—Sophia Stewart, editor

*

April

Transcription by Ben Lerner (FSG)

In the beautiful and resonant latest from Lerner, a middle-aged man constructs an elaborate farewell to his mentor. Read more.

One Leg on Earth by ‘Pemi Aguda (Norton)

The marvelous debut novel from National Book Award finalist Aguda follows a young woman whose arrival in Lagos for an exciting career opportunity coincides with a series of harrowing suicides by pregnant women. Read more.

Work to Do by Jules Wernersbach (University of Iowa Press)

Wernersbach’s debut follows a queer-owned Austin co-op as it prepares to unionize amid Texas hurricane season.

The Ritz of the Bayou by Nancy Lemann (Hub City)

The 1985-86 trials of Louisiana’s flamboyant Gov. Edwin Edwards on charges of crooked hospital deals and other racketeering is compellingly reported by Lemann, a New Orleans–born author with a New York City perspective. Read more.

Gather by Ashanté M. Reese (Norton)

In this phenomenal meditation on food’s role in Black history and culture, anthropologist Reese shares guiding principles gleaned from Black social gatherings that can help combat hunger and food insecurity. Read more.

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta (Scribner)

A middle-aged man makes peace with his childhood trauma in Perrotta’s stellar latest. Read more.

Inheritance by Jane Park (Pegasus)

Upon returning to Canada for her father’s funeral, a young woman must confront her childhood and the legacy of guilt, sacrifice, and resilience that accompanies the immigrant experience.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday)

“The truth is, everybody lies,” observes New Yorker staff writer and National Book Critics Circle award winner Keefe in this gripping investigation into a young man’s mysterious death in 2019 London. Read more.

Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron)

In her third novel, the author reimagines The Great Gatsby as a story of 2007 Fort Greene, with women in the male roles and vice versa. Read more.

Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent (Deep Vellum)

Vincent parses and probes the death of her parents in a traffic accident when she was 14 years old through artfully arranged fragments—most of which contain the number 14.

My Dear You by Rachel Khong (Knopf)

In these provocative stories, Khong offers well-wrought and intricate depictions of Asian American and Asian life, often with a fantastical or speculative twist. Read more.

Empire of Skulls by Paul Stob (Counterpoint)

Stob, a professor of American studies and communication studies at Vanderbilt, casts a light on one family’s outsize role in the rise of phrenology. Read more.

Like This, But Funnier by Hallie Cantor (S&S)

When the reader meets Caroline Neumann, the TV comedy writer at the center of Cantor’s hilarious and propulsive debut, her life is in shambles. Read more.

After Oscar by Merlin Holland (Europa)

In this unique biography, Holland, Oscar Wilde’s grandson, explores the long-lasting impact of Wilde’s criminal conviction for homosexuality in London in 1895 and seeks to clear up misconceptions related to the incident. Read more.

Witches by Steven Veerapen (Pegasus)

Veerapen offers a stirring account of witches across the ages, from the witchcraft trials under King James VI to the ultimate decline of witch-hunting in the early 1700s.

The Oyster Diaries by Nancy Lemann (NYRB)

Lemann takes readers back to the world of her 1985 cult classic Lives of the Saints with an easygoing and lovely novel of late middle-age. Read more.

Picture of Nobody by Philip Owens (McNally Editions)

The forgotten modernist reimagines Shakespeare as a young writer in 1930s London in this strange, sharp satire.

Fidelty by Susan Glaspell (Belt)

First published in 1915, Glaspell’s feminist novel chronicles an affair between a woman and a married man—and how its ramifications echo across their small hometown in Iowa.

If This Be Magic by Daniel Hahn (Knopf)

Translator Hahn shows how Shakespeare’s intricate wordplay is preserved and transformed into other languages in this lively exploration. Read more.

Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell (Ecco)

In this noir-tinged novel, a trans author returns to his childhood home after receiving a mysterious envelope in the mail with a photo of his deceased brother. Read more.

Body Double by Hanna Johansson, tr. Kira Josefsson (Catapult)

Johansson explores themes of doppelgängers, loneliness, and selfhood in her sly latest. Read more.

Wifehouse by Sonya Walger (Union Square)

Through shifting perspectives, Walger offers a nuanced portrait of a woman who embarks on an affair with her much-younger French tutor.

Starstruck by Christopher McDougall (Vintage)

McDougall delivers a propulsive, horrifying account of the sexual abuse scandal involving Mexican pop singer Gloria Trevi and her manager, Sergio Andrade, which he previously covered in 2001’s Girl Trouble. Read more.

Visitations by Julia Alvarez (Knopf)

In her prismatic fourth collection, novelist, memoirist, and poet Alvarez spins richly detailed micro-narratives of her childhood in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s, her young adulthood in New York City, and beyond. Read more.

A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia (Grove)

A vivacious woman falls in love with a priest in 1950s England in the emotive and revelatory debut novel from poet Sy-Quia. Read more.

The Madness of Believing by Josh Owens (Grand Central)

Owens, who dropped out of film school at 24 to accept a job offer from Infowars, reflects on his fall into a world of conspiracy theories, propaganda, and disinformation—and what it means for the rest of us.

Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola (Pamela Dorman)

Akinola’s debut takes a closer look at the American Dream through four siblings who reunite at their Nigerian immigrant parents’ Thanksgiving table after a decade apart.

How Black Music Took Over the World by Melvin Gibbs (Basic)

The intricate rhythms and protean harmonies of Africa lie at the heart of most modern music, according to this exuberant debut study. Read more.

The Witch by Marie NDiaye, tr. Jordan Stump (Knopf)

Witchcraft and family strife animate this 1996 novel by NDiaye, winner of the Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women. Read more.

Midnight, at the War by Devi S. Laskar (Mariner)

Combining the drama of newsrooms, global conflicts, and personal strife, Laskar’s novel follows a foreign correspondent as she is dispatched to the war-torn Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11.

Famesick by Lena Dunham (Random House)

In her latest memoir, the writer and director contends with her swift, and often turbulent, rise to fame across three acts.

Ultranatural by Candice Wuehle (University of Iowa Press)

Wuehle’s latest sees a pop idol forced to confront her small-town past in Appalachia—and the friendship that first threatened her rise to stardom years before.

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley (NYRB)

From the author of My Phantoms and First Love comes a slender, subtle meditation on friendships and how they endure during times of strife.

Surrender by Jennifer Acker (Delphinium)

Unfolding across the bountiful fields of New England, this bildungsroman follows a 47-year-old goat farmer as she reunites with her high school best friend—and realizes she wants more from her than just friendship. Read more.

Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein (Doubleday)

For Jean Dornan, the protagonist of Langbein’s incandescent sophomore novel whose life is still in shambles following a toxic relationship with her college professor almost two decades earlier, it feels like “#MeToo had come and gone like a parade two streets over.” Read more.

American Spirits by Anna Dorn (S&S)

Dorn spins an enjoyable if chaotic satire of celebrity culture and the dark side of fandom. Just like its characters, this is messy and appealing in equal measure. Read more.

Talking Classics by Mary Beard (UChicago Press)

In her newest book, the renowned classicist considers our ongoing fascination with the ancient world and the role of antiquity in the popular imagination.

The First Emancipation by Jeremy D. Popkin (Princeton University Press)

Popkin expertly traces the influence of race on the French Revolution, charting how France became the first western country to abolish slavery throughout its empire—only to return many formerly enslaved people to bondage years later.

How It Feels to Be Alive by Megan O’Grady (FSG)

Critic and essayist O’Grady looks closely at five artworks and the circumstances of their creation, testing Barbara Kruger’s assertion that art offers the “ability to show and tell … how it feels to be alive.”

The Memory Museum by M Lin (Graywolf)

Lin debuts with a perceptive story collection about the unsettled lives of characters who were born in China and are now scattered around the world. Read more.

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, tr. Helen Stevenson (Mariner)

A French coast guard officer confronts the existential dilemma of her job in the thought-provoking English-language debut by novelist and philosopher Delecroix. Read more.

Tosquelles: Healing Institutions by Francesc Tosquelles, tr. Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem (Semiotext(e))

This rigorous anthology, the first of its kind, gathers the Catalan psychiatrist’s intellectual, clinical, and political writings, many of which have yet to appear in English.

Concert Black by Michael O’Donnell (Blackstone)

In this twisty novel, a biographer doggedly pursues a legendary but elusive conductor who is determined to thwart her efforts, setting them on a dramatic collision course.

Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov (FSG)

American-Israeli Holocaust scholar Bartov offers a powerful meditation on his birth country’s turn toward violence. Read more.

Small Town Girls by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)

Pulitzer-winning novelist Phillips takes a lyrical look at her West Virginia upbringing in this wonderful memoir-in-essays. Read more.

Exemplary Humans by Juliana Leite, tr. Zoë Perry (Two Lines)

In Leite’s ambitious English-language debut, a 100-year-old woman revisits her past, all while believing that a spy is watching her through her window.

American Men by Jordan Ritter Conn (Grand Central)

This immersive account from Ringer senior staff writer Conn profiles four American men whose lives uniquely tangle with an “inherited masculine ideal.” Read more.

Muskism by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff (Harper)

In this searing analysis of Elon Musk, historian Slobodian and tech journalist Tarnoff argue that, just as Fordism “was the operating system” of the 20th century, “Muskism” is that of the 21st. Read more.

Middlemen by Laura B. McGrath (Princeton University Press)

McGrath, an English professor at Temple University, debuts with an enlightening study of how agents have shaped the American literary landscape. Read more.

When the World Sleeps by Francesca Albanese (Other Press)

“I am writing these words at a strange moment in my life: I have just been sanctioned by the United States…. for the absurd ‘crime’ of allegedly working with the International Criminal Court,” begins this incisive, heart-wrenching account from UN special rapporteur Albanese. Read more.

Questions 27 & 28 by Karen Tei Yamashita (Graywolf)

In this innovative polyphonic novel, Yamashita blends archival documents with fictional flourishes to chronicle the detention, forced removal, and conscription of Japanese Americans during WWII. Read more.

All Flesh by Ananda Devi (FSG)

At the beginning of this sensual and provocative novel by Mauritian writer Devi, the unnamed but unforgettable narrator announces she’s about to livestream her own “sacrifice.” Read more.

Mrs. Benedict Arnold by Emma Parry (Zando)

Parry debuts with a reimagining of the life of Peggy Shippen, wife of that infamous turncoat, as she navigates the political currents of the American Revolution and conspires to commit treason.

Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg (Hogarth)

The protagonists of this glittering story collection from Eisenberg grapple with the messiness of desire and their relationship to their bodies as queer and fat people. Read more.

Presence by Erin Maglaque (Astra House)

Maglaque’s sweeping history of women’s bodies braids personal experience with scholarship to probe the ways the female form has been politicized through sex, abortion, pregnancy, caregiving, and labor.

Aside from My Heart, All is Well by Héctor Abad, tr. Anne McLean (Archipelago)

Colombian author Abad follows The Farm with a mesmerizing chronicle of Luis Cordóba, an opera-loving priest and film critic, based loosely on the life of Luis Alberto Alvarez (1945–1996). Read more.

The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared by Rosa Campbell (Melville House)

Historian Campbell debuts with a revelatory biography of sex researcher Shere Hite (1942–2020), best known for her 1976 publication, The Hite Report. Read more.

*

May

Keeper of My Kin by Ada Ferrer (Scribner)

Pulitzer winner Ferrer traces the impact of her family’s migration in this wrenching account. Read more.

Patient, Female by Julie Schumacher (Milkweed)

This shrewd short story collection explores the messy, mundane realities of both girl- and womanhood from every possible angle.

Honey by Imani Thompson (Random House)

Thompson debuts with the scintillating tale of a disillusioned Cambridge University PhD student who goes on a killing spree. Read more.

Abundance by Hafeez Lakhani (Counterpoint)

Lakhani’s perceptive debut follows the fates and fortunes of an Indian American family facing an impending loss. Read more.

A Little Bit Bad by Cassandra Neyenesch (Summit)

Neyenesch’s darkly funny debut splices a murder mystery with a torrid extramarital affair between a sleep-deprived new mother and her roofer. Read more.

Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter by Stephanie Fairyington (Pantheon)

Journalist Fairyington examines beauty standards and reflects on her meandering road to self-acceptance in her bold debut. Read more.

Five Weeks in the Country by Francine Prose (Harper)

Hans Christian Andersen visits Charles Dickens and his family in this revealing novel from Prose. Read more.

Violent Phenomena, ed. Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang (HarperVia)

Across 22 essays by established and emerging translators alike, this captivating anthology proposes radical alternatives to the act of literary translation, all while grappling with its imperial legacies.

The Hill by Harriet Clark (FSG)

Clark blends vivid Kafkaesque motifs with a whimsical coming-of-age narrative in her beautiful debut. Read more.

The Fifth Year by Marlen Haushofer, tr. Shaun Whiteside (New Directions)

Four-year-old Marili learns about life and death and discovers the beauty of the natural world in this deeply perceptive and sensuous 1951 novella from Austrian writer Haushofer. Read more.

John of John by Douglas Stuart (Grove)

Booker Prize winner Stuart showcases his impressive gift for characterization in this perceptive and propulsive story of a tight-knit community of Gaelic-speaking sheep farmers and weavers on the remote Scottish isle of Harris. Read more.

Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer by Brooke DiDonato (Thames & Hudson)

This monograph collects the photographer’s surrealist images, which distort and reimagine familiar and domestic spaces.

Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt (S&S)

“I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead,” writes Hustvedt in the opening sentences of this tender tribute to Baumgartner author Auster, who died of lung cancer in 2024. Read more.

Adrift in the South by Xiao Hai (Granta)

Xai’s memoir lays bare the realities of migrant labor in 21st-century China, from the alienation of the factory floor to the hope found in telling one’s story.

A Siege of Owls by Uchenna Awoke (Catapult)

Nigerian author Awoke offers a captivating and magic-fueled adventure set in contemporary Africa. Read more.

The Lost Soldiers by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Dralyuk (HarperVia)

The difficulty of solving crimes in a war-ravaged city is at the core of Ukrainian novelist Kurkov’s excellent third mystery featuring novice police investigator Samson Kolechko. Read more.

The Foursome by Christina Baker Kline (Mariner)

Orphan Train author Kline offers a daring and deeply empathetic tale of the sisters who married conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874). Read more.

Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu (Flatiron)

Residents of an Asian American community in Western Massachusetts respond in consequential ways to a false alert of a “ballistic missile threat” in Yu’s resonant debut. Read more.

Memory House by Elaine Kraf (Modern Library)

In this arresting posthumous novel from Kraf, who died in 2013, washed-up writer Marlane Frack attends a mysterious retreat for former artists. Read more.

The Lost Book of Lancelot by John Glynn (Grand Central)

The entertaining debut novel from memoirist Glynn puts a queer spin on Arthurian legend. Read more.

American Rambler by Isaac Fitzgerald (Knopf)

In this lyrical travelogue, memoirist Fitzgerald recounts a yearlong journey he took from Massachusetts to Indiana that was inspired by his childhood love of Johnny Appleseed. Read more.

Night Train by Xu Zechen, tr. Jeremy Tiang (Two Lines)

Hoping for a vacation before beginning his PhD program, an erratic student concocts a story about killing someone and needing to flee in Xu’s latest novel.

America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Crown)

Bestseller Glaude offers a forceful counternarrative to the official commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary by surveying the horrors attendant to some of the nation’s previous anniversaries. Read more.

Kitchen Venom by Philip Hensher (McNally Editions)

First published three decades ago, this inventive novel unravels the scandals that wracked Margaret Thatcher’s government through the eyes of the Iron Lady herself.

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda, tr. Sarah Booker (Coffee House)

Ojeda delivers an intense and remarkable polyphonic hymn to the consoling and destructive power of music. Read more.

What’s So Great About Great Books? by Naomi Kanakia (Princeton University Press)

The novelist and literary blogger makes the case that, despite their frequent difficulty and contentiousness, reading the “Great Books” is not only beneficial but necessary.

Attention-Seeking Behavior by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo (Graywolf)

In this genre-defying novel, an self-identified liar spins tales of love and betrayal, while we readers attempt to parse whether she’s telling the truth, or just looking for attention.

On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)

The two-time National Book Award winner’s creative nonfiction is collected here, from her most beloved essays to never-before-published speeches.

The Danger to Be Sane by Rosa Montero, tr. Lindsey Ford (Europa)

In this unique exploration, Spanish journalist and novelist Montero unpacks the relationship between creativity and madness. Read more.

How to Rule the World by Theo Baker (Penguin)

In this incendiary account, debut author Baker details how a tip he received as a freshman student journalist at Stanford University led to the resignation of university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Read more.

Memory Rehearsal by Eleni Sikelianos (City Lights)

Mixing poetry, prose, and archival materials, this hybrid text excavates the legacy of the author’s great-grandmother, classical Greek revivalist Eva Palmer.

The Land and Its People by David Sedaris (Little, Brown)

Humorist Sedaris returns with a funny and heartfelt essay collection on friendship, family, and aging. These essays are among the best of his career. Read more.

Glyph by Ali Smith (Pantheon)

Booker finalist Smith offers a clever and enjoyable companion piece to her 2025 novel, Gliff. Read more.

Artifacts by Natalie Lemle (S&S)

A repatriation case against a New York City museum forces a lawyer to revisit troubling memories from her college summer abroad in Lemle’s suspenseful debut. Read more.

I Would Die If I Were You by Emily Rapp Black (Counterpoint)

In her latest memoir, Rapp Black draws on two decades of teaching to meditate on disability, grief, and empathy across art.

Binary Star by Sarah Gerard (Seven Stories)

A teacher in training struggles with anorexia and a troubled relationship throughout this new paperback edition of Gerard’s 2015 debut novel in verse. Read more.

Lost Worlds by Patrick Wyman (Harper)

Historian Wyman upends myths about the rise of civilization in this profound and enchanting study. Read more.

Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon, trans. by Daniel Hahn (Bellevue Literary)

Guatemalan writer Halfon reflects on his time at a nightmarish summer camp in this resonant autofiction. Read more.

Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth (FSG)

A woman develops an all-consuming infatuation with the mare she leases part-time in Haworth-Booth’s alluring first novel.

It’s Hard to be an Animal by Robert Isaacs (Grand Central)

Riffing on Doctor Doolittle, the exciting and hilarious debut from Isaacs follows a 28-year-old New Yorker who suddenly develops the ability to hear what animals are saying. Read more.

Helen Levitt by Joshua Chuang (Thames & Hudson)

This groundbreaking survey catalogs the work of American photographer Helen Levitt (1913-2009), who, across six decades, captured the streets of her native New York City with startling intimacy.

Hope House by Joe Bond (Hub City)

Bond’s gut-punch of a debut centers on Hope House, a Kentucky group home for a motley crew of boys who, in the 1980s, don’t have much of a future ahead of them—most likely prison, living on the streets, or worse. Read more.

Pretend You’re Dead and I’ll Carry You by Julián Delgado Lopera (Norton)

Delgado Lopera dives into Colombia’s taboo queer culture in this scintillating narrative of a man torn between belonging and self-expression. Read more.

The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams (MCD)

In the hypnotic sophomore outing from Williams, a professor’s personal assistant gets drawn into a strange triangle with her boss and a male student. Read more.

The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to John Milton by Robert Graves (Seven Stories)

This reissue of Graves’s 1943 classic delves into the life of Marie Powell, who, at 16 years old, was pushed into marrying one of England’s greatest epic poets.

Spawning Season by Joseph Osmundson (Bloomsbury)

Biophysicist Osmundson blends memoir and science writing in this moving meditation on queer family, the climate crisis, and 21st-century child-rearing. Read more.

No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed (Harper)

Sayed’s impressive debut tells the parallel stories of two gay men who meet in 2015 Istanbul. Read more.

The Disease of Boredom by Josefa Ros Velasco, tr. Kyle Rosen (Princeton University Press)

In this thought-provoking historical account, Ros Velasco, a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, demystifies a misunderstood emotion.

Prophecies by Chrisopher Dell (Thames & Hudson)

Across nine richly illustrated chapters, art historian Dell reveals how we’ve grappled with the future and its attendant uncertainties through the divine, the occult, and the supernatural.

And, How Have You Been by Maria Judite de Carvalho, tr. Margaret Jull Costa (Two Lines)

This collection gathers the late stories of the Portuguese author (1921-1998), known for her incisive prose and finely-tuned portraits of women, translated into English for the first time.

*

June

Whistler by Anne Patchett (Harper)

Patchett follows 2023’s Tom Lake with another perfectly executed and quietly profound family drama. Read more.

