In 1971, the German actor Klaus Kinski performed a theatrical monologue called Jesus Christ Saviour at the Deutschlandhalle arena in Berlin, but things didn’t quite go to plan. A controversial figure in his lifetime, Kinski was irascible, egomaniacal and prone to violent temper tantrums.

The film director Werner Herzog famously worked with Kinski on movies including Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo and later filmed a documentary about the actor’s unhinged antics called My Best Fiend. The antipathy went both ways: in his memoir, Kinski fantasised about Herzog dying of the plague or being eaten alive by ants.

In his experimental novella Jesus Christ Kinski, Benjamin Myers attempts to get inside the mind of the actor during his ill-fated Berlin performance when, having cast himself as the messiah, he was laughed at and heckled by onlookers, some of them demanding their money back. The show gradually dissolved into a slanging match between Kinski and his rapidly dwindling audience.

As narrator, the actor Rory Kinnear energetically inhabits Kinski, revelling in his uncontrolled fury and scattergun insults. Rising to the crescendo of interruptions, Kinski eyeballs a heckler and shouts: “I am a genius, you piece of shit!”

Kinski’s tirade is broken up with recollections from his early life, his work with Herzog, plus scenes in which an unnamed writer – whom we take to be Myers – ponders the wisdom of his latest project. While these latter sections don’t have the same punch as the Kinski meltdown, they offer intriguing ruminations on the writing process and how much oxygen should be given to an actor who, were he alive today, would almost certainly be cancelled.

Available via Bloomsbury, 3hr 7min

Further listening

Keep Laughing
Chris McCausland, Penguin Audio, 10hr 5min
The comic and Strictly winner reflects on his early years in Liverpool, his experience of sight loss, his career in standup and his unexpected pivot to dancing. Read by the author.

Caledonian Road
Andrew O’Hagan, Faber, 22hr 51min
O’Hagan’s state-of-the-nation novel is set in contemporary London and follows the fortunes of a wealthy art historian and writer Campbell Flynn, a man who has it all until an unwise business association brings a dramatic unravelling. Narrated by Michael Abubakar.

Robert Prevost – now Pope Leo XIV – is set to publish a collection of his writings from the 2000s in English later this year.

Freedom Under Grace: Reflections on the Spiritual Tradition That Formed Me will be released in September, featuring unpublished homilies and addresses from Prevost’s time as prior general of the Order of Saint Augustine between 2001 and 2013.

The book contains “an urgent message of love and service to address the challenges of the world today”, said Campbell Wharton, publisher at Penguin Random House Christian, the US publisher of the book. The collection was originally published in Italian by Libreria Editrice Vaticana, the Vatican’s publishing house. In the UK, it will be the launch title of a new spirituality imprint at Penguin division Cornerstone. Wharton further described it as a book “for any Catholic, but also any Christian or spiritual seeker”.

Prevost became the first American pope in May 2025. Born in Chicago, he studied maths at Villanova University, Philadelphia, before becoming ordained as a priest in Rome in 1982. He was then sent to a mission in Peru. After serving as prior general of the Augustinian order in the 2000s, he was consecrated bishop in 2014, and made a cardinal by the late Pope Francis in 2023.

The collection is organised chronologically, so that “readers can observe the development of Prevost’s thinking”, writes editor Matthew Burdette in a reader’s note. Themes covered in the book include education, leadership, diversity and “the church in the world”. The book’s title originates from the text of the Rule of Saint Augustine, in which the Bishop of Hippo urges his monks to live “not as servants under the law, but as men free under grace”.

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A collection of sermons and speeches made by Prevost since becoming pope were published as Peace Be with You!: My Words to the Church and to the World in February.

You could debate what the best American LGBTQ+ book is until the cows come home, but experts at least tend to agree on the first one: 1870’s catchily titled Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania by Bayard Taylor. Compared with the well-worn classics of the British LGBTQ+ literary canon – from Oscar Wilde to Jeanette Winterson and beyond – its US counterpart feels invitingly hazy: greener and ever-evolving to reflect the spectrum of queer American life.

To celebrate pride month and the upcoming 250th anniversary of America, the Guardian asked nearly two dozen leading queer writers for their favorite LGBTQ+ book from the country they call home. Read on for their choices.

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Sarah Schulman selects

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

Lula Carson Smith, born in segregated Georgia in 1917, changed her name to Carson, wore suits and wrote books with boyish protagonists named Mick and Frankie. As she transgressed gender, she also crossed the color bar, and her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, published at age 23 in 1940, featured queer and trans characters, but also scenes with only Black people in the room. She wrote about working people’s rights, and was driven by her and their own freedom vision. Before this publication, Carson won a scholarship to Juilliard to study piano, but ended up handing over all her money to a female sex worker and had to come home. There she married a fellow writer, Reeves McCullers, also on a gender tightrope, an alcoholic and depressed. The two loved and tormented each other through two marriages, while Carson went on to become a singular, organically talented literary marvel – writing novels, short stories, a memoir and plays. She died at age 50, and her death mirrors colleagues Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, three queer geniuses who never got a grip on their addictions. I still read and reread Carson with wonder and admiration.

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Michael Cunningham selects

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

This is probably the least widely acknowledged queer novel in American literature. It’s the story of the doomed love between Jake Barnes, an American who’s had his balls shot off in the war, and an Englishwoman, Lady Brett Ashley – two expats living in Paris. Jake can’t have sex with anyone. Brett has sex with almost half the men she meets. She’s not coquettish, though. She wears men’s sweaters. Her hair is “brushed back like a boy’s”. She’s described as “damn good-looking”, never pretty or beautiful. She doesn’t need to be pretty. She’s a force. She’s fatale but not femme. I’d never underestimate the marginalization of LGBTQ+ writers, or our longstanding status as separate from “serious” writers, if we dare to write about the lives we know. By 2026, though, I’m ready for that distinction to retire. The love story between Brett and Jake is very much about the Q in LGBTQ+, with its insistence, a century ago, that “queer” applies to all sorts of writers and characters; that the particulars about who they have sex with are not necessarily among their most fundamental aspects. It’s an early call for the undermining of gender norms. From Ernest Hemingway, of all people.

