Notes of a Crocodile

Taipei in the early 1990s, a group of queer university students navigating love, identity, and a Taiwan that has no language yet for what they are. Qiu Miaojin wrote this as a cult novel before her suicide at 26 in Paris. The novel alternates between realistic scenes of queer life in Taipei and surrealist interludes about crocodiles who disguise themselves as humans to survive. The dispatch from inside the experience of being queer in a society that requires you to wear a human suit. One of the great queer novels in any language and the most important Taiwanese novel in English translation.