Here are some words I never thought I’d be able to say: There is a queer bookstore in Cobb County, Georgia.

It’s called The Lavender Bookshop, and it’s at 1289 Roswell Road, Suite 700, Marietta GA 30062, just under half a mile from the Big Chicken (if you’re from Cobb County, you know what that is).

It’s an indie bookstore with a warm and inviting atmosphere, a full calendar of monthly book clubs and other events, a comprehensive Young Adult section, and a very good selection of contemporary as well as classic queer books. These are the first three books I bought, two of them new and one of them a classic:

The Resurrectionist by A. Rae Dunlap (2025). Victorian-era graverobbers? Dark Academia? How could I not buy this?

Book Boyfriend by Kris Ripper (2022), a gay romcom novel from Carina Adores, the LGBTQ+ imprint of Harlequin.

The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal, first published in 1948. I know about Gore Vidal mainly from his very public, sometimes raucous literary feuds with Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and William F. Buckley. This will be the first novel I’ve read by him.

You can support The Lavender Bookshop by ordering books and ebooks from Bookshop.org and by ordering audiobooks from Libro.fm and linking your accounts to the store. I’ve provided direct links to both in my Linktree (as well as in this paragraph).

I have switched from Audible to Libro.fm for my audiobooks going forward, and I have switched over from Amazon Kindle to the easy-to-use Bookshop e-reader on my phone and iPad. The first two ebooks I downloaded from Bookshop were Burn to Strike, the new Joe Ledger novel by Jonathan Maberry, and The Get Off, the new Hard Case Crime novel from Christa Faust (both Jonathan and Christa are allies, and I’ve met both at literary conventions and they are both cool as hell).

The first time I visited The Lavender Bookshop, I actually had to leave quickly because I got emotional. I never thought I’d ever see a queer bookstore in Cobb County. But there it is. It’s totally queer and it’s totally awesome. Check it out.