Poetry shelf: Notes on a Past Life (BlazeVOX) by David Trinidad, as dishy and revealing as the best literary memoirs, picks at old scabs, slashes new wounds, spills the beans on contemporary poetry-world wars, ignites new feud fuses and drops names like F-bombs. This book is so hot, it should come with its own flame-retardant gloves and fire extinguisher.
Matters of the Sea/Cosas del mar (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press) by Richard Blanco, son of Cuban exiles and Barack Obama's inaugural poet, written for the U.S. embassy in Havana's ceremonial reopening, is a bilingual chapbook-length poem.
Like Blanco, United States Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera is the son of immigrants, and his poetry collection Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights) touches on the migrant experience and politics.
Fiction in action: Jed, a gay, black expat "earning a living" in Europe in the 1980s, is the gripping main character in Black Deutschland (FSG), the second novel by award-winning writer Darryl Pinckney.
One of the most celebrated debut novels of the year, What Belongs to You (FSG) by Garth Greenwell, evolving from the author's novella Mitko, is a stunning achievement in the way that it tells the story of a teacher living in Bulgaria who begins an unusual and intimate relationship with a young hustler named Mitko.
Hiding (Bloomsbury), the debut novel by Matthew Griffin, is timely in the way it relates the tale of Wendell and Frank, a gay male couple who have been together since after WWII, and addresses the couple's history in alternating past and present chapters, including the way gay men face every aspect of the aging process.
Alexander Chee's epic second novel The Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) takes readers back to the Second French Empire. Lilliet takes the Paris opera by storm while trying to discover the mysterious person threatening to lift the veil on her true identity.
Winner of two Lambda Literary Awards when it was first published, the expanded 25th anniversary edition of The Gilda Stories (City Lights) by Jewelle Gomez, with a new foreword by the author and an afterword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, tells the tale of the vampire Gilda, beginning in 1850 Louisiana.
Counternarratives (New Directions), John Keene's well-received collection of novellas and short fiction, features a varied array of pieces spanning in time from the 17th century to the present day, and crossing multiple continents.
Set in a college town in 1979, centering on friends Kyle, Craig and Justin, Dale Boyer's debut novel The Dandelion Cloud (daleboyerworks.com), described by the writer as "a labor of love for a long time," asks and answers a question many have asked at one time or another: "What is the difference between friendship and love?"
The Scarlet Letter (Penguin Classics) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, newly reissued with an insightful foreword by Tom Perrotta, featuring notorious adulteress (see the red A) Hester Prynne, is as timely as ever, given the rise of public shaming.
The whole queer truth: Now in paperback, Bettyville: A Memoir (Penguin), "the last place in America with shag carpet" is where gay writer and book and magazine editor George Hodgman has returned (from Manhattan) for his role as "care inflictor" for his 90-year-old mother, the Betty of the title of this breathtaking memoir about mother/son relationships, identity and so much more.
Based on Lindsay King-Miller's online column on The Hairpin, Ask a Queer Chick: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life for Girls Who Dig Girls (Plume) promises to "help readers through major life milestones, from coming out to breaking up, from your first really gay haircut to walking down the aisle."
Augusten Burroughs' Lust & Wonder (St. Martin's Press) is the gay Running with Scissors writer's third memoir in which he focuses his distinctive brand of wit on his ongoing addiction and sobriety struggles, as well as the end of his relationship with his ex Dennis and the beginning of his relationship with his husband (and literary agent) Christopher.
In his eighth book The Fate of Gender: Nature, Nurture and the Human Future (Bloomsbury), gay writer Frank Browning, a former science reporter for NPR, takes an in-depth look at "human gender geographies around the world." This book foretells "a wave of gender variance and sexual fluidity just visible on the horizon."