If You Loved Woodworking, These Five Books Are Waiting

You finished Woodworking and now nothing feels right to pick up next. The queer interiority, the quiet devastation, the way Emily St. James made a novel about building something feel like it was actually about coming apart. That specific combination is hard to replace. These five

Published September 16, 2026 · 5 min read · Recommendations & TBR

You finished Woodworking and now nothing feels right to pick up next. The queer interiority, the quiet devastation, the way Emily St. James made a novel about building something feel like it was actually about coming apart. That specific combination is hard to replace. These five books are our best attempt at finding it again.

Why Woodworking is harder to follow than it looks

A lot of queer fiction gets recommended in the same breath as Woodworking, and most of it doesn't quite land for the same readers. Here's the thing: Woodworking isn't just a queer novel. It's a novel about labor and identity, about what we make with our hands when we don't know what to do with our lives, about trans experience without the narrative needing to resolve on schedule. Readers who loved it aren't looking for a redemption arc. They're looking for something that sits with ambiguity the way this book does.

Recommendations that miss this tend to be too tidy. Too triumphant. Good books, just not the right inheritance.

What follows are five books like Woodworking by Emily St. James that share its actual DNA: queer characters who are complicated, prose that earns its quietness, and endings that don't pretend the hard stuff wraps up neatly.

Five books that live in the same emotional neighborhood

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

If you want queer fiction that refuses to simplify, start here. Peters writes about trans women and chosen family with more wit and structural nerve than almost anyone working right now. The novel is funny in the way things are funny when they're also kind of awful. It has three main characters, all of whom you'll want to be right and none of whom entirely are.

Why it works as a follow-up: Woodworking readers tend to respond to trans perspectives told from inside the experience rather than observed from outside it. This delivers that. Peters also has no interest in making you comfortable, which you probably noticed you liked.

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

A Black queer grad student in the Midwest, a weekend that quietly falls apart, sentences that are almost unbearably precise. Brandon Taylor writes interiority the way Emily St. James does: not by explaining how a character feels, but by rendering exactly what they notice. There's a scene involving a lab accident that becomes, somehow, a scene about every humiliation the protagonist has absorbed over years. You'll know it when you get there.

This is one of the slower books on the list. Give it the time it's asking for.

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

Yes, it's sixty-something years old. It belongs here anyway. Baldwin writes about queerness and shame and the stories men tell themselves when they can't afford the truth with a clarity that hasn't dated. If Woodworking left you thinking about what it costs to suppress who you are, Giovanni's Room is the long history of that cost. Short novel, long aftertaste.

It's also a reliable book club pick because almost everyone reads David differently, which makes for a good two hours of argument.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

This one isn't explicitly queer, and we're recommending it anyway. Woodworking is, among other things, a novel about being uncertain inside your own life. Selin, Batuman's narrator, is one of the best portraits of that feeling in recent fiction. She's a Harvard freshman in the nineties who is very smart and almost completely unable to act on what she wants. The whole novel is her watching herself not do things. It sounds frustrating. It's also one of the most absorbing reading experiences you can have.

For readers who responded to Woodworking's quieter register, this is the recommendation we'd push hardest.

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

Short stories about Cambodian American communities in California, and one of the best debut collections in recent memory. So writes queer characters as fully formed people whose queerness is part of the whole picture, not a plot to be resolved. Several stories will make you laugh and then hit you sideways. "Superking Son Scores Again" in particular has stayed with readers the way certain chapters of Woodworking do: you'll think about it later, randomly, and feel something.

This one's for readers who want something next that doesn't feel like homework. Short stories, when you're still a little wrecked, are sometimes the right format.

What to look for when you're building your own list

If none of these five land exactly right, a few signals are worth looking for in any search for books like Woodworking:

• Trans or queer perspectives written from inside the experience. Books that treat queer identity as lived reality rather than concept tend to do what Woodworking does.
• Prose that rewards slowness. St. James is a sentence-level writer. Plot-forward books tend to feel like a register shift.
• Ambiguous endings. If the back-cover copy uses the word "triumphant," read a few pages first.
• Character over concept. Woodworking isn't really about woodworking. The best follow-ups will also be ostensibly about something else.

For book clubs: this list works well if you let members bring one title to defend rather than assigning a single read. The conversation about which book captured what you loved about Woodworking is often better than the conversation about any single title.

What to do next

If you're hosting a queer fiction book club and want to build a full session around Woodworking, a few practical things:

1. Start with the DNF conversation. If some members couldn't get into Woodworking, find out where they stopped. That's usually the most useful data point for picking the next read.
2. Ask members to name one book they loved recently, one that didn't work, and what mood they're in now. Open-ended asks stall. This gets five good answers in ten minutes.
3. Don't overlook Afterparties as a bridge title. If your club has mixed feelings about slower literary fiction, the short story format gives everyone an entry point.
4. Give Giovanni's Room a dedicated meeting. It's short enough that everyone actually finishes it, and the conversation tends to open into bigger questions about queerness and the time periods your members have lived through.
5. Keep a shared running list between sessions. The best recommendations in any book club surface in the margins of conversations about something else. Write them down somewhere everyone can see.

The right next book is out there. Sometimes it's one of these five. Sometimes it's something a club member read three years ago and has been waiting for the right moment to press into someone's hands. Both are good outcomes.

You don't have to replace Woodworking. You just have to find something worth reading next.