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Another Country

James Baldwin · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Sexual OrientationSuicide ContentNew York CityLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · 736 pages

Suicide ContentSexual OrientationNew York CityEnsemble Cast
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers · 334 pages

Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior

RacismSuicide ContentEnsemble CastMusician
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Sophie's Choice

William Styron · 625 pages

The gripping, unforgettable story of Stingo, a 22-year-old writer; Sophie, a Polish-Catholic beauty who survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz; and Nathan, her mercurial lover. The three friends share magical, heart-warming times until doom overtakes them as Sophie's and Nathan's darkest secrets are revealed.

Suicide ContentNew York CityLiterary FictionClassics
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South of Broad

Pat Conroy · 646 pages

The publishing event of the season: The one and only Pat Conroy returns, with a big, sprawling novel that is at once a love letter to Charleston and to lifelong friendship.Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local

Suicide ContentRacismSexual OrientationEnsemble Cast
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Lair of Dreams

Libba Bray · 592 pages

The longing of dreams draws the dead, and this city holds many dreams. After a supernatural showdown with a serial killer, Evie O'Neill has outed herself as a Diviner. With her uncanny ability to read people's secrets, she's become a media darling, and earned the title "America's Sweetheart Seer." Everyone's in love with the city's newest It Girl...everyone except the other Diviners. Piano-p

New York CityEnsemble CastSexual OrientationRacism
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The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe · 690 pages

RacismNew York CityEnsemble CastLiterary Fiction
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams · 158 pages

Members of a neurotic Southern family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.

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Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches

Tony Kushner · 128 pages

Winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Winner of the 1993 Tony Award for Best Play. In the first part of Tony Kushner's epic, set in 1980's New York City, a gay man is abandoned by his lover when he contracts the AIDS virus, and a closeted Mormon lawyer's marriage to his pill-popping wife stalls. Other characters include the infamous McCarthy-ite lawyer Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, a former dr

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Quicksand

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

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Last Exit to Brooklyn

Hubert Selby Jr. · 303 pages

Last Exit to Brooklyn is a raw depiction of life amongst New York's junkies, hustlers, drag queens and prostitutes. An unforgettable cast of characters inhabits the housing projects, bars and streets of Brooklyn: Georgette, a hopelessly romantic and tormented transvestite; Vinnie, a disaffected and volatile youth who has never been on the right side of the law; Tralala, who can find no escape from

New York CityEnsemble CastLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Perfect

Ellen Hopkins · 656 pages

Everyone has something, someone, somewhere else that they’d rather be. For four high-school seniors, their goals of perfection are just as different as the paths they take to get there. Cara’s parents’ unrealistic expectations have already sent her twin brother Conner spiraling toward suicide. For her, perfect means rejecting their ideals to take a chance on a new kind of love. Kendra covets the p

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Faggots

Larry Kramer · 384 pages

It is a portrayal of 1970s New York's very visible gay community in a time before AIDS. Graphically sexual and one of the best-selling gay novels of all time, Faggots is the story of Fred Lemish, who at thirty-nine has built up his body into a fatless state of being in Great Shape. Finally he is ready to find Mr. Right. But from the Everhard Baths, to the Pines on Fire Island, to that place of m

New York CitySexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistEnsemble Cast
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A Visitation of Spirits

Randall Kenan · 257 pages

From Publishers Weekly As its title suggests, a powerful strain of mysticism runs through this story of personal awakening in a black North Carolina family, but first-time novelist Kenan has a rare gift for naturalism as well, capturing the texture of farm life with vivid detail. The novel follows Horace Cross, a brilliant, tormented teenager who is his family's greatest hope, through a night whe

Suicide ContentSexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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The Heart of Thomas

Moto Hagio · 515 pages

Boys' boarding school attendee Thomas Werner falls to his death after sending a cryptic letter to a schoolmate, a trauma that sends the school into turmoil until a new student arrives who looks exactly like Thomas.

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When the Tides Held the Moon

Venessa Vida Kelley · 466 pages

The Shape of Water meets The Greatest Showman in this beautifully illustrated queer historical cozy fantasy, as a young Puerto Rican immigrant goes through a journey of love and self-discovery after capturing a merman for a Coney Island sideshow act in turn-of-the 20th century New York. “Venessa gives life to the most unexpected things. I have a strong, strong feeling that this is the start of som

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for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

Ntozake Shange · 64 pages

First published in 1975, Shange's choreopoem has been read and performed because it truly revealed what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. Here is the complete text, with stage directions of the dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

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Plays Well with Others

Allan Gurganus · 337 pages

**From Amazon.com:** With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists--refugees from the middle class--hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun. Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the c

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Us Against You

Fredrik Backman · 448 pages

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Nine Stories

J.D. Salinger · 208 pages

First published short story volume by the author of Catcher In The Rye.

Suicide ContentNew York CityLiterary FictionClassics
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The Chaperone

Laura Moriarty · 419 pages

"A novel about the friendship between an adolescent, pre-movie-star Louise Brooks, and the 36-year-old woman who chaperones her to New York City for a summer, in 1922, and how it changes both their lives"--

Sexual OrientationNew York CityEmotionalRacism
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Paradise

Toni Morrison · 336 pages

"Rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year's Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what w

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