Books like Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas

In a near‑future collapse, married couple Stan and Charmaine survive by living in their car while hunting for a place in the city’s state‑run Positron Project, which offers six‑month secure housing amid rising violence.

A Dominican‑American teenager in New Jersey struggles with weight, family history, and an unbreakable love, while his dream of becoming a writer clashes with a centuries‑old curse that haunts his lineage.

Saeed Jones’ memoir, winner of the Kirkus Prize and Stonewall Book Award, traces the journey of a young black gay man from the South as he navigates family, love, and identity across America.

The shocking memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas "is a book above all about being free," said The New York Review of Books--sexually, politically, artistically. Arenas recounts a stunning odyssey from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, through his suppression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, and his subsequent life and the events leading to his death in New York. In what The Miami Herald calls his "deathbed ode to eroticism," Arenas breaks through the code of secrecy and silence that protects the privileged in a state where homosexuality is a political crime. Recorded in simple, straightforward prose, this is the true story of the Kafkaesque life and world re-created in the author's acclaimed novels.

A vivid and funny first novel about three generations of a Cuban family divided by conflicting loyalties over the Cuban revolution, set in the world of Havana in the 1970s and '80s and in an emigre neighborhood of Brooklyn. It is a story of immense charm about women and politics, women and witchcraft, women and their men.

His mother talks piously of the heaven that awaits the good, and disciplines him with an ox prod. His grandmother burns his precious crosses for kindling. His cousins meet to plot their grandfather's death. Yet in the hills surrounding his home, another reality exists, a place where his mother wears flowers in her hair, and his cousin Celestino, a poet who inscribes verse on the trunks of trees, understands his visions. The first novel in Reinaldo Arenas's "secret history of Cuba," a quintet he called the Pentagonia, Singing from the Well is by turns explosively crude and breathtakingly lyrical. In the end, it is a stunning depiction of a childhood besieged by horror--and a moving defense of liberty and the imagination in a world of barbarity, persecution, and ignorance.

A biography that reveals the hidden life of Samuel M. Steward—novelist, poet, professor, and post‑Stonewall tattoo artist—through unpublished diaries and research correspondence, illustrating early homosexual existence in America.

In 1939 a young African‑American woman marries a Jewish refugee fleeing the Nazis; together they raise three children whose quests for voice—tenor, activism and family harmony—unfold against the backdrop of 20th‑century America.