Five years of unrelenting censorship has brought queer books and the authors to a breaking point. Authors, agents, publishers: every part of the industry is seeing the strain.

Here are just some of the warning signs that queer YA and children’s books are in crisis:

• Agents are reporting that for the first time in a decade, publishers are explicitly telling them that they’re avoiding acquiring LGBTQ books because they’re difficult to place in stores.
• Small publishers focusing on diverse books have seen their sales to libraries and schools drop by 50%.
• Queer authors are seeing royalties drop by 70% and their titles go out of print after 10+ years of success.
• LGBTQ book deal announcements have declined, and publishers are using coded language to hide queer representation.

So many of the people fighting for queer representation in books, especially in YA and children’s books, are running on fumes.

• The librarians, teachers, authors, agents, and publishers who have been pushing back against anti-trans and anti-queer censorship for years on end are tired.
• They’ve put their livelihoods at risk. Some have lost their jobs, and many others have had their income drop significantly.
• They’ve endured bigotry, doxxing, and death threats.
• And there’s no sign of this wave of book banning and bigotry abating any time soon.

I have no doubt that queer writers will continue to find a way to get their stories into the world.

• What’s needed, though, is reinforcements: new people to step up as queer lit advocates. Here are 60+ small tasks you can do to defend the freedom to read.

When covering queer books, I often think about the ones I wish I could give my younger self—they would have saved me a lot of confusion and pain. This Pride Month, make a plan: how can you make sure this generation of kids and teens has access to those life-saving books?

👉 Read the full story, and sign up for the Literary Action newsletter! — DE

It is the best of times because three beloved literary writers have new books out today. And it’s the worst of times because what do you mean, we have to pick one to read first?

• 🥔 In Land, Maggie O’Farrell takes us to Ireland in the years before the Great Hunger.
• 🐴 A middle-aged woman is unexpectedly reunited with the man who was her stepfather during a formative period of her childhood in Ann Patchett’s Whistler, which is not actually about horses.
• ⌨️ Ruth Ozeki meditates on language and writing in The Typing Lady, a short story collection to tide us over between novels.
• Melissa Albert, author of the popular YA fantasy series The Hazel Wood, is making her adult debut today with The Children. In a Book Riot exclusive, Albert and her editor discuss her experience writing adult fiction about childhood.

Also hitting shelves today:

• Ben Mezrich investigates the scandal that shook the chess world
• A dark-and-twisty thriller* about a woman who goes missing from a luxury hotel and the detective who believes the case is connected to other unsolved disappearances
• A working-class witch tries to break the evil spell that is torturing a Spanish heiress in a queer Gothic tale

📚 See more of this week’s most exciting new releases.

^{*A message from our sponsor}

An atmospheric audiobook about reclaiming your voice.

Fleeing a dangerous ex, Callie arrives at the Chateau of the Lost with her young daughter and finds magical springs, eccentric neighbors, and music she thought she’d lost forever. As danger closes in, she’ll have to reclaim her voice to protect everything she’s found.

In The River Muse, Laura Resau creates a lush, whimsical blend of magical realism, romance, and mystery. Acclaimed narrator Cassandra Campbell delivers an immersive listening experience filled with emotion, suspense, and lyrical storytelling.

Before she was a bestselling author, beloved teacher, and Oprah mainstay, Maya Angelouwas an adventurous little girl named Marguerite Johnson who was obsessed with books and wanted to become a poet someday.

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , the first of seven autobiographies (seven!) she wrote to capture her fascinating life, Angelou recounts coming of age as a Black girl in the Jim Crow South and the move to California that would change the direction of her life.

The history of this book is almost as interesting as Angelou’s life itself:

• Angelou wrote the book after James Baldwin took her to a party in 1968, where she met a woman who was friends with Random House editor Robert Loomis.
• Upon its publication in 1969, Angelou was hailed as "a new kind of memoirist" at a time when Black women rarely got to tell their stories with such candor.
• Caged Bird was celebrated from the jump, earning rave reviews and a National Book Award nomination.
• It has sold an estimated 2-3 million copies, has never been out of print in the 57 years since it first hit shelves, and continues to appear on English class syllabi across the U.S.

🎧 Hear our conversation about this groundbreaking read on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcatcher of choice.

Claire Fuller is the author of Hunger and Thirst, a literary horror out today from Tin House / Zando.

