How do we live radiantly when the world seems bent on our erasure?

Today we meet Caro De Robertis and we’re talking about the queer book that saved their life: Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, translated by Bonnie Huie.

Caro’s books best-selling books have Stonewall Book Awards and the Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award; and, they have been finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Lambda Literary Award, and the Kirkus Prize. These books include The Palace of Eros, The President and the Frog, Cantoras, The Gods of Tango, and Perla. Caro was the first openly nonbinary person to received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. A professor at San Francisco State University, Caro is co-curating Conjuring Power: the Roots & Futures of Queer & Trans Movements, for San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It will open Spring 2026. Their newest book is So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color.

Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story 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, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.

Connect with Caro

website: caroderobertis.com
instagram: @caro_derobertis

Our Bookshop

Visit our Bookshop for new releases, current bestsellers, banned books, critically acclaimed LGBTQ books, or peruse the books featured on our podcasts: bookshop.org/shop/thisqueerbook

Buy Notes of a Crocodile: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9781681370767

Buy So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9781643756875

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Host/Founder: John Parker
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
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