Dispatch No. 1 · June 2026

Dispatched 31 May 2026  ·  54 new releases for June

It is June, so the marketing departments have briefly remembered the word "queer." Good of them. This catalogue will still be here in July.

Fifty-four releases this month, which is roughly what Pride does to a publishing calendar. The season runs heavily to gothic horror and, for reasons no one has bothered to explain, pirates. Emma Osborne's Grief Eater arrives on the 1st with a Suzan Palumbo blurb, which is the sort of thing that rearranges a reading pile. Cynthia Gómez's Muñeca brings the historical gothic. And though it sits at the edge of speculative rather than squarely inside it, Dreams in Which I'm Almost Human — a memoir reading disability and identity through the lens of SF and storytelling — is worth making room for. You have been warned, on at least three counts.

(First dispatch, so: this lands on the last day of every month with the following month's queer speculative fiction and the representation detail nobody else prints. That's the entire newsletter, no further announcements. It's researched and written by one person, by hand, so "the last day of every month" is an intention rather than a guarantee. Some months, life intervenes. The books will keep.)

A note on method: representation here is my best reading of ARC reviews, blurbs, author channels, and Goodreads, all of which lie occasionally. A blank means I found nothing specific, which usually means queerness isn't central to the book. Corrections are welcome and frequently necessary. How the list gets made is on the about page.

Worth your time

• Charlie Jane Anders on the death and, she argues, rebirth of the queer bookstore.
• Trans writers not waiting for permission: on self-publishing and the small presses picking up the slack.
• Beasts of England, a folk-horror anthology with a lovely mini-site. Dead Ink isn't a queer press, but they're publishing the queer horror timider houses won't.
• A record of failed attempts to say what trans lit is for, which is more useful than most successful ones.
• Where the trans fiction actually is, if you'll look past the big houses.
• Femmephilia by Sophie Lewis: essays on femme femininity, trans mermaids (yes, really), and yearning in mythology.
• Femme and Sundance by Christopher Caldwell (~5,600 words). Read it for a class, haven't stopped thinking about it since.

Replies reach a human. If I've missed a release or got a representation wrong, tell me — it happens more than I'd like.