The Best Overlooked Books

The Great Night by Chris Adrian (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
In this darker and smuttier retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream,Adrian gives magic to the humans and humanity to the sprites.

Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planetby Catherine Friend (Da Capo Lifelong Books)
The lesbian author of Hit by a Farm is tired after 15 years of shepherding but reconsidering her retirement in this history of sheep and the current state of American small farms.

Blind: A Memoir by Belo Miguel Cipriani (Wheatmark)
In 2007, Cipriani was beaten so badly he lost his sight. As this memoir reveals, the perpetrators were his childhood friends. But the real story is in his learning to deal with his sudden disability.

Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, edited by Ivan E. Coyote (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Butch storyteller Coyote edits this anthology of queer, intersex, and trans authors including Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), and S. Bear Bergman (Butch Is a Noun) writing about butch-femme identities and relationships.

Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction, edited by Devon W. Carbado and Dwight McBride (Cleis Press)
This overview of 100 years of African-American writing demonstrates the interconnection between race, gender, and sexuality.