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Robert Glück selects

The New American Poetry

Edited by Donald Allen

In the 60s, when homosexuality was considered a crime and a disease, I found The Satyricon in the Woodland Hills Branch library. It was my first encounter with normal homosexuality, but I was too late for life in ancient Rome. Later, I found Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, the bible of poetry’s counterculture. I wonder if it’s understood what a queer bible it is? The Allen Anthology, as we called it, shaped postwar American poetry into schools: the Beats, the New York school, Black Mountain … There were lapses of course. The 44 poets were overwhelmingly male, but almost 30% queer! I discovered Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, James Schuyler, John Wieners and most importantly, Frank O’Hara. What a revelation for a generation of young queer poets! This was a world I could enter. I read that book till it fell apart – I have the pieces. Later, I became friends with some of these poets, and I learned that Don was gay. Later still, in a Proustian turn of events, he called me out of the blue and asked to publish a book on his Grey Fox imprint, and we became good friends.

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Bryan Washington selects

Light From Uncommon Stars

Ryka Aoki

Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars nearly defies description: in the midst of a deal between the literal devil, a damned violinist and her potential protege – a teenage trans runaway – a queer love story unfolds alongside and within a family of interstellar refugees. The novel is a love letter to California, doughnuts, found families, infatuations and the costly choices – macro and micro – marginalized communities make in the US every day. But while the book’s premise is literally beyond, Aoki’s prose is astounding. Some of the most gorgeous writing in English that I’ve read. Aoki simply works in a different frequency. When I think of queer American literature, this novel reaches the limits of possibility and says, do more.

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Melissa Febos selects

Chelsea Girls

Eileen Myles

When I was a young teenager, this book provided a portal into a possible future – a life of days filled with art and girls and sex and the kind of chaos I knew only from the inside at that age. I was living in a smallish town on the Massachusetts coast and didn’t know anyone gay under 35. I used to skip school and hitchhike to Provincetown just to look at gay people. I was in love with my best friend and had no idea that was a cliche. Myles’s New York read like a dream sequence: drinking and danger and the erotic and giddy fun all swept up into the same handful, every day. “With a woman I felt whole, not different,” they wrote, and I hung on to that, the proof that I was something so knowable a stranger could write it. That I could aspire to be an artist, a mess, a lover: the person I already was.

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Kaveh Akbar selects

Feeld

Jos Charles

Anne Carson said that Paul Celan “translated German using German”, and I think reading Jos Charles’s Feeld is the closest thing to that feeling I’ve ever come across in English verse. For Feeld, Charles – educated both as a musician and medievalist – strips English down to its studs, reconfiguring it into a new pidgin, one part pre-Chaucerian Anglo-Saxon and one part millennial text-speak. One of her poems ends: “i kno no new waye / 2 speech this / the power off lyons.” Another: “u who unforl me / how many / holes would blede / befor / u believ / imma grl”. Feeld is a painstaking, unprecedented work of an actual capital-G genius, a trans poet de- and re-constructing a language that never anticipated a life like hers. It’s a book that feels more miraculous every time I revisit it.

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Imogen Binnie selects

Period

Dennis Cooper

I moved to New York to figure out that I was trans, although I didn’t know it. That need was an internal, invisible Rube Goldberg machine of truths, fears and Do Not Enter signs, impenetrable and as ignored as possible. I worked at the notorious love-it-and-hate-it bookstore institution The Strand. Shelving fiction one evening, I found a novel whose cover image I’d previously seen as an implied author photo on the back of the classic transgender hoax novel, Sarah, by JT LeRoy. I didn’t know how to interpret the reuse of that photograph. Still don’t. But, appropriately, that confusion led me to sneak it into the employee bathroom and start reading.

It was Dennis Cooper’s novel Period. I was obsessed immediately. I’d never seen my own urgent dissociation on the page, or anywhere. Every one of Cooper’s books is a classic, but the depiction of dazed, blunted queerness in the George Miles Cycle – five books, of which Period is the last – made it possible for me to become a person. Cooper’s depiction of deeply inarticulate young people driven by overwhelming needs they could barely express resonated deeply. Still does, if I’m honest. Dennis Cooper saved my life.

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Brontez Purnell selects

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

Though not a “queer novel”, I know way too many gays who have adopted this devastating, awe-inspiring, if not even (and thank God for this) “problematic” novel of the perils of social isolation, suicidal ideation and in small parts, hope. I was a depressed little gay boy in middle school in Alabama, and God bless my English teacher at the time because she was like, “I don’t know what exactly to do for him, let me just give him The Bell Jar” – why on earth you would give a depressed gay 12-year-old Black boy The Bell Jar is still beyond me, but thank God she did. The striking point of the novel is a young girl who is wrestling with the confines of the world that she is simply too astronomically gifted to be in. In real life, Sylvia lost her battle with dealing with this reality and killed herself a mere couple of cosmic seconds before the cosmic shift in the world that made her plight in the book more and more apparent and compelling the longer the book lived – she stopped just short of seeing the change she made. I would hope to have my books do something like this, and I would hope to live to see it.

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Samuel R Delany selects

Giovanni’s Room

James Baldwin

In James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, David, the narrator and a white American, is engaged to marry Hella, a young woman studying painting. David has a passionate sexual relationship with a bartender in Paris named Giovanni. His affair occurs in the titular room, where Giovanni has covered the windows in boot polish and soap, so no one can see what he does inside. David struggles with the guilt of cheating on his fiancee and failing as a “real man”, sleeping with women to prove he isn’t gay. His affair suddenly ends when Giovanni is arrested and executed for a murder about which David knows almost nothing. Finally, his relationships with both Hella and Giovanni have ended outside his control, nor can he control his own feelings. In 1956, it was a brave book. In one scene, the characters Giovanni, Jacques and Guillaume have breakfast at Les Halles. When I got to Paris myself, that was one of the first things I and the young men I was traveling with did. Breakfast before dawn at Les Halles was just something everyone did – until it was torn down in 1973.

