Nonfiction, Fiction, and Poetry Published in 2025
America, América: A New History of the New World
Nonfiction What if we had international law—a rules-based order that bound every country, big or small, rich or poor, to shared standards? I was taught that those were American questions, sparked mainly by the world wars. They are indeed, the historian Greg Grandin argues in America, América—encompassing the entire North and South American continents. Within 50 years of the US’s founding, more than a dozen American republics won their own independence, beginning with Haiti. They had to build out a foreign policy and navigate discord (notably around slavery and Indigenous rights) with rules subtler than “might makes right” to govern sovereignty, territorial integrity, and defense. That struggle, Grandin writes, helped define the new republics, including the US—our laws, attitude to internationalism, and self-concept—and laid groundwork for institutions like the League of Nations and UN. Grandin’s Pulitzer-winning The End of the Myth tracked the collapse of an American devil’s bargain: hoovering up Lebensraum to ease domestic tensions. The US of the titular myth is self-made. Its neighbors are supposedly there as insulation and grist, not to chat about republican thought. But America, América, picking up there, traces the political legacies of Spanish and English settlers, then their descendants; often dueling, always in dialogue. Grandin makes legal debates as lively and interesting as the personalities of key players; America, América enriches the story of both the US and the hemisphere. Next time someone mentions the “rules-based order,” ask, as Latin Americans did: Whose rules? —Daniel Moattar
The Catch
Fiction I read The Catch a while ago, and have thought about it quite a lot, and I’m still not sure what actually happened. And yet this book completely mesmerized me. Here’s what I’m generally sure to be true: Clara and Dempsey are twins whose mother, Serene, mysteriously disappeared into the Thames when they were babies. They are adopted into different families; Clara becomes a bestselling author, Dempsey a clerical worker. Clara spots a woman she’s certain is their mother on the streets of London. The catch is that Serene hasn’t aged at all; she appears to be the same age as Clara and Dempsey. The Catch—Yrsa Daley-Ward’s fiction debut, following two memoirs and a book of poetry—jumps between timelines, perspectives, and large sections of Clara’s fictional bestseller. The writing is as beautiful as you’d hope coming from a poet, and yes, the plot is compelling, but mostly I was captivated by the nerve of it. I wanted to know what would happen next to Clara and Dempsey, but mostly I wanted to know what would happen next to the prose itself. —Ruth Murai
Like a Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration
Poetry In September, the Black liberation activist Assata Shakur died in Cuba, where she had sought asylum for more than four decades. The news of her passing prompted me to return to a poem she had written while incarcerated in New York and included in her self-titled autobiography. “Leftovers—What Is Left” is simultaneously devastating and hope-giving. “Love is my sword and truth is my compass,” Shakur writes. “What is left?” There aren’t many published poetic accounts of life behind bars. But this anthology is full of them, and, like the work of the late Shakur, is something I see myself returning to again and again. I picked up a copy in the spring, shortly after it came out, and sat with it for a long time, reading a couple poems every few days and then spending several more turning them over in my mind. Like a Hammer features the works of some of my favorite writers like former poet laureate Ada Limón and poet and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib, as well as lesser-known poets affected by the US carceral system. “While the legal system may appear established and unchangeable, art has the power to question dominant narratives…and organize communities in support of reform,” Delgado writes in the introduction. The collection is informative, challenging, and unabashedly real, somehow shining a new light on the cruelty and injustice of the prison system and serving as an act of resistance in and of itself. —Chasity Hale
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
Nonfiction Survival stories tend to be epic tales of disaster suffered by men doing dumb things to prove a point. Think Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air or Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton, who attempted the first land crossing of Antarctica but instead spent a year with his ship stuck in the ice. Women rarely feature prominently in these narratives, which is why I so liked A Marriage at Sea. It also starts out with a bad idea: In June 1972, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey give up their life in Derby, England, to set sail for New Zealand. Maralyn, who’d worked in a tax office, couldn’t swim. Maurice was a stubborn know-it-all with a dull job in a printing office. They longed for something more interesting. For the journey, they packed a tinned Huntley & Palmers Dundee cake for Maralyn’s