Other Name: Exploring Queer Relationships, Bruce Gillespie, TouchWood Editions
• Outer Voices Inner Lives, Mark McNease and Stephen Dolainski, editors, MadeMark Publishing
• The Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South, Douglas Ray, editor, Sibling Rivalry Press
• Understanding and Teaching US Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, Leila J. Rupp & Susan K. Freeman, University of Wisconsin Press

LGBT CHILDREN’S/Young adult

• Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, Susan Kuklin, Candlewick Press
• Double Exposure, Bridget Birdsall, Sky Pony Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing
• Five, Six, Seven, Nate!, Tim Federle, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
• Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before, Karelia Stetz-Waters, Ooligan Press
• Lies We Tell Ourselves, Robin Talley, Harlequin Teen
• Pukawiss the Outcast, Jay Jordan Hawke, Dreamspinner Press/Harmony Ink Press
• This is Not a Love Story, Suki Fleet, Dreamspinner Press/Harmony Ink Press
• When Everything Feels like the Movies, Raziel Reid, Arsenal Pulp Press

LGBT DEBUT

• Death in Venice, California, Vinton Rafe McCabe, The Permanent Press
• Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, Megan Milks, Emergency Press
• A Map of Everything, Elizabeth Earley, Jaded Ibis Press
• The Music Teacher, Bob Sennett, Lethe Press
• Nochita, Dia Felix, City Lights/Sister Spit
• Part the Hawser, Limn the Sea, Dan Lopez, Chelsea Station Editions
• Unaccompanied Minors, Alden Jones, New American Press
• The Walk-In Closet, Abdi Nazemian, Curtis Brown Unlimited

LGBT DRAMA

• The Beast of Times, Adelina Anthony, Kórima Press
• Bootycandy, Robert O’Hara, Samuel French
• A Kid Like Jake, Daniel Pearle, Dramatists Play Service
• The Whale, Samuel D. Hunter, Samuel French
• Wolves, Steve Yockey, Samuel French

LGBT GRAPHIC NOVELS

• 100 Crushes, Elisha Lim, Koyama Press
• Band Vs. Band Comix Volume 1, Kathleen Jacques, Paper Heart Comix
• Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag, A.K. Summers, Soft Skull, an imprint of Counterpoint
• Second Avenue Caper, Joyce Brabner; Art by Mark Zingarelli, Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Snackies, Nick Sumida, Youth in Decline

LGBT NONFICTION

• An American Queer: The Amazon Trail, Lee Lynch, Bold Strokes Books
• Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS, Martin Duberman, The New Press
• The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality, Julie Sondra Decker, Skyhorse Publishing/Carrel Books
• Nevirapine and the Quest to End Pediatric AIDS, Rebecca J. Anderson, McFarland
• Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor, Hilton Als, Ann Temkin, Claudia Carson, Robert Gober, Paulina Pobocha, Christian Scheidemann, The Museum of Modern Art
• Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange, How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos, Robert Hofler, It Books/HarperCollins
• The Transgender Archives: Foundations for the Future, Aaron H Devor, University of Victoria Libraries
• The Up Stairs Lounge Arson: Thirty-Two Deaths in a New Orleans Gay Bar, June 24, 1973, Clayton Delery-Edwards, McFarland

LGBT SF/F/HORROR

• Afterparty, Daryl Gregory, Tor Books
• Bitter Waters, Chaz Brenchley, Lethe Press
• Butcher’s Road, Lee Thomas, Lethe Press
• Child of a Hidden Sea, A. M. Dellamonica, Tor Books
• Full Fathom Five, Max Gladstone, Tor Books
• FutureDyke, Lea Daley, Bella Books
• Skin Deep Magic, Craig Laurance Gidney, Rebel Satori Press

LGBT STUDIES

• After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba, Noelle M. Stout, Duke University Press
• Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, Rachel Hope Cleves, Oxford University Press
• Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture, Vincent Woodard, Ed. Justin A. Joyce and Dwight McBride, New York University Press
• Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela, Marcia Ochoa, Duke University Press
• The Queerness of Native American Literature, Lisa Tatonetti, The University of Minnesota Press
• Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings, Juana Maria Rodriguez, New York University Press
• The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, Susan S. Lanser, University of Chicago Press
• Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene, Bobby Benedicto, University of Minnesota Press

TRANSGENDER FICTION

• Everything Must Go, La JohnJoseph, ITNA PRESS
• For Today I Am a Boy, Kim Fu, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab, Shani Mootoo, Doubleday Canada
• Revolutionary: A Novel, Alex Myers, Simon and Schuster
• A Safe Girl To Love, Casey Plett, Topside Press

Transgender Non-Fiction

• Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man, Thomas Page McBee, City Lights/Sister Spit
• Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More, Janet Mock, Atria Books
• Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community, Laura Erickson-Schroth, Oxford University Press