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Andrea Lawlor selects

Discontents: New Queer Writers

Edited by Dennis Cooper

I’ve been thinking a lot about anthologies lately, and the anthologies I encountered in my misspent youth. Along with High Risk and High Risk 2 from the brilliant Amy Scholder and Ira Silverberg, the most formative for me was Dennis Cooper’s Discontents: New Queer Writers, published by Amethyst in 1992, and purchased by me that year at A Different Light in New York City. Did I buy it for Nayland Blake’s cover? Maybe. Was it a staff pick? Probably! Turns out I love an eclectic anthology, a peephole into the mind of the gatherer. Cooper gathered more than 50 writers – including New Narrative greats (Steve Abbott, Robert Glück, Kevin Killian, Eileen Myles); the coolest dyke novelists (Sarah Schulman, Achy Obejas, Dorothy Allison), zinesters (Larry-bob Roberts, Lily Braindrop, Vaginal Davis, GB Jones); cartoonists (Diane DiMassa, AK Summers, Roxxie, Alison Bechdel); the literary gays of the day (Scott Heim, Dale Peck, David Trinidad, Bo Huston); the magazine gays of today (David Sedaris, Hilton Als); the avant garde (Ana Simo, Matias Viegener, Joe Westmoreland); sex writers (Annie Sprinkle, Patrick Califia) and so many more. I used the contributor bios as a reading list, and thus my real education began. Why is this essential time capsule out of print, you may ask? I blame capitalism.

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Kay Gabriel selects

Counternarratives

John Keene

John Keene’s Counternarratives is subtitled “stories and novellas”, but that’s not quite right. Think of it rather as 13 movements that animate the past 500 years of life in the Americas – all the struggles across time and place, over resources and freedom, that have given shape both to our fatally unequal world and to how people endeavor to change it. In astonishing prose, Keene inhabits layer after layer of social and political consciousness in writing the transformations of colonization, race, place, people, economy, war. Across Counternarratives, you can see queer sexualities emerging almost in real time as conditions change, but it’s not as if Keene is writing fables based on the orthodoxy of political economy. It’s more like he wants you to think about what it really meant to people at particular points in human history to face conditions not of their choosing, to confront the world and themselves with desires and drives that they can only ever make partial sense of. I wish I could read it again for the first time, but I’ll settle for convincing you to do that instead.

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Hilton Als selects

Lesbian Nation

Jill Johnston

Jill Johnston didn’t start off as a writer. She was a dancer first, a Judson church person who found one self in movement, and another in writing. Actually, her writing was like dancing: sinewy, lithe, turning in circles and then doubling back on itself to talk about queerness, art, all the parts of her myriad self and the culture’s myriad self. One read her in the Village Voice – her first and most consistent outlet from 1959 on; her first gig was as the paper’s dance critic – to see as much what she had to say about something as how she would say it. She wasn’t “just” a great stylist; she was a great believer in critical inquiry, and how that wasn’t synonymous with the flat voice of seriousness.

For Johnston, thinking was play, and the body was not inseparable from it. Born in London in 1929, she and her mother moved to Queens, New York, after Johnston’s father abandoned his small family. College followed, then that marvellous time as a performer with contemporaries Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs and other marvels. Andy Warhol photographed her dancing, and in 1969, Johnston, whose column had by then become a kind of report on her consciousness as it developed in New York City’s cultural scene, began to write about the queer world, and her transition from being a nominally straight woman to a lesbian. Her book, Lesbian Nation, is brilliant, outrageous, uncompromising. In it, Johnston argues for lesbian separatism, a world that doesn’t so much take the patriarchy by the scruff of the neck and give him a good shake so much as she argues for self-determination. She loved women, and I loved her.

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Rumaan Alam selects

Family Dancing

David Leavitt

I can’t remember how I first heard David Leavitt’s name. Discovery was a different matter in the days before the internet, but gay kids have to be practiced sleuths. Some magazine informed me that Leavitt was the wunderkind who had snuck homosexuality into the pages of the New Yorker. Finding a copy of his debut story collection, Family Dancing, at a used bookstore in the suburbs, was a crucial step in the scavenger hunt that would lead me to myself. It was shocking to me, at 16, to read Territory, the protagonist of which understands his own gayness at age 12. More shocking that the story’s hero has the kind of mom who is supportive – an ally, we’d call her today. The title says it; family is Leavitt’s subject, and the thing I thought I’d have to renounce if I dared to be who I was. It struck teenage me as revolutionary to know that an American family might include a gay guy. Forget about art imitating life or vice versa; art has the power to ratify one’s very existence.

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Jordan Tannahill selects

Angels in America

Tony Kushner

With Angels In America, 35-year-old Tony Kushner channelled his immense rage, intellect and visionary imagination into an eight-hour reckoning with the Aids crisis under Ronald Reagan, and changed the American theatre forever. From Ethel Rosenberg’s deathbed visitation of Roy Cohn, to apparitions of 13th- and 17th-century ancestors, themselves plague survivors of yore, to the sublime arrival of the terrifying multigendered Angel, Kushner tackled the American mythologies of faith, capital and national identity, while elevating the play itself to the register of myth. And yet, the play remains human-scaled, ultimately about our responsibilities to one another, and speaks directly to the millenarian moment into which it premiered. It must be said that the play is also filled with humor and dazzling wit – how else could we endure it? Ultimately, Angels reminds me of the miracle of great theatre. Its political and moral force. Its capacity for the transcendent. Its ability to transmute suffering into a beauty which fortifies and clarifies.

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Davey Davis selects

Resentment: A Comedy

Gary Indiana

In the summer of 1994, a writer travels from New York to Los Angeles to cover a murder trial whose grisly details more than slightly resemble the crimes of the infamous Menendez brothers (with shades of the OJ Simpson and JonBenét Ramsey scandals). These similarities are the satirical scaffolding upon which Indiana pins his unforgettable “reverse roman à clef”, which is, as he writes, “a narrative in which stray threads of reality reinforce an imaginary tapestry of the era’s psychic life”. To say that the great writer and critic’s hilariously terrifying and nauseatingly erotic novel anticipates contemporary American life is to miss his diagnosis. Resentment’s eternal TV screens, pointless consumers and dissociated sadists aren’t just at home in today’s America (an enterprise whose founders, a cabal of slavers and genocidaires, must look up at with some satisfaction), but constituent of it. This is not light reading; famous for his dark and cynical wit, the late Indiana was no optimist, nor are his characters likable, much less good or heroic. But as troubling, even literally nightmarish, as Indiana’s fiction is, I read and reread it for the furious integrity smuggled in its core.