birthday, but no motor or radio. Maurice “chose to sail the old way, by his wits and the stars.” Things go well until an injured whale hits their yacht, the Auralyn, and for the next four months they float in a lifeboat. But in this story, it is the man who falls to pieces. Maralyn figures out how to make fishhooks from safety pins, carefully rations their food, and turns turtles into meals, while writing her way out of loneliness in the diary that provides some of the basis for the book. What’s unique about this adventure isn’t just the way the Baileys get food or water or patch their leaky dingey, but how this odd couple didn’t kill each other before they could be rescued. Married people everywhere will recognize where the real survival story in this book lies. —Stephanie Mencimer
Middle Spoon
Fiction You’ve probably heard the joke about Brooklyn polycules. Which joke? Pick one. The proliferation of nonmonogamy, particularly in the studied hipster enclaves of America’s most liberal cities, has become fodder for TV shows (Black Mirror, Sense8) and magazine covers. But for all its prevalence in pop culture, polyamory still tends to be relegated to the domain of punchline or spectacle. We rarely get access to the inner lives of people who, even in queer communities, are often ostracized for their nontraditional lifestyles. That’s what makes Middle Spoon, by Brooklyn-based novelist Alejandro Varela, such a delight. In it, we meet a middle-aged gay man struggling with heartache and forced to retreat to “the barren, antiseptic land of boundaries.” Varela writes his characters with such playful humor that any reader can learn a thing or two about commitment and desire while being thoroughly entertained in the process. —Jamilah King
Mother Mary Comes To Me
Nonfiction Arundhati Roy wrote one smashingly successful semi-autobiographical novel, 1997’s The God of Small Things, before turning her searing attention to politics, culture, and human rights activism in her native India. (Her second work of fiction, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was published 20 years after the first.) In between, she also quietly managed a complex, often fraught relationship with her famous mother, the indomitable Mary Roy, a women’s rights activist and educator who founded an influential secondary education school and crusaded against unjust inheritance laws that unfairly cut women out of family fortunes. But Mary Roy, as her daughter writes with equal parts tenderness and stern, unflinching clarity, was also a tyrant in the home: verbally and physically abusive, despotic, and cunningly melodramatic, driving Arundhati and her brother into estrangement from her for long periods of time. Yet the book is improbably beautiful, a look at how history acted on one remarkable family, and the challenges of attempting to love—or at least understand—someone who’s made connection genuinely impossible. Under the younger Roy’s hands, what should be a harrowing tale of child abuse becomes luminous. And she doesn’t let what could be the most triumphant part of the book—her extraordinary success as a writer and cultural figure—make for a pat happy ending. —Anna Merlan
One of the Boys
Fiction This powerful YA novel makes the case for trans and women’s inclusion in sports, showing how meaningful it can be to be part of a team, even if on the margins. Zeller has a deep familiarity with her Western New York turf and a complicated love of football, plus a wicked sense of humor. Her debut novel centers on Grace Woodhouse, a kicker with D1 talent who has left her team—and her gender assigned at birth—behind. While much of the action takes place after Grace has transitioned, a nonlinear flow of chapters flashes us to earlier moments in the “before” times, like stealing a dress from her ex-girlfriend’s room. The structure puts us in Grace’s present while addressing for young readers what their transgender peers and classmates are going through. We watch Grace code-switch in “group chat” passages that offer a window into her new queer friend group, as well as the close bonds she maintains with her football teammates. Though the novel moves through many high school milestones with wonder for the future, it avoids “big-game” cliches of a conventional sports story, and offers a few enjoyable surprises—an in-team romance I will say no more about—along the way. School athletics come at such a formative phase, and I don’t think I’m alone in having walked away from homophobic and abusive team cultures. I couldn’t help but get emotional thinking about the complicated team Grace belongs to, one with its own transphobic and closed-minded figures, but where players are welcomed on the field for what they can contribute—not the body or gender identity that they inhabit. One of the Boys shows why sports can be so important for young people—including, of course, transgender youth just doing the day-to-day teenage work of becoming who they are. During a time when Republicans have politically weaponized trans people in sports, reading about the life of a young athlete offers an important reality check. But that’s not all; this book provides a hopeful road map for how young adults and families can support queer and trans peers at a time that can be painfully messy and difficult for everyone. —Jim Briggs
Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur
Nonfiction In the hundreds of books written about the life of slain rapper Tupac Shakur, we usually encounter the same characters. There’s Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother, a jailed member of the Black Panther Party who won her freedom just weeks before he was born. There’s Suge Knight, the menacing CEO of Death Row Records, who drove the BMW carrying Shakur the night he was gunned down on the Las Vegas strip in 1996. Inevitably, there’s also Jada Pinkett Smith, his one-time classmate at the Baltimore School for the Arts and the only one to come even remotely close to matching his star power. In Only God Can Judge Me, noted sportswriter Jeff Pearlman introduces us to a far wider tapestry of people who played critical roles in the rapper’s brief life. We meet the friends whose sofas he slept on while his mother was in the throes of addiction and the high school girlfriends who saved his love letters. Pearlman scoured the country and interviewed more than 300 people. The result is a deeply reported portrait of a man who was both haltingly effeminate and frustratingly misogynistic. He was investigated by police for two vicious sexual assaults and wrote one of the most heartbreaking songs in hip-hop history, “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” about a 12-year-old who throws her newborn down a trash chute (Pearlman tracked down both the mother and child). Tupac may have been a heartthrob by the time of his death, but Pearlman excavates a man so gangly and uncoordinated that at least one of the two gunshots that entered his body during an assault three years before his eventual murder was accidentally self-inflicted. By the book’s end, we are left to mourn a man awash in contradictions owed not to any artistic genius or political acumen, but because, at 25 years old, his brain never got the chance to fully develop. —Jamilah King
Perfection
Fiction If you’ve ever tablescaped your background before a video call or cooked colorful dishes in order to post about them on Instagram, this novel is for you. It follows Anna and Tom, a couple from southern Europe who’ve moved to Berlin to live out a seemingly ideal existence of cheap rent, trendy art openings, casual friendships, and vaguely creative graphic design careers that, importantly, allow them to work from anywhere. But as time goes on, the core of their glossy life shows rot; the search for perfection has a way of souring the everyday until there is no there there anymore. When Anna and Tom sublet their home and decamp for Lisbon—convinced they’ll find sunnier pastures in Europe’s next Berlin—their story shifts from jaunty to dreadful. Latronico captures a specific kind of 21st century hollowness with deft imagery and lacerating prose, masterfully translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes. Though Perfection’s slim and digestible format may be right at home in our social media era, it sinks deep and unsettles in the way only a novel can. —Maddie Oatman
Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening
Nonfiction For about a week after finishing Run the Song, it felt like my ears popped mid-flight. I could hear again. Had I even noticed sound had been so muffled? Reborn, I took in—really took in—music recommended in former New York Times pop and jazz critic Ben Ratliff’s new meandering, eccentric, and beautiful book about what he listens to while running. Some tunes were standbys now unwearied: Mal Waldron sounded fresh; Annea Lockwood pierced anew. And then there was the novel, like the utterly transcendent six-hour DJ set from Theo Parrish, “Eargoggles,” that reconfigured my entire chemistry. Before I go further: Don’t worry, this is not a book about running. Instead, it is Ratliff finding a new way to write about what he is best at: explaining the attention, depth, and openness required to love art. You will follow him whether or not you regularly don trainers. Run the Song is a fine work, but more than an argument, it prompts an accidental anamnesis; one can’t help but remember how to listen—and, as Ratliff argues, how to live. Worried I was alone in finding a flooding awareness after reading, I texted a friend who also read Run the Song. He had the same experience. What a strange book, we both said. It was good, yes. But, even more so, the whole world seemed much more alive—worth pausing over, inspecting, enjoying—afterward, too. —Jacob Rosenberg
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
