Add these rainbow recs by Deep Vellum to your Pride reading list

RICH LOPEZ | Staff writer
rich@dallasvoice.com

Whether the team at Deep Vellum knows it or not, their spot may just be the queerest bookstore in town. The independent publisher and bookstore in Deep Ellum has been open for more than a decade, and the store features an eclectic but accessible array of titles, many they published.

We asked the shop for a list of recommended reads for Pride and did Deep Vellum deliver! (Many thanks to employee Riley Rennhack.)

Here are 10 titles by Deep Vellum publishing to keep your Pride going the entire year — if you’re a slow reader like me. And if you barrel through these fast-like, head on over to Deep Vellum for more queer-centric books and other off-the-beaten path finds for your reading list.

• Beauty Salon by Mario Bellain. Translated from the Spanish by poet and translator David Shook. Bellatin’s allegory of plague that brought him to cult status as auteur of Latin America’s most singular literary vision, in a brand-new translation.

• Trash by Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny. Translated by J.D. Pluecker, this novel was named a Lambda Literary Award finalist for transgender fiction. Trash interweaves the voices of three women with lived connections to the municipal garbage dump of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

• Freedom House by KB Brookins. Winner of the 2024 Stonewall Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry of Freedom House explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity and afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different “rooms.”

• A Boy in the City by S. Yarberry. The author uses poems to weave a sexy, glitzy journey through their city, where the speaker can “pose” and “compose” in a “trans way, of course.”

• Welcome to Midland by Logen Cure. A debut collection of poetry reckoning with silence, secrets, gossip and survival while growing up queer in conservative West Texas.

• Girls Lost by Jessica Schiefauer. In this tale, the body is a battlefield, and masculinity is a drug. Poetic and poignant, this story was adapted into a feature film exploring how we shape our identity and how we cope with our own transformations. Translated by Saskia Vogel.

• Not One Day by Anne Garreta. A tour de force of experimental queer feminist writing, Not One Day is the author’s intimate exploration of the connection between memory, fantasy, love and desire. Translated by Emma Ramadan.

• Misadventure by Nicholas Grider. Men search for themselves, for each other, for the sources of sanity and sickness, power and grief. Grider challenges the conventional gay narrative and asks the reader to reimagine the kind of work short fiction should do.

• La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc. Nominated for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Femina, La Bâtarde is an obsessive self-portrait of a woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and her physical appearance. Translated by Derek Coltman with a foreword by Simone de Beauvoir.

• Ryder by Djuna Barnes. From the author of the lesbian-thematic novel Nightwood, Barnes’ title is a book that is all that she was and must still be: vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic and a little mad.

All descriptions via Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive Press. Visit Deep Vellum at 3000 Commerce St. or online at DeepVellum.com.