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Wayne Koestenbaum selects

Stage Fright: Plays from San Francisco Poets Theater

Kevin Killian

The late Kevin Killian, an unclassifiable polymath, held San Francisco together and prevented it from sliding off the cultural map. With his brilliant life partner Dodie Bellamy, he fostered an ecosystem of artists and writers that rivaled in its flashy intensity the fabled New York School of Poets. The place to begin reading Killian might be his Selected Amazon Reviews, a mad compendium of the irreverent, erudite appraisals (of books, films and household products) that he subversively posted on Amazon; but an equally tart entry point might be the selection of plays he wrote for San Francisco Poets Theater, which wasn’t quite an organization, but more of a wish, a confluence – a series of happenings, demonstrations, collisions and farcical celebrations of the random and the rarefied.

A Killian play, evoking the madcap world of Charles Ludlam, Tennessee Williams, John Waters and Ed Wood, thrives on lunatic, joy-enhancing juxtapositions of improbable situations and characters. In my favorite play, Island of Lost Souls, the dramatis personae include Jack Kerouac and his mother, William S Burroughs, Claus and Sunny von Bülow, Yma Sumac, Julie Andrews and Anaïs Nin. Like any good “camp” artefact, a Killian play makes cheeky bricolage out of unrelated cultural spheres. Stage Fright celebrates an insider sensibility – a coterie consciousness – deserving canonization. Killian recasts the outre as a new and necessary centrality. Like any principled absurdist, he uncovers, within the molten heart of literary anarchy, a sweet-tempered, blockbuster-worthy core.

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Daniel Lefferts selects

The Shards

Bret Easton Ellis

Ellis’s The Shards is many things – a coming-of-age novel, a slasher thriller, an ethnography of popped-collar privilege in 1980s Los Angeles – but at its core it’s a profound interrogation of the gay male American psyche in all its unrequited lovesickness and rage. The novel follows an aspiring writer, an autofictional stand-in named Bret, during his eventful senior year of high school. Around the time a serial killer begins murdering local teenagers, including a male classmate the closeted Bret has been sleeping with, a mysterious new student named Robert Mallory arrives at school, immediately arousing Bret’s suspicion. Is Robert the killer, or is Bret simply projecting his own sexual paranoia, attributing secrets to others as he hides his own? Or does Robert strike Bret as uniquely malevolent only because he’s uniquely beautiful, the most illustrious of the “teenage Greek gods” Bret pines after but can never have and never be? The Shards spins from Bret’s torment a definitive classic, one that captures an entire American era with a peculiarly American combination of horror and lust. It’s a blood-splattered epic of homosexual resentment and longing: a beautiful, libidinal, terrifying tragedy in a category all its own.

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Eileen Myles selects

A Woman Is Talking to Death

Judy Grahn

Judy Grahn’s masterpiece poem A Woman Is Talking to Death was first published in the journal, Amazon Quarterly, in 1973. Then it was a chapbook, and then it turned up in The Work of a Common Woman, which was a collection of Grahn’s poems that stayed in print for a while. Now you can find it in any of Grahn’s various collected poems and online. What it is: a dark, complicated chant of a poem that indicts America’s military, the lethal racism in everyday law & order, the inherent danger in overt love between women, and a direct account of Grahn’s own experience of being drummed out of the military for being a dyke. It’s wrapped in a wrenching story of a young guy tripping on a motorcycle on the Bay Bridge and being inadvertently mowed down by a truck driver of color who pays with the time of his life, and the entirety is framed in a long story of women incarcerated and tortured by their husbands in the middle ages. Grahn says it all in 14 pages, and this legend of a poem should be taught in school across this godforsaken country that prefers Paul Revere’s Ride. Don’t miss this poem in your reading lifetime. It’s magnificent, sensual, damning conceptual folk art, like nothing else. So unforgettable and strong.

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Kyle Carrero Lopez selects

Inheritance

Taylor Johnson

Home and family are two of this debut poetry collection’s central topics, but the scope of Washington DC native Taylor Johnson’s body of work cannot be easily distilled into quick categorizations or buzzwords. The poet Thylias Moss once explained that what she aims for in her writing is range: an exploration of all themes involved in living. That is what is at play here.

High-caliber lyric beauty from a Black, trans perspective, Inheritance is, quite simply, the real thing. These poems are meditative, emerging out of intent listening and quiet contemplation, and they are also sensual and cerebral, yet approachable – in that they investigate the essential questions of being, like how to belong, like how to keep going. In Trans Is Against Nostalgia, Johnson writes, “I’ve picked up the hammer every day / and forgiven myself. There is a new / language I’m learning by speaking it.” I believe this collection can stand the test of time as a classic of early 21st-century poetry.

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Jordy Rosenberg selects

Return to Nevèrÿon series

Samuel R Delany

Listen, I’m not kidding when I say Samuel Delany’s prismatic and torrid Return to Nevèrÿon series – a four-volume set of novellas, short stories, prefaces, appendices, paratexts and metatexts in the tradition of sword-and-sorcery style fantasy – is basically the Das Kapital of 20th-century US fiction. Published between 1979 and 1987, the series is an immense, complexly interwoven allegorical comment on deindustrialization, our domination by speculative finance capital, the rise of the Aids epidemic, and the persistence of racism and “organized abandonment” (to quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore) in the years after the Black freedom struggles of the mid-century. All told through a slave rebellion led by Gorgik the Liberator, an ardent homosexual who leaves no missed opportunities for BDSM-laced encounters in his wake. Gorgik’s world is populated by wayward youth atop wild dragons, raunchy hook-ups in ruined castles, and theory – lots and lots of post-structuralist theory. It’s a demanding and life-altering opus. There is no other fictional project of that century, or this one, that attempts so momentous an account of our world. Does it give me immense satisfaction that such a colossal achievement is also textured and gorgeous, epically filthy and very gay? Happy Pride, everyone.

