A deep dive into the five finalists for the 38th Lammy Award in Bisexual Fiction, and what they illuminate about a category that had to fight for its own existence.
What Is the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction?
The Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction recognizes the best novel or short story collection of the year written by and centering bisexual experience. Of all the fiction categories at the Lammys, this one has perhaps the most contested and instructive history, because for most of the awards’ existence, it did not exist at all.
The Lammys launched in 1989 with categories organized primarily around gay and lesbian identity. Bisexual writers and bisexual stories existed within the broader queer literary world, but for years there was no dedicated award category recognizing work that centered bisexual experience specifically. This was not merely an administrative oversight. It reflected a broader cultural tendency to render bisexuality invisible: to fold it into gay or lesbian identity when convenient, to treat it as a transitional state rather than a distinct and stable orientation, to leave it without its own institutional recognition.
The addition of bisexual categories to the Lammys was the result of sustained advocacy by bisexual community members and writers who argued, correctly, that the absence of a dedicated category was itself a statement. Bisexual fiction, they noted, had particular concerns and particular literary traditions not adequately captured by awards organized around gay and lesbian identity. A novel centering a bisexual protagonist navigating attraction to multiple genders was doing something different from a gay novel or a lesbian novel, not better or worse, but different, and that difference deserved recognition.
Today the Bisexual Fiction category is an established part of the Lammy landscape, and its shortlists have tracked an emerging body of work that takes bisexual experience seriously as literary subject matter.
The Particular Challenge of Bisexual Fiction
Writing bisexual fiction presents writers with a set of challenges worth understanding if you want to read the 2026 finalists with full attention.
The first is representation without reduction. Bisexuality is frequently misunderstood as simply “attraction to both men and women,” a definition that erases the full complexity of the bisexual experience. It can includes attraction regardless of gender, fluidity over time, and the particular social pressures of existing in a world that tends to read people as either gay or straight based on their current partner. Fiction that takes bisexual experience seriously has to navigate these misunderstandings without becoming a corrective pamphlet.
The second challenge is biphobia within LGBTQ+ spaces themselves. It is a documented phenomenon, and bisexual fiction that takes it seriously is engaging with something simultaneously internal to queer life and reflective of broader social dynamics. The third is formal restlessness: the experience of not quite fitting into the available categories can produce fiction that itself refuses neat resolution. Some of the most interesting writing on this shortlist leans into that quality directly.
The 2026 Finalists for Bisexual Fiction
And I’ll Take Out Your Eyes by A. M. Sosa (Algonquin Books)
The title comes from a Spanish proverb: Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos. Raise crows and they’ll take out your eyes. It is a saying about what we breed in our own homes, what our families make of us, what we pass down when we think we’re doing nothing at all.
Since the age of seven, Christian has been under the thumb of a curse. The novel opens with him waking up in his family’s kitchen holding a knife, his mother’s attempt at “good magic” failing to break whatever has taken hold of him. He reads the curse everywhere: in his bedridden mother’s wilting plants, in his estranged older brother, in his father’s fists and glassy stare. Growing up in the Mexican American community of 1990s Stockton, California, Christian struggles with his sexuality in a culture of repression, drinking and getting high to escape himself and the violent city that seems to have its claws in him. Even when he flees to college in Berkeley, the curse follows, until he begins to find, tentatively, that writing might be a way to process the trauma and discover who he actually is.
What makes the novel formally distinctive is how Sosa uses multiple points of view to tell Christian’s story. Dissociative second person appears when recounting aggression. First person arrives when Christian begins writing for himself. These shifts keep readers on edge while pulling them deeper in. Shelf Awareness called it “lyrical, fierce, and unfiltered.” Ruth Madievsky, the author of All-Night Pharmacy, described it as “a poetic gut punch that heals just as much as it haunts.”
A. M. Sosa uses they/them pronouns and is a queer Mexican-American writer from Stockton who won the 2022 Henfield Prize at UC Irvine’s MFA program. This is their debut novel, and it reads like an announcement.
Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive!: Stories by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Astra House)
A beheaded body interrupts a quinceañera. A sentient tail sprouts from a hospital worker’s backside and throws her romantic life into complete chaos. A recently cancelled musician flees New York and finds herself in a haunted punk house in Boston. A student finds unsettling attention from a predatory professor, and a billboard proclaiming Jesus’s miraculous living forces her to reckon with choices she’d rather not examine too closely. A woman kidnapped by mistake, because she was wearing the wrong coat, ends up on what feels like a very strange romantic comedy date with the young man holding the gun.
These are the kinds of stories Melissa Lozada-Oliva tells. The ten pieces in this collection live at the intersection of body horror, fabulism, Catholic iconography, Latinx identity, and the deep unease of being a girl in a world designed to make that feel dangerous. What holds them together is not plot but sensibility: a tenderness for the strange, a refusal to let the supernatural overwhelm the human, a conviction that the line between disgust and desire is thinner than we admit.
Lozada-Oliva is the child of Guatemalan and Colombian immigrants and the author of the novel-in-verse Dreaming of You and the novel Candelaria. She holds an MFA in poetry from NYU, and that background is audible on every page. One reviewer in BOMB Magazine said her short stories are “luminescent, uncanny, and infused with earnestness and humor.” GennaRose Nethercott called her “a shimmering patron saint of the weird girl lit world.”
The collection received a starred review from Kirkus and was named a Best Book of 2025 by Book Riot. For readers who love Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and want something in that territory but entirely its own thing, this is the book.
House of Beth by Kerry Cullen (Simon & Schuster)
Cassie Jackson is a bisexual literary agency assistant in New York when two things happen nearly simultaneously: she goes through a gut-wrenching breakup with her girlfriend, and she discovers her boss slumped over his desk, apparently dead. Convinced she will somehow be blamed, she flees to her New Jersey hometown along the Delaware River, where her father and stepmother are conveniently away.
There, she reconnects with Eli, her high school best friend, now a widowed father of two. Things move fast. Within months Cassie is married, living in Eli’s house in the woods, homeschooling the kids, and getting to know their reserved neighbor Joan. She has traded a chaotic New York life for something that looks, from the outside, exactly like domestic bliss. The problem is the house. Beth, Eli’s late wife, was a devoted homemaker whose presence still saturates every corner of it. Her decor, her rhythms, her absence. Cassie begins to feel she has stepped into someone else’s life rather than made her own.
Then Cassie begins hearing a voice. And the voice knows things about how Beth died.
The novel has been widely compared to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and the debt is acknowledged rather than hidden. What Cullen adds is a very contemporary layer: Cassie’s harm OCD, which floods her mind with graphic, violent intrusive thoughts she cannot control and spends enormous energy concealing. The New York Times called it “an uncanny debut,” noting that what’s truly fantastical in the novel is not only the ghost but the illusion of domestic bliss itself. The novel also takes the “trad wife” cultural moment and holds it up to the light in ways that are pointed and thought-provoking without being polemical.
Cullen earned her MFA at Columbia and has published fiction in Prairie Schooner and The Indiana Review. This is her debut novel. Kirkus called it “modern gothic meets psychological suspense in this wholly original work.”
Sympathy for Wild Girls: Stories by Demree McGhee (The Feminist Press)
A runaway seeks shelter from violence with a pack of wild coyotes. A young woman falls into a hypocritical crew of white Christian YouTube influencers and finds, unexpectedly, that she likes something about the life they’ve made. A mother watches her daughter’s prophecy about the end of the world come true. A group of shoplifters lose themselves in their quest for cheap lipstick and cheaper fame.
In each story, Demree McGhee’s protagonists are young, Black, and queer, navigating a version of our world familiar enough to recognize and warped enough to unsettle. The stories track desire and pain to the edges of reality. They are interested in what it costs to exist in a body that the world reads as multiple kinds of wrong at once: Black, female, queer, hungry. In the titular opening story, Daisy does everything she can think of to make herself undesirable, to inspire disgust and disinterest as a form of self-defense, because she understands at a bone level that desire can be a road to danger.
McGhee is a debut author who earned her BA from UC San Diego and is currently an MFA student at San Diego State. She said in an interview that “society’s violence against us is hell, but we deserve great fiction.” The collection was named a Best Book of 2025 by Book Riot, received a starred review from Kirkus, and has been compared to Carmen Maria Machado’s work for its feminist fabulism and its willingness to sit inside discomfort rather than resolve it.