The Children by Melissa Albert (Morrow)

The 30-something daughter of a famous novelist looks back on her traumatic Vermont childhood in the eerie and assured adult debut from YA author Albert. Read more.

The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory by Andrew McKenzie-McHarg (Princeton University Press)

From Machiavelli to QAnon, this incisive account charts how the conspiracy theories have evolved—and remained the same—throughout the centuries.

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy (FSG)

A transplanted Londoner in contemporary Paris struggles to write an essay on Gertrude Stein in this arch novel from Levy. Read more.

Meeting New People by Daniel M. Lavery (HarperVia)

Following Women’s Hotel, Lavery returns with a novel about a 50-something, twice-divorced woman looking back on the dissolution of the nine best friendships of her life.

Cut Out by Fiona Rogers (Thames & Hudson)

Complete with 200 color illustrations, this comprehensive volume explores the relationship between photography, feminist art, and collage through the collection of the V&A.

Good-Bye by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy (New Directions)

This new collection of eleven short stories and vignettes, many never before translated into English, is sure to appeal to the rabid fanbase of the Japanese writer (1909–1948), best known for his portraits of despair.

1873 by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin)

The latest from the Pulitzer Prize–winning financial historian reckons with the fraught legacy of the Rothschilds and the famous banking family’s role in one of the world’s worst economic collapses.

It’s All River by Carla Madeira, tr. Alison Entrekin (Liveright)

In this taut narrative, the Brazilian writer offers the story of a prostitute caught in a twisted love triangle—and the destruction it leaves in its wake.

Like a Cat Loves a Bird by James Bailey (Princeton University Press)

Bailey’s stylish biography traces the arc of Spark’s life and literary career, both of which spanned nearly the entire 20th century.

Bone Horn by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain (Soft Skull)

Picasso once quipped that Alice B. Toklas’s bangs hid the stump of a horn—and in Bussey-Chamberlain’s queer detective novel, a newly registered private investigator attempts to track it down.

Freedom by Zinzi Clemmons (Viking)

The electrifying nonfiction debut from novelist Clemmons muses on the thorny concept of freedom in “a world buckling from the consequences of centuries of interlocking injustices.” Read more.

A Sense of Occasion by Brodie Crellin (Riverhead)

The British novelist’s debut sees a dysfunctional family reunite in a small English village for their matriarch’s funeral over a sweltering summer weekend.

Quake by Kitty Mrosovky (McNally Editions)

Mrosovsky, who died in 1995, weaves a sensuous tale of female desire—unpublished in her life time—in which a woman grows increasingly enamored with her younger Italian lover.

Rasputin Swims the Potomac by Ben Fountain (Flatiron)

Fountain’s satire imagines an alternate reality not that far from our own, complete with a mysterious pandemic, a desperate president, and a pro wrestler thrust into the political limelight.

Two Ships by David S. Reynolds (Penguin)

Reynolds maps the how the arrival of two ships—The White Lion, which brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown in 1619, and the Mayflower, which brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock in 1620—set the stage for centuries of American polarization.

Pool House by Mary H.K. Choi (Flatiron)

At the heart of Choic’s adult debut is the tense relationship between a mother and daughter, both of whom live in their backyard pool house while renting out their main home to pay the bills.

Empire of Ink by Alex Wright (Basic)

Wright’s history traces the rise of the American newspaper from the Revolutionary War through to the 20th century, and the radical spirit behind its inception.

On the Other Side Is March by Sólrún Michelsen, tr. Marita Thomsen (Transit)

A middle-aged woman adjusts to being a grandmother and caretaker for her own mother in the wake of her father’s death, in the poignant English-language debut from Michelsen—the first female Faroese writer to ever appear in the language. Read more.

Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis (S&T Classics)

Lewis’s 1929 satire, about millionaire auto manufacturer whose marriage is imperiled by his wife’s European vacation, returns in a new edition with insights from scholars Nissa Ren Cannon and Sheila Liming.

There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood by Rasheed Newson (Flatiron)

The My Government means to Kill Me author returns with a novel set in 1950s Hollywood and propelled by the untimely death of a young Black movie star.

The Summer of the Serpent by Cecilia Eudave, tr. Robin Meyers (Soho Press)

Set during a sweltering summer in 1977, this fragmented novel takes a surrealist tack to excavate the secrets of a quiet, residential neighborhood in Guadalajara.

The Perfect Moment by Isaac Butler (Bloomsbury)

The National Book Critics Circle Award–Winner returns with a smart cultural history of today’s culture wars, arguing that their origins lie in a 1988 attempt by Pat Buchanan and other conservatives to stir up moral panic about contemporary artists like Robert Mapplethorpe.

The Narrow Road of Oku by Bashō, tr. Meredith McKinney (New Directions)

McKinney’s translation breathes new life the Edo-era poet’s now-famous travelogue chronicling his pilgrimage from Tokyo to Lake Biwa.

Cleanup on Aisle Five by Ann Larson (One Signal)

This illuminating debut chronicle turns Larson’s pandemic-era stint as a grocery worker into a rallying cry against corporate greed. Read more.

Without Terminus by Chaun Webster (Graywolf)

In his first work of nonfiction, the poet braids together memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to explore anti-Black violence, inheritance, and memory, as well as his own grandfather’s experience as a Pullman porter.

I’ll Take the Fire by Leila Slimani (Penguin)

Slimani’s autobiographical coming-of-age novel follows a woman who, after growing up in socially conservative Morocco, embarks on a quest for political and sexual freedom.

The Cruelty of Nice Folks by Justin Ellis (Harper)

In this penetrating and moving debut, journalist Ellis examines past and present African American life in his hometown of Minneapolis. Read more.

Shakespeare’s Margaret by Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern (Norton)

Theater critic O’Malley and lawyer Stern assemble an enthralling history of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Margaret of Anjou, who married Henry VI at 14 and ruled during the War of Roses. Read more.

Trash! A Garbageman’s Story by Simon Pare-Poupart, tr. Pablo Strauss (Melville House)

“The garbageman is the Sisyphus of our consumer society, condemned to go from house to house picking up bags, swept along day after day in the never-ending flow of refuse we produce,” writes Montréal sanitation worker Pare-Poupart in his bewitching debut memoir. Read more.

The Sixth Nik by Daniel Kraus (Saga)

This galaxy-spanning adventure follows a nine-year-old cultist with a tech-enhanced brain as boards a mysterious spaceship to investigate an even more mysterious planet.

Weimar by Katja Hoyer (Basic)

Following her history of East Germany, the historian and journalist returns with a sprawling chronicle of interwar Germany, as told through the town of Weimar—which, Hoyer notes, was both the site of the country’s first democracy and the first place Nazis were welcomed into local government.

The post The Millions’ Great Spring 2026 Book Preview appeared first on The Millions.

Below, you’ll find 100 titles out this winter that we’re excited about here at The Millions. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to dive into based on their authors or subjects. We leaned on our friends at Publishers Weekly to help blurb some of the many, many titles that we’re eager to put on your radar.

The Millions is, alas, still on hiatus, but we’re determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim (if a bit belatedly). 

—Sophia Stewart, editor

*

January

Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo (Black Cat)

NBCC Award winner Guo delivers a spectacular retelling of Moby-Dick, in which she recasts Ishmael as a 17-year-old girl and Ahab as a Black freedman named Seneca who’s battling the “white devil.” Read more.

Philosophy of Writing by David Arndt (Bloomsbury Academic)

In his latest, the comparative literature professor proposes new frameworks through which to understand writing not just as a craft, but as a philosophical undertaking.

Nothing Random by Gayle Feldman (Random House)

This cinematic biography of Random House founder Bennett Cerf from longtime PW writer Feldman teems with a star-studded cast including Truman Capote, James Joyce, Alfred Knopf, Ayn Rand, and Dick Simon. Read more.

Palinuro of Mexico by Fernando del Paso, tr. Elizabeth Plaister (Dalkey Archive)

Virgil’s Palinurus was Aeneas’s helmsman who fell victim to the god of sleep; his namesake in this complex, beautiful novel, is also a guide to a novel that straddles the conscious and subconscious, life and death. Read more.

The Last of Earth by Deepa Anappara (Random House)

Edgar winner Anappara offers a vivid narrative of two 1869 expeditions into Tibet at a time when it was still closed off to outsiders and its rivers and mountains were mostly uncharted. Read more.

Fire Sword and Sea by Vanessa Riley (Morrow)

Riley’s exciting latest follows a young Haitian woman’s fight against slavery and her turn toward piracy. Read more.

We Would Have Told Each Other Everything by Judith Hermann, tr. Katy Derbyshire (FSG)

In this deeply affecting English-language debut, German writer Hermann reflects on the connections between art and experience, delving into her protagonist’s family history in West Germany and the relationships that shaped her life. Read more.

The Hitch by Sara Levine (Roxane Gay)

Levine serves up a bizarre and mordantly funny tale of a six-year-old who might be possessed by a dead corgi. Read more.

This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Knopf)

Mueenuddin’s lavish sophomore effort spans six decades and traces the lives of a wealthy Pakistani clan and those who work for them. Read more.

The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken (Penguin)

In Knausgaard’s ingenious fourth entry in the Morning Star series, a self-absorbed Norwegian photographer strikes a Faustian bargain in exchange for success. Read more.

The Snakes That Ate Florida by Ian Frazier (FSG)

In this substantial yet brisk collection, essayist and humorist Frazier compiles highlights from his half-century career at the New Yorker and other outlets. Read more.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden (Dial)

Immigration lawyer Burden traces the exhilarating start and excruciating dissolution of her two-decade marriage in this bruising debut. Read more.

Pedro the Vast by Simón López Trujillo (Algonquin)

In Trujillo’s equally heady and thrilling sci-fi debut, panic attack–prone mycologist Giovanna Oddó is summoned to a provincial Chilean hospital to consult on a strange case of “lethal blight” believed to be caused by the mushroom Cryptococcus gatti. Read more.

The Old Fire by Elisa Shua Dusapin, tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Summit)

In the quietly affecting latest from Dusapin, two sisters reunite to clear out their family home in the French countryside. Read more.

Discipline by Larissa Pham (Random House)

Pham, author of the memoir Pop Song, turns to fiction with the dazzling story of an art critic who publishes a novel about the former professor who rejected her after their affair. Read more.

Eating Ashes by Brenda Navarro, tr. Megan McDowell (Norton)

The grieving unnamed narrator of Mexican writer Navarro’s spellbinding U.S. debut ruminates on the effects of migration. Read more.

Scale Boy by Patrice Nganang (FSG)

In this gorgeous memoir, Cameroonian novelist Nganang chronicles his coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s and his decision to pursue a literary life. Read more.

Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland (Unnamed)

Banned from publication in the U.S. until 1966, Cleland’s erotic novel from 1749 offers an account of a woman’s early days of prostitution in 18th-century London.

Iconophages by Jérémie Koering, tr. Nicholas Huckle (Princeton UP)

In this adroit English-language debut, Koering, an art history professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, surveys the long and surprising tradition of how “figured representations” have been ritualistically consumed. Read more.

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson (Grove)

Critic and fiction writer Winterson anchors this dazzling memoir-in-essays in her childhood obsession with One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern folktales that introduced magic lamps and flying carpets to the West. Read more.

When Trees Testify by Beronda Montgomery (Holt)

Plant biologist Montgomery mixes memoir, history, and science in this unique examination of the significance of trees in Black history. Read more.

The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Random House)

In her stunning debut memoir, poet and novelist Griffiths details the most challenging period of her life, during which her best friend died and her husband, the author Salman Rushdie, was brutally attacked. Read more.

Crux by Gabriel Tallent (Riverhead)

This tense and staggering tale of rock climbing and family demons from Tallent explores the cost of following one’s dreams. Read more.

Beckomberga by Sara Stridsberg, tr. Deborah Bragan-Turner (FSG)

Stridsberg’s singular novel traces the history of Stockholm’s Beckomberga psychiatric asylum via wrenching stories of its patients. Read more.

How to Commit a Post-Colonial Murder by Nina McConigley (Pantheon)

McConigley follows her PEN/Open Book Award–winning collection, Cowboys and East Indians, with a witty and ultimately profound tale centered on two angsty preteens’ plot to kill their abusive uncle. Read more.

Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg (Avid Reader)

Torenberg debuts with a bewitching tragicomedy about a young woman who takes drastic actions to raise money for her sister’s medical bills. Read more.

A Very Cold Winter by Fausta Cialente, tr. Julia Nelsen (Transit)

In this overdue translation of Cialente’s vital 1966 novel, her first to be published in English, a family struggles to find harmony while crammed together in a frigid Milan squat. Read more.

Station of the Birds by Betsy Sussler (Spuyten Duyvil)

In the author’s latest, a son disinherited by his father while attending college returns to his hometown with an eye toward vengeance.

Vigil by George Saunders (Random House)

A ghost attempts to guide an unrepentant oil executive toward redemption and the afterlife in the staggering latest from Saunders. Read more.

A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot, tr. Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver (Penguin)

Pelicot, who first rose to prominence after waiving her right to anonymity in the court case against her husband and 50 men accused of sexually assaulting her, tells her story for the first time in this harrowing, galvanizing memoir.

Black Dahlia by William J. Mann (S&S)

Novelist and biographer Mann delivers a meticulous and humane reconsideration of one of America’s most sensationalized unsolved murders. Read more.

Rooting Interest by Cat Disabato (831 Stories)

In this sapphic sports romance from Disabato, NFL reporter Jennifer Felix is reassigned to cover WNBA All-Star Weekend, despite knowing nothing about basketball. Read more.

February

Lee and Elaine by Ann Rower (Semiotext(e))

In this second novel by Rower, the artistic and social excesses of the New York School painters—Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning—provide a welcome obsession for a painter in a midlife crisis. Read more.

The End of Romance by Lily Meyer (Viking)

Critic and translator Meyer’s sharp and sexy sophomore novel chronicles a young woman’s liberation from an abusive marriage. Read more.

Language as Liberation by Toni Morrison (Knopf)

In this series of lectures from the Nobel laureate’s tenure as a professor at Princeton, Morrison examines Black characters throughout American literature and their impact on our national imagination.

Superfan by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (Flatiron)

Zhang explores the line between fandom and idol worship in her sharp sophomore outing. Read more.

The People Can Fly by Joshua Bennett (Little, Brown)

Bennett charts the complex role of Black prodigies and gifted children in American history, including by tracking the early educations of luminaries ranging from Malcolm X to Stevie Wonder.

Second Skin by Anastasiia Fedorova (Catapult)

Toggling between memoir, reportage, social history, cultural criticism, and erotic writing, Fedorova maps the worlds of sexual fetishism and kink, considering the the forces that shape desire, and how desire shapes us.

Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf)

Memoirist and novelist Rivera Garza weaves labor history, environmental catastrophe, and stories of her family into a vivid tapestry. Read more.

A Killing in Cannabis by Scott Eden (Spiegel & Grau)

Investigative journalist Eden shines in this novelistic work of true crime, which opens in 2019, when deputies responded to a 911 call reporting a kidnapping in Santa Cruz, Calif., at the home of tech CEO Tushar Atre, who’d recently launched a cannabis company. Read more.

Heap Earth Upon It by Chloe Michelle Howarth (Melville House)

Howarth captures the rhythms and underlying tensions of an Irish village through the eyes of multiple characters in her alluring sophomore outing. Read more.

Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes (Dalkey Archive)

Barnes’s trailblazing work of lesbian literature—part social satire, part Restoration pastiche, part love letter to Paris—returns nearly a century after its 1928 publication courtesy of Dalkey Archive.

The Wall Dancers by Yi-Ling Liu (Knopf)

This incisive, empathetic debut study from journalist Liu examines three decades of the internet’s evolution in China, from the mid-1990s explosion of microblogs and message boards that corresponded with the country’s increasing liberalization, to the mid-aughts raising of the Great Firewall. Read more.

Alice Baber: An Artist’s Triumph Over Tragedy by Gail Levin (Pegasus)

Levin’s biography questions why Baber—whose abstract paintings had entered into the collections of the Met, Whitney, Guggenheim, and MoMA by the time she died at 54—ultimately fell into obscurity, while also restoring the artist to her rightful place in modernist history.

Scatman John by Gina Waggot (Bloomsbury Academic)

Music journalist Waggott debuts with an affectionate biography of John Larkin (1942–1999), better known as Scatman John, who rose to fame in the mid-1990s with a blend of jazz, pop, and scat-singing. Read more.

The Jills by Karen Parkman (Ballantine)

Parkman debuts with a thrilling mystery that offers an immersive view into the lives of NFL cheerleaders. Read more.

Frog by Anne Fadiman (FSG)

Essayist and reporter Fadiman reflects on her life and the ever-changing world around her in this affecting and often humorous collection. Read more.

I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For by Bsrat Mezghebe (Liveright)

The nuanced debut from Mezghebe finds an Eritrean American teen seeking answers about her late father’s life as a revolutionary martyr. Read more.

This is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman (Dial)

Goodman delivers a bighearted linked story collection about a family’s travails. Read more.

One Bad Mother by Ej Dickson (Simon Element)

New York magazine writer Dickson debuts with a smart and funny exploration of what it means to be a “bad mom.” Read more.

On Morrison by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth)

Serpell, a novelist and professor of English at Harvard, provides an insightful and stimulating exploration of the work of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. Read more.

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig, tr. Saskia Vogel

The first in a trio of works by the legendary Swedish writer set to be translated by Vogel, this 1964 novella follows a girl named Judit and her enigmatic inner life.

Lean Cat, Savage Cat by Lauren J. Joseph (Catapult)

An artist’s bohemian existence in Berlin implodes in this exquisite novel from Joseph. Read more.

Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (Ecco)

Oshetsky’s potent latest dives into the volatile inner world of a young woman who fantasizes about a life beyond her abusive marriage. Read more.

Head of Household by Oliver Munday (S&S)

Munday’s debut story collection mines the complexity, anxieties, and daily rituals of contemporary fatherhood.

The Writer’s Room by Katie da Cunha Lewin (Princeton UP)

Literature lecturer Lewin debuts with an insightful exploration of the spaces where famous writers crafted their most influential works. Read more.

Citizenship by Daisy Hernández (Hogarth)

Hernández presents a comprehensive and timely inquiry into American citizenship, weaving together memoir, history, and cultural criticism.

Beloved Son Felix by Felix Platter, tr. Seán Jennett (McNally Editions)

In 1552, a 16-year-old Felix Platter left Switzerland to study medicine in France, documenting his daily life in a diary—and now, contemporary readers can enjoy one of the world’s earliest journals, which chronicles everything from a brush with the bubonic plague to a John Calvin speech.

A Place Both Wonderful and Strange by Scott Meslow (Running Press)

The short-lived 1990 TV series Twin Peaks cast a long cultural shadow, according to this energetic account from film critic Meslow. His diligent account of the show’s cultural legacy [is interwoven] with delightful peeks into its idiosyncratic production and the eccentric directorial style of David Lynch. Read more.

Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl by Mandy-Suzanne Wong (Graywolf)

This mesmerizing collection from novelist and essayist Wong uses observations of small invertebrates to tackle questions about selfhood, consciousness, and humans’ relationship with nature. Read more.

Everything Lost Returns by Sarah Domet (Flatiron)

In Domet’s latest page-turner, two women are united across time by the arrival of Halley’s comet.

Every Moment Is a Life, ed. susan abulhawa (One Signal)

This Arabic-English bilingual anthology compiles essays by 18 young Palestinian writers whose writing grapples with the ongoing genocide in their homeland.

The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova, tr. Sasha Dugdale (New Directions)

In this captivating and capacious novel from Stepanova, a 50-year-old novelist experiences a bizarre and liberating metamorphosis while in exile from her unnamed home country, which has just started a devastating war with its neighbor. Read more.

I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa, tr. Adrian Nathan West (FSG)

Nobel laureate Llosa, who died last year, tackles Peruvian history and culture in this searching novel, published in Spanish in 2023, about the limits of idealism. Read more.

I Am the Ghost Here by Kim Samek (Dial)

Samek debuts with a striking collection of fantastical and speculative stories about conformity, technology, and the limits of bodily autonomy. Read more.

Doing Nothing by James Currie (Duke UP)

In his contribution to Duke University Press’s Practices series, Currie delves into modes of being such as procrastination, resignation, and melancholia—and the unexpected opportunities these states can present.

Technology and Barbarism by Michel Nieva, tr. Rahul Bery and Daniel Hahn (Astra House)

From the author of Dengue Boy comes a probing nonfiction collection which investigates the influence of “hard” science fiction and how the genre informs our complicated relationship with technology.