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Danez Smith selects

The Color Purple

Alice Walker

Dear God, it was hard not to pick a poetry collection, but maybe that’s fine because for me, one of the most essential queer novels is still the masterwork of a supreme poet. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple shows us the transformational power of queerness to reorder, reconcile and rapture the materiality and potential of a life. When Shug Avery kisses Celie – awakening in her relationships to beauty, to joy, to potential that laid dormant and battered in the cage of her abusive relationship – everything in her life queers, meaning opens, meaning blooms. Sex becomes not an act that happens to her, but something she can be alive inside. Later, when she finds letters from her exiled sister Nettie, the divine queers and the letters which frame the novel are no longer directed to God but to Nettie, sisterhood being the real God of this work.

It’s no wonder to me why this work has inspired two Oscar-nominated films, a Tony-winning play and countless writers who write in the purple shadow of Walker’s brilliance. In the book as is in life, for the queer and non-queer, queerness is liberation, queerness is a portal; if even one person walks through, the entire community is enriched. And, it must be said, Walker wrote the hell out of that book. Only a poet could write one woman’s story so powerfully that it frees the soul of anyone who picks it up.

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Rita Mae Brown selects

Becoming a Man

Paul Monette

Two books exploded open the price of homosexual oppression. Born in 1947, Andrew Tobias’s The Best Little Boy in the World, published in 1973, reveals a “perfect” youth who realized he was gay, hence no longer perfect. Paul Monette, born in 1945, won the National book award in 1992 for Becoming a Man, published that year. It has been my delight to know both of these writers. As Andy is still very much alive, let’s hope for more books. Paul died in 1995. I will focus on his autobiography, which reveals the depth of self-loathing, the choking repression of self as a response to the hatred of gay men.

Insights like “privacy is essentially benign while it’s hard to maintain the idea of secrecy as neutral, morally speaking” fill the book. His pain drips on every page. It’s upsetting to read. It’s not simply how a man born at the end of the second world war finally liberates himself. It reveals the price of becoming a man. He writes: “I can’t remember it myself sometimes, how fresh the words of the deep past sting, how sharp the dry-eyed tears are even at this distance.” You will believe it. You will feel his freedom, his acceptance of self when he finds it and you will understand why he won the National book award. Paul and I were bound by our Latin and Greek, plus our swift wits. I miss him, yet I take some comfort that he is not here to see that the film of history has been put on backwards.

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Chukwuebuka Ibeh selects

Memorial

Bryan Washington

A friend once shared Waugh by Bryan Washington with me, with the words “I think you would like this,” and through the first paragraph, I could confirm she was right. By the end, I was a true believer, and like all believers, went in search of more. And in that search, I found Memorial, the author’s debut novel, a shimmering, generational achievement. In it, a couple’s staid relationship comes under further strain when one of them loses his father and has to fly back home to Japan, just as his rather forthright mother comes to the US to stay with his partner. The result of this unlikely roommate situation is a timeless, sharp, yet delicate portrait of family and estrangement, love and duty, self-alienation and searching, with a finale that is as shattering as it is redemptive.

• Photography credits: Sarah Schulman by Lola Flash; Michael Cunningham by Richard Phibbs; Robert Glück by Xavi Permanyer; Bryan Washington by Cydney Cosette; Melissa Febos by Beowulf Sheehan; Kaveh Akbar by Riel Sturchio; Samuel R Delany by Tom Kneller; Andrea Lawlor by Joanna Chattman; Kay Gabriel by Chris Berntsen; Hilton Als by Ali Smith; Rumaan Alam by David Land; Jordan Tannahill by Laura Barisonzi; Davey Davis by Clare Worsley; Wayne Koestenbaum by Maxwell Harvey-Sampson; Daniel Lefferts by Nina Subin; Eileen Myles by Roberto Ricciuti/Getty; Kyle Carrero Lopez by Voxigma Lo; Jordy Rosenberg by Beowulf Sheehan; Danez Smith by Anna Min; Rita Mae Brown by Mary Motley Kalergis; Chukwuebuka Ibeh by Erin Lewis

Annie and Vernice (or Niecy, as Annie calls her) are “cradle friends”, brought up in their home town of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, in 1950s America. The protagonists are defined by their motherlessness and their diverging drives to escape their individual tragedies and pre-written destinies. In this haunting novel of motherhood and sisterhood, Tayari Jones writes into unknowability – how far we can know another person, or indeed oneself.

The pair, who speak in alternating chapters, are “not the same, but still the same”. Each is tended to by mother figures – grandmothers, aunts – and gives meaning to each other’s lonely, questioning existence: “When you don’t have your mother, you don’t really know who you are.” Annie’s mother has abandoned her but is apparently alive in Memphis, and she makes it her obsession to reconcile with her; Niecy’s, on the other hand, is lost for ever, murdered by Niecy’s father. Where the former is holding out hope, the latter has none; and herein lies the fork in their futures. While Niecy chooses the sensible, stable life path – college, a traditional marriage – Annie spirals from tragedy to tragedy, consumed by thoughts of her missing mother. Call it destiny, or a kind of grieving.

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Jones’s idiomatic, hypnotic prose pulls you in, and she playfully threads tropes of twinning, doubling and foiling throughout the novel, which alleviates the melancholy and makes the plot twists shine. “Some truths are too bitter to let sit on your tongue”, we’re told; merciless violence and melodrama are kept off the page as the pair navigate the faultlines of racism and classism (there’s an incident on a bus, and another in a laundromat, where Jones shows remarkable restraint). She re-utilises the epistolary device in her Women’s prize-winning novel, An American Marriage, to glue the women together through words as the years tear them in different directions. When they eventually reunite, will they recognise who they’ve each become, now with a new set of secrets in tow? “I struggled to decide if secrets and lies were twins, regular sisters, or just cousins.”

