Queer Voices Reading Group

Welcome to the first Queer Voices Reading Group of 2026!

“I’d taken everyone I loved and killed them off in my heart, one by one. I’d long been tending their graves—secretly visiting and mourning during the day, going out and erecting a cross on starry nights, lying inside and awaiting my own death on starless nights.”

Set in the post-martial-law era of late 1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin's cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon.

It's difficult to fully encompass the impact this book had on Taiwanese lesbian culture. To this day, 'Lazi' is used as a self-referential term within the sapphic community. A queer classic, this is a must read for lesbians (or fans of lesbians!) around the globe.

"...This text is the story of queerness. It is the framework that so many of us have to live our lives, whether we are out and proud or not." -Medium

"Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, ​Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature." -London Review Bookshop