Diverse Books for a Neighborhood of Readers
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LGBTQ Books for Adults

We here at Big Blue Marble remember the days when there were only a handful of “LGB” books, and we each took personal pride in owning most of them. 2024 is an entirely different universe, with a deluge of diverse books, in all genres and formats, documenting lesbian, bisexual, gay, queer, intersex, trans, nonbinary, and something-beyond-labels-we-have lives. This page is a small selection of the best of the newest of these books. Look for our lists of LGBTQ books for kids, middle grade, and YA!

Ocean Vuong, "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous"

Ocean Vuong, "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous"

$18.36

Price includes state and local tax. Book can be picked up at the store or delivered to your home in Northwest Philadelphia. We don’t yet mail books - if you live outside of our delivery area, please visit Bookshop.org to have this great book mailed to you.

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Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award Shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize


Winner of the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction! Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Oprah.com, Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, Nylon, The Week, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more.

"A lyrical work of self-discovery that's shockingly intimate and insistently universal...Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post Poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

Named a Best Book of the Year by:
GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and more!

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Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Copy)

$18.36
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Rivers Solomon & Clipping, The Deep

$18.35
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Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted

$22.67
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Zaina Arafat, You Exist Too Much

$18.31
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Andrew Sean Greer, Less

$19.43