Ultimately, the novel dissects what happens when you love selflessly, endlessly, unrequitedly, into the dark; when maternal love, or the lack thereof, turns poisonous and parasitic; and when a mother’s love, one that’s supposed to nourish and sustain your soul, instead drains and destroys it (“Everything requires water to live. But not too much. That’s the paradox of water. You need it, but it can kill you”). By turns pacy and profound, Kin is a cautionary tale about the limits of love, both rendered and received: “Love, I learned, was the responsibility of the one doing the loving. The other person didn’t necessarily have to make a contribution to the stew.” And “that’s why you got to be careful who you give it to. They can put your love in their back pocket and never give it back.”

Is there a more fundamental loss, a more acute fissure than that caused by losing the one who gave you life? “Grief is a kind of spell”, and with Kin, Jones casts one on her readers, leaving us certain something has – quietly, almost unknowingly – stirred within our souls.

‘Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles.” So observed Hungarian journalist George Mikes in How to Be an Alien (1946), one of the finest examples of a tradition in which foreigners explain Britain to itself. From Voltaire to VS Naipaul, outsiders have often illuminated national peculiarities, revealing contradictions so embedded in British life that they pass unnoticed. Helene von Bismarck’s Fantastic Kingdom is the latest contribution to this genre.

Von Bismarck, a distant relative by marriage of the Iron Chancellor, seems ideally placed for the task. The name alone gives her project a certain piquancy; there is something almost Pynchonesque about a German historian with that name attempting to decipher Britain for the British. Raised across Europe as the daughter of a diplomat, educated at the same Brussels school attended by Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen, and a frequent visitor to the UK for two decades, she possesses the combination of distance and familiarity that can produce genuine insight. Her grand theme is that Britain is a “bewildering, complex, and wildly contradictory place”: a monarchy and a liberal democracy; a state of four nations; hostile to immigration yet remarkably pluralistic; obsessed with hierarchy yet strikingly informal. These tensions provide the book’s organising principle.

The snag is that, while Von Bismarck repeatedly emphasises her foreignness, she often writes like an insider. The promise of a stranger’s-eye view gives way to something closer to Westminster conventional wisdom. To be sure, Von Bismarck excels at identifying the paradoxes and incongruities that litter British public life. She highlights Britain’s simultaneous reverence for tradition and selective amnesia about history, the oddity of a supposedly status-conscious society in which everyone is on first-name terms, and the spectacle of Rory Stewart’s appeal for political seriousness being delivered from a circus tent. She also notes the irony of Boris Johnson championing Ukraine’s European future after leading Britain out of the EU.

Yet these astute observations are overshadowed by the book’s fixation on Brexit. The standard-issue continental view – of an admirable country led astray by populism and provincialism – is rehearsed throughout. The result is a curious time warp. Von Bismarck’s Britain appears frozen in a pre-pandemic intellectual landscape, perpetually condemned to relive the referendum and its aftermath.

More disappointing is Von Bismarck’s reluctance to pursue her own insights to their logical conclusions. When genuinely contentious issues arise, she retreats into caution. Discussing Scottish independence, she avoids weighing whether the costs of breaking up the union might be justified. Encountering Suella Braverman’s splenetic rhetoric on immigration, she informs us that the former home secretary’s personal motivations are “outside the scope of this book”.

This reserve is striking. Von Bismarck is neither a diplomat nor a civil servant, yet she writes as though Anglo-German relations depended upon her discretion. The reason may lie in the book’s intended audience. Von Bismarck explicitly tells us that she is writing for Britons. Even so, she feels compelled to explain that the country is “located by the sea”, that Scotland contains many supporters of independence, and that shadow ministers scrutinise government departments. Large sections read less like illuminating reflections on a contrary country than civics lessons for invading Daleks.

This is especially frustrating because Von Bismarck is well placed to offer comparisons that might have enriched the book: between Britain’s unwritten constitution and Germany’s legalism, British pragmatism and continental ambition, or Anglican ambiguity and German earnestness. Instead, she spends much of her time explaining systems her readers likely already understand.

Ultimately, what Fantastic Kingdom lacks is judgment. Britain is hardly short of books attempting to explain itself, and readers seeking a deeper analysis may find more rewarding alternatives. Brian Harrison’s recently published Yesterday, for example, covers much of this ground with greater precision and considerably more panache.

One closes the book with the sense that Von Bismarck knows more than she is willing to say – and wishing for more of the sharp, memorable insights that made George Mikes’s insider-outsider’s view so enduring.

Dementia, war, migration and loneliness are among the themes of the six novels selected for this year’s Miles Franklin award, Australia’s most esteemed literary prize, worth $60,000.

Announced on Wednesday, the 2026 shortlist includes four first-time nominees, two of whom are debut novelists: Brisbane-based Steve MinOn for First Name Second Name and Tasmania-based Konrad Muller for My Heart At Evening.

Second novels from Omar Musa (Fierceland) and Sean Wilson (You Must Remember This) are also in contention for the award, as are Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline and Josephine Rowe’s Little World.

This year’s judging panel said the shortlist showed that Australian novels can “grapple with the most vexing and profound questions of our time”.

“Grand and intimate, these novels sing the Australian experience into new shapes,” the judges said.

Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline, which won the people’s choice award at the 2026 Victorian Premier’s literary awards, was described as “both a taut political thriller and a humane meditation on the way that Australia must continue to find ways of working through agonising conflicts”.

The Palestinian Australian author was disinvited from Adelaide writers festival earlier this year, leading to the event being boycotted by hundreds of writers and subsequently cancelled. In April, Abdel-Fattah cut ties with publisher University of Queensland Press, joining at least 16 other authors who ended their contracts or vowed not to work with the publisher again after it cancelled its publication of Jazz Money’s Bila, A River Cycle over comments by the book’s illustrator.

MinOn’s First Name Second Name follows a dead protagonist as he encounters four generations of family estrangements to recover his lost identity. Judges called it “complex and timely” for its questions about “who gets to be a settler and who remains a migrant in Australia”.

Judges said Josephine Rowe’s “slender novel” Little World, partially set in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and covering themes of desire, loss, loneliness and faith, was “beautifully compressed”.

Omar Musa’s Fierceland was called “ambitious” for its story of two siblings grappling with the burden of inheritance and legacy. “Fierceland is a psychologically layered and storied reckoning with the world we have inherited,” they said.