The Silent Period by Francesca Manfredi, tr. by Ekin Oklap (Norton)

The elegant and witty latest from Manfredi sees an unfulfilled young woman commit to silence. Read more.

Brawler by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)

Story Prize winner Groff delivers a gorgeous collection about families transformed by desperate circumstances. Read more.

More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen (Random House)

DNA test results rattle a middle-aged New Yorker in the poignant latest from Quindlen. Read more.

Starry and Restless by Julia Cooke (FSG)

In this expansive group biography, journalist Cooke profiles three prolific mid-century female journalists and examines the impact their reporting had on both their times and their profession. Read more.

March

Dream Facades by Jack Balderrama Morley (Astra House)

Morley explores what the dwellings depicted on reality TV reveal about Americans’ deep-seated desires for safety and security.

Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead)

In his latest work of alternate history, Mexican novelist Enrigue delivers his most ambitious book to date—a multilayered epic of the Apache Wars. Read more.

Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer (Putnam)

Journalist Oppenheimer contends in this impressive biography that Judy Blume “rewired the English-speaking world’s expectations of what literature for young people could be.” Read more.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life by Ellen Carol DuBois (Basic)

As a historian of woman’s suffrage, DuBois paints a definitive portrait of one of the most influential leaders in the fight for American women’s right to vote.

The Complex by Karan Mahajan (Viking)

In Mahajan’s immersive third novel, a family tragedy unfolds against the backdrop of political upheaval in India. Read more.

Will This Make You Happy by Tanya Bush (Chronicle)

This hybrid memoir and cookbook from the cofounder of Cake Zine pairs more than 50 recipes with a chronicle of the year she rediscovered her joy of baking.

Seeking Sexual Freedom by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah (S&S)

Sekyiamah profiles traditional sex practices across Africa—particularly older women and gurus who guide girls through puberty and early marital life—and argues that such open, liberated sex lives are hampered by Western norms.

A Marsh Island by Sarah Orne Jewett (S&T Classics)

Originally published in 1885, this reissue of Jewett’s idyllic classic chronicles life in a small New England coastal community through the eyes of a Manhattanite landscape painter.

Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen (Faber)

In this sly and visionary 1969 novel from Bodelsen, reissued with a new introduction by Sophie Mackintosh, a 30-something magazine editor agrees to be cryogenically frozen until a cure is found for his terminal cancer. Read more.

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli (Grand Central)

The EGOT icon tells the story of her life in her debut memoir, from her four marriages to her lifelong struggle with substance use to her experience growing up as the only child of two Hollywood legends.

Voices by Frederic Prokosch (NYRB Classics)

American fantasist Prokosch’s mostly made-up memoir of his childhood in Middle America and later years in the South of France, first published in 1982, returns thanks to a reissue by NYRB.

Down Time by Andrew Martin (FSG)

In Martin’s well-observed but listless third outing, a group of loosely connected 30-somethings float through the Covid-19 era, coping with cheating partners, enduring lockdown, and questioning their professional, romantic, and creative choices. Read more.

Whidbey by T Kira Madden (Mariner)

The propulsive debut novel from Madden, author of the memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, explores the aftermath of child sexual abuse. Read more.

I Was Alive Here Once, ed. Sarah Coolidge (Two Lines)

This anthology, the latest installment in Two Lines’ Calico series, anthology gathers ghost stories from Korea, Yemen, Poland, Japan, Uzbekistan, Iceland, Tanzania, and Thailand.

On an Inland Sea, ed. Michael Welch (Belt)

Thirty-three writers meditate on the experience of living on the Great Lakes in this anthology from Cleveland-based Belt Publishing, which promotes voices from the Rust Belt.

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood (Riverhead)

Reissued on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, this novel is allegory at its best, a phantasmagoric portrait of modern culture’s sexual politics textured by psychological realism and sparing lyricism. Read more.

Partially Devoured by Daniel Kraus (Counterpoint)

Novelist Kraus offers an entertaining deep dive into George A. Romero’s classic horror film, which inspired a lifelong passion for horror, low-budget filmmaking, and Romero’s movies. Read more.

Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, tr. by Polly Barton (Ecco)

In her follow-up to Butter, Yuzuki returns with an unnerving portrait of female obsession and friendship, in which a woman develops an all-consuming fascination with a popular lifestyle blogger.

Chains of Ideas by Ibram X. Kendi (One World)

The National Book Award winner tackles the “great replacement theory,” and how it came to find its way into contemporary politics, in his latest.

My Lover the Rabbi by Wayne Koestenbaum (FSG)

Polymath Koestenbaum charts the psychosexual relationship between the narrator and his rabbi, as the two men torture, pleasure, and exploit one another.

Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami, tr. Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio (Knopf)

Kawakami unfurls a remarkable noir-tinged tale of female desperation set during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Read more.

Who Killed Bambi? by Monika Fagerholm, tr. Bradley Harmon (University of Wisconsin Press)

Set in a fictional, affluent suburb of Helsinki, this nonlinear novel follows a successful realtor haunted by his role as one of four teenage rapists involved in a devastating sexual assault.

The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day (Astra House)

Day explores the nature of parasitic and symbiotic relationships in her wondrous debut, which largely follows the deterioration of a couple’s beloved French bulldog, Gelsomina. Read more.

Sydney Journals by Antigone Kefala (Transit)

This cosmopolitan collection of journal entries from the late Australian poet Antigone Kefala, who died in 2022, contains moving reflections on the tension between modern life and the life of the mind. Read more.

Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich (Harper)

Pulitzer winner Erdrich dives deep into the American psyche in this spectacular collection. Read more.

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro (New Directions)

Scodallero’s mesmerizing and challenging debut novel focuses on a film screening in a near-future intentional community of women. Read more.

The Life You Want by Adam Phillips (FSG)

In a series of interlinked essays, Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to unveil the difficulties of fashioning—and enjoying—our lives.

American Han by Lisa Lee (Algonquin)

Lee’s debut follows a brother and sister as they confront how they once embodied—and ultimately departed from—the American myth of the “model minority.”

The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)

The Irish writer’s latest story collection includes nine works of short fiction—many never-before-published—set across Ireland, Spain, and America.

A Good Person by Kirsten King (Putnam)

Screenwriter King debuts with the clever tale of a vengeful woman whose ex-boyfriend winds up dead after she casts a spell on him. Read more.

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel (Norton)

In the inspired latest from Booker winner Martel, a literature scholar discovers an alternate account of the Trojan War. Read more.

The Monroe Girls by Antoine Volodine, tr. Alyson Waters (Archipelago)

The fascinating and sardonic latest from Volodine plays out in the mind of a schizophrenic who lives in a postapocalyptic psychiatric hospital among the living and the dead. Read more.

The post The Millions’ Great Winter 2026 Preview appeared first on The Millions.

This year, the series is taking a more condensed form—we asked contributors for shorter reflections, and are publishing them all simultaneously—but we hope it will nevertheless help you discover your next great book. I, for one, am newly determined to finally read some Muriel Spark—thanks, Sebastian Castillo.

—Sophia Stewart, editor

* * *

Caleb Gayle

author, Black Moses

It’s usually impossible to find time to read much during a book launch. But when a book like Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement by Brandon Terry landed on my doorstop, I knew that I would need to make the time. In it, Terry upends our too-often romantic, or at other times, deeply ironic memories of the Civil Rights Movement. It isn’t the kind of book that one breezes through—I know I didn’t! But it is the kind of book that lingered with me, haunted how I revisit the past, and forced me to reconsider how that past informs the present. When I wasn’t reconsidering the past, I just had a blast reading Katie Yee’s Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. What a fun and funny ride.

* * *

James Webster

marketing director, Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive Press

I’ll be honest, this was an unusually contemporary year for me! Normally I read pretty widely, time-wise, but there were a handful of remarkably self-assured debut novels that couldn’t be ignored. First, I adored Stephanie Wambugu’s deliberately-old-fashioned Lonely Crowds, and have recommended it to so many people that they could populate an upstate college town like the one that features so heavily in the novel. I loved the flame-throwing Bad Nature by Ariel Courage, which is so furious in its voice, so cutting with its humor, that it’s almost intoxicating—like the buzzy lightheaded feeling you get from giving blood. And rounding out the trilogy was Cora Lewis’s Information Age, which is one of those fragmentary novels that we’ve all seen countless times, but incredibly, Lewis sacrifices nothing in the negative space.

Elsewhere, Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is an exemplary biography, looking at both an artist, and the creation of that artist’s legacy—itself a sort of art form. I spent several months reading nothing but Italian women (Ginzburg, de Céspedes, Morante, Terranova, Raimo, Mazzetti), and I also enjoyed playing director while reading Karl Krauss’s delirious and impossible-to-stage Modernist play, The Last Days of Mankind.

Finally, as the father of a two-year-old, I read the same 10 children’s books approximately one thousand times, each. Don’t miss Curious George Takes a Job, which contains a disquieting scene at the hospital, where George finds a bottle of ether and inhales the anesthetic until “everything went dark.”

* * *

Henry Hoke

author, Open Throat

I became a parent at the start of 2025, and although I was hanging out with my kid on the opposite coast, my heart and my reading choices were with my long-time home of Los Angeles. In an unimaginable and devastating year for the city, I was grateful to experience new work by some of my favorite LA artists. First, Season of the Rat by Elizabeth Hall, published by the freshly launched Cash 4 Gold Books. It’s a cutting marvel of hybrid prose that explores forgotten queer landmarks, sexual assault, recovery, burgeoning romance, and, of course, a rat on the roof. Then, the arrival of Sitting Vol. 2: Plein Air by Stacy Elaine Dacheux, the second in her series of illustrated chapbook memoirs. I adore the singular wit and succinct beauty of Stacy’s writing and art. This remarkable volume—much of it covering the direct aftermath of the fires, in which many of my friends lost their homes and businesses—becomes a meditation on resilience, how we shape ourselves by moving through. Lastly, Ottodokki by Patrick Michael Ballard, from art press Sming Sming, which is a pack of 24 randomized collectible cards by a visionary of material and myth. The cards’ uses are undefined, up to you. I had to buy one pack to keep sealed and one to crack open. My baby divined seven cards from the deck and we built a bedtime story with his choices.

* * *

Grace Byron

author, Herculine

I spent a lot of the year finally reading Thomas Pynchon and Barbara Ehrenreich, a pair that perhaps never seemed so omnipotent in their prophetic powers as they do now. I was delighted to find the former reference in the latter in Bait and Switch, her chronicle of white collar unemployment, a spiritual sequel of sorts to Nickel and Dimed. I also tuned into Philip Roth for the first time; I found The Counterlife a fascinating experiment in fiction and adored Portnoy’s Complaint. I read less contemporary fiction than usual but I adored Information Age by Cora Lewis, Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood, and Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers. And, since this is a list, Things In Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li is a moving archive of grief, a list that unspools great beauty and gripping love.

* * *

Peter Mendelsund

author, Weepers and Exhibitionist

I stopped reading about four years ago (it’s a long story). But I’m recently back in the game.

I still don’t read contemporary literary fiction, which is especially ungenerous of me having just thrown my new novel onto the toppling pile. What I do read is philosophy, poetry, fanfiction, sci fi, and fantasy (I’ve dipped my beak into romantasy this year as well). Which is to say that this list will be a mixed bag. Though as John Ashbery says, “good things sometimes come in mixed bags.”

Speaking of Ashbery, this year I read his 1989 Norton Lectures: Other Traditions. I’d read very little poetry outside of those works anthologized in my high school and college textbooks, so decided I should educate myself. Ashbery is, in many ways, a surprising guide here, as his own poetry is daunting and hermetic. (Once, after he spoke to Richard Howard’s class at Columbia, Howard told him the students “wanted the key to your poetry, but you presented them with a new set of locks.”) Yet Ashbery’s lectures have helped me quite a bit—specifically due to his reluctance and self-professed inability to explain anything. I am trying to follow his example, relinquishing my compulsive need to have a poem reveal itself completely. I sit with a poem now, let it wash over me, hear its music, and take from it what I will. Ashbery discusses six “lesser-known” poets in the book, including David Schubert, whose work I now find myself reading obsessively.

The Horus Heresy is a set of sixty-four fanfiction novels based on—and contributing to—the lore surrounding a tabletop miniatures game called Warhammer. My YouTube algorithm decided I’d like to watch videos of men meticulously painting miniature models of blood-spattered space warriors and tentacular aliens. Wanting to learn more about these characters and the world they inhabit I dove headfirst into the history of a war-torn 31st millennium.

This has been my year of considering “the object.” I’ve been reading anything I can get my hands on that contends with the ontology and phenomenology of stuff. A sampling would include, of course, Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein, etc., but most recently I’ve read Heidegger’s wonderful (though at times inscrutable) “The Thing.” Also, I reread the excellent Alien Phenomenology by Ian Bogost as well as A Philosophy of Sport by Steven Connor, which includes a wonderful chapter on sports equipment and the philosophical implications of human/object interaction.

A piano is an object, but also quite a bit more than an object. I read Sophy Roberts’s beautiful, elegiac book The Lost Pianos of Siberia, as well as the late pianist and polymath Alfred Brendel’s Music, Sense and Nonsense.

I read eight novels by Terry Prachett this year. I recommend The City Watch series, which follows a motley police force in the fantastical city of Ankh-Morpork as they contend with dragons, golems, assassins, and interspecies warfare. Pratchett also takes on larger questions around what a city is, and how it can, against all odds, function. These books are smart and wickedly funny.

I also read Cyrill Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, a book at once ingenious and utterly terrible. There are passages that fit neatly within a genre I love: the author discussing ideal conditions under which he will—but ultimately can’t—write his future masterpiece. See under Barthes’s last lectures Preparation for the Novel. Which I also re-read. Anyway, the degree of bellyaching and bathos alongside the extreme erudition in Connolly’s book is delightful.

* * *

Eliana Ramage

author, To the Moon and Back

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Palestinian American poet and writer Hala Alyan exists in the urgent space before the birth of a child, as Alyan waits in a separate country from her surrogate Dee. With breathtaking precision, Alyan gathers and considers her daughter’s inheritance. She maps a family legacy of displacement—from Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, and Lebanon. She weaves in her own coming-of-age—in Kuwait, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dallas, and Oklahoma City—and stories of addiction, sobriety, pregnancy, and loss. Meanwhile, her daughter is the size of a grain of rice, and then a raspberry. Alyan’s writing is lyrical and surprising, open-hearted and unwavering. A tender and honest exploration of peoplehood, personhood, endings, and beginnings.

* * *

Erin Somers

author, The Ten Year Affair

I published a book this year which makes a person—how to put this?—go completely insane. Maybe not everyone. Does someone out there not go insane? Reach out via email. I personally go buck wild. I got excessively fit this year? Like ripped? I wrote 60,000 words of a new book? I could hear how I sounded describing to people that this was only a third of the planned word count. I sleepwalked every night for five months. I am still sleepwalking every night. My nightmares are of being publicly disgraced in some way, or that I’ve forgotten about a podcast interview. Imagine dreaming of podcast interviews! A new hell for the twenty-first century.

You can get to wondering why you write for a living, if you are so ill-cut-out for it. If it fills you with horrible anxiety. If it chases you. If it sucks up all your time. If it takes you further away from the thing you liked doing in the first place, which was just reading. Why didn’t I go and make a job out of the thing I liked best?

In this frame of mind, I read Howards End by E.M. Forster. Every year I try to fill some holes, read some classics I missed. I have been doing this long enough that I should know that whatever my notions are about a classic are likely wrong. But no, I never learn. Every time I’m like, what is this turgid artifact? From what dusty tomb was it unearthed?

Howards End looks so, so dusty. It’s like they tried to make it look as dusty as possible. They should refresh the design. They must. But then when you crack it, it is funny and alive, a class novel inspired by the lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell concerning the fate of a country house.

The refrain of Howards End is “only connect,” and it’s possible that this is corny, maybe the corniest part of the book, which is mostly a closely observed and perceptive novel about how different tiers of rich people interact in Edwardian England. The old rich hate the nouveau riche and vice versa. The old rich pity the poor, while the new rich loathe the poor, and so on. It is also about a set of sisters going around being charming and slightly eccentric.

“Only connect” is Forster’s entreaty to connect the rational part of your brain with what might be called the heart. In my ragged, somnambulant, pointlessly shredded state I interpreted this as an argument in favor of art. If you go looking for the reason you do something, or a reason to keep doing whatever you’re doing, you’ll see it everywhere. You’ll hear it in a pop song or see it in a painting or in your kid’s face or in the pattern of a leaf.

Do I write to connect? I hope so? Probably not though. If I’m being honest it’s just that I’m compelled to do it. It’s that stupid and that inescapable. I just feel like doing it. In spite of everything, the part that is good—purely and without complications—is sitting down and writing. If there were moments of gratification this year they were in one of two places: in hanging out and doing nothing and on the page. These are my two vocations. Nothing and typing on my laptop. But it’s nice, isn’t it, only connect? It gives a sort of nobility to the whole endeavor. Maybe I could be worthy of it one day.

* * *

Natan Last

author, Across the Universe

The year your first book comes out must always involve shameful rereading, pawing at the greats to avoid peering unconvinced at the competition, reviving the adolescent fantasies of reading made feeble and death-aware by the reality of publishing.

I began the year with my third encounter of Nabokov’s Pnin, that sepia shambolic schlub double-fisting his laminated antiques, pride at newly-acquired U.S. citizenship and a full-time post at a college. I hacked my way through inauguration, its days pointy and gray and tragicomic like the pigeon-proofing spikes at a baseball stadium, with the cutlass imagery of Martín Espada’s Imagine the Angels of Bread (lightning jabbed the building / … scattering bricks from the roof / like beads from a broken necklace).

John Berger’s About Looking was the perfect companion on a couple of cold-month jaunts to tropicality, first to Turks & Caicos for a residency (where the chapter on suits bent my eye from sea to sequin) and then to Colombia for a wedding (where everything from hummingbird sanctuaries to seating charts parroted the section on zoos).

More recently, Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds emerged as the best new novel I’d read this year; each chapter ends, like a Tobias Wolff short story, with an eerie, inevitable spine-tingle, simultaneously slowed-down and propulsive. I work (to the extent the field still exists) in humanitarian immigration and keep up with the fictions and analyses its horrors generate; I really liked Vincent Delecroix’s non-judgmental experiment in Small Boat and Stephanie DeGooyer’s legal-literary history, Before Borders.

Finally, Ellen Bryant Voigt, a poet I’m always imitating, passed this year, and I spent Thanksgiving re-experiencing the tractor engine of her synactic wizardy in Headwaters (it matters / what we’re called words shape the thought don’t say / rodent and ruin everything).

* * *

Sebastian Castillo

author, Fresh, Green Life

This was a great year for reading (they are all great years) and some favorites include Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure (delectable), Dag Solstad’s Novel 11, Book 18 (protean, confounding! a compliment), Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance (prismatic and devastating), as well as Ron Padgett’s incredibly sweet Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (it made me cry).

But if I had to pick two books I think will stay with me for a while—and this is perhaps due to some recency bias—they are A Far Cry from Kensington and Loitering with Intent, both by Muriel Spark, which I read back to back. I’ve long been a great admirer of her work but I’ve never read novels so perfect as these two, with voices so utterly sui generis, with such an addictive tonal buoyancy that I now pace about my apartment and sulk, look out the window with a little vapor in my mien, because I am not reading Muriel Spark, when I should be. In fact, I am starting a new one today.

And sorry, last one: I just finished Iris Murdoch’s The Bell last night, but so far my astonishment toward this work of art is too great to replace the experience meaningfully with words. And like Lyn Hejinian, I love to be astonished!

* * *

Hala Alyan

author, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

I wasn’t ready for Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth in the best kind of way. It’s rare for a read to be both raucous and poignant, but this collection manages exactly that. Her explorations of Black womanhood are incisive and heart-lifting at turns, continuously testing what else language can hold. I’m sure many have characterized her tone as “unapologetic,” but that’s not quite right. Clark transcends apology. She’s willing to be ashamed, to be wrong, to be afraid. She’s willing to sit with history—and her own heart—a beat longer than is comfortable, which means the reader has to be as well. That sort of co-curated courage is what I love most in poetry, and Clark excels at it.

“The truth is: I lied,” she writes in the titular poem. “Did I have to be there for it to still hurt me?” The answer, of course, is no. Life marks us sometimes most in the act of witnessing. But more than the wound, Clark is interested in what grows around it. She writes joy with the same precision she brings to heartache—joy in femmeness, joy in Blackness, joy in restarting, in not getting what we want, and in getting it. The collection becomes a testimony to desire, to its unruly persistence, to the impossibility of a blank slate—and thank God for that.

