The LAMBDA Literary Awards 2024

Last year's National Book Award for fiction is "astonishing" and "easily 2023's sexiest novel" wrote critic Hamilton Cain in the Star-Tribune. "A transfixing collage of gorgeous prose and manipulated illustrations, with themes of cultural erasure and the effervescence of lust and love.."

"This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir...This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know.." —Dwight Garner

"Restless, imaginative and daring, Couplets advances the canon of the erotic." —The Washington Post

"Washington is a generous and gentle writer, with a profound capacity to face the cruelty and pain of contemporary American life while simultaneously offering his characters — and readers – an expansive space for self-forgiveness, hope and nourishment." —The Washington Post

"Shelve her latest novel alongside those of Richard Russo, Nora Ephron, Armistead Maupin, Jess Walter and other comic novelists whose works are both timely and ultimately transcendent." —The Los Angeles Times

"Hijab Butch Blues is more than a must-read. It's also a study guide on Islam, a handbook for abolitionists, and a queer manifesto. It inspires critical thinking, upholds activist self-care, and permits the defining of one's own queerness." —NPR

"Possesses something of the febrile intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, their laser focus on female friendship, but instead of Naples, K-Ming Chang’s wild girls inhabit a magical universe of talking dogs and shape-shifting body parts." —The New York Times

"All-Night Pharmacy’s world feels like a Phoebe Bridgers song—spooky and sexy, stringing pop culture together with the abject, and always swelling with feeling... Madievsky uses dry humor, finely dialed insights, and lush, imagistic language to articulate the burdens of the past that we carry in our bodies." —The Believer

Locus Magazine gave this Nebula best novel winner a rare review early on: "Truly superb books – ones that are complete, that are organic, that invite themselves into your brain fully formed and transport you somewhere else, that leave you humming and staring and obsessed, that leave characters and images and ideas hard-printed among your own memories – are hard to talk about. It’s hard to talk about Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors." —Locus Magazine."

"Marisa Crane’s debut novel is a remarkable feat of speculative fiction, its premise so strangely familiar that to call it speculative feels like a misnomer," praised Bookpage in one of the many rave reviews of this book. "It’s about what humans can bear and what we can get used to, about the choices we make and that are made for us, about the worst things we do to each other and the most astonishing."