Nonfiction Hanif Abdurraqib is reliably one of our most intimate writers on music and culture, filling another few hundred pages the way some of us might cover our arms with ink, or the way a punk might inscribe a jacket with odes to their loves. In his latest book, his heart-on-his-sleeve writing game flows through the parallel timelines of two Millennial Black men from Ohio: the writer himself, and the world-eating LeBron James. As the chapters progress, headings count down the remaining minutes of the game, while Abdurraqib takes the time-outs as opportunities to connect his narrative to culture and community. You might ask how a story that spends a lot of time on LeBron—a rich and powerful man who has lived most of his life in the public sphere—can feel intimate and warm and surprising and original. It’s because in the same pages, we hear the voices of packed arenas and the trash talk on ragged neighborhood courts. We see the “one basket” Abdurraqib ever saw his dad take. While LeBron ascends, we sit with the author, the less celebrated Black man from Ohio, while he lives in a storage locker and is barely able to make ends meet. Abdurraqib holds a special place in my heart for the elegance with which he deploys his art of withholding—not to tease the reader but to take them aside, to make room for the right moment for an idea. It isn’t easy to recommend a memoir when readers have access to an overabundance of personal and behind-the-scenes storytelling. There’s Always This Year stands out for the care it seems to have for the reader, and it sticks with us long after the clock hits zero. —Jim Briggs
Nonfiction, Fiction, and Poetry Published Before 2025
The Anti-Federalist Papers (1787–1788)
Nonfiction “The Anti-Federalists spotted this coming from miles away.” So said New York Times columnist David French, reflecting recently on the Constitution’s vulnerability to Donald Trump. It’s a jarring observation for those of us taught that the Constitution—for all its faults—was an ingenious document full of tyranny-preventing checks and balances. That was the argument of the Federalists, immortalized in famous essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, urging ratification of a new system of government to replace the floundering Articles of Confederation. They were opposed by the Anti-Federalists—whose disparate speeches, pamphlets, and letters have not been turned into any Broadway musicals. But a quarter millennium later, some of the Anti-Federalists’ warnings seem prophetic. They’re worth a read. The Constitution’s language was far too “vague and inexplicit,” leaving the president with “great powers” that “would lead to oppression and ruin,” wrote pseudonymous Cato. The president and his appointees, argued Brutus, would abuse their control of the military, treasury, and pardon power to gratify “their own interest and ambition, and it is scarcely possible, in a very large republic, to call them to account for their misconduct.” The Anti-Federalists worried profoundly about the dangers of a federal standing army—“military execution of laws,” said the writer identified as Federal Farmer, would surely lead to “despotic government.” Above all, the Anti-Federalists offered their countrymen a warning about human progress that is just as dire today: As flawed as the old Articles of Confederation were, Melancton Smith told the New York ratifying convention, “no one could deny but it was possible we might have a worse government.” —Jeremy Schulman
Don Quixote (1605–1610)
Fiction I decided to read the most famous novel in the history of the world after Conan O’Brien said it was funny during his appearance on Hot Ones. His chin was coated in a film of sauce, and he was starting to sound delusional, but Conan was right: Don Quixote is funny—not just in the way that a certain kind of physical comedy has always been funny, but funny in a way that I didn’t think you could be in 17th-century Spain without getting killed. It is funny in astonishingly meta and modern ways. One of the major plot points in the second part of the novel is the fallout from Cervantes’ publication of the first part (they were originally released 10 years apart). The protagonist is surprised to discover not just that he’s famous, but that a glut of hack authors have been pushing unlicensed Don Quixote sequels. Everyone always talks about the windmills, but that’s literally one of the first things that happens in the book. Keep reading until the plot is hijacked by Cervantes’ attempts to regain control of his intellectual property. If this isn’t a story for our times, what is? —Tim Murphy
Dungeon Crawler Carl (2020)
Fiction Whenever this year got tough—which it often did—I would ponder: “What would happen if the aliens came to Earth right now?” Then I read Dungeon Crawler Carl. And I felt a sense of ease: It could be so much worse. Aliens could come to our planet and put me in a reality TV show. Dungeon Crawler Carl is the first in an eight-book (and growing) series about a rag-tag group of humans fighting their way through a fantasy-themed game show for the slim chance of citizenship in an intergalactic world. Like all good science fiction, it refracts reality in meaningful ways. Though it was first published in 2020, its tagline, “the apocalypse will be televised,” feels relevant. Dinniman doesn’t belabor the “this is about real life” metaphors too heavily; there are plenty of talking cats, gory fight scenes, and pants-less heroes. The novel works as sci-fi escapism. But the moments of reflection do occur, too. There is a fight for dignity and joy against impossible odds that offers unexpected and surprising jolts of hope. —Henry Carnell
Ex-Wife (1929)