* * *

Deesha Philyaw

author, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes resonated with so many facets of who I am. There’s the lover-girl in me who can’t resist a sweet-but-complicated-but-genuine love story like the one Norris’s main character Davis and his husband Everett share. There’s the grieving daughter who has learned, as Davis learns, that there are unexpected and upending layers to that grief when the parent you lost hurt you when they were alive. And finally, there’s the reader-writer in me who hungers for a beautiful, breathtaking page-turner with emotional heft and narrative surprises. Norris’s debut is a powerful reminder of all the different kinds of love we’ll experience, if we’re lucky, and how those ever-evolving loves can both collide with and be shaped by important questions of legacy and identity.

* * *

Ethan Rutherford

author, North Sun

This has been a strange year—my father died, we moved, my book came out—and I’ve felt more adrift in my reading life than at any other point I can remember. I pick things up and put them down; favorite authors no longer do the trick. I feel like I’ve lost the ability to steer myself true. Luckily, I am blessed with friends who have impeccable taste, and who are incredibly thoughtful, and who, when I look back at what I read this year on their recommendations, seem also to be watching out for me, and to them I am grateful.

Tongues by Anders Nilsen is my favorite book of the year and the one book I would press on anyone—it is beautifully drawn, beautifully told, complicated and strange, somehow feels even larger than it is. It’s perfect.

I owe my favorite (or, most meaningful) reading experience of the year to my friend Jill, who, after my dad died, found a beautiful copy of Virgil’s Aeneid: Book VI, trans. by Seamus Heaney, and gave it to me. This small chapter of the story concerns the moment Aeneas travels to the underworld and meets the spirit of his own father. I thought I had processed things, but of course I hadn’t. I read this on an airplane, slowly, and quietly cried while everyone else slept, and I felt lucky to hold that book in my hands.

The titles that follow are others I’ve read and loved this year (actually, this fall; spring was a mess), and are, in fact, some the only books now with me in our new apartment, far from home. I’ve come to think of them as cherished traveling companions, though they’re all new to me. I took a picture for accuracy. Can’t go wrong with any of these:

Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro; Orbital by Samantha Harvey; Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck; Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro; Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West; Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert; O’Clock: Sixteen Stories by Quim Monzo; The Infatuations by Javier Marías; Palaver by Bryan Washington; The Week of Colors by Elena Garro; The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor; Los Cuarto Fantasticos: Mister Fantastico (I’m trying to learn Spanish); The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow; State Champ by Hilary Plum; Magic Can’t Save Us by Josh Denslow; Look Out by Edward McPherson; States by Ciaran Berry; and The Understory by Saneh Sangsuk.

And finally, I am currently reading The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and I never want it to end.

* * *

Angela Flournoy

author, The Wilderness

At this point I might be becoming a broken record, but I really loved The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne, which is a debut novel that feels assured, and announces Fayne as a writer with a true storytelling gift. It’s an inter-generational saga that follows one family over more than a century—from West Africa to enslavement-era Tennessee to present day Tennessee. Alongside many memorable members of this family, we spend time with the devil himself, who functions as a kind of humorous, trickster guardian fallen angel for them. It is inventive, funny, and a book I still think about.

* * *

Emma Goldberg

reporter, the New York Times

There is something about New York that makes grit and shmaltz feel like two sides of one coin—the rat dragging its pizza on the A-train platform, the stranger holding open a subway door. The density of this place makes miracles feel more readily apparent, in the little kindnesses of people packed together like sardines and in the vastness of steel, iron, brick, and concrete. This year, I read three books about the history of New York, really about the underbelly of its miracles and about the people whose obstinance made the city as it is today, this ridiculous, jaw dropping grid of egos, lights and midnight sandwiches. One was The Power Broker by Robert Caro; the next was Gods of New York by Jonathan Mahler; the third was New York, New York, New York, New York by Thomas Dyja.

Taken together, the books explain how the city climbed from a fiscal hole to soaring wealth, how the chasm grew between the martini-drinking, Page Six names of billionaires’ row and the packed homes of NYCHA. These books course with the ambition that built oceanside boardwalks, but also with greed and plenty of petty point-scoring. In each one, the mythic men of New York turn into flesh and bones, men whose wives bought their socks: There was Robert Moses staging a fist fight with an “exceedingly drunk” city administrator, Alfred E. Smith unlocking the gates of the Central Park zoo at night to commune with the tigers, Ed Koch finally moving out of Gracie Mansion and into his nemesis Larry Kramer’s Greenwich Village apartment building. New York has a way of turning its bosses into demigods, but the authors turn those demigods back into men, characters whose grit and patriotic city schmaltz built New York and also left so many behind.

* * *

T Kira Madden

author, Whidbey

Because I’m currently working on a story about senior superlatives, maybe I’ll try to slot some of my other favorite reads by this way of categorization; Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian made me laugh the hardest. Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch made me cry the hardest. The book that asked me to slow down in large and small ways was Richard Powers’s The Overstory, and the book that asked me to devour it all at once was Quiara Alegría Hudes’s The White Hot. The most astonishing sentences I read were in Che Yeun’s forthcoming Tailbone, and the horniest, queerest book which has lodged itself in my brain is Melissa Faliveno’s forthcoming Hemlock. Stop Me if You’ve Heard this One by Kristen Arnett made me most homesick for Florida, and Mariah Rigg’s Extinction Capital of the World made me most homesick for Hawai’i. Sophie Lefens’s forthcoming Her Kind felt the most like hanging out with friends when I didn’t have friends to hang out with, and I learned a new term in 2025, “competency porn,” which calls to mind Michael Jerome Plunkett’s mesmerizing, obsessively detailed Zone Rouge. Most times I’ve said “so and so needs to read this book” in a gossipy way: Melissa Febos’s The Dry Season (IMO her best); most times I’ve said “so and so needs to read this book” in a you’re-not-alone way: Trying by Chloé Caldwell. The most beautifully written and composed cookbooks I read were Samin Nosrat’s Good Things (how many cookbooks quote June Jordan?) and Hetty McKinnon’s Linger. 

* * *

Canisia Lubrin

author, Code Noir and The World After Rain

I read some great books this year. Among them The Book of Records, You Will Not Kill Our Imagination, We, The Kindling, The River Has Roots and Under the Eye of the Big Bird. A year in reading can mean uncovering the nearly surreal layers of recent days and a book’s intersecting with the world in real-time.

This year, it was Olive Senior’s Hurricane Watch, a poetry volume collecting one “New and Uncollected Poems” with four previously published books. Having read it in 2022, my rereading of it felt talismanic. If you’re a reader like me, you appreciate the long arc that is the life of a book in the world and how it might defy the logic of its pub season because it accompanies you through many years. As I read Hurricane Watch super typhoons swelled to terrifying girths in the East and a category five storm called Hurricane Melissa—queue memories of Katrina and Sandy—tore down the Atlantic basin with Jamaica, the poet’s island in its path, eye and all. All at once with Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Cuba were also hit with scale-tipping winds, carnage and heartache for those on and off island. The poems in Hurricane Watch—prescient and tightly constructed—manage playfulness without being performative. Their second-order wisdoms that should by now have swayed the human hand away from the risks of treating human life as preordained resound in Senior’s poetic world of interconnected life.

* * *

Oliver Munday

author, Head of Household

This is no exaggeration: I’ve been waiting for Maggie Gram‘s The Invention of Design for twenty years (maybe not this book exactly, but a worse version to be sure). As a graphic designer myself, I’ve found very few books that take a comprehensive look at design—and none that have done so with the rigor and wit of Maggie Gram. The book charts the ways in which design has gone from something decorative to potentially destructive, evolving from the Bauhaus to the boardroom over the last hundred or so years. Through this fascinating story, a history of the 20th century emerges, as we watch design contorting itself to serve the shifting demands of capital. Written with a sceptical Marxist bent, without ever being didactic, the book illuminates design as the overlooked phenomenon that it is: something so ubiquitous (and insidious) we often have no idea that we’re even engaging with it. Grounding her narrative with biographical sketches of figures like ceramicist Eva Zeisel and industrial designer Walter Teague, Gram gives us a deeply human sense of how design’s utopian ideals continued to be reimagined, and how we ended up endowing design with such faith to solve even society’s biggest problems. If you’ve ever wondered just how we got to this place where the facile language of Design Thinking has so deeply pervaded our culture, this is the book for you. I learned so much about something I thought I knew well. The single best book on design I’ve read. 

* * *

Sophia Stewart

Editor, The Millions

Nonfiction tends to comprise the bulk of my reading diet, but my absolute favorite books of 2025 were two novels: Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice and Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair. Both are scarily smart and largely concerned with the unbridgeable gaps between our ideals, our fantasies, and our realities. Among my other Year in Reading–worthy encounters, I finally read Norman Rush’s Mating, a novel belonging to my preferred genre which my boyfriend calls “How Men and Women Relate.” I adored and cried reading linguist Julie Sedivy’s memoir Linguaphile, and made my first foray into audiobooks with my girl Martha Barnette’s impossibly delightful (and wonderfully narrated) Friends with Words. And finally, I continued to steadily work my way through Shelley Jackson’s Riddance, which is not just a masterpiece of stuttering literature, but a masterpiece, period.

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The post A Year in Reading: 2025 appeared first on The Millions.

Here you’ll find around 100 titles out this fall that we’re excited about here at The Millions. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to dive into based on their authors or subjects. We leaned on our friends at Publishers Weekly to help blurb some of the many, many titles that we’re eager to put on your radar.

The Millions is, alas, still on hiatus, but we’re determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim (if a bit belatedly). 

—Sophia Stewart, editor

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October

The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus (Scribner)

A successful writer chafes at criticism and obsesses over a murder case in the ponderous latest from Kraus. Read more.

The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe by Lauren D. Woods (Autumn House)

A wife literally begins to shrink inside her house, a mother remembers a surreal encounter between her infant daughter and a bear, and a woman stumbles upon a night club filled with her lover’s exes in Woods’s imaginative debut.

Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Kurt Beals (ND)

After winning the Booker International Prize in 2024, Erpenbeck returns with a stunning collection of interlinked autobiographical essays exploring memory, loss, and absence.

The Mind Reels by Fredrik deBoer (Coffee House)

In this bracing debut novel from cultural critic deBoer, a young woman becomes a prisoner of her own mind. Read more.

Mothers by Brenda Lozano, tr. Heather Cleary (Catapult)

From Mexican writer Lozano comes a smashing novel set in 1946, as a wave of kidnappings shock and scandalize northern Mexico. Read more.

It Girl by Marisa Meltzer (Atria)

In this first comprehensive biography of Jane Birkin, Meltzer gives due credit to the woman behind one of the world’s most iconic and coveted handbags—and makes the case for why she was much more than an “it girl.”

Vaim by Jon Fosse, tr. Damion Searls (Transit)

Nobel winner Fosse centers this spectacular story of loneliness, love, and death on three linked characters living in small-town Norway. Read more.

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press)

With his casually playful and chillingly resonant ninth novel, Pynchon delivers a warning against global fascism, a slapstick symphony whose antic comedy can’t begin to conceal its hopelessly broken American heart. Read more.

Unfit by Ariana Harwicz, tr. Jessie Mendez Sayer (ND)

Harwicz spins an unrelenting tale of a migrant woman who takes drastic steps to fulfill her radical conception of motherly love. Read more.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade (Scribner)

This innovative biography of Stein from Square Haunting author Wade assesses the influential writer’s life and work, from her childhood in California and productive years in Paris, to the ways that scholars constructed her posthumous legacy. Read more.

Intemperance by Sonora Jha (HarperVia)

In the jaunty latest from Jha, a twice-divorced feminist scholar decides to celebrate her 55th birthday by throwing herself a swayamvar, a traditional Indian ceremony in which a woman invites potential suitors to compete for her hand in marriage by performing various feats. Read more.

The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson (FSG)

Johnson, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son, unfolds a majestic saga of political unrest in the South Pacific and a girl’s quest to save her people. Read more.

We Survived the Night by Julian Brave NoiseCat (Knopf)

Fresh off his first Oscar nomination, NoiseCat returns with an oral history and work of reportage that probes Indigenous culture through an intimate journey shared by a father and a son.

Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead)

The gimlet-eyed latest from Taylor follows a creatively blocked painter through the New York City art world. Read more.

Vagabond: A Memoir by Tim Curry (Grand Central)

In this charming debut autobiography, British actor Curry offers a peek behind the curtain of his prolific screen and stage careers. Read more.

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Knopf)

Majumdar spins a luminous story of a family facing climate catastrophe and food scarcity in near-future Kolkata. Read more.

A Wooded Shore: And Other Stories by Thomas McGuane (Knopf)

McGuane rounds up another memorable group of misguided and doomed characters in this stellar collection. Read more.

Analog Days by Damion Searls (Coffee House)

Searls, translator of Jon Fosse and author of The Philosophy of Translation, offers in these clear-eyed ruminations a Gen Xer’s impressions of the technology and violence that shape 21st-century life. Read more.

Three or More Is a Riot by Jelani Kobb (One World)

New Yorker staff writer Cobb offers an expansive collection of his published essays, spanning from 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, which “ruined the mood of a nation that had, just a few years earlier, elected its first black president,” to Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025. Read more.

The House of Beauty by Arabelle Sicardi (Norton)

Across this searing collection of essays, former beauty editor Sicardi takes a knife to the industry in which they built their career, considering everything from the shimmering mica in beauty products to the historical connection between fragrance and fascism.

Twice Born by Hester Kaplan (Catapult)

In this affecting memoir, Kaplan examines her relationship with her father, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Justin Kaplan, who died in 2014. Read more.

Bog Queen by Anna North (Bloomsbury)

The discovery of a woman’s body in an English bog kicks off the piercing latest from North, which alternates between the perspectives of a forensic scientist tasked with identifying the remains and the long-dead woman, a young Druid leader who died around the year 50 BCE.  Read more.

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu (Saga)

This dazzling near-future mystery from Hugo winner Liu sparkles with suspense, intensity, and effortless worldbuilding. Read more.

The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee (Harper)

This posthumous collection of Lee’s work offers up newly discovered short stories and previously published essays and magazine pieces that reveal another side to the To Kill a Mockingbird author.

The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers (S&S)

Somers’s latest novel is a wry and ingenious tale of marital infidelity, offering a sardonic view into the pressures of marriage and motherhood and the ambient temptation of adultery. Read more.

Look Out by Edward McPherson (Astra House)

Guggenheim fellow McPherson presents a charming, idiosyncratic meditation on the human urge to see further, and more, in this cultural history of the “aerial view.” Read more.

Time Tunnel by Eileen Chang, tr. Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang (NYRB)

This sweeping collection gathers stories and essays from every stage of the late Chinese author’s career, some of which have never before been translated into English, spanning Shanghai and Hong Kong to the freeways of Los Angeles.

Looking for Tank Man by Ha Jin (Other Press)

In the latest from the National Book Award winner, a Chinese Harvard student grows fixated on the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Read more.

Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe (Ecco)

This kaleidoscopic volume from Ioffe, a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, combines memoir, journalism, and history to paint a nuanced portrait of modern Russia, all through the lens of womanhood.

That’s How It Works, ed. Katherine Webb-Hehn (Hub City)

This vibrant collection highlights the best Southern fiction published by the Spartanburg, S.C.–based Hub City Press over the past three decades, featuring work by Carter Sickels, James Yeh, and more.

Sacrament by Susan Straight (Counterpoint)

Straight’s immersive latest is a vibrant drama following a group of nurses at the height of Covid-19 in August 2020. Read more.

The Anthony Bourdain Reader by Anthony Bourdain (Ecco)

This career-spanning collection offers up new and never-before-seen material, including diary entries and unpublished short stories, while also celebrating Bourdain’s most compelling and definitive essays.

Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen by Kate Evans (Verso)

This artful and thought-provoking graphic biography from Evans stitches a postcolonial layer into the narrative by examining the fabrics worn by Jane Austen and her contemporaries. Read more.

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan, tr. Jack Hargreaves (Astra House)

A literary sensation in China when it was first published in 2023, this vivid self-portrait is a universal exploration of gig work and the financial pressures of surviving in today’s big cities.

One, None, and a Hundred Grand by Luigi Pirandello, tr. Sean Wilsey (Archipelago)

The 1926 novel by the late Nobel Prize winner—a meditation on relativism that poses urgent questions about self-perception, insecurity, and doubt—gets a second life in this elegant new translation.

The Book of Kin by Jennifer Eli Bowen (Milkweed)

Bowen’s probing debut questions how we forge relationships, community, and joy within a world rife with isolation and solitude, drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Bigger by Ren Cedar Fuller (Autumn House)

Fuller’s collection of personal essays calls on readers to imagine a “bigger” way of being in the world, from accommodating and celebrating difference, to finding new modes of expressing ourselves and loving others.

Jack the Modernist by Robert Glück (NYRB)

Glück’s novel of sex and art—a cult classic and trailblazing work of postmodern gay fiction—traces the gradual dissolution of a love affair against the backdrop of 1980s San Francisco.

Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)

Novelist and critic Smith brings an incisive eye and keen wit to art, music, fiction, politics, and more in these wide-ranging essays. Read more.

Little F by Michelle Tea (Feminist Press)

By turns heartbreaking, hilarious, and hope-filled, the latest from Tea follows a 13-year-old runaway’s search for a queer paradise. Read more.

November

Across the Universe by Natan Last (Pantheon)

New Yorker crossword constructor Last debuts with an enthusiastic exploration of the crossword puzzle, amounting to a love letter best suited for fellow obsessives. Read more.

On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle, tr. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (ND)

In the ingenious third installment of Balle’s septology, Danish rare book dealer Tara Selter is still trapped in the 18th of November. Read more.

Dress, Dreams, and Desire by Valerie Steele (Bloomsbury)

Steele, once described by critic Suzy Menkes as “the Freud of fashion,” probes the intersections of psychoanalytic principles and the clothes we wear.

Queen Esther by John Irving (S&S)

Irving revisits the setting of The Cider House Rules with a novel about a Viennese Jewish orphan and her adoptive family in New Hampshire. Read more.

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)

The remarkable debut memoir from Booker Prize winner Atwood recounts pivotal moments in her personal life that shaped some of her most enduring work as a writer. Read more.

Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel (Riverhead)

A California couple’s marriage is put to the test when they take part in a dodgy experiment in Gabel’s satisfying sophomore novel. Read more.

Palaver by Bryan Washington (FSG)

Washington revisits the Japanese setting of his novel Memorial with a bighearted drama about a 30-something Houston man’s reunion with his estranged mother. Read more.

The Year of the Wind by Karina Pacheco Medrano, tr. Mara Faye Lethem (Graywolf)

Pacheco Medrano dazzles in her English-language debut, the surreal story of a 50-something Peruvian writer reckoning with her cousin’s disappearance during the government’s conflict with a Maoist insurgency in the 1980s. Read more.

Helm by Sarah Hall (Mariner)

This virtuosic outing from Hall gives voice to the Helm—a storied northeasterly wind known for its destructive power and distinctive cloud formations that blows down the Cross Fell escarpment in Northwest England. Read more.

Bread of Angels by Patti Smith (Random House)

Smith returns with yet another memoir, even more intimate than the last, traversing her teenage years, romantic entanglements, defining losses, and creative liberation.

False War by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, tr. Natasha Wimmer (Graywolf)

Cuban writer Álvarez constructs a mesmerizing novel out of vignettes featuring characters who left Castro’s Cuba only to experience more dispossession and indignity. Read more.

Hidden Portraits by Sue Roe (Norton)

In six biographical essays, Roe paints a detailed study of the women who inspired, loved, and troubled Pablo Picasso: models Fernande Olivier and Marie-Thérèse Walter, ballerina Olga Khokhlova, painters Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, and Picasso’s widow, Jacqueline Roque. Read more.

Pandora by Ana Paula Pacheco, trans. by Julia Sanches (Transit)

Equal parts ribald and unsettling, Brazilian writer Pacheco’s English-language debut chronicles a literature professor’s mental breakdown. Read more.

Governing Bodies by Sangamithra Iyer (Milkweed)

Iyer traces her passion for conservation and animal rights activism back two generations in this beautiful debut memoir. Read more.

Queen Mother by Ashley D. Farmer (Pantheon)

Historian Farmer offers an impressive biography of pioneering Black Nationalist Audley “Queen Mother” Moore. Read more.

Life on a Little-Known Planet by Elizabeth Kolbert (Crown)

Kolbert has radically informed the way modern audiences understand climate change, and her newest collection is no exception, zooming into stories of hope, activism, and innovation across the globe.

