Hudson News Featured Title for June 2025
May 2025 Reads for the Rest of Us, Ms. Magazine
Best Books to Celebrate Pride, Goodreads
Put These Popular Books by LGBTQ+ Authors on Your Reading List, Sunset Magazine
10 Queer Travel Books to Read This Summer, Condé Nast Traveler
“In the intrepid, intimate essays of Edge of the World, edited by Alden Jones, travel engenders realizations about self, society, and the value of queer community…. [A] stellar anthology of miniature travelogues that are as illuminating about identity as they are about the places they feature.”—Foreword Reviews, STARRED review
“This dynamic collection of queer travel writing will have you longing for the inspiration, energy and connection brought on by exploring new peoples and places. From Cambodia to the Netherlands and Russia to Senegal, these stories are contributed by some of my favorite writers, including Genevieve Hudson, Alexander Chee, Putsata Reang and Daisy Hernández.”—Ms. Magazine
“The groundbreaking collection brings together diverse voices exploring the unique challenges, joys and revelations of navigating foreign spaces while queer—filling a critical gap in a genre historically dominated by straight, cisgender perspectives…Through these diverse queer voices, readers gain not just new destinations to explore, but entirely new ways of experiencing the journey.”—Pride Source
"With essays from Alexander Chee, Daisy Hernandez, Edmund White, and more, the collection makes clear that queer travel writing isn’t just overdue—it’s transformative.”—Slate, Outward podcast
“[An anthology] to keep on-hand in the passenger seat and readily accessible in your carry-on for the plane…the essays in Edge of the World open the mic stand to an array of writers in the LGBTQ+ community. A fine coterie of writers that includes Garrard Conley, Genevieve Hudson, and Denne Michele Norris lends an idiosyncratic voice and a real heartbeat to the destinations they’ve dreamed of, lived in, and moved through.”—Condé Nast Traveler
“I cried a bunch while reading Edge of the World...a profoundly topical collection…. Each one of the stories is richly heartfelt and thoughtful in considering how broader contexts affect the narrator’s experience of moving across borders and boundaries. If you enjoyed the memoirs of Trevor Noah or Putsata Reang…or Ocean Vuong’s autofiction, this book is a must-read…The second line of Jones’ introduction…says that ‘We travel to find each other.' I believe most readers will be able to find pieces of themselves and their loved ones, their fears and anxieties and hopes and dreams reflected in these pages. While the stories will remind readers that the fraughtness and fear of moving through an unjust world is not new, they also express something more hopeful, more powerful: that the importance of community to surviving and thriving remains as old as love. Whether you’ve traveled the world or only two towns over, there is probably a story or two that will speak to you. The rest will hopefully expand your perspective on what is possible—or better yet, where it is possible to go from here.”—The Lesbrary
“A powerful new anthology of queer travel writing. Read Edge of the World not just because it’s queer; read it because it’s beautiful, because it’s honest; because it will make you a better, more empathetic person. That’s what great writing does. And for those of us who see yourselves in these pages, thank you for telling your stories...we need them."—Alyssa Milano, Sorry Not Sorry podcast
"Edge of the World brings readers to the cusp of longing. At the heart of this collection of travel essays is a queering of narrative, of point of view, of relationships between people as well as the relationship queer humans have to the nonhuman world around them. Underneath tourism an entire universe exists that teaches us how to see each other and the planet differently. This book will open eyes and hearts in the most astonishing, beautiful ways."—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves and The Chronology of Water"Edge of the World is one of those rare anthologies that will live alongside you for ages. What a joy to walk through so many worlds with our most gifted writers. Whether in Senegal or Cambodia or Holland or Key West, the insights and revelations in these essays offer endless food for thought. The travel is not just multi-geographic dalliances, of course—instead we are the tourists exploring the psyches of these authors from all kinds of backgrounds. Alden Jones has brought together essential voices who span half a century in age and are rooted in all kinds of distinct cultures, concerns, inclinations, and styles. The result is a dazzling gift to our queer communities and a most loving invitation for all kinds of wandering souls to walk through the world on our too-often-overlooked magical margins."—Porochista Khakpour, author of Tehrangeles and Sick
"In the pages of Edge of the World you'll find much more than travel advice. Each of these incredibly vulnerable and beautifully written essays remind us that our identities can affect where we go, who we are expected to be in those spaces, and that beauty (and heartache) can be found almost everywhere. I'm grateful to each of this anthology's contributors for their stories, and I believe you will be, too—queer or not."—De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills and Decent People
“If, like most queers I know, you're more yourself when you're not at home, and your sense of home itself is fraught, and most days find you simultaneously restless and dreamy and anxious about your thirst for adventure, these stories are your stories. Candid, wise, and filled with longing, Edge of the World is an essential compendium of the unique discoveries we've made on our most unforgettable journeys. I'm shocked this vital book hasn't existed until now.”—Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men
“If I were curating a cohort to accompany me on my travels I could hardly do better than the writers assembled in this collection. Witty, intelligent, gossipy, and wise, these writers remind me of why I love to travel. Their essays beautifully trace the different ways queerness interacts with being a stranger in a strange land, alive to possibility and reinvention.”—Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland
“Edge of the World is a mesmerizing feat. It honors the exquisite complexity of queer travel with immediacy, tenderness, and ferocious curiosity. I’m so grateful for these 16 authors who chart paths through cultures and languages, along the Baltic Sea, from Mérida to Amsterdam, across class strata, and even into the past, through family lineages and memory. This collection offers a new cartography of becoming, alert to the ways queerness shapes how we see, seek, and find. This collection is a vital contribution to the discourse, arriving at a crucial moment when the illusion of virtual 'connectivity’ makes the nuance of travel more important than ever."—Margot Douaihy, USA Today bestselling author of Scorched Grace and Blessed Water
