Best LGBT Classic Fiction Books
Here you will get Best LGBT Classic Fiction Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Giovanni's Room
Author: by James Baldwin
Vintage Books
English
176 pages
Set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, this groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is “a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction” (The Atlantic). In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.
David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy.
But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy. David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark nightthe night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
2. The House in the Cerulean Sea
Author: by TJ Klune
12 hours and 12 minutes
TJ Klune
Daniel Henning
“Daniel Henning is a great narrator for this quirky and theatrical audiobook…. Henning revels in a cornucopia of characters, diving into nuanced voices and colorful moments with accents and growls, tone shifts and whispers…. This is definitely a title for those who enjoy fantasy stories replete with gnomes and witches and all in between.” (AudioFile Magazine) Lambda Literary Award-winning author TJ Klune’s breakout contemporary fantasy Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth.
He’s tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world. Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn.
And his secrets will come to light. The House in the Cerulean Sea is an enchanting love story, masterfully told, about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place – and realizing that family is yours.
3. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Author: by Oscar Wilde
English
186 pages
1515190994
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian GrayThe Picture of Dorian Gray is a 1891 gothic and philosophical novel by Irish writer and playwright Oscar Wilde.
First published as a serial story in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, the editors feared the story was indecent, and without Wilde’s knowledge, deleted five hundred words before publication. Despite that censorship, The Picture of Dorian Gray offended the moral sensibilities of British book reviewers, some of whom said that Oscar Wilde merited prosecution for violating the laws guarding the public morality.
In response, Wilde aggressively defended his novel and art in correspondence with the British press. Wilde revised and expanded the magazine edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) for publication as a novel; the book edition (1891) featured an aphoristic preface an apologia about the art of the novel and the reader.
4. The Importance of Being Earnest
Author: by Oscar Wilde
English
58 pages
1503331741
The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James’s Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious person to escape burdensome social obligations.
Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play’s major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways. Contemporary reviews all praised the play’s humour, though some were cautious about its explicit lack of social messages, while others foresaw the modern consensus that it was the culmination of Wilde’s artistic career so far.
Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde’s most enduringly popular play. The successful opening night marked the climax of Wilde’s career but also heralded his downfall. The Marquess of Queensberry, whose son Lord Alfred Douglas was Wilde’s lover, planned to present the writer with a bouquet of rotten vegetables and disrupt the show.
5. Brideshead Revisited
Author: by Evelyn Waugh
Back Bay Books
English
432 pages
Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century and called “Evelyn Waugh’s finest achievement” by the New York Times, Brideshead Revisited is a stunning exploration of desire, duty, and memory. The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece – a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire.
Through the story of Charles Ryder’s entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities.
At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh’s early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.”A genuine literary masterpiece.” -Time”Heartbreakingly beautiful… The twentieth century’s finest English novel.” -Los Angeles Times
6. Another Country
Author: by James Baldwin
Vintage
English
448 pages
Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passionssexual, racial, political, artisticthat is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.”Brilliantly and fiercely told.” The New York TimesNominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
7. The Price of Salt
Author: by Patricia Highsmith
Dover Publications
English
256 pages
A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom.
But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover. Author Patricia Highsmith is best known for her psychological thrillers Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Originally published in 1952 under a pseudonym, The Price of Salt was heralded as “the novel of a love society forbids.” Highsmith’s sensitive treatment of fully realized characters who defy stereotypes about homosexuality marks a departure from previous lesbian pulp fiction.
Erotic, eloquent, and suspenseful, this story offers an honest look at the necessity of being true to one’s nature. The book is also the basis of the acclaimed 2015 film Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.
8. Maurice: A Novel
Author: by E. M. Forster
English
256 pages
0393310329
“The work of an exceptional artist working close to the peak of his powers.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York TimesSet in the elegant Edwardian world of Cambridge undergraduate life, this story by a master novelist introduces us to Maurice Hall when he is fourteen.