Black-Owned by Char Adams (Tiny Reparations)

Former NBC News journalist Adams debuts with an illuminating history of America’s Black-owned bookstores, from the Tribeca storefront opened in 1834 by abolitionist David Ruggles to the radical bookshops of the 1960s. Read more.

Fire in Every Direction by Tareq Baconi (Washington Square)

In this poignant autobiography, queer Palestinian writer and activist Baconi tenderly explores identity, nationality, and family history. Read more.

The Bridegroom Was a Dog by Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani (ND)

First published in 1998, Parul Sehgal called Tawada’s absurd yet tender tale of unexpected romance “her masterpiece.”

The Silver Book by Olivia Laing (FSG)

Laing, who’s written nonfiction about the lives of artists and one previous novel, Crudo, fuses the two forms with a lush narrative of art and love in 1970s Italy. Read more.

The White Hot by Quiara Alegria Hudes (One World)

The potent debut novel from playwright and memoirist Hudes follows a single mother who abandons her daughter to try and find herself. Read more.

The Emergency by George Packer (FSG)

Packer, a journalist and National Book Award winner, delivers a propulsive Orwellian novel set in a strange future world known as “the empire.” Read more.

Find Him! by Elaine Kraf (Modern Library)

Kraf, who died in 2013, depicts in this striking 1977 novel the eccentric life of a mysterious unnamed woman who confesses she has “no identity, no ability to think or speak.” Read more.

This Unruly Witness, ed. Lauren Muller, Becky Thompson, Dominique C. Hill, and Durell M. Callier (Haymarket)

June Jordan’s legacy as a poet, activist, and healer is celebrated in this landmark collection, complete with contributions from such luminaries as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Imani Perry, and Angela Davis.

The Book of Women’s Friendship, ed. Rachel Cooke (Norton)

Drawing on fiction, diaries, poetry, and letters, this first major anthology of female friendship succinctly mines the impact, history, and beauty of platonic love between women.

The Body Digital by Vanessa Chang (Melville House)

Chang, director of programs at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, debuts with a lofty history of the relationship between technology and the human body. Read more.

Estate by Cynthia Zarin (FSG)

The elegant latest from Zarin offers a new and seemingly autofictional version of the love story central to her previous novel, Inverno. Read more.

Girls Play Dead by Jen Percy (Doubleday)

Percy, a New York Times Magazine contributing writer, offers a groundbreaking exploration of women’s often shamed and silenced responses to sexual assault. Read more.

Blank Space by W. David Marx (Viking)

Marx offers an astute glimpse into how culture has stagnated throughout the past 25 years while examining how commercial and technological forces have played into that shift.

My Little Donkey by Martha Cooley (Catapult)

In this elegant volume, novelist Cooley reflects on her late-in-life move to Italy. Read more.

Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times by Tracy K. Smith (Norton)

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet demystifies an art form that for many can seem inaccessible and intimidating, arguing that poetry—and the humanity it brings to the fore—is needed now more than ever.

Winning the Earthquake by Lorissa Rinehart (St. Martin’s)

Historian Rinehart offers an illuminating biography of the first woman elected to Congress. Read more.

(Th)ings and (Th)oughts by Alla Gorbunova, tr. Elina Alter (Deep Vellum)

The 61 stories in this razor-sharp collection from Gorbunova evoke the absurdity of everyday life in post-Soviet Russia. Read more.

Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines)

In this propulsive, deeply researched narrative, readers accompany Barrera as she investigates the influential 20th-century Mexican novelist Elena Garro, using everything from Garro’s archives to astrology.

The Week of Colors by Elena Garro, tr. Megan McDowell (Two Lines)

Publishing in tandem with Barrera’s The Queen of Swords is this dazzling 1963 collection of stories about hauntings, curses, and the uncanny from Garro, a pioneer of magical realism. Read more.

Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac (NYRB)

The autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac’s daughter, first published in 1981, offers a thrilling and unflinching glimpse into the author’s difficult childhood—shaped by paternal neglect—and the sense of resilience and self-reliance it instilled in her.

Married Life by Sergio Pitol, tr. George Henson (Deep Vellum)

From one of Mexico’s most influential writers comes a satirical, unsparing story about a heartbroken wife seeking a fresh start in the wake of her husband’s infidelity.

Palace of Deception by Darrin Lunde (Norton)

The rise of scientific racism takes on a new dimension in Lunde’s stunning investigation into the American Museum of Natural History and its complicated origins.

Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen, tr. David Hackston (Little, Brown)

Turpeinen’s fantastic debut interweaves the fate of an extinct aquatic species with the stories of the people who discovered and destroyed it. Read more.

Racial Fictions by Hazel V. Carby (Verso)

Combining historical analysis, literary criticism, and cultural theory, Carby’s interrogation of the racial myths that have shaped our world is as insightful as it is timely.

December

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead)

This vivid 1998 novel from Nobel winner Tokarczuk prefigures the discursive style of her later work such as Flights, with the story of a woman who moves with her husband from their Polish city to rural Silesia. Read more.

A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken (Ecco)

Story Prize winner McCracken distills decades of personal experience into 280 idiosyncratic reflections on writing. Read more.

Algorithm of the Night by A.S. Hamrah (n+1)

The film critic’s talents are on full display in this collection, which gathers recent essays from n+1, The Baffler, the New York Review of Books, the Criterion Collection, and more.

The Complete C Comics by Joe Brainard (NYRB)

Throughout the 1960s, Joe Brainard teamed up with such poets as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Barbara Guest to create pioneering, collaborative comic strips—and now, these comics are compiled for the first time in a single, sweeping volume.

Galapagos by Fátima Vélez, tr. Hannah Kauders (Astra House)

Colombian writer Vélez makes a striking debut with a fever dream of a novel that evokes the AIDS epidemic as it follows a group of artists and political radicals on a phantasmagoric voyage. Read more.

Barbieland by Tarpley Hitt (One Signal)

Timed perfectly to Barbie’s cultural resurgence, Hitt deftly unpacks the history behind and enduring appeal of the beloved doll.

The Jaguar’s Roar by Micheliny Verunschk, tr. Juliana Barbassa (Liveright)

The Brazilian author’s fifth novel, and first to be translated into English, weaves an extraordinary tale about an Indigenous girl’s kidnapping during a colonial expedition and the ramifications that unfold centuries later.

The Award by Matthew Pearl (Harper)

Pearl takes a knife to the publishing industry and its much-ballyhooed literary prizes, offering a keen-eyed portrait of ambition, jealousy, and desperation.

Casanova 20 by Davey Davis (Catapult)

Davis unfurls a fascinating narrative of art and desire, following an amorous and preternaturally beautiful young man and his unusual friendship with an elder painter. Read more.

Googoosh by Googoosh (Gallery)

The legendary Iranian superstar tells the story of her rise to fame in pre-revolution Iran, her arrest and imprisonment, her 20 years in exile, and, eventually, her triumphant return to the global stage.

The Aquatics by Osvalde Lewat, tr. Maren Baudet-Lackner (Coffee House)

Cameroonian filmmaker and photographer Lewat makes her English-language debut with a shocking morality tale about an African woman torn between her bureaucrat husband and her artist friend, whose homosexuality is a high crime in their fictional country of Zambuena. Read more.

The Lord by Soraya Antonius (NYRB)

This timely, vivid novel meditates on myth, community, revolution, and prejudice through the eyes of a magician living in Palestine before the Nakba.

Television by Lauren Rothery (Ecco)

Rothery’s nimble debut zooms in on an aging, A-list movie star, the relationships that buoyed him throughout his career, and the disparities of talent, wealth, and artistry that mar Hollywood.

A Danger to the Mind of Young Girls by Adam Morgan (One Signal)

Morgan, founder of the Chicago Review of Books, debuts with a comprehensive biography of Margaret C. Anderson (1886–1973), founder of the early-20th-century avant-garde magazine The Little Review. Read more.

Daring to Be Free by Sudhir Hazareesingh (FSG)

In this stunning revisionist history, Hazareesingh makes the case that enslaved people rebelled against their captivity throughout all four centuries of the Atlantic slave system—and that those efforts contributed more to their freedom than “the campaigns of enlightened white abolitionists.” Read more.

Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether (Feminist Press)

This new edition of Meriwether’s classic novel about a young Black girl’s coming of age in 1930s Harlem offers a fresh glimpse into the author’s legacy, featuring new writing celebrating her life, work, and activism.

The post The Millions’ Great Fall 2025 Book Preview appeared first on The Millions.

In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged 30 years and younger. Our goal, at the time, was to expand the popular perception of who book collectors are (and can be) by highlighting original collections built by young women, often without the knowledge or help of the rare book trade. By celebrating their achievements, we hoped to inspire potential collectors to look at their shelves differently, to identify patterns and projects, to think creatively about the aspects of the historical record they might recognize and preserve.

The response to this prize over the past nine years has exceeded all of our expectations, and this year’s cohort of collectors was particularly strong. We are delighted to announce the $1000 winner of the 2025 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize:

WINNER

Alexandra E. LaGrand, 29, (she/her), a doctoral candidate at Texas A&M University, for “Archiving the Shakespearean Breeches Actress.” LaGrand’s research on the nineteenth-century British stage led to her interest in actresses in breeches roles: performances in which a woman plays a part originally written for a man, as Sarah Bernhardt did when she starred as Hamlet.

LaGrand’s winning collection brings together almost forty printed and manuscript artifacts that document Shakespearean breeches actresses over the long nineteenth century. The collection includes books, letters, signatures, playbills, prints, a theatrical scrapbook, a prompt book from an 1878 production of Macbeth featuring “Miss Lewis” as Donalbain, and a core collection devoted to Charlotte Cushman, the first internationally renowned American actress, who was celebrated for her breeches roles: 

“I wanted to collect items [Cushman] had touched in order to closely feel the history of her career. This manifested through collecting ephemeral items such as a manuscript letter by her and a signature card, but also books, including an 1868 first edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s New England Tragedies, which bears her inscription to one of her lovers. As I collected more Cushman items, I grew more ambitious, seeking out wholly unique and thus more special and valuable items that documented her career, such as a grangerized first edition copy of Emma Stebbins’s 1878 biography of Cushman, featuring extra illustrations and materials tipped in throughout, an undated playbill featuring Cushman in the role of Romeo at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, and even a carte-de-visite photograph portrait of her costumed in the role of Romeo.”

A digital humanist, LaGrand has created a public database, Points Like A Man, to compile historical records of genderfluid Shakespearean performance. We were impressed by the energy that LaGrand brought to the material side of her project: her bibliography describes a suspenseful, unfolding process of discovery, as each chance find in a bookstore or at auction or online opens up new paths of inquiry, highlighting the way that digital and archival resources enrich and expand each other. 

You can read LaGrand’s winning essay and bibliography here. 

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We are also awarding five honorable mentions of $250 each:

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Ashleigh McConnell, 29, (she/her) of Washington State, a recent master’s graduate in Emergency Management pursuing a career in disaster preparedness and recovery, for “My Journey with Jane: A Tale of Discovery and the Birth of a Collector.”

McConnell has collected over three hundred editions and variants of her favorite book, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, with the goal of owning “a Jane Eyre edition from every year from 1847 to the present.”

McConnell began collecting during a study abroad trip to Europe, where she sought out copies of Jane Eyre in the native language of each country she visited. Over time, her collection became a memoir on the shelf, a tangible reminder of places she traveled, people she met, and bookshops she explored. She sought out a fresh edition of Jane Eyre in each of the lower 48 United States: “I discovered small town bookstores, library sales, antiques alleys, and used book stores of all sizes and shapes. Each new copy I found had its own character and its own story.” 

Single title collections are popular in the book world because they create opportunities for collectors to explore a favorite book from multiple angles. McConnell eventually pursued not only copies of Jane Eyre, but prequels, sequels, pastiches, retellings, screen adaptations, the script for a theatrical performance, and even a “choose your own adventure” version of Brontë’s classic. We enjoyed the energy and creativity McConnell brought to her quest. 

Nat McGartland, 30, (she/her), a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland and instructor at UMD BookLab, for “Quhare scant wes Scottis: A Political History of the Scots Language.”

McGartland collects books that document Scots as a language of its own, a distinct historical and political mode of expression, rather than simply a regional dialect of English. 

McGartland’s collection includes dictionaries, glossaries, and appendices in Scots, as well as landmark publications like the 1790 first printed edition of The Brus, the oldest work in Scots, and Gawin Douglas’s Scots translation of the Aeneid, which predates the first English translation. The renewal of interest in an independent Scotland, reflected in the highly contested 2014 referendum on the question, inspired McGartland to redirect her collecting focus: “I’ve found myself moving from the historical to the contemporary. I’m interested in Scottish women poets, fiction writers, speakers of the language in the present day . . . [and] the revival of Scots in literature particularly since the 1980s.” 

McGartland uses her historical collection of Scots classics to inform and contextualize her emerging collection of Scots writing in the present: a pivot that strengthens both collections.

Bella Savignano, 24, (she/her), an administrator at Swann Galleries in New York City, for “Flashbang: Amplifying a Revisionist History of Glam Rock.”

Savignano’s collection began with a fluke gift: an old box of photographs, film negatives, and “assorted pieces of paper” from Jumpin’ Jack Flash, the NYC clothing and custom shoe store that defined the emerging “glam” aesthetic for rock stars, local musicians, and fans in the 1970s. 

“I was curious about the mutant style that emerged when British glam fashion touched down in New York City […], the boutique’s role within it, and how it pertained to the local scene. As I devoted my free time to investigating my newly acquired archive, I was shocked to find very little. The brands that the boutique sold were iconic and are held within many important collections, but the store itself was lost to time.” Inspired by Jumpin’ Jack Flash’s advertising maquettes, footwear guides (one with a note to call Bootsy Collins’s agent), and snapshots of employees and patrons in full regalia, Savignano set out to fill in the archival gaps of that moment in all its feathered and sequined glory. 

The result is a kaleidoscopic picture of the New York glam rock scene, as Savignano tracks down magazines, posters, concert tickets, even a manila folder of clippings about the New York Dolls collected by a contemporary fan. We appreciated Savignano’s focused attention to the material castoffs of a subculture, both to reconstruct its atmosphere and to weigh its impact. 

Amalia V., 29, (she/her), a professional dominatrix (and self-described “archivatrix”) in New York City, for “Collecting Sex,” a collection of over 150 books, magazines, zines, and pulps “at the intersection of one or more of the following categories: sex work, queer BDSM, and Female Domination (FemDomme.)” 

Often printed and distributed outside mainstream publishing channels, these historical materials constitute “a form of cultural preservation for communities who are often ignored, reviled, and even punished for simply existing.” Amalia V. understands her collection as “a critical intervention in this blatant censorship of erotic laborers in our sex-phobic American cultural landscape. I might get kicked off of social media, but Mark Zuckerberg can’t pry my collection of kinky books from me.” We were struck by the rare and often ephemeral titles she managed to track down, including publications from the House of Milan (the only 1970s fetish publishing house headed by a woman), Mama Vi, Patrick Califia, and the leatherdyke collective Samois.

In lieu of a headshot, Amalia V. has provided an illustrated portrait in the style of the “tart cards” created by London sex workers in the late twentieth century, a graphic tradition well-represented in her collection. We were impressed by the nuanced view of contemporary sex workers that her collection offers, illuminating their identities as parents, activists, and community members.

Jaeden Yoshikawa, 30, (she/they) of Mankato, Minnesota, a professional archivist enthusiastic for new career opportunities, for “A Trip Down Lover’s Lane: A Collection of Lover’s Real Photo Post Cards.”

Yoshikawa collects scenic ephemera depicting local “lover’s” tourist sites (Lover’s Lanes, Lover’s Leaps, Lover’s Retreats), aiming to explore “what defines a space for lovers, and how the histories and legends tied to these places might offer deeper insight into human relationships and sexuality.” 

Yoshikawa focuses primarily on real photo post cards (RPPCs), “small-batch” postcards created directly by vernacular photographers from film negatives, rather than mass-produced printed images. RPPCs of lover’s locations have a special poignance, since the images often feature people known to the photographers, perhaps even lovers themselves. She also considers the iconography of lover’s sites on vintage ephemera, including sheet music: “The markers we’ve established for Lover’s Lanes are present even in these artistic renditions, showing tree-lined paths and shaded places for lovers to promenade. . . . I’d love to find a Lover’s Lane with a sandy beach path, or in a flowering garden, or in a desert somewhere to act as an outlier to the collection.”

We admired the depth and originality of Yoshikawa’s project, and soon began seeing images of woodsy “lover’s” tourist attractions everywhere, drawn into the cultural phenomenon her collection explores.

To see last year’s winners, click here.

The co-founders of the Honey & Wax Prize, Heather O’Donnell of Honey & Wax Booksellers and Rebecca Romney of Type Punch Matrix, would like to thank the 2025 prize sponsors: Biblio, Bibliopolis, The Caxton Club, Christie’s, and Ellen A. Michelson. 

The post Meet the Winners of the 2025 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize appeared first on The Millions.

The Millions is, alas, still on hiatus, but we’re determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim (if, at times, a bit belatedly). 

—Sophia Stewart, editor

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July

I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman (Ecco)

Kreizman’s writing captures that distinctly millennial brand of malaise with refreshing wit and vigor, and her always-correct book world takes are informed by a deep love of literature. I’m looking forward to seeing these chops and more on display in her debut essay collection. —Sophia M. Stewart

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn (Catapult)

Nguyen’s debut is a subversive satire and romantic romp rolled into one, following two Asian American trans women’s scheme to join a men’s pro indoor volleyball league. —SMS

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Random House)

Shteyngart returns with the story of a precocious little girl as she searches for her birth mother, navigates her imploding family, and strives toward unending love. —Eva M. Baron

Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloombsury)

Savas’s followup to her brilliant novel The Anthropologists is a collection of stories that deconstruct contemporary life through the lenses of desire, loss, and intimacy. —SMS

A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart by Nishant Batsha (Ecco)

The sophomore novel from Batsha, inspired by the real-life romance of 20th-century radicals M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, tells the love story of an Indian revolutionary and Stanford grad student who fall for one another in 1917. —SMS

Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie (Doubleday)

A ruthless theater critic meets his match in a struggling actress, who sets off the unraveling of his reputation after a one-night stand in Runcie’s clever tale, which also offers a piercing critique of power games and misogyny. —Sam L. Spratford

Putafeminista by Monique Prada, tr. Amanda De Lisio (Feminist Press)

Brazilian sex worker and activist Prada calls for a working class women’s movement that rejects “whorephobia” and critiques current feminist discourse around sex work in this bracing manifesto. —SMS

Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth (Melville House)

Howarth’s queer coming-of-age novel set in small-town Ireland in the early 1990s mines the intensity of first love (and first heartbreak) as well as the pain of being queer in a small, conservative community. —SMS

Fools for Love by Helen Schulman (Knopf)

Following her 2023 novel Lucky Dogs, Schulman offers up a smart short story collection complete with a cast of characters including an East Village playwright, a precocious baby, and an American mother and French Orthodox rabbi who become lovers. —EMB

The Feather Detective by Chris Sweeney (Avid Reader)

In the 1960s, Roxie Laybourne pioneered the field of forensic ornithology, which is exactly what it sounds like—using feathers to solve bird-related mysteries and crimes, from plane crashes to a racist tarring-and-feathering. Sweeney’s biography must be read to be believed. —SMS

A Return to Self by Aatish Taseer (Catapult)

Part travelogue, part memoir, A Return to Self was spurred by the revocation of Taseer’s Indian citizenship in 2019, exiling him from his home of 30 years. Traveling across cities in Turkey and Mexico, he considers questions of identity, home, and why certain sites become historical epicenters. —SMS

The Convenience Store by the Sea by Sonoko Machida, tr. Bruno Navasky (Putnam)

Centered on a small-town Japanese mini-mart aptly called Tenderness, Machida’s international bestseller is a heartfelt ode to community and the unassuming delights that help us all endure. —SLS

Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems by Vernon Duke, tr. Boris Dralyuk (Paul Dry Books)

I’ve been reading Dralyuk’s translations of and writing about Vernon Duke for a couple years now, courtesy of his wonderful blog, and could not be more excited to see Duke’s Los Angeles poems paired with his 1995 memoir—both rendered in Dralyuk’s always-brilliant translation from the Russian. —SMS

A Flower Traveled in My Blood by Haley Cohen Gilliland (Avid Reader)

Gilliland’s sweeping, rigorous narrative history tells the story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the fearless Argentine grandmothers whose pregnant daughters were disappeared and whose grandchildren were kidnapped by the government—and have much to teach us now. —SMS

Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore (Tin House)

