Since the early 2000s saw a wave of young adult fiction that explored LGBTQ undertones, YA novels featuring LGBTQ characters are coming out in larger numbers, reports Mitchell Sunderland at Broadly.

David Leviathan’s Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2003) “ushered in a golden age of gay young adult fiction,” Sunderland writes, “....inspiring a new generation of YA authors.” Among those inspired writers is Jeffrey Self, who authored the recently published YA novel Drag Teen and who said of Leviathan’s book: “It just showed me there was an openness to the YA LGBTQ world that was very flexible and cool.”

Authors say readers are also pushing the market to produce more books about LGBTQ voices. “[Teenagers] expect [that] the book better be fucking [diverse],” said Simon Curtis, another YA novelist. “It shouldn’t be just straight white kids like how it has been for the past hundreds of years.

Check out Goodreads’ list of “popular gay YA fiction.”

Related reading: A picture book exploring queer South Asian themes complicates the conversation about how queerness in the United States is received.

In other fiction news: Amitav Ghosh laments the absence of climate change themes in literary fiction in The Guardian; “Poetry, on the other hand,” Ghosh writes, “has long had an intimate relationship with climactic events.”