I’m always searching for horror novels where the writer seems to have cared as much about interesting, beautiful prose as scaring me. Here are three:

Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford: Told mostly in the first person plural, the voice of this novel is skittish, with digressions and asides. Some young cousins gather for a birthday party in upstate New York, where they see something from a bathroom window moving over and over from the treeline to a shed. Abi, only three, charges outside, and the others follow. There is creepiness, surprise, and craziness, all of it brilliantly written. It’s an absolute one-off, and I loved it.

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami, translated by Ralph McCarthy: I’ve only just discovered Ryu Murakami, more fool me, but I’ll be reading all his novels that have been translated from the original Japanese. There’s no denying it, this novel is disturbing, with graphic scenes of murder that the pared-back writing makes all the more real. Kenji takes tourists on tours of Tokyo’s sex bars where the body of a teenage girl has recently been discovered, and he begins to suspect his latest client, dead-eyed American Frank, who tells stories about his lobotomy and an ability to hypnotise.

Old Soul by Susan Barker: Descriptive and lush but full of action, Old Soul had my skin tingling. After a chance meeting at an airport, Jake and Marika realise their loved ones died in similar and disturbing circumstances, both linked by a mysterious woman. Jake sets out to find other people who have suffered the same way, presenting testimonies that finally lead him to a force he could never have imagined. 

An epic historical spy novel, filled with illicit romance.

In The Fire Agent, inspired by the remarkable life of the author’s grandfather, a German Jewish spy in Tokyo becomes a double agent for the Americans as the fascists rise to power.

Spanning two world wars, this is a gripping story about espionage, forbidden love, and the impossible choice between loyalty and survival.

Every month, Libro.fm announces its most listened-to books. Here a few highlights from May’s list.

• ⏳ Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke was the most listened-to fiction book in May (and I can attest that my local bookstore was almost sold out when I swung by this weekend).
• 🌾 Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer at #8 on the nonfiction chart shows just how different nonfiction audiobook patterns are. That book is over a decade old, yet still is finding new readers. (We did a whole Zero To Well-Read episode on it, so we get it.)
• 👓 Despite only being available for the last five days of the month, David Sedaris’ new book, The Land and Its People, took the #4 spot in non-fiction.
• 📚 The Correspondent and Theo of Golden stay hot, coming in at #4 and #3 respectively in fiction.
• 💜 And finally, I was delighted see bell hooks’s Communion make the non-fiction chart at #10. I have no idea why so many people listened to it in May (re: it was probably TikTok), but there was a new audio version released in the fall. — JO

Cindy Pham is a BookTuber (Read With Cindy) whose first novel, The Secret World of Briar Rose, is out today from Kokila. Below, she discusses how being an avid reader influenced the writing of her debut.

In 2018, I started a YouTube channel where I talked about books. Most viewers tune in for the rants; besides the entertainment of watching someone dramatically read faerie smut, people also enjoyed my critical eye for prose and characterization. Naturally, when I announced my debut novel coming out in 2026, people were curious about how my own book would match up.

I’m sorry to tell you the bad news: being a reader didn’t make me a good writer.

Making that assumption sets both the reader and author up for failure. Writing is so incredibly subjective that no book is universally loved, and even the most popular ones have the biggest critics.

Rather than strive to meet impossible standards and conflicting opinions, I wrote my book for one person: my 11-year-old self, who wished she could sleep forever and never wake up.

The Secret World of Briar Rose is a queer reimagining of Sleeping Beauty inspired by that wish. The book is not only an expression of my lifelong experience with depression and suicidal ideation, but also an amalgamation of things I’ve loved in other books: flowery prose, flawed characters, dual timelines, and ruminative writing, even at the expense of slower pacing and depressing themes.

In the end, being an avid reader didn’t make me a “good” writer, but it did make me a more purposeful one. I learned what I liked and disliked in books and specified my subjective tastes even further. I got to narrow down the exact type of story I wanted to write, rather than be influenced by what the average person believes a good book “should” be.

What matters is not chasing publishing trends or universal praise, but listening to what speaks true to you. I believe that’s what storytelling should be: a way of expressing yourself, what you care about, and how you understand the world around you. Leaving behind a fingerprint that is uniquely yours, with all its different shapes and whorls, that no one else can replicate.

For what it’s worth, I think my younger self would have liked the book too.

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Did you know? Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries is the only novel to win both The Pulitzer Prize and Canada’s Governor General’s Award in the same year.

🌈 Celebrate Pride with 160 new and recent LGBTQ+ books.

🎮 Game out the rise of LitRPGs.

💥 Check out the comic books that were nominated for the Best Comic Books of the Century So Far.

📚 Revisit seven books you’ll never outgrow.

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