The 11 stories in Moore’s debut collection explore the lives of Black men and women in the American South—from North Carolina to Florida to Texas—who seek a sense of belonging in the oppressive shadow of history. —SMS

Information Age by Cora Lewis (Joyland)

Lewis’s novella of a journalist covering technology in the late 2010s looks back on the not-so-distant early days of our dizzying digital news cycle, through the ears of one woman whose reporting and personal life meld into one noisy milieu. —SLS

Blowfish by Kyung-Ran Jo, tr. Chi-Young Kim (Astra House)

A successful sculptor contemplates killing herself by eating a fatal serving of blowfish—just as her grandmother did before her—in Jo’s haunting novel. —SMS

Nothing More of This Land by Joseph Lee (One Signal)

Growing up on Martha’s Vineyard, Lee found that his Wampanoag identity didn’t match what he learned about U.S. history at school. Now a journalist, he thinks about the meaning of Indigenous identity today and how one might move beyond colonial legacies. —Nathalie op de Beeck

Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde (Riverhead)

Following their acclaimed debut Vagabonds!, Osunde’s sophomore novel conjures up more than two dozen multi-generational characters navigating queer life in Nigeria, who grapple with everything from the risks of authenticity to questions of death and God. —SLS

Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee (Summit)

Yee weaves tragedy into comedy in her debut novel, which follows an unnamed Chinese American woman as she navigates the one-two punch of discovering her husband’s infidelity and being diagnosed with breast cancer. —SMS

Pan by Michael Clune (Penguin)

A precocious teenager tries to get to the roots of his anxiety after he starts suffering from panic attacks, reading and writing his way toward an explanation—including that the Greek god Pan, from which the word panic, comes, might be trapped inside his body. —SMS

Sloppy by Rax King (Vintage)

King follows up her cheeky debut Tacky with an essay collection about bad behavior—from shoplifting to drug use and abuse to mental illness—written with her characteristic wit, cheek, and sense of gallows humor. —SMS

Black Genius by Tre Johnson (Dutton)

Johnson’s subversive and entertaining essays weave family and U.S. history to illuminate Black ingenuity and the “brilliance of the everyday,” from 90s airbrush graffiti tees to unassuming family traditions. —SLS

The Trembling Hand by Mathelinda Nabugodi (Knopf)

Nabugodi’s new history of Romantic literature illuminates the ever-looming presence of the Atlantic slave trade in the lives and work of Shelley, Keats, and others, exemplifying the difficulty—and necessity—of facing the violent contradictions that undergird the stories we love to read and tell. —SLS

An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park (Random House)

Park’s story collection perfects the tongue-in-cheek accounting of modern life that characterized his two novels, delivering a memorable cast of characters whose fates coincide at the border between mundane and strange. —SLS

Time of Silence by Luis Martín-Santos, tr. Peter Bush (NYRB)

This new translation restores the most unsavory truths about Franco’s dictatorship to Martín-Santos’s darkly funny 1962 novel, which follows a Nobel-aspiring scientist through the shadows of a society that has hit rock bottom. —SLS

The Dance and the Fire by Daniel Saldaña París, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Catapult)

Described as “spellbinding” by PW, Saldaña’s latest is a smoldering tale of three friends whose erotic and artistic dynamics rouse a Mexican city from its collective slumber. —SLS

Simplicity by Mattie Lubchansky (Pantheon)

From the editor of the satirical comics publication the Nib comes an imaginative and terrifying story of monsters both natural and supernatural, set in 2081 between a dystopian New York City and a cult in the Catskills. —SLS

My Clavicle and Other Massive Misalignments by Marta Sanz, tr. Katie King (Unnamed)

Sanz’s autofictional English-language debut is a poetic meditation on illness, mortality, and writing sure to please memoir readers and mystery enthusiasts alike. —SLS

Love Forms by Claire Adam (Hogarth)

In a sprawling and emotional tale of an aging woman in search of the daughter she gave up for adoption at 16, Adam probes the many ways love can shape our lives in her latest novel since her prize-winning debut Golden Child. — SLS

Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu (Little, Brown)

The art world is infamously cutthroat—and an endless source of inspiration for novelists. Wambugu’s debut fits squarely into this tradition, conjuring New York’s art scene in the early 1990s through the intense, competitive, and richly imagined friendship of two ambitious women. —EMB

August

Solitaria by Eliana Alves Cruz, tr. Benjamin Brooks (Astra House)

In Cruz’s propulsive liberation novel, a mother and a daughter work as live-in maids in the Golden Plate, the most expensive building in an unnamed Brazilian city. While there, the duo must reckon not only with their own invisibility and dissatisfaction, but with Brazil’s legacies of colonial violence, wealth, and injustice. —EMB

He Rolled Me Up Like a Grilled Squid by Yoshiharu Tsuge, tr. Ryan Holmberg (D&Q)

Manga creator Yoshiharu Tsuge, now in his 80s, had a relatively short comics career from 1965–1987, rising to cult status but plagued by difficulties with his mental health. This collection of his work, spanning 1975–1981, showcases Yoshiharu’s characteristic blend of the personal and the nightmarish. —NodB

People Like Us by Jason Mott (Dutton)

Mott follows up his 2021 National Book Award–winning novel Hell of a Book with a surreal and intimate story about two Black writers contending with loss, longing, and gun violence. —EMB

Blessings and Disasters by Alexis Okeowo (Holt)

Perhaps even more than the New Yorker writer’s journalistic chops, Okeowo’s ability to navigate, with nuance and empathy, seemingly hopeless racial divides is what makes this ground-level depiction of her home state of Alabama exceptional. —SLS

The Invention of Charlotte Brontë by Graham Watson (Pegasus)

Watson’s debut biography deconstructs the Jayne Eyre author’s swift ascent to literary fame and the dueling narratives that continue to shape her legacy. —SMS

The Book of Homes by Andrea Bajani, tr. Elizabeth Harris (Deep Vellum)

Bajani’s episodic, nonlinear narrative traces one man’s memories and rites of passage through a series of northern Italian homes, from infancy in 1976 to 21st-century adulthood. —NodB

Moderation by Elaine Castillo (Viking)

As our world becomes more virtual, so too does romance. That shift grounds Castillo’s intriguing latest, where one of the world’s best content moderators must contend with falling in love during a digital—and increasingly isolated—era. —EMB

Putting Myself Together by Jamaica Kincaid (FSG)

Intimate in scope and ambitious in subject matter, this collection gathers Kincaid’s early pieces from such publications as the New Yorker, Village Voice, and Ms., exemplifying her stylistic confidence—and evolution—across time. —EMB

Friends with Words by Martha Barnette (Abrams)

A Way with Words is the only podcast I listen to, and the fact is that I would die for Martha Barnette, so I can’t wait to read her chronicle of her lifelong love of language. —SMS

God and Sex by Jon Raymond (S&S)

Climate disaster, New Age writing, carnality, and meditations on God may seem an unlikely melange, but Raymond brilliantly merges each of these strands into this rigorous and probing novel about an author whose brush with a forest fire pushes him to seek a higher power. —EMB

The Dilemmas of Working Women by Fumio Yamamoto, tr. Brian Bergstrom (HarperVia)

Each of the five stories in Yamamoto’s collection centers on a different woman navigating life in contemporary Japan, where the alienation of wage labor compounds with the pressure to be agreeable, maternal, and non-confrontational—patriarchal norms to which these “spiky” women cannot bend. —SLS

Loved One by Aisha Muharrar (Viking)

Muharrar—a TV writer with credits on Hacks, Parks and Rec, The Good Place, and more—makes her literary debut with this story of love and loss, about a young woman who goes on an intercontinental journey to recover the belongings of her old friend and first love, who dies unexpectedly at 29. —SMS

Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel (FSG)

Perhaps out of necessity, our ongoing housing crisis offers perfect fodder for fiction—or at least that’s the case for Kivel’s aptly-titled, surrealist debut. Part fairy tale, part social commentary, this innovative and wry story follows a young woman’s quest for a home when, in a world-ending twist, every renter is evicted en masse. —EMB

Little World by Josephine Rowe (Transit)

Rowe’s story about various lives touched by a child saint’s corpse over space and time is lyrical, varied, and only slightly less strange than it sounds. —SLS

Positive Obsession by Susana M. Morris (Amistad)

Octavia Butler was a literary trailblazer as the first Black woman to consistently write and publish science fiction. This sweeping biography probes Butler’s legacy with both sensitivity and rigor, considering the cultural, political, and social contexts that shaped her life and writing. —EMB

Black Moses by Caleb Gayle (Riverhead)

It’s a rare and satisfying experience to find a nonfiction book that balances the scope of its content with narrative coherence, without sacrificing either. Gayle’s latest carves a historical epic out of a forgotten episode in the Black separatist movement, enthralling as both a character study and a novel look at America’s racial history. —SLS

Stories of the True by Jeyamohan, tr. Priyamvada Ramkumar (FSG)

With evocative, refreshing, and at times volatile prose, Jeyamohan reveals the intricacies of life in contemporary India through stories about bureaucrats, elephants, gurus, and doctors.  —EMB

The Dancing Face by Mike Phillips (Melville House)

In this highly original thriller, Gus, a Black university professor, plans a burglary to “liberate” a priceless Benin mask from a London museum. The result is a timely meditation on what art institutions owe us and the cultures they plunder. —EMB

The Right of the People by Osita Nwanevu (Random House)

Taking up some of the most monumental political questions of our day, including the viability of America’s founding institutions, this treatise from Nwanevu, an editor at the New Republic, is essential reading for anyone who feels their hopes for democratic reform floundering. —SLS

The New Lesbian Pulp ed. Sarah Fonseca and Octavia Saenz (Feminist Press)

Who doesn’t love pulp fiction, the more melodramatic the better? This collection is a heady mix of 1950s-era lesbian pulp and newer material that turns up a notch or two the classic tropes of romantic peril, unbridled passion, and revenge. —Claire Kirch

Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, tr. Jeremy Tiang (Riverhead)

In this propulsive translation, a nanny witnesses a wealthy Chinese family’s fall from grace—all while knowing their darkest secrets and caring for their only son. —EMB

The El by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Vintage)

Van Alst Jr.’s semi-autobiographical novel, inspired by Sol Yurick’s The Warriors, follows a group of teenage gang members in Chicago who trek across the city to attend a high-profile gathering of gangs. —SMS

Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin Press)

In Chou’s clever collection, which includes short stories and a novella, features a cast of characters who invariably find themselves in extraordinary situations that shake up their sense of self and make them reconsider their place in the world. —CK

The New Negro ed. Martha H. Patterson and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Princeton UP)

This anthology, coedited by the great Skip Gates, spanning 1887-1937 chronicles how generations of Black thinkers from W.E.B Du Bois to Oscar Micheaux to Zora Neale Hurston conceptualized and debated the idea of the “New Negro.” —SMS

The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus (Hogarth)

Antrobus’s memoir untangles his knotty relationship to his own deafness, exploring the “missing sounds” that shaped his life and the sense of in-betweenness that long defined both his aural ability and racial identity. —SMS

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens (FSG)

The debut novel from the inaugural FSG Writer’s Fellow is a Black Southern family drama that wrestles with sin, silence, and patriarchy in a small Mississippi town. —SMS

Mounted by Bitter Kalli (HarperOne)

As Beyoncé and others push us to reconsider the legacy of the cowboy, Kalli explores how intertwined Blackness, nationhood, and horses have been throughout history. —EMB

Patchwork by Tom Comitta (Coffee House)

For fans of Burroughs’s cut-up tradition, Comitta’s latest is a fresh experiment in the limits of literary collage. Using illustrations and passages from classic literature, the Nature Book author fashions a playful story about the search for a missing snuff box, full of sensory surprises and curiosities of craft. —SLS

Archipelago by Natalie Bakopoulos (Tin House)

This atmospherically rich book, which follows an unnamed translator at an artists’ residency on a Croatian island, is also chock-full of thought-provoking commentary on authorship and creative identity. —SLS

Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs (FSG)

Boggs’s door-stopper of a biography—the first of Baldwin in three decades—examines how the visionary author’s intimate and artistic relationships with four men shaped his life and work. —SMS

Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers (Hub City)

Wohlers’s debut novel follows a young woman who arrives at her late grandfather’s apple orchard with the intention of giving up her painting career and social life in order to become one with the trees—until the appearance of an old friend upends her plans. —SMS

A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury)

Marking the first time in two decades that Toews has written about her own life in nonfiction, this memoir is a poignant meditation upon her sister’s suicide, the urge to write, and the limits of memory. —EMB

Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles (Picador)

Bowles’s 1943 novel—her only one, now with a new introduction from Sheila Heti—is a modernist tale about two upper-class women who eschew convention and embrace debauchery. —SMS

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang (HarperCollins)

Fans of Babel will not be disappointed by Kuang’s latest dark-academia epic, which follows an honors graduate student in “Analytical Magick” and her rival as they embark on a Dantesque journey to rescue her advisor from the underworld. —SLS

Such Great Heights by Chris DeVille (St. Martin’s)

This cultural history of the indie rock explosion—from Neutral Milk Hotel and Death Cab to Sufjan and the National—would have blown my teenage self’s mind. It is total catnip to adult-me as well. —SMS

September

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Scribner)

In electrifying, intimate prose, Roy’s first memoir traces the her complex relationship with her mother, Mary and how it shaped the person—and writer—she ultimately became. —EMB

The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda, tr. Polly Barton (Europa)

Following her last collection Where the Wild Ladies Are, Matsuda’s latest stays focused on the absurdities and traumas of sexism in Japan, presenting 52 fresh, subversive stories that call to mind Shirley Jackson’s short works. —SLS

Trip by Amie Barrodale (FSG)

Barrodale’s debut novel follows Sandra, who dies suddenly at a death conference in Nepal and must set off on a quest in the afterlife to help her son, who is both literally and metaphorically lost at sea. —SMS

Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Astra House)

Magic, humor, and faith ground Lozada-Oliva’s story collection, which features beheaded bodies, bizarre video games, sentient tails, and haunted punk houses. —EMB

Miss Ruki by Fumiko Takano, tr. Alexa Frank (NYRC)

Frank’s translation brings this lighthearted manga into English for the first time. Originally published in Japan in the 1980s, the eponymous protagonist is an offbeat young woman who rejects the rat race for a slower, more intentional life. —SLS

The Improbable Victoria Woodhull by Eden Collinsworth (Doubleday)

At once celebrated and maligned, the 19th-century businesswoman and activist at the center of Collinsworth’s biography dipped her toe in everything from mysticism to free love to an unprecedented presidential campaign. —EMB

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, tr. Martin Aitken (ND)

An unlikely narrator guides this visceral horror story: a wax doll created by an unmarried noblewoman accused of witchcraft. Through the eyes of this doll, we witness—with startling clarity—the brutality and fear that ruled 17th-century Denmark. —EMB

Grace Period by Maria Judite de Carvalho, tr. Margaret Jull Costa (Two Lines)

When de Carvalho’s protagonist sets out to sell his childhood home to fund a trip for his dying girlfriend, he is forced to reckon with the 25 out-of-control years that separate him from his past, which is full of paralyzing love, pain, and apathy. —VMS

Reflections on Exile by Edward W. Said (Vintage)

This reissue of selected essays by the great scholar and critic Said, which features the particularly salient title essay on the fate of the Palestinian people, is just the book we need right now. —SMS

Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela (Viking)

As polyamory and open relationships gain cultural relevance, Varela’s subversive and generous novel considers the sting of rejection and heartbreak from the perspective of its married narrator who has just been dumped by his younger boyfriend. —EMB

Tracker by Alexis Wright (ND)

Decorated novelist Wright returns to nonfiction with a portrait of an influential Aboriginal Australian leader conveyed through collective storytelling, providing a window into Aboriginal culture as it narrates a moment in 20th-century Australian politics. —SLS

The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym (NYRB)

Pym’s shrewd and ahead-of-its-time 1978 novel about a women’s attachment to a much younger man is back in a new edition from NYRB, featuring an intro from Loved and Missed author Susie Boyt. —SMS

Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman (Coffee House)

The country home around which Goodman’s story coalesces is no ordinary haunted house. Through the eyes of a male protagonist, readers feel the titular spirit Helen at once as an intimately tangible presence and a harbinger of the existential stakes of starting one’s life over again. —VMS

The Animal on the Rock by Daniela Tarazona, tr. Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn (Deep Vellum)

After the death of her mother, a woman named Irma holes up on a faraway beach to grieve and, the process, undergoes a supernatural metamorphosis in the Mexican author’s latest. —SMS

A Silent Treatment by Jeannie Vanasco (Tin House)

Vanasco’s memoir looks at how silence is wielded and weaponized through the lens of her own complicated relationship with her mother. —SMS

The Lack of Light by Nino Haratischwili, tr. Charlotte Collin and Ruth Martin (HarperVia)

This sprawling, densely populated saga charts the lead-up to and fallout from Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union through the lives of four childhood friends. —SMS

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (Mariner)

The brilliant sophomore novel from the National Book Award finalist follows five Black women across two decades as they attempt to shape their lives on their own terms. —VMS

Surviving Paris by Robin Allison Davis (Amistad)

We’ve all dreamed of escaping to Paris and living “la vie en rose.” Davis, a Black woman and journalist, has written a memoir of how she did just that, but things did not go exactly as she’d hoped: Davis was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to contend with it far away from her loved ones, all while trying to find her way amid a foreign culture. —CK

Bird School by Adam Nicolson (FSG)

It’s a slippery slope from looking up a little brown bird on Cornell’s Merlin app to becoming an all-season birder. For Nicolson, a recognition of nesting species led to setting up a shed to watch wildlife year round. The book’s British setting covers only a narrow range of birds, but its sentiments are universal; the world might have greater peace and sounder environmental policies if everyone took up birding. —NodB

Animal Stories by Kate Zambreno (Transit)

Zambreno is one of our most inventive and formally daring writers, and their latest work of nonfiction—a meditation on mortality, alienation, boredom, surveillance, and the animal kingdom—sees them at the height of their powers. —SMS

Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me by Mimi Pond (D&Q)

Pond crafts a graphic narrative biography of the six Mitford sisters, among them writers Jessica and Nancy. Raised in a deteriorating English country manse, the early 20th-century socialites were known for differences of opinion around Empire and fascism. Pond paints the upper crust scene in prim navy, cool periwinkle, and powder blue. —NodB

Kaplan’s Plot by Jason Diamond (Flatiron)

Centered on a son who returns to Chicago to be with his dying mother, Diamond’s debut novel is a stunning story of how families bend to accommodate the unspoken, and how, every once in a while, a tenacious individual might straighten things out. —VMS

Articulate by Rachel Kolb (Ecco)

The deaf writer’s deft debut memoir probes the many meanings of language, voice, and communication through the lens of her own attempts to harness speech and be perceived as “articulate.” —SMS

For the Sun After Long Nights by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy (Pantheon)

Iranian journalists Jamalpour and Tabrizy chronicle the 2022 women-led protests in Iran over the murder of Kurdish woman Mahsa Jîna Amini at the hands of police, catalyzing one of the country’s largest uprisings in decades: the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. —SMS

The Waterbearers by Sasha Bonét (Knopf)

Bonét’s profound ode to Black womanhood narrates the history of America through generations of Black mothers and daughters—including her own. —SMS

Discontent by Beatriz Serrano, tr. Mara Faye Lethem (Vintage)

When Marisa goes on a company retreat with her unhinged coworkers, the lies she’s built her whole successful, fine-art-appreciating persona around are threatened to be exposed. What ensues is like a car crash you can’t look away from—if a car crash was as hilarious and well-crafted as Serrano’s writing. —SLS

It’s Me They Follow by Jeannine Cook (Amistad)

Cook, founder and owner of the beloved Harriett’s Bookshop in Philly, debuts with a romance starring a bookseller who becomes a reluctant matchmaker. —SMS

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead)

After a bout with Covid, a successful author reckons with a dissolving sense of self and struggles to maintain her public persona, in this fictive exploration of consciousness. The No One Is Talking About This author conveys her protagonist’s dissociation and memory loss, heightened when her husband becomes ill and requires her care. —NodB

Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp (Knopf)

The state of the world seems uniquely grim today—but haven’t people always thought so? Kemp’s sweeping survey charts the surprising history of societal collapse, bringing some (not always comforting) perspective to our own troubling reality. —SMS

We Love You Bunny by Mona Awad (S&S/Marysue Rucci)

Awad returns with another darkly comedic novel set in the “Bunny-verse,” after her 2019 cult classic Bunny, about a lonely MFA student who gets seduced by a creepy clique. —SMS

Electric Spark by Frances Wilson (FSG)

The enigmatic Scottish writer Muriel Spark gets her due in Wilson’s illuminating biography, which aims to demystify its stubbornly elusive but endlessly fascinating subject. —SMS

Beings by Ilana Masad (Bloomsbury)

Masad’s second novel, after All My Mother’s Lovers, weaves together three narratives—two set in the 1960s and one in the present—of love, loneliness, and supernatural encounters. —SMS

Cécé by Emmelie Prophète, tr. Aidan Rooney (Archipelago)

Immersed in the atmosphere and people of a Haitian cité, Prophète’s titular protagonist attempts to claw a life for herself out of the hands of gangs, junkies, grandmothers, and preachers. With her morbid internet following on one side and the pressures of sex work on the other, Cécé is an imperfect and deeply human testament to female resiliency. —SLS

The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lin (Dorothy)

Taking inspiration from Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Lin chronicles her partner Lan Thao’s life and work in this genre-defying portrait. —SMS

To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage (Avid)

Ramage’s ambitious and big-hearted debut novel follows one young woman across three decades and multiple continents on her quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut. —SMS

The post The Millions’ Great Summer 2025 Book Preview appeared first on The Millions.