We follow him through public school and Cambridge, and into his father’s firm. In a highly structured society, Maurice is a conventional young man in almost every wayexcept that his is homosexual. Written during 1913 and 1914, immediately after Howards End, and not published until 1971, Maurice was ahead of its time in its theme and in its affirmation that love between men can be happy.
“Happiness,” Forster wrote, “is its keynote…. In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad businessman and rather a snob.
Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, torments him and finally saves him.”
9. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Author: by Oscar Wilde
Penguin Classics
English
304 pages
An astounding novel of decadence, debauchery, and secrecy from one of Ireland’s greatest writers. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American ReadEnthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray makes a Faustian bargain to sell his soul in exchange for eternal youth and beauty.
Under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, where he is able to indulge his desires while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only Dorian’s picture bears the traces of his decadence.
A knowing account of a secret life and an analysis of the darker side of late Victorian society. The Picture of Dorian Gray offers a disturbing portrait of an individual coming face to face with the reality of his soul.
Shocking in its suggestion of unspeakable sin, this novel was later used as evidence against Wilde when he was tried for indecency in 1895. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world.
10. Carmilla
Author: by Joseph Sheridan Lefanu
Lanternfish Press
English
144 pages
Isolated in a remote mansion in a central European forest, Laura longs for companionship – until a carriage accident brings another young woman into her life: the secretive and sometimes erratic Carmilla. As Carmilla’s actions become more puzzling and volatile, Laura develops bizarre symptoms, and as her health goes into decline, Laura and her father discover something monstrous.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s compelling tale of a young woman’s seduction by a female vampire was a source of influence for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which it predates by over a quarter century. Carmilla was originally serialized from 1871 to 1872 and went on to inspire adaptations in film, opera, and beyond, including the cult classic web series by the same name.
11. Just Above My Head: A Novel
Author: by James Baldwin
Delta (June 13, 2000)
English
592 pages
James Baldwin’s final novel is the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers (The New York Times Book Review). Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.
The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this stunning, unforgettable novel. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, James Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the forbidden passion of Giovanni’s Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work.
Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and sensesand a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land.
12. Nightwood
Author: by Djuna Barnes
New Directions
English
208 pages
The fiery and enigmatic masterpieceone of the greatest novels of the Modernist era. Nightwood, Djuna Barnes’ strange and sinuous tour de force, “belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch” (Times Literary Supplement).
That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes’ novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe’s great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Viennaa world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.
The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fictionthere is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O’Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions.
13. The Well of Loneliness (Wordsworth Classics)
Author: by Radclyffe Hall
English
448 pages
184022455X
‘As a man loved a woman, that was how I loved… It was good, good, good…’ Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents – a fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover.
But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions. The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity when published in 1928. It became an international bestseller, and for decades was the single most famous lesbian novel.
It has influenced how love between women is understood, for the twentieth century and beyond.
14. The Berlin Stories
Author: by Christopher Isherwood
New Directions
English
256 pages
A classic of 20th-century fiction, The Berlin Stories inspired the Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film Cabaret. First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which are recognized today as classics of modern fiction.
Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and cafs; marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous, with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy, with its mobs and millionairesthis is the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power.
The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable Sally Bowles, whose misadventures in the demimonde were popularized on the American stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am A Camera and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret; Mr. Norris, the improbable old debauchee mysteriously caught between the Nazis and the Communists; plump Frulein Schroeder, who thinks an operation to reduce the scale of her Bste might relieve her heart palpitations; and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family, the Landauers.
15. The Flowers of Evil (Oxford World's Classics) (English and French Edition)
Author: by Charles Baudelaire
English, French
464 pages
0199535582
The Flowers of Evil, which T.S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking of sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinchingcelebration of the seamy side of urban life.
Including the French texts and comprehensive explanatory notes to the poems, this extraordinary body of love poems restores the six poems originally banned in 1857, revealing the richness and variety of the collection. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe.
Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expertintroductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
