You’ll find queer characters falling in and out of love, wrestling with big life decisions, contemplating time travel, turning into trees, having kids. There’s a book of Métis futurism, and a few collections that can only be defined as Weird Queer. These collections span a wide range of genres form contemporary and historical fiction to sci-fi and fabulism. I could write several more paragraphs like this, but I’ll refrain. I’m currently reading Pretend It’s My Body by Luke Dani Blue (out in September), and after that I plan to devour Gods of Want buy K-Ming Chang (out in July).

I limited myself to books published in 2020 and after, which means I didn’t include Look Who’s Morphing by Tom Cho, Sea, Swallow Me by Craig Gidney Laurance, or Love After the End edited by Joshua Whitehead.

Believe me when I tell you that these 12 are just the beginning. So I’ve put together a list of 12 of my absolute favorite queer story collections from the past three years. There are so many! More come out every month! There’s absolutely nothing wrong with non-queer short story collections, but as someone who grew up hungering for queer lit, this current abundance is especially satisfying. Now that I’ve started reading short story collections again, I can see clearly what the problem was: the stories I was reading before just weren’t queer enough! These days I cannot get short stories into my bloodstream fast enough. So, over the years, they mostly dropped out of my reading life. I tried to read a lot of story collections, but I’d always find myself mildly disappointed. I didn’t used to be a huge fan of short stories.

Love after the end joshua whitehead