We are, alas, still on hiatus, but are determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim. 

—Sophia Stewart, editor

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April

Pathemata, or, The Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson (Wave)

Nelson’s genre-busting Bluets is a perpetual handselling favorite at many an indie bookstore and practically lyricism incarnate. Anything billed as “something of a companion piece” to it is worth a look. If anyone can make a diary of jaw pain sing, it’s Nelson. —John H. Maher

The Ephemera Collector by Stacy Nathaniel Jackson (Liveright)

Jackson’s Afrofuturistic debut novel, which pays homage to Octavia Butler, follows an archivist at the Huntington Library who fights to protect her life’s work—an impossible collection of ephemera from an undersea city that has yet to be founded—following the kidnapping of the Huntington’s CEO. —Sophia M. Stewart

Surreal by Michèle Gerber Klein (Harper)

Mining a trove of newly uncovered material, Klein brings the extraordinary and enigmatic life of Gala Dalí—wife and muse of Salvador, as an art world mover and shaker who championed Surrealism—out of the shadows and into the much-deserved limelight. —SMS

Gloria by Andrés Felipe Solano, tr. Will Vanderhyden (Counterpoint)

Solano’s English-language debut traces the life of centers on a young Colombian immigrant as she navigates New York City and attends a fateful concert—the 1970 performance of Argentine singer Sandro at Madison Square Garden—which echoes into the life of her son five decades later. —SMS

Authority by Andrea Long Chu (FSG)

If Long Chu’s work for New York magazine is any indication, her newest collection of essays is sure to be equally riveting. Throughout, the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic examines everything from The Phantom of the Opera to social media, weaving a compelling narrative about how criticism, now more than ever, presents a solution to our current crises. —EMB

I Ate the Whole World to Find You by Rachel Ang (Drawn & Quarterly)

Jenny, a “twenty-something-going-on-thirty hot mess,” gropes her way toward adulthood while navigating work, romance, friendship, and the horrors of having a body in Ang’s debut collection. —SMS

Dysphoria Mundi by Paul B. Preciado (Graywolf)

The Testo Junkie author’s so-called “mutant text” blends essay, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction to explore dysphoria as an era-defining condition that captures our current cultural, political, and social moment. —SMS

Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom (Flatiron)

Carlstrom’s debut novel centers on a mid-bender corporate burnout who sets off on a road trip to track down their conspiracy-theorist father—and in the process wrestles with everything from queerness to capitalism. —SMS

Searches by Vauhini Vara (Pantheon)

Building off of her brilliant 2021 essay for the Believer, Vara’s essay collection—her nonfiction debut—elegantly grapples with questions around artificial intelligence, technological progress, and human connection. —SMS

Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)

The much anticipated follow-up to 2021’s Intimacies centers on a mysterious relationship between a well-known, middle-aged theater actress and a young man—are they friends, lovers, mother and son? Kitamura’s bifurcated novel keeps you guessing. —SMS

My Documents by Kevin Nguyen (One World)

Nguyen’s sophomore novel follows four cousins in a United States whose government is rounding up Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Both America’s history and its present indicate how terrifyingly close to life that premise is. To quote Nguyen quoting The Legend of Zelda as the epigraph of New Waves, his debut novel: “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” —JHM

Big Chief by Jon Hickey (S&S)

Hickey’s debut—hailed by David Heska Wanbli Weiden as the “great Native American political novel”—chronicles tribal politics, familial allegiances, and the quest for power on a Wisconsin reservation. —SMS

Mending Bodies by Hon Lai Chu, tr. Jacqueline Leung (Two Lines)

The Hong Kong writer’s dystopian latest depicts a failing city where the government has incentivizes couples to surgically “conjoin”—and a struggling grad student who is forced to grapple with the new policy. —SMS

Going Around by Murray Kempton, ed. Andrew Holter (Seven Stories)

This collection, featuring a foreword by Darryl Pinckney, gathers the defining columns and essays from Kempton, the late Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who “almost miraculously immersed himself in every region, profession, political movement, and social class,” per Benjamin Moser. —SMS

Is Peace Possible? by Kathleen Lonsdale (Marginalian Editions)

First published at the height of the Cold War in 1957, this slender volume sees the pathbreaking Quaker scientist reckoning with nuclear warfare and the role of science in shaping the future of humanity. —SMS

What’s Left by Malcolm Harris (Little, Brown)

Historian-activist Harris follows up his barn-burner history of Palo Alto with a clear-eyed guide to what collective political action, if any, can stem the climate crisis. —SMS

The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley (Atlantic Monthly)

Admit it: we’ve all wondered what it’s like to be one of the New Yorker magazine’s famous fact checkers. This novel promises us some insights into the experience, as the reader embarks on a wild ride through New York City with one such guardian of truth and accuracy. —Claire Kirch

Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove)

The latest novel from the author of the brilliantly weird Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings imagines an alternative Japan where married couples no longer have sex and all children are born by artificial insemination. —SMS

Now, the People! by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, tr. David Broder (Verso)

Mélenchon, a leader of the French radical left once described by the Washington Post as “France’s Bernie Sanders,” proposes a new kind of revolution against capitalism suited for our present moment—what he calls “a citizen’s revolution.” —SMS

In the Rhododendrons by Heather Christle (Algonquin)

I was an ardent fan of Christle’s 2019 The Crying Book, and have a feeling her latest—a hybrid memoir that weaves personal narrative together with meditations on the life and work of Virginia Woolf—will bowl me over me yet again. —SMS

Fugitive Tilts by Ishion Hutchinson (FSG)

In his prose debut, poet Hutchinson offers an evocative meditation upon home, displacement, inheritance, and memory, chronicling everything from his trips to Senegal and his love of John Coltrane to the Jamaican music of his youth and paintings by Édouard Vuillard. —Eva M. Baron

The Power of Adrienne Rich by Hilary Holladay (Princeton UP)

Holladay’s comprehensive biography of the trailblazing lesbian-feminist writer, thinker, and activist draws on unpublished materials and rigorous research to paint the most expansive portrait of Rich to date. —SMS

Fish Tales by Nettie Jones (FSG)

Jones’s debut novel—a portrait of a 1970s party girl whose life is tinged by drugs, sex, and violence—was first acquired by Toni Morrison at Random House and originally published in 1984, yet feels as fresh as ever. —SMS

Ordinary Time by Annie B. Jones (HarperOne)

The indie bookseller’s debut book extolls the virtues of small, quiet, ordinary lives and the joy that comes with learning to love where you are, whether or not it’s where you dreamed you’d be. —SMS

I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer by Mary Beth Norton (Princeton UP)

Norton’s annotated collection of questions and answers from the world’s first-ever advice column, which debuted in the 1690s, shows how eternal our preoccupations with love, sex, and romance are—and both how much and how little has changed in the last few centuries. —SMS

Gabriële by Anne Berest and Claire Berest, tr. Tina Kover (Europa)

There’s no doubt that he author’s second foray into the English language—which follows the passionate love affair between a young French woman and a Spanish artist during the height of the Belle Époque and, later, World War I—should be just as engrossing as her hit English-language debut The Postcard.  —EMB

The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza (Catapult)

This timely memoir from Palestinian American journalist Aziza explores bodies, borders, and death in all its forms as she traces three generations from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City. —SMS

Atavists by Lydia Millet (Norton)

Millet’s 21st book is a collection of loosely linked stories set in Los Angeles, where a cast of recognizable characters navigates the tech-saturated, climate crisis–addled present, with varying degrees of success. —SMS

Notes to John by Joan Didion (Knopf)

Ethically, I have some reservations about posthumously publishing the journal in which Didion chronicled her therapy sessions, but as a forever fan and student of her work, I can’t say I’m not looking forward to reading this new material. —SMS

When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy (Nightfire)

Cassidy’s title will be familiar to fans of the music of the Mountain Goats, whose songwriter, John Darnielle, has a talent for telling horror stories himself. In the case of the lyric evoked here, the terror is an abusive father coming home. Cassidy’s novel takes that fear to the extreme. —JHM

Dianaworld by Edward White (Norton)

Princess Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris more than a quarter of a century ago and still, people the world over remain fascinated by her. White’s ruminations on the life and times of Princess Diana examine her impact upon popular culture then and now, and I am so here for this. —CK

Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy (FSG)

One of the great chroniclers of how money works turns his mind to the system itself. If anyone can sum up the tumultuous and knotty history of the dominant economic system of our era in a brisk 600-and-change pages, it’s Cassidy. —JHM

Strangers in the Land by Michael Luo (Doubleday)

Luo’s narrative history of Chinese immigrants in America documents a century-long struggle marked by exclusion, violence, and extraordinary resilience which proves essential to understanding the formation of American identity. —SMS

Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert (Penguin Press)

Gilbert is one of my favorite writers and thinkers, particularly on the subjects of gender and womanhood—and her debut book, which dissects three decades of pop culture through a feminist lens, is sure to be one of the standouts of the year. —SMS

*

May

Make Me Famous by Maud Ventura, tr. Gretchen Schmid (HarperVia)

As the stateside appetite for French literature grows, Ventura’s latest should provide ample satiation. The novel explores ambition and obsession via Cléo, the French-American daughter of two academics whose relentless pursuit of fame within the music industry leads to shocking twists and revelations. —EMB

The Stolen Heart by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Dralyuk (HarperVia)

Kurkov returns with a follow-up to The Silver Bone (one of PW’s best books of 2024!), in which Samson Kolechko must rescue his kidnapped fiancée while investigating the illegal sale of meat in 1920s Kyiv. —EMB

Second Life by Amanda Hess (Doubleday)

The New York Times culture critic’s debut is a candid chronicle of pregnancy, parenting, and paranoia in the page of social media, deriving humor and insights from her own internet-aggravated anxieties over her unborn child. —SMS

Melting Point by Rachel Rockerell (FSG)

Rockerell’s genre-busting family memoir uses only primary sources—letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, and interviews—to tell the story of a group of Russian Jews whose search for a new homeland in the early 1900s brought them to, of all places, Galveston, Texas. —SMS

The Painted Room by Inger Christensen, tr. Denise Newman (New Directions)

A three-part literary novel of murder mystery, political intrigue, and Italian Renaissance frescoes—all with a dash of high fantasy? Sounds like the triptych of a lifetime. —JHM

Motherhood and Its Ghosts by Iman Mersal, tr. Robin Moger (Transit)

What does it mean to be a mother, and is there any way to convey those facts with fidelity? The latest entry in Transit’s Undelivered Lectures series is a meditation on identity, motherhood, and love, complete with archival photographs, journal entries, and writings that have informed Mersal’s practice and perspective. —EMB

Come Round Right by Alan Govenar (Deep Vellum)

Set in 1971, this hitchhiking journey follows 18-year-old Aaron Berg as he reckons with a sexual assault he and his new girlfriend survived in Canada five months earlier. The novel winds through Appalachia, charts America’s midcentury cultural upheavals, and plumbs the perennial allure of acceptance. —EMB

These Survivals by Lynne Huffer (Duke UP)

Wildly experimental and interdisciplinary, Huffer’s latest examines ethical living in the environmental ruin of the Anthropocene (a term that, she says, “sags from overuse”). Through collage, poetry, multimedia work, and memoir, Huffer balances a philosopher’s gravity—she is best known for her three-book treatment of Foucault’s ethics of eros—with a poet’s sense of play. —Jonathan Frey

The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis (University of Texas)

Stratis’s memoir-in-essays, the latest entry in UT Press’s American Music Series, is a coming-of-age story from a distinctly working-class trans perspective which pays homage to the music that saved its author’s life. —SMS

Everything Is Now by J. Hoberman (Verso)

Back in the 1960s, New York City was a haven for the avant-garde, whether it was in the shape of subcultural movements like fluxus and guerrilla theater or venues like coffeehouses, bars, and lofts. Hoberman’s cultural history is a thorough account of the New York underground, complete with rich, minute details about what the city once was. —EMB

A Toast to St Martirià by Albert Serra, tr. Matthew Tree (Coffee House)

Billed as the memoir of the acclaimed and adventurous Catalan filmmaker Serra that was composed of a wholly improvised speech at a film festival that seemingly doesn’t exist named for a saint that also appears nonexistent, what exactly this book is remains a mystery. But odds are that whatever that may be will be interesting. —JHM

Apocalypse by Lizzie Wade (Harper)

Covid. Trump. Climate change. Natural disasters. The hits keep coming—and it’s not the first time. Wade’s book traces various catastrophes that have befallen human beings stretching back thousands of years, proving that those who came before us survived apocalypses and we will survive what’s being thrown at us too. —CK

The Living and the Rest by José Eduardo Agualusa, tr. Daniel Hahn (Archipelago)

What do you get when you mix a literary festival, an island off the coast of East Africa, and cyclone season? A storm of stories. —JHM

The Deserters by Mathias Énard, tr. Charlotte Mandell (New Directions)

From the winner of the Prix Goncourt comes an ambitious novel that intertwines the stories of a soldier emerging from the Mediterranean wilderness during an unspecified war and a scientific conference taking place on September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship. —EMB

The Family Dynamic by Susan Dominus (Crown)

Dominus, a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, profiles cadres of high-achieving siblings (among them Lauren Groff!) in a quest to understand the familial conditions that lay the groundwork for success. —SMS

Happiness Forever by Adelaide Faith (FSG)

Faith’s debut novel follows a veterinary nurse named Sylvie whose ardent love for her therapist gives meaning to what she considers to be a small life—until that therapist starts to prepare Sylvie for the end of their time together. —SMS

This Is Your Mother by Erika J. Simpson (Scribner)

In her debut memoir, Simpson reflects on her complicated relationship with her equally complicated mother, the daughter of sharecroppers who did what it took to survive and is now dying. —SMS

Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read (Crown)

Most of us are familiar with multilevel marketing schemes at this point, but Read’s debut offers an even more incisive and sprawling account of the MLM phenomenon. The New York journalist considers how brands like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife have devastated some of America’s most vulnerable populations, while also illuminating how MLMs strengthen the forces of capitalism. —EMB

Sleep by Honor Jones (Riverhead)

This dazzling novel examines what it means for parents to exist inside two families simultaneously—the one they’re born into, and the one that they create. When Margaret, a newly divorced young mother, returns to the home in which she was raised with her two daughters, she must reckon with her own childhood as well as its lingering secrets. —EMB

Proto by Laura Spinney (Bloomsbury)

Ancient Greek and Latin can’t hold a candle to Proto-Indo-European as far as scope of influence is concerned. The latest from journalist Spinney aims to show just how great the impact of this little-remembered language still is. —JHM

The Einstein of Sex by Daniel Brook (Norton)

German-Jewish sexologist and queer rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld, best known for his rejection of gender binaries and theory of “sexual relativity,” finally gets his due in Brook’s biography. —SMS

Spent by Alison Bechdel (Mariner)

Bechdel skewers her own commercial success—and her trouble adapting to it—in her latest, an autofictional graphic novel that finds her lightly fictionalized alter ego raging against capitalism but too distracted to do anything about it. —SMS

Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski (S&S)

Urbanski’s short story collection surveys sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and realism to explore the allure of portals and the infinite possibilities they represent. —SMS

Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel (Atria)

Michel’s work has long taken a calculated approach to probing the porosity of genre, and his sophomore novel is no exception. You’ve simply gotta hand it to someone whose story concept alone makes you wonder what a sci-fi epic collectively written by Joshua Cohen, Robert Heinlein, and Jonathan Lethem over Slack might look like. —JHM

So Many Stars ed. Caro de Robertis (Algonquin)

It’s tough to be BIPOC, queer, trans, or nonbinary in the current political climate, but this oral history affirms that queer people of color have a long and proud history in the United States and beyond. —CK

State Champ by Hilary Plum (Bloomsbury)

When a “heartbeat law” criminalizes most abortions statewide, an abortion clinic receptionist stages a hunger-strike at her boarded-up workplace in protest—and unexpectedly mobilizes the people around her. —SMS

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)

Though originally a poet, Vuong’s 2019 prose debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, proved his immense command over fiction. His newest novel, which chronicles the budding friendship between a troubled young man and an 82-year-old Lithuanian woman, should be equally captivating, lyrical, and singular. —EMB

Shamanism by Manvir Singh (Knopf)

Singh traces the evolution of shamanism—which he sees as a natural human response to the uncertainty of the world, reflective of our desire for ritual and curiosity about the supernatural—from the Paleolithic era through the 20th century. —SMS

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (FSG)

Following her short story collection Wednesday’s Child, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year, Li returns with a devastating memoir about the loss of her two teenage sons, James and Vincent, to suicide and her journey toward acceptance in the face of grief. —EMB

Aggregated Discontent by Harron Walker (Random House)

Walker is one of the sharpest writers around, and her debut essay collection about 21st century womanhood—its perils, indignities, and occasional joys—is sure to be a candid and keen-eyed dissection of the way women live today. —SMS

Marsha by Tourmaline (Tiny Reparations)

Legendary Black trans activist Marsha P. Johnson is considered to be the first person to have thrown a brick during the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. Her story needs to be told, especially when LGBTQ+ people are once again being targeted and marginalized. —CK

That’s All I Know by Elisa Levi, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf)

Written as a sustained monologue, this ambitious and unusual novel follows 19-year-old Little Lea and her life in a rural town at the edge of the forest. Over a shared joint with a stranger, Little Lea spins a tale of loss, desire, and conspiracies, creating an idiosyncratic, voice-driven atmosphere that is sure to interest fans of Graywolf’s other translations. —EMB

The Cloud Intern by David Greenwood (Under the BQE)

One of two inaugural titles from the the new Brooklyn-based press Under the BQE, Greenwood’s novel imagines a near-future where a tech company cofounder searches for connection in the alienating world he helped create. —SMS

Burning Down the House  by Jonathan Gould (Mariner)

Music biographer Gould tells the definitive story of the Talking Heads and the gritty New York City scene that birthed them in this overdue account, out just in time for the 50th anniversary of the band’s founding. —SMS

Freelance by Kevin Kearney (Rejection Letters)

I love Kearney’s writing, and I’m so excited to read his latest novel, which centers on a young rideshare driver and asks big questions about labor, technology, and what we owe to our employers. —SMS

*

June

Sick and Dirty by Michael Koresky (Bloomsbury)

Koresky’s history surveys how queerness still made its way onscreen, behind the camera, and between the lines during the censorious Hays Code era, which lasted from the 1930s to the 1960s, examining the work of Lillian Hellman, Vincent Minnelli, Alfred Hitchcock, and more. —SMS

Nadja by André Breton, tr. Mark Polizzotti (NYRB)

This surrealist classic novel brings back memories. I read it in a college French literature course many years ago, and loved the romance between two rather absurd characters who could only have lived in Paris in the early 20th century. —CK

Be Gay, Do Crime ed. Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley (Dzanc)

In these “sixteen stories of queer chaos,” authors Myriam Gurba, Alissa Nutting, and many more imagine queer characters who turn to crime as a means of survival, protest, retribution—or simply by accident. —SMS

The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram (Basic)

Design permeates nearly everything we do and everywhere we go. This fact is at the core of Gram’s cultural history, which explores design’s enduring appeal as both an economic and utopian tool throughout the 20th century. —EMB

What Is Wrong with Men by Jessa Crispin (Pantheon)

Feminist cultural critic Crispin turns to Michael Douglas movies to get to the root of the so-called crisis of masculinity and the anxieties around women, money, and power that are helping fuel it. —SMS

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Hala Alyan (Avid Reader)

The acclaimed Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist adds a memoir to her body of work with this meditation on motherhood via surrogacy and the legacy of the displaced. —JHM