Fiction Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel about a young woman reckoning with the end of her marriage was a bestseller in its time. But it had been more or less forgotten until McNally Editions reissued the book in 2023. It fits neatly into our current wave of divorceliterature. Parrott’s protagonist, Patricia, is a 24-year-old copywriter living in a Jazz Age New York City in which women experimented with their newfound freedom—yet were still subject to punishing double standards. Patricia tolerates her husband’s infidelity, but when she has her own one-night stand, the marriage unravels. Finding herself forever marked by the social stigma of being an ex-wife, Patricia embarks on a series of doomed romances, numbing the pain with booze and fancy dinner dates and beautiful clothes. The resulting novel is an unsettling mix of glittering escapism and almost unbearably dark humor—in one scene, dressing herself immaculately before an illegal abortion, Patricia remarks that if she’s going to end up a corpse, “I would prefer to be a well-groomed one.” Though Parrott depicts a world very different from our own, her book nonetheless seems appropriate for our current age of heteropessimism and encroaching restrictions on women’s rights. Maybe that contemporary resonance is why, one weeknight in August, I arrived late to a talk on Ex-Wife at McNally Jackson (the New York indie bookstore chain that owns McNally Imprints) to find it was standing-room only, with most of the chairs filled by women in their midtwenties. When the hosts asked who had read the book, they seemed shocked that most of the hands in the room shot up. At a time when the news seems filled with warnings that AI could spell the death of literacy, it warmed my heart to see a bunch of Gen Zers show up for an event on a previously obscure 100-year-old novel. Heterosexual relationships may be irredeemably flawed, but at least reading isn’t dead yet. —Sophie Murguia
Histories of the Transgender Child (2018)
Nonfiction The historical existence of trans children should have no bearing on their right to exist today. Trans kids do exist—that should be enough to guarantee their protection. And yet in our political discourse, the supposed “newness” of gender nonconforming kids is often invoked as a way to delegitimize their experiences. “It’s just a fad!” conservative commentators cry. “Save your kids from the scourge of gender ideology!” Except trans kids always have existed, Jules Gill-Peterson shows us in Histories of the Transgender Child. A rigorous historian, she dives deep into 20th-century medical archives—and in turn weaponizes the normative, hegemonic institution of medicine against itself—to show how young people in America have sought medical transitions as far back as the 1930s and social transitions even before that. In fact, the theory of gender as distinct from sex was born from eugenicist doctors who experimented on intersex infants and children at gender clinics. But while the media and politicians often paint trans children as sanitized, innocent, and passive—expressing doubt and outrage that kids could ever have “self-knowledge about something as profound as their gender”—Gill-Peterson treats trans kids as full people, participatory agents in the formation of their embodied lives. In doing so, Histories of the Transgender Child shows “that trans childhood is a happy and desired form…richly, beautifully historical and multiple.” —Schuyler Mitchell
Invisible Man (1952)
Fiction Three-quarters of a century later, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the author’s sole novel, remains stunningly relevant. In this absurd, funny, and epic novel, we follow the eponymous invisible man from the Jim Crow South—where he (literally) battles his way to a prestigious Black college—to the streets of Harlem, where he rises through the ranks of a left communist group called the Brotherhood. While reading, I laughed out loud constantly and dogeared incessantly. Rarely is a novel so beautifully written, engrossing, and yet perplexing. In one section I loved, the invisible man, equipped with a new suit and a new name, prepares to give a speech to the Brotherhood. As he anxiously awaits his turn, he resolves to let go of his past and push down the part of himself that “looked on with remote eyes,” “the traitor self that always threatened internal discord.” In somewhat Du Bois-ian fashion, Ellison captures the “peculiar sensation” of being Black in America: feeling both hypervisible and invisible, struggling to reconcile one’s conflicting identities and find one’s authentic self in a world that only wants to see you cast in a certain light. It’s a memorable meditation on Blackness and masculinity. —Chasity Hale
The Korean War: A History (2010)
