Queer Life, Queer Love 3

The editors at Muswell Press return with their third anthology, and if you're wondering whether they've lost steam—Dear Reader, they haven't. This collection continues its mission of excavating brilliance from the global margins, assembling poems, essays, and fiction that refuse to whisper when they could shout, refuse to apologize when they could celebrate.

What strikes hardest about this volume is its range—not just of form or geography, but of emotional register. The Queer pulse throbs through every page, tender as a bruise, loud as a pride parade. These are intersectional voices refusing the closet of literary respectability, writers who get that authenticity isn't polite. From the forbidden to the quotidian, from shadow work to neon-lit, this anthology throws the most fabulous shade while holding space for genuine vulnerability.

The collection spans established names and emerging talents, a democracy of excellence that trusts readers to find their own tribes and vibes within these pages. Approach it methodically or flip open at random, each entry offers its own portal into lives lived outside the margins that society tries to draw around us.

Among my favourites: How to talk to Unicorns: Greg Williamson a story featuring a unicorn so magnificently unimpressed with human nonsense that it becomes the perfect vehicle for exploring otherness, schoolyard cruelty, and the holy relief of finding your people. Dining Table (Sold as Seen) Ted Marshman a meditation on a dining table sale that transforms furniture into a vessel for mourning and metamorphosis—objects as archives of everything we've survived. Sea Change: Graham J Sharpe A family's relocation becomes a pressure cooker for reinvention, with parental tensions simmering beneath every cardboard box and shifting things offering new perspectives on parents and self possibilities. Then there's The Long Haul: Matt Cain's story of the trucker whose cruising ground rituals and long-haul routes map a geography of desire lost and tentatively reclaimed, told through layered timelines that ache with possibility. And perhaps most devastating: The Old Man and The Sea Serpent: Tejas Yadav's mystical tale of father who spins a vibrant oceanic Princess mythology to process his estranged lesbian daughter's absence, love and loss braided into folklore.

The serious sits alongside the subversive; autobiography crashes into wild imagination. You could crack this book at random and find something that grabs you by the heartstrings or makes you laugh out loud—possibly both. Not every piece will land for every reader, but that's the compact you make with a genuine anthology: the misses matter less than the permission to skip forward to your next revelation.

Muswell Press understands we don't need more books that comfort us with the familiar. We need work that drags us into unmapped territory, that challenges and surprises and occasionally makes us uncomfortable in exactly the right way. This third volume delivers that urgent, necessary disorientation with passion, verve, and a thrilling disregard for convention—bold, uncompromising, and thrillingly itself.

Out now £12.99

For more info or to order see the publishes website.