My Heart At Evening, Konrad Muller’s mystery set in 1832 Tasmania, is a “complex novel”, remarked the judges, which “reveals the power of literature to centre the discomfort of this settler colony’s past and present”.

Sean Wilson’s You Must Remember This, which is narrated in first-person by a woman who is steadily losing her memory, “shows us that dementia is a process still fully situated in the tissue of significance,” said the judges, “without romanticising its real losses.”

Each shortlisted author receives $5,000 from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Last year’s winner was Siang Lu for his sprawling, ambitious novel Ghost Cities.

The Miles Franklin literary award will be announced on 5 August.

The 2026 Miles Franklin shortlist

• Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah (University of Queensland Press)

• First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn (University of Queensland Press)

• My Heart At Evening by Konrad Muller (Evercreech Editions)

• Fierceland by Omar Musa (Penguin Random House Australia)

• Little World by Josephine Rowe (Black Inc)

• You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson (Affirm Press)

Dua Lipa and Callum Turner have been honeymooning in Italy, after throwing a star-studded wedding in Palermo earlier this month. But their relationship began with a book: running into each other at an LA restaurant, the pair realised that they were not only reading the same novel – Trust by Hernán Díaz – but had both just finished the first chapter. “So, we’re on the same page,” Turner said to Lipa. Here, four other couples share the literary sparks of their love stories.

Andy, 52, and Lisa, 51, from Otley, Leeds: ‘An attractive male who likes books – what was there not to like?’

In the University of Sheffield English literature class of 1995 there were around 60 women and seven men, including Andy Poplar. He and Lisa Oakley didn’t get together until a night out at the student union in the second year. “An intellectual, attractive male who likes books – what was there not to like?” says Lisa. “Given the ratio I feel I did very well.”

Shared lectures included Modern British literature on a Friday morning. Andy remembers staying over at Lisa’s, then arriving together, which was the source of some raised eyebrows at first. Lisa laughs recalling how, in the early days of their relationship, she felt an increased pressure to say something profound in seminars when Andy was in the room.

“Quite early on we started collecting books together,” says Andy. “There were those little Bloomsbury classics that they used to do, and we would buy them for each other for Valentine’s Day or a birthday and write an inscription in them, with the idea that one day we’ll have a house and have them on a shelf together.” This library now lives in their hallway.

They got engaged at Tiffany’s as a nod to Truman Capote, have a cat called Orwell and their 17-year-old son is planning on reading English at university too. “We’re surrounded by books,” says Lisa. “Even now, after being together for ever, we talk about the literature that we are enjoying over a glass of wine.” They don’t particularly like reading the same kind of things these days, but both loved Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

There is no doubt that they put their English degrees to good use: Lisa is now head of English at a school, and Andy’s work involves etching words and phrases on glass. For Lisa’s 50th he got her a 1920s mirror, and added the F Scott Fitzgerald quote: “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

Millie, 24, from Norwich and Lois, 27, from Oxfordshire: ‘I remember her leaning over the table and saying, “I love that one”’

“It is called the Silent Book Club,” says Millie Smith-Clare, “but we meet up at a cafe, and it has become a running joke for the baristas there that we’re not very silent.”

Millie, who works in PR, met Lois Glithero, a textile conservator, in February 2025 at the Norwich branch of Silent Book Club, a global initiative which encourages attendees to bring along a book to read in the company of others. “Occasionally you get about two minutes of reading in, if you are lucky, then conversation will happen,” says Millie.

The club can have anywhere from six to 30 people in attendance, depending on the time of year, and is a diverse and queer-friendly space, says Millie. “I had brought a book that’s very queer, called Mary, or the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout. I remember Lois leaning over the table and saying, ‘Oh, I love that one’. Instantly I was like, ‘Oh, she’s very attractive’.” A few weeks later, a few book club members went to a poetry reading night, an evening that marked the beginning of their relationship.

Books have been central to their romance. “We read lots of books at the same time,” says Lois, such as Frankenstein and The Great Gatsby. “We are currently reading all the Moomin stories in order of seasons. Because we have a long distance relationship, we record them as audiobooks for each other,” says Millie. Last year, they gave each other books on Christmas Eve, inspired by the Icelandic tradition of jolabokaflod – gifting books to read together.

They still go back to the book club when in Norwich at weekends, and although there might be a few more potential pairings on the horizon, they are the only official couple, so far. “We are the smug ones,” says Millie.

Andy, 56, and Sapna, 55, west London: ‘He messaged with the subject line: “Please Say Yes”’

In late December 2009, Andy Pieroux, who runs an IT consultancy company, was browsing match.com when he came across someone he liked the look and sound of. Scrolling to the end of her profile, he spotted that her favourite book was Yes Man by Danny Wallace, about the author’s experiment saying “yes” to every opportunity. “I thought, ‘this is an easy win’,” says Andy.

Brand consultant Sapna Pieroux – spoiler, they got married – loved Yes Man so much that after a breakup she had embraced the idea herself, saying yes to all kinds of opportunities for a year. “I went to five festivals that summer, travelled, learned to pole dance and how to ski – badly.” She had some amazing adventures, so when the year was up, she decided to continue.

After trying various free dating sites, “and saying yes to some less than ideal dates,” Sapna laughs, she turned to match.com and happened to mention the book in her profile. Andy had also read it: “I’m a voracious reader and it was a very popular book of its time,” he says. “I’d loved the philosophy of it as well, although I hadn’t quite gone to the same extremes as Sapna had.”

Andy messaged with the subject line “Please Say Yes”, which impressed Sapna because she knew that he had actually bothered to read her profile. She had also mentioned that she was dreading seeing the film adaptation of the book starring Jim Carrey because “he overacts and it is a very British story told by a British comedian – it should have been Simon Pegg.” Andy said that he too was dreading watching the movie – should they go and see it together?

“I said, ‘I suppose I have to say yes, but can we go on a first date where I can actually get to know you, rather than sitting in a darkened room not speaking to each other for two hours?’”

Andy suggested ice sculpting at the Natural History Museum instead. But before that was due to happen, they realised that Wallace was doing a talk about his latest book, Friends Like These, so they met for the first time there, before going on for a Chinese meal and a kiss.