Nonfiction You will often hear of war crimes in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in discussions of the United States’ 20th-century commitment to containing communism with bombs. Read this and add Korea to that list. Bruce Cumings’ short book busts the usual myths about this “forgotten” war. The conflict was violent and horrific, and led to a rupture that still dominates the politics of a peninsula divided. This book, as Cumings explains, is “for Americans and by an American about a conflict that is fundamentally Korean.” It is not the usual story. Cumings’ revised view takes special care to understand the motivations, decisions, and movements of North Korea—especially leading up to the US entering the conflict. You won’t get easy answers about the US’s actions in the war or its reasonings for them. In particular, though, the book shines in describing the play-by-play of the conflict. Cumings’ descriptions of the battles are legible and damning. His explanation of a vast bombing campaign—akin to Allies’ assault on German cities during World War II—is stunning. But what made the work most valuable to me was its fearless desire to weave descriptions of war, crimes, and politics with essayistic mediations on memory and loss. Drawing on Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf, Cumings notes that humans’ “need to forget” is a forceful act of repression. It is a choice. “Here, in essence,” he explains, “is the reason why Koreans remember, and Americans forget” this war. To keep doing this, everywhere—again and again—Americans chose not to see. —Jacob Rosenberg
Men of Maize (1949)
Fiction He’s one of the most important writers of the 20th century, and you probably haven’t heard of him. Before Gabriel García Márquez, there was Miguel Ángel Asturias—the Guatemalan novelist who invented magical realism. Asturias won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967, but his hugely influential repertoire has long been criminally overlooked in the English-speaking world. Last year, Penguin Classics quietly released Gerald Martin’s English translation of Asturias’ 1949 novel, Men of Maize (Hombres de maíz), which had previously been out of print. It’s a masterpiece. Unfolding in six parts, Men of Maize blends Mesoamerican folklore and the history of Spanish conquest to render a surreal, multilayered portrait of colonial domination, religious syncretism, capitalist exploitation, and environmental destruction. The book draws heavily from the Popol Vuh, a foundational sacred text for the Kʼicheʼ Maya people. While Asturias—who was Ladino, of mixed Spanish and Indigenous descent—has been rightly criticized by some for engaging with Indigenous issues through the romanticized lens of a mythical past, the book still succeeds at offering a critique of imperialism that is equal parts poetic and incisive. The endless drive for profit “impoverishes the earth and makes no one rich”; the fires turn the moon into an “enormous bloodsoaked disk”; the rain is little more than “pure wasted water on the barren black fields.” Don’t take the gravity for a lack of humor. The book is also very funny. In one of my favorite scenes, two drunks hatch a get-rich-quick scheme as liquor salesmen, but they keep selling drinks to each other and unwittingly wind up passing the same six pesos back-and-forth. In the process, the men misplace their liquor permit and get arrested. “Wretched piece of paper…Its value lay in what it said,” writes Asturias. “Without the permit they were smugglers; with it respectable men.” —Schuyler Mitchell
Omeros (1990)
Poetry There is an ever-present past, and it comes in Derek Walcott’s opus, Omeros—a mystifying, engrossing, and enlivening seven-chapter epic poem that moves between accounts of Caribbean colonization, references to Homer, and first-person travelogue—as a capitalized word: “History.” History haunts; History lingers; History inflects everything, whether we realize it or not. Walcott, who lived in St. Lucia and wrote in English, was actively attuned to the long-lasting horrors of imperialism. Omeros captures the everyday of this. It provides the texture of Walcott’s home, employing language simultaneously lyrical, epic, and common. He shows a place that, as Hilton Als noted, “most Americans think of in terms of sunblock and steel drums.” You might feel intimidated by a very long poem that draws on the Greeks to understand colonialism. I did. But consider banishing the hesitation. You don’t have to grasp everything to see the fullness of the work and delight in it. In fact, much of this poem is about understanding the eerie ways in which our moment-to-moment is contoured by what has come before—even if it is submerged. And in this work no one is spared judgment; there are not easy conclusions. “All the colonies,” Walcott notes, “inherit their empire’s sin.” —Jacob Rosenberg
Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl (2020)
Nonfiction In 2021, Donald Trump Jr. launched Field Ethos, a magazine that showcases the president’s son kitted up in thousands of dollars of gear, going out to kill endangered animals with high-powered weapons in exotic locations. He murders sheep in Mongolia and spearfishes tuna off the Turkish coast, where even underwater, his perfect veneers shine bright. But Trump is one of those rich trophy hunters known to pay a local advance man to do the boring legwork so he can come in late for the Instagram shot. I thought of him frequently as I read this book. The New York City–bred scion wouldn’t last a week in the shoes of Minnesota ornithologist Jonathan Slaght. Slaght spent five years tracking the mysterious Blakiston’s fish owl through remote eastern Russian forests. With a graduate student budget that barely covered his cross-country skis, the former Peace Corps volunteer risked his life fording freezing rivers and endured long hours straining in the snow to record a few notes of a mating pair’s eerie duet. Drinking vodka with ornery Russian hermits helped with his quest. His goal was not to kill the owl, but to save it. Its habitat—mostly large trees near icy rivers rich with salmon—is threatened by logging and dams, and even with its six-foot wingspan, the fish owl hadn’t been sighted in this part of eastern Russia for 100 years. Slaght stumbled upon one while hiking in 2000 and became obsessed with studying a bird so elusive that scientists knew little about it. His book reads like both a grand adventure story and a love letter to a magnificent creature that will never be seen in the pages of Trump’s magazine. —Stephanie Mencimer