The Feminist Press is the right home for this book. A publisher with decades of commitment to work at the intersection of feminist politics and queer identity, it connects McGhee’s debut to a long tradition of literature that takes Black women’s inner lives seriously as both political and aesthetic subject matter.
The Salvage by Anbara Salam (Zando/Tin House)
It is 1962. Marta Khoury, a trailblazing marine archaeologist at a time when women in her field are a rarity and a Palestinian-Scottish woman even more so, has been called to Cairnroch, a small fictional island off the east coast of Scotland. A Victorian shipwreck, the HMS Deliverance, has been dragged up from arctic waters. It holds the remains of Auld James, a celebrated local explorer and religious fanatic whose posthumous legend is basically the identity of the whole island. Marta’s job is to excavate the treasures of his final expedition and give Cairnroch something to sell to tourists.
On her first dive down to the ship, she sees something move in the dark water. A figure, lurking in the wreckage. Then the Cuban Missile Crisis breaks, a record-breaking winter descends, and Marta finds herself stranded on Cairnroch with no way out. She forms a relationship with Elsie, a local woman working at the island’s only hotel. When the ship’s artifacts begin inexplicably disappearing, the two of them have to brave the freezing conditions together to find out what is happening before anyone discovers the truth about Marta’s past.
Anbara Salam is half-Palestinian, half-Scottish, grew up in London, holds a PhD in Theology, and has published three previous novels in the UK. The Salvage is her American breakthrough: a Goodreads Editor’s Pick, a Town & Country Best Book of Fall, an Autostraddle and Literary Hub Most Anticipated title, and a Favorite Queer Book of 2025 from Book Riot. The Chicago Review of Books called it “a journey both eerie and inspiring to embark on.” Scientific American named it a Favorite Book of 2025.
What makes the novel particularly interesting in the context of the Bisexual Fiction category is how it treats Marta’s bisexuality as simply part of who she is, woven into her character rather than foregrounded as a theme to be examined. Her relationship with Elsie develops out of circumstance and genuine connection, against the backdrop of Cold War dread, island insularity, and the ghost in the water. For readers looking for gothic atmosphere, historical precision, and a bisexual protagonist who is fully realized rather than defined by her identity, this is the book.
What the 2026 Bisexual Fiction Shortlist Tells Us
Five finalists, and between them: a Chicano coming-of-age novel about curses and sexuality and the violence of Stockton; a fabulist body horror collection about Latinx women and faith and the strangeness of desire; a gothic ghost story about a bisexual woman in a haunted New Jersey house grappling with OCD and someone else’s life; a debut collection of surreal stories about young Black queer women at the edges of reality; and a 1962 Scottish island gothic thriller with a bisexual Palestinian-Scottish marine archaeologist and a Victorian shipwreck.
The publisher range is Algonquin, Astra House, Simon & Schuster, The Feminist Press, and Zando/Tin House. Three of the five titles are story collections rather than novels, which is unusual and interesting: the short story form may have a particular affinity with bisexual experience, with its multiple perspectives, its comfort with fragments and open endings, its refusal to resolve into a single sustained arc.
What the shortlist makes absolutely clear is that bisexual fiction in 2026 is not organized around a single identity politics. It is five writers doing five wildly different things, all of them considered essential.
Winners will be announced at the ceremony at Sony Hall in New York on June 12, 2026.
How to Read the 2026 Bisexual Fiction Finalists
- For readers who want a lyrical, devastating debut about growing up queer in a violent place: And I’ll Take Out Your Eyes by A. M. Sosa
- For readers who love feminist fabulism, body horror, and genuinely weird girls: Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! by Melissa Lozada-Oliva
- For readers who want gothic domestic horror with a bisexual protagonist and OCD at the center: House of Beth by Kerry Cullen
- For readers who want surreal, skin-deep stories about young Black queer women: Sympathy for Wild Girls by Demree McGhee
- For readers who want a gothic thriller, a historical setting, and a bisexual archaeologist stranded on a Scottish island: The Salvage by Anbara Salam
The 38th Lambda Literary Awards ceremony takes place June 12, 2026, at Sony Hall in New York City. All finalists were announced March 18, 2026, by Lambda Literary.