They rearranged the ice sculpting and made a penguin, then got round to the film for their third date – “We were right about it – I didn’t like it,” says Sapna – after which they went for drinks, and Andy asked Sapna if she would be his girlfriend. The answer was obviously yes.

Sam, 29, and Clíodhna, 35, from Edinburgh: ‘I went up to him and said, ‘Can I sit next to you?’ and he looked at me in absolute horror’

It was a Thursday evening in January when Clíodhna Conboye, a board game shop manager, sat one seat away from Sam Fern, then an aspiring author, at an underattended book talk at Waterstones Covent Garden in London. “There were about 30 chairs, and when I got there, only about five other people. I thought I’ll sit near someone so that we’re a bit bunched up, and he looked the friendliest,” says Clíodhna.

Clíodhna took out her book while she was waiting for the talk to start, and Sam asked her what it was (the essay collection Can’t We All Be Feminists? by June Eric-Udorie). Clíodhna then bumped her head while putting her coat beneath the seat, and gave Sam permission to laugh at her. In between listening to the authors they had “a nice back and forth”, says Sam, and talked about future book events they were planning to attend. At the end, Sam’s brother arrived to meet him, and when he turned to say goodbye to Clíodhna, she was talking to someone else.

Sam spent the next month trying to decide whether to show up at a talk Clíodhna said she would be at, or if that would be weird. He decided to go, arriving early and making himself quite visible, then waited to see if Clíodhna would say hello. Sam had big, curly hair at the time, so he was easy to spot.

“I went up to him and said, ‘Can I sit next to you?’ and he looked at me in absolute horror,” says Clíodhna.

“I jumped out of my skin because I thought I had seen her somewhere else in the crowd, and then she popped up to my left. It was like she had teleported there,” says Sam.

The pair couldn’t stop talking the whole night. They discovered they shared a mutual love of The Edge Chronicles series by Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart, and arranged to meet at a launch the following week. “When I was reading that series when I was about 10, I didn’t know anyone else who was into them,” says Clíodhna. “So it was cool that he liked these books that were a huge thing to me. It didn’t hurt that the main character in the first book is this really cute boy with big, curly hair.”

For the next month they went to three book events a week and soon became an item. They have since moved to Edinburgh, where they run a book club. Sam has had two children’s books published, both of which are dedicated to Clíodhna: “I read his first book before we actually got together, when we were still friends,” she says. “It was good, which was a relief.”

The memoir of a man who survived the horrors of Hiroshima is to be published for the first time this summer after its discovery in a US archive.

The 230-page memoir was written almost 80 years ago by Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who witnessed the city’s destruction after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. He will now be portrayed in a feature film by Takehiro Hira, whose acclaimed roles include the detective in the Netflix Japanese-British drama Giri/Haji. Pre-production begins in November, ahead of the shoot in February 2027.

The film is being produced by Donald Rosenfeld, a former president of Merchant Ivory Productions, whose period classics include Howards End, starring Emma Thompson. Rosenfeld told the Guardian that with today’s impending nuclear threats, a film about Hiroshima and the publication of a survivor’s account could not be more timely.

“It’s an in-depth look at what this terrible bomb did,” he said. “It is so topical now with the Iran situation and North Korea. You can’t imagine anything worse than Hiroshima, but it could be worse – supposedly 10,000 times stronger today. We really have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

On 6 August 1945, the US attacked Hiroshima with an atomic bomb in an attempt to end the second world war. The world’s first nuclear attack decimated the city, reducing it to rubble. An estimated 120,000 people were killed within the first four days after the blast. Bodies were burned and disfigured through acute exposure to radiation. Three days later, the Americans dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing about 73,000 people. On 15 August, Japan surrendered, bringing an end to the war.

Tanimoto, who died in 1986 aged 77, was a Hiroshima Methodist priest, whose life was spared because he happened to be away that day, transporting a wardrobe to another town.

He returned to find unimaginable horrors. Having thought they could never be put into words, he eventually decided that a memoir “would help ensure that no one experienced it ever again”, his daughter Koko Tanimoto Kondo said.

In the memoir’s foreword, Kondo writes of the need for future generations to remember it as “memory is our hope for survival as human beings”.

Having lain unpublished and forgotten in a US archive, the memoir will be published on 6 August, Hiroshima’s anniversary, by Random House in the US and Penguin worldwide. The book has already been sold in most major territories. Rosenfeld described it as “beautifully written”.

The memoir will be released by publishers worldwide this summer, with a 9,000-word foreword by Kondo, now 81. She writes: “For many years I could not live in Hiroshima, the city of my birth. On the day the atomic bomb dropped I was eight months old, a baby in the arms of my mother. It was 40 years before she could bring herself to tell me, in her own words, how I had survived. Few people would talk about that time. Their memories kept them quiet.”

She adds that “the blast flattened almost everything in central Hiroshima” and that the heat was about 4,000C at ground level: “It burned through wood, tile, concrete and human flesh.” She is also involved with the film, introducing the film-makers to survivors or their families as part of their research.

The film takes its title, Hiroshima, 8:15, from the exact time the bomb was dropped. It is being directed and written by Phil Joanou, who made the crime drama State of Grace.

The memoir was found in the Beinecke rare book and manuscript library at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, among the papers of John Hersey, the American Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who died in 1993.

Hersey had struck up a friendship with Tanimoto when visiting Hiroshima eight months after the bomb, which inspired his 1946 nonfiction account, titled Hiroshima, on which the film is also based.

In the screenplay, seen by the Guardian, Tanimoto returns to a city engulfed by towering flames and toxic smoke, its buildings and people broken and burned, while thick black droplets rain down “almost like oil falling from the sky”. He encounters men, women and children whose clothes have been shredded from their bodies.

In one scene, he comes across a tram, toppled over, its side ripped open. “The occupants inside incinerated. He is drawn to the victims. Frozen. Like Pompeii. Each in a different pose. Their bodies carbonised. Charcoal black.”

While British prisoners of war were among those who suffered extreme brutality at the hands of their Japanese captors, Tanimoto says in one scene: “We deserved to lose. We could not win. Did we deserve the atomic bomb? Perhaps … perhaps not. But no one yet understands … what it was like here.”