Private Rites (2024)
Fiction The characters in Private Rites commute to work, get degrees they don’t know what to do with, and worry whether their unkind thoughts make them bad people. But amidst the mundane, a disquiet grows, until the differences of the world become too stark to ignore: This is a climate apocalypse novel. And the introduction of this dystopic landscape feels unsettlingly familiar. One of Julia Armfield’s great strengths as a speculative writer is capturing how climate disaster sneaks up on you—like the moment you realize a pond that froze over when you were a kid now laps at the shore all winter long. I picked up this book after devouring Armfield’s first novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, which shares a few key components: lesbians, lyricism, and lots and lots of water. Private Rites takes place in an increasingly submerged world where public transit is dominated by ferries, historic monuments are lost to miles of ocean, and constant rain threatens new disaster with every drop. Three sisters navigate the recent death of their father, an architect famous for crafting luxurious houses designed to lift with the rising water, buoying the few who can afford their own private islands. Money is also one of the ways the architect, when alive, tried to sow division among his daughters—a bribe of uncertain weight, like everything in their waterlogged world. The novel is a very loose adaptation of King Lear, and one of the play’s most famous lines seems to shroud each character: “We that are young, Shall never see so much, nor live so long.” —Anna Rogers
Rejection (2024)
Fiction Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection—hailed by Redditors as “the first truly incel novel”—is a difficult read to recommend. But like I’ve just visited a parallel dimension, I want to tell everyone about it. The few times that I’ve cautiously mentioned this book in public, someone else’s eyes have invariably lit up: Oh, you read it too? Though no part of Rejection could be called tame, a few especially disturbing moments tend to stick with readers, including the brutal end of the first story, which follows a character’s descent into the corrosive world of inceldom. But “incel novel” is still not the right label for this hard-to-define book. Instead, the interlinked stories are joined by the far more relatable experience of what it’s like to feel lonely and alienated and to—perhaps most importantly—have an internet connection. Like many of us at our lowest, Tulathimutte’s unlikeable (but undeniably human) characters seek solace online—that promising and terrifying place where you can find camaraderie with fellow narrow-shouldered men, illegally order a raven to enhance your personal brand, or create an all-encompassing conspiracy theory enabled by endless bot accounts. I laughed. I cringed. I felt embarrassed reading this book in public. I hope you do too. —Anna Rogers
Tiny Love (2019)
Fiction In 1973, Larry Brown, the son of a sharecropper, joined the Oxford, Mississippi, fire department. He had failed high school, served in the Marines, bounced between jobs, and settled into life in his hometown. He had hopes, of course. He lived one of those quiet, painful American lives of hunger. He had a foolish wish: He wanted to be a writer. So, in his off time, he wrote about the lives of those around him—simple folks who are never simple. Brown read ravenously, too. He pounded away. He sent stories to magazines and got rejection after rejection. After 16 years, he published his first short story. It was in a bikers’ magazine. From there? More failures. He had to wait another five years before the next story got published. But then, eventually—finally—he did what so few of his characters ever do: He won. Larry Brown became one of the South’s most cherished writers. Tiny Love is a wide-ranging collection of his short stories. Many hit on the same themes: loser drunks, cheating women, cheating men. But like a good country song, it’s about the way you tell the same story that matters. The delight in reading Brown’s writing is that you can feel the buildup of his desire, the yearning to put down on that page all the desperation that ordinary people feel each day. There is an honesty and truth mixed with craft that gripped me in re-reading this collection. Brown is a cult hero. Consider joining the devotees. —Jacob Rosenberg
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.