Welcome to Our Queerest Shelves, your source for new queer books, queer book news, and recommendations for every reader under the rainbow!
Our Queerest Shelves from Book Riot is dedicated to celebrating the huge spectrum of queer lit, spanning every genre, age category, and LGBTQIA2S+ identity. We’ll keep you up to date on the new queer books coming out every week, the queer book news of the moment, and a whole spectrum of queer book recommendations.
At Book Riot, we’ve been writing about queer books for the past decade, and our writers have been reading, researching, and recommending LGBTQ+ lit for even longer. These books aren’t always easy to find, especially if you’re looking for a specific identity, which is why we do the digging for you to collect together all the newest queer books that deserve a spot on your TBR.
We go beyond the standard Pride month recommendations of the same old handful of titles, offering recs for queer mecha books, books with main characters who are trans and autistic, sapphic mermaid novels, Black queer memoirs, and so much more.
Whether you want to find books that reflect your own queer identity, diversify your reading, or both, Our Queerest Shelves has everything you need to make your TBR a whole lot more interesting.
Should I upgrade to paid?
Everyone has access to the Tuesday new releases and Thursday recommendation lists on Our Queerest Shelves, but if you want to support the newsletter and get even more queer bookishness in your inbox every week, consider becoming a paid subscriber! Subscribers get exclusive bonus content every week, which includes opportunities for community engagement, essays, book lists, and experimental content, like podcasts and videos. You won’t find this content anywhere else, and you’ll have access to our back catalog of bonus content, too.
How much is it to subscribe?
Only $6! And if you subscribe annually, you’ll get 17% off.
What do I get with a paid subscription?
Paid subscribers help make Our Queerest Shelves possible, but you also get some sweet bonus content out of the deal.
Every week, you get a third newsletter in your inbox, which will be different every time. Maybe it’s an essay about the queer legacy of your favorite kids’ book author. Maybe it’s a podcast about the state of LGBTQ book bans. Maybe it’s a queer BookTok compilation, or a super-sized recommendation list, or an advice column addressing your queer reader conundrums.
We’ll keep you on your toes, always experimenting with different kinds of bonus content, so there’s always something new to discover. There will also be opportunities for community engagement for you to chat with other queer book fans! You also get access to our backlog of bonus content.
What do I get with a free subscription?
Don’t worry, you still get twice-weekly Our Queerest Shelves newsletters with a free subscription!
On Tuesdays, you get a list of the most exciting new queer book releases out this week, including discussion of the ones on the top of our TBRs.
On Thursdays, you get a list of queer book recommendations on a theme, whether that’s sapphic mermaid stories, asexual sci-fi novels, trans graphic memoirs, or something else entirely! Don’t see what you’re interested in? Let us know what you’d like recommended next, and it might just be the theme of the next newsletter.
We also squeeze in some links to the cool queer book coverage happening on the rest of the internet, whether it’s a new trailer for an upcoming queer book adaptation, a thought-provoking interview with a queer author, or other queer bookish links worth clicking.
I’m not sure whether to upgrade to paid…
Our Queerest Shelves is a newsletter from Book Riot, and inclusivity and social justice are core values of ours. This is a chance for us to shout our love of queer books from the rooftops, at a time when queer books are being banned at an unprecedented rate.
We also bring those values into our coverage of queer books specifically. Our Queerest Shelves is inclusive of all LGBTQIA2S+ identities, including asexual, aromantic, intersex, bisexual, nonbinary, trans, Two-Spirit, lesbian, and gay books. We also actively seek out intersectional queer books; no all-white recommendation lists here.
Your subscriptions make this newsletter possible, and they help get it to the people who could most use it. For $6 month, you get a total of three newsletters a week celebrating queer lit, including opportunities to connect with other people who love queer books.
I don’t want to miss anything!
We got you! Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox, and you can find all of our older posts in the Our Queerest Shelves archive.
If you’ve got a friend who would like to get in on the action, be sure to share Our Queerest shelves with them!
