Fall for the Book

Two writers show how LGBTQ characters can survive in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara is a debut novel that follows a cast of gay and transgender club kids navigating the Harlem ball scene of the 1980s and ’90s, inspired by the real House of Xtravaganza made famous by the seminal documentary Paris Is Burning. Booklist reviews that “Cassara has done a superb job of re-imagining a world that will be foreign and even exotic to many readers.” Some Hell by Patrick Nathan is a wrenching and layered debut novel about a gay teen’s coming-of-age in the aftermath of his father’s suicide that shows how unspeakable tragedy shapes a life, and how imagination saves us from ourselves. The New York Times Book Review describes Some Hell as “a very different literary thriller, one in which the mystery is not who killed the victim, but how those who kill might live with what they’ve done.”