Flashlight by Susan Choi (FSG)

The National Book Award winner’s latest novel follows a woman as she makes sense of a mysterious tragedy—the disappearance of her father—and the geopolitics of her family, whose ties to America, Korea, and Japan are impossible to untangle. —SMS

The Slip by Lucas Schaefer (S&S)

Boxing novels are having a moment right now, and this newest addition should also be a knockout. Schaefer’s debut follows two Texas teenagers, one of whom vanishes a decade later. In so doing, the author weaves an unflinching narrative about race, sex, and, of course, the fights that unfold inside the ring. —EMB

Lili Is Crying by Hélène Bessette, tr. Kate Briggs (New Directions)

Throughout her life, this midcentury French author published 13 novels, but none of them, until now, have been translated into English. Lili Is Crying, lauded upon its initial French publication in 1953, mines the fraught relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte, complete with tight, experimental prose that unearths the startling nuance of both characters. —EMB

Clam Down by Anelise Chen (One World)

Chen’s genre-defying memoir turns her mother’s innocent typo—an exhortation to “clam down”—into an investigation of her own “clam genealogy”—that is, the family history and forces that led her to retreat into her shell following a divorce—as well as what we can learn from those most cloistered of sea creatures. —SMS

How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast (Viking)

Jong-Fast’s intimate memoir reflects on her unconventional upbringing and intense yet elusive relationship with her mother, the acclaimed author Erica Jong, in the face of Jong’s dementia diagnosis. —EMB

The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward (Liveright)

The inaugural novel in Liveright’s Well-Read Black Girls series follows estranged twin sisters who are stunned one day when they meet a version of their mother, who vanished when they were infants, that appears to have lived a full, childless life—and soon burrows her way into their lives as well. —SMS

The Dry Season by Melissa Febos (Knopf)

The master memoirist returns with an account of what she learned about sex, pleasure, and solitude from a year of celibacy. With Febos, you’re always in good hands. —SMS

We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, tr. Robin Myers (New Directions)

I first encountered Cábezon Cámara by way of her International Booker Prize–shortlisted novel The Adventures of China Iron, and have been eager to read more of her ever since. Her latest, a “queer baroque satire” of the Basque nun and explorer Antonio de Erauso, sounds promising. —SMS

Endling by Maria Reva (Doubleday)

On the eve of Russian invasion and against the backdrop of Ukraine’s prosperous “Romance Tours,” in which Western bachelors visit in search of compliant wives, three women set off on a cross-country road trip in an effort to secure a last-ditch chance at procreation for Lefty: bachelor, snail, and last of his species. In this Saundersian tangle, it is unclear which is the metaphor and which is the ground, but there is a non-zero chance that this debut novel from the Ukrainian-born, Canadian-raised author of Good Citizens Need Not Fear might contain a key to navigating our incomprehensible present. —JF

Culture Creep by Alice Bolin (Mariner)

What do diet tracking apps, Animal Crossing, and Silicon Valley titans have in common? According to Alice Bolin, they’re all symptoms of the ongoing “pop apocalypse.” Bolin’s newest collection mines the intersection of technology, culture, and feminism to make sense of the vicissitudes of modern existence. —EMB

Alpha and Omega by Jane Ellen Harrison (Marginalian)

The new imprint of McNally Editions led by cultural critic Maria Popova brings back an acclaimed early 20th century classicist and linguist’s 110-year-old collection of essays on consciousness, faith, love, reason, science—you know, the light stuff. —JHM

Exophony by Yoko Tawada, tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)

Tawada’s first book of essays to be translated into English fittingly centers on her lifelong fascination with the possibilities of “cross-hybridizing languages” as well as writing and existing outside one’s mother tongue. —SMS

That’s How They Get You ed. Damon Young (Pantheon)

A pioneering collection of Black humor, edited by the Thurber-winning Young and featuring an all-star roster of contributors including Hanif Abdurraqib, Wyatt Cenac, Kiese Laymon, Deesha Philyaw, and Roy Wood Jr.—need I say more? —SMS

Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House)

Three giants stuck in a spaceship must keep speaking to keep the ship moving—and themselves from growing bigger than their confines. It sounds about as strange, and intriguing, a parabolic vessel for the exploration of imprisonment and power as they come. —JHM

Art Above Everything by Stephanie Elizondo Griest (Beacon)

Passion, especially when directed toward a creative pursuit, can be all-encompassing. In this book, Griest explores this timeless conundrum through queer, BIPOC, and women artists around the world, all of whom consider their own relationship to ambition, redemption, and creativity. —EMB

Grand Finales by Susan Gubar (Norton)

My most anticipated summer read looks at nine women artists—including George Eliot, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, and Gwendolyn Brooks—who flourished creatively in the final chapters of their lives. —SMS

Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin (Summit)

This debut novel was one of the books being buzzed about at a recent booksellers conference, and I’m intrigued by the concept: a Black man from an elite family who spirals downward into New York City’s underworld, where he’s defined more by his race than class. —CK

Homework by Geoff Dyer (FSG)

Dyer has written countless works of fiction and nonfiction, but this memoir may be one of his most intimate. Charting his youth through the lens of schooling, exams, and, of course, the titular homework, this is a generous and deeply personal portrait of England in the 1960s and 70s. —EMB

Allegro Pastel by Leif Randt, tr. Peter Kuras (Granta)

The latest novel in the Granta Magazine Editions series traces the long-distance relationship of two millennials—a cult author and web designer—as they navigate life, love, and work (not to mention the encroachment of technology and climate change) in contemporary Germany. —SMS

Toni at Random by Dana A. Williams (Amistad)

What fascinates me most about Toni Morrison wasn’t just a literary genius but an editorial one: during her tenure at Random House she shepherded the work of such authors as Toni Cade Bambara and Lucille Clifton. Morrison herself asked that Dana A. Williams tell the story of this facet of her career—and even gave the book its unsurprisingly winning title. —SMS

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà, tr. Mara Faye Lethem (Graywolf)

Leave aside the title like the piercing gaze of truth itself. A multigenerational saga of Catalonia told by gossiping ghosts readying an otherworldly welcome party for a descendant on her deathbed? Now that’s a concept. —JHM

The Stone Door by Leonora Carrington (NYRB)

Carrington’s long unavailable novel, written at the end of WWII and first published in 1977, has everything: love, adventure, the Zodiac, Mesopotamia, a mad Hungarian King, and, of course, the titular great stone door that leads to the unknown. —SMS

Porthole by Joanna Howard (McSweeney’s)

Howard’s latest novel traces the total meltdown of an art-house film director who may or may not be responsible for the on-set death of her leading man, muse, and lover. —SMS

These Heathens by Mia McKenzie (Random House)

The two-time Lambda Award winner’s latest novel, set in 1960s Georgia, follows a pious small-town teenager as she travels to Atlanta to get an abortion only to discover the burgeoning civil rights movement and the secret lives of queer Black folks. —SMS

Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season by John Gregory Dunne (McNally)

Dunne’s work often languishes in the shadow of his famous spouse, but this under-appreciated and long out of print memoir shows the writer—mordant, deadpan, and mid–nervous breakdown—at the height of his powers. —SMS

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey (FSG)

Lacey’s latest is as ambitious and genre-agnostic as anything she’s ever written, which is saying something. Part novel, part memoir, what might have become a mere separation narrative in another’s hands instead interrogates through its own form whether anything begins or ends in the first place. —JHM

The Scrapbook by Heather Clark (Pantheon)

The Sylvia Plath biographer makes her fiction debut with a story—inspired by Clark’s own discovery of her grandfather’s WWII scrapbook—about the illusions of first love and the burden of family history. —SMS

The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri (FSG)

Originally written in English, a first for the author, Khemiri later rewrote this sweeping family saga in his native Swedish, which was published in 2023 and has since become a bestseller in Sweden. Now, the novel officially reappears in English, offering an indelible portrait of three Tunisian-Swedish sisters and the possible curse that follows them. —EMB

Among Friends by Hal Ebbott (Riverhead)

Ebbott’s debut novel follows two wealthy couples who get together for a fateful weekend in the country—and how they navigate the harm, secrets, and life-shattering revelations that come from it. —SMS

Misbehaving at the Crossroads by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper)

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois author makes her nonfiction debut with an essay collection that explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives—and her own private life. —SMS

The post The Great Spring 2025 Book Preview appeared first on The Millions.

In Kinsky’s latest novel, Seeing Further, the landscapes are still alive—but as the backdrop to the book’s main focus, the lost beauty and magic of cinema. Seeing Further is an elegy to the film-reel cinemas of the past, those places “that fomented stories by robbing you of words before the screen,” “these dormant motion-picture castles, with their worm-eaten, rusty, blockaded doors.” The question opening Seeing Further continues the preoccupations of Kinsky’s earlier fiction: “How to direct the gaze?” And Kinsky decides to turn her gaze to the abandoned ritual of cinema because, as her autobiographical narrator argues, “in the past century no location was as important for the how of seeing.” The narrator continues: “The collective experience facilitated by this space is disappearing along with it,” and so “this loss, whether mourned or not, deserves to be described and merits consideration.” Films and landscapes both point us to questions about the collective, to “the boundary between images seen and things experienced,” and Kinsky brings them into dialogue in strange and unexpected ways.

As she does this, Kinsky supplies only sparse characterization and plot. An unnamed narrator discovers a run-down cinema she wants to revive in a small town in southeast Hungary because of her responsibility “to reawaken a space for collective seeing.” She leaves Budapest to restore the building, revives the cinema according to her own tastes, and finally sells it after public indifference. In the middle of this, she pauses to tell the story of a timber merchant who falls in love with movies and travels from village to village to project films in the late 1920s. Kinsky stages no direct dialogue, sketches few additional characters, and avoids dramatic conflict.

What, then, is in this novel? The past: details watched in slow motion. Rain and wind, the musty scent of damp wood, heavy felt curtains, people smoking in screening rooms, “plumes rising before the image and floating in the air.” Projectors thrumming, clicking with life. Concession stands, coat checks, “old-fashioned tear-off tickets made of a thin textured cardboard,” and celluloid film strips, teeming with “an entirely distinct, unrepeatable magic”—“beauties from a different time.” Seeing Further reads like those eulogies in which we grasp at memories of a person we have lost so that we can cling to him and hold him on this side of death. “Where to bring a deceased screen?” Kinsky’s narrator asks. “Were there still small residues of images and scenes sticking to the edges of the holes and damaged spots?”

The epigraph, a quote from the filmmaker John Cassavetes, prepares us for this tone: “There is something important in people, something that’s dying—the senses, a universal thing. […] The whole world is dying of sadness.” Kinsky writes to remind us of those beautiful fragments of the past, that time before we learned to glutton ourselves with streaming. Early on, the narrator asks, “why the cinema?” She goes on to provide many answers. “Seeing is a proficiency you should acquire,” and the cinema “a venue where seeing was a collective experience.” Kinsky’s narrator explains that “the cinema was always a place to which you brought your own solitude, but it used to be that you did so knowing you would take your place among other solitary people. […] You surrendered to the beam of light from the projector, operated by a foreign hand. […] You abandoned yourself to the place, in order to see.” And now? The cinemas of old, Kinsky’s narrator concludes, “died due to lack of an audience, lack of renovations, due to the general rampant, feeble opinion that it’s enough to watch digitized images flicker across any old screen.”

At times Kinsky’s language becomes even more didactic and academic, such as when she writes that “the disappearance of the cinematic site is inseparable from the infiltration of this volitional act of seeing, committed under the pretense of a larger selection, and relegated to the realm of the private…” Yet she balances this discourse with beautiful descriptions of solitary people and the landscapes they inhabit, like when lovers gather outside the narrator’s cinema for a final screening, observing how “a wind had picked up outside, eddying the dust on the dry, hard-packed dirt ground, forming small funnels with little things swirling helplessly inside: small pieces of wood, scraps of twine, the scattered, used entry tickets from previous screenings.” Winter takes over, and “in this cold, starving birds dropped from the trees like forgotten toys, weary and frostbitten, and helpless wild animals, knowing how to put their hooves down so gently that only a trace remained, as if blown onto the surface, advanced into the gardens, where here and there was a brassica plant gone to flower.” I’m not sure yet what all this means—the long-time of nature and the short-time of cinema—but I emerged from the novel dwelling on the rhythms of loss and time. Kinsky—in Caroline Schmidt’s elegant English translation—remains one of our most lyrical writers, and a master of description, mood, and tone. As a result, this book is less of a novel and more of a brief dream, an appointment in a dark room suspended in the light of images, half-quiet, cinema.

You leave Seeing Further with the feeling that Kinsky’s narrator has made her argument, over and over, about how “a trip to the cinema expands the world and stretches time,” and about how, without the collective moviegoing of old, we can no longer talk with one another and experience together like we used to. Kinsky couches the romanticism and elegy in the dreaming eyes of the narrator, who longs for “a time when everyone went to the cinema every day, rushed there, in fact, as a matter of course, frequenting the screen in order to train their gaze.” After a number of pages, you get the point. And you wonder about where else we can train our gaze, and about whether we can glimpse pieces of old cinema glinting in the rubble of today. And sometimes, suddenly, the narrator’s sentences unwind and they surprise. At one point, she muses: “the films—I really grew to like them.” Then, she writes, moving from the known to that beautiful space of novels and films, the land between the known and not-known: “Never would I have thought the cinema could be such a rock in my life; every film was like an excursion into another country, every time, and I was alone and at the same time I wasn’t.”

The post Esther Kinsky’s Lyrical Elegy for the Movies appeared first on The Millions.

I spoke with Watts about writing in the second person, the private grief of living a reproductive life in America, and ambiguous endings.

Marisa D. Wright: The novel’s epigraph is a quote from Roland Barthes which reads, “You have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you),” and it seems connected to how the novel is addressed to a particular character. In a Substack post from last August, you wrote, “Epigraphs are a gesture of confidence I make towards myself.” What were you gesturing at with this epigraph?

Madeleine Watts: When I’d read A Lover’s Discourse in my early-to-mid 20s, I had underlined a line addressed to “you.” The whole time I’d been writing this book, I’d been very aware because I did an MFA that you should never use the second person. People don’t like it. I had tried to write the book in first person, and I tried to write it in third person, and it just never worked. It started coming out in second person, so I was always trying to reason with myself about why it needed to be second person. I was trying to think through and frame why the narrator would be speaking in this way. Because the book is so much about grief and loss, my experience, at least, is there is a kind of conversation that’s always happening in your head that is addressing that person—like telling them things that you might want to tell them that you can’t. What that epigraph framed for me was to speak to the lost person is to make them present and invoke them. It’s conjuring through language. The very act of speaking and telling a story can bring them to life again.

MDW: This novel has many strands: a road trip through the Southwest, a climate crisis lurking in the background, a family loss, and a marriage story. How would you describe its genre? Does “contemporary climate fiction” feel right?

MW: It’s kind of like a genre mishmash. I started writing it during the pandemic, so I was physically stuck and couldn’t leave the house, so there’s a road trip element. It’s a love story, and it’s also self-consciously about climate change. When I started writing this book, I would do interviews and events, and I would be asked these big questions like “Do you think there’s hope?” I was really trying to think about my answers to those questions. To some extent, this book is an answer and kind of an extension of a lot of the things I was thinking of in the first book. At the same time, I was beginning to teach and think in a much more academic way. If you write a realist novel but fail to mention climate change, it will still be there in your work because you live in it. It’s in the air you breathe. I think anything that I’m ever going to write is going to have that awareness in it because it’s in the ambient atmosphere of my social relationships and the way that I’m thinking about things.

MDW: In your first book, The Inland Sea, the narrator says, “I liked this idea of the writer’s [life]; that I was in some way undercover in the real world, reporting from the front lines of my own experience.” Does this quote capture what it feels like for you as a writer?

MW: Yeah, I think that’s still the case. When I wrote that line in the first book, I was a bit more wedded to the romance of it. I do feel there’s a part of my brain that’s always writing. When I see the way that other people live their lives, I often think they’re able to experience something that I don’t necessarily feel like I’m able to experience because I’m always sort of undercover writing in the background. I don’t think my sister, who is a pastry chef, necessarily goes through the world like that. I find that sad to some extent. I don’t love it, to be honest. And I think I thought I would maybe love it more when I wrote that line.

MDW: Both of your novels feature depictions of pregnancy and abortion. Why does that thread feel important for your work? How did writing about reproductive events differ between your first novel, which is set in Australia, and your second, which is set in the United States?

MW: Some things are always going to capture my imagination. Writing through and thinking about the body is really interesting. For me, that comes down to reproductive events. In the first book, there’s an abortion and a traumatic IUD implantation event, which is about control, about bodily autonomy. That book is all about emergency. The narrator is trying to regain control, but her body won’t let her do it. The second book is different. It’s me thinking through those things seven to 10 years later in a reproductive life. I was writing the book when Roe v. Wade was overturned, and living in America. It was awful, and it was so frightening. I remember being on the subway that day and seeing women crying. People cry in New York cry all the time in public, but it felt like people were grieving, and it also felt like people were grieving alone. It felt really, really private. And I think that’s a reality of reproductive events—they’re incredibly private. All those sorts of things make it really sticky for me. I’m interested in bringing those sorts of things to life.

MDW: Interestingly, you included endnotes of sources and references, and each chapter is preceded by an index. Why did you make those editorial choices?

MW: It’s a gesture towards being community-minded. This book is fictional, but it is also deeply researched. I’m a novelist, but I also write nonfiction. If I were writing a book of nonfiction, I would name everybody and cite the sources that had gone into my thinking. It began to feel disingenuous that I wasn’t naming some of the books that I referenced. If somebody’s influenced your thinking, I think even just in the acknowledgments, you should thank them. Claire Vaye Watkins was a big influence on me, and she acknowledges books that were important for her in her novel Gold Fame Citrus.

Originally, I wrote the indexes almost like a prose poem of what to expect in each chapter. You don’t need to read them to understand the book. They provide a kind of guide, and as chronology starts to deliberately become a little bit murkier, they’re a way of stressing that this idea of rationality—which comes from scientific travel literature based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of enlightenment thinking—doesn’t exist. This world might be knowable, but it’s not.

MDW: I’ll be vague here, but I want to ask you about the novel’s ending and the mirroring of personal grief with ecological loss. The fate of one of the characters doesn’t become clear until late in the novel. Can you tell me about writing toward that kind of ending?

MW: When I first started writing it, I had absolutely no idea what the plot was. I started off with ideas like the Colorado River, the Southwest, and these two people, but I didn’t know what was going to happen to them. It became clear over the course of writing, partly because I had to think about why it was addressed to “you.” It became clear to me that this book was an elegy and that it was about grief, so it became clear how it needed to end.

It also became clear how that ending had to be ambiguous. I’ve already had one or two people ask me, “But what happened at the end?” You’re not meant to know. There isn’t meant to be closure. I was thinking a lot about grief and loss and how a lot of those things don’t have clear-cut endings. Grief is sort of cyclical, and it comes up again and again, and it’s got these peaks and flows. It never really ends. There’s no conclusion—your life just begins to grow around grief.

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Over to You, a collection of letters exchanged by Yves and his father between 2015 and 2016, the artist and art critic John Berger (1926-2017), comes closer to giving us “the real experience” of time. In its pages, paintings from different historical periods (all helpfully reproduced in color) call out to one another: Albrecht Dürer’s Screech Owl (1508) “wink[s]” at Max Beckmann’s Columbine (1950); Vincent Van Gogh’s Still Life with Bible (1885) responds to Rogier van der Weyden’s The Annunciation (c. 1440); and John Berger’s own watercolor rose nods to Andrea della Robbia’s Madonna with Four Angels (c. 1480-1490). Throughout much of the book, the images are embedded in the letters. But toward the end, the words disappear, giving way to a visual essay—a form that would be familiar to the readers of John Berger’s celebrated 1972 book Ways of Seeing. The visual essay consists mostly of the two letter writers’ alternating drawings, which serve as a continuation of the conversation that father and son have been having with each other and with the painters of old. The book, it seems, sets out to demonstrate that “in the realm of the visible all epochs coexist and are fraternal,” to borrow from John Berger’s 2001 essay “Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible.”

Another important tenet of the “Small Theory” is that a painting is born out of an “encounter between painter and model—even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles” (81). In Over to You, both father and son take this idea to heart, keenly listening to what the paintings’ subjects, whether animate or inanimate, have to say. Giorgio Morandi’s “jugs and bricks,” Yves writes, are in “conversation”; Nicolas Poussin’s and Zhu Da’s landscapes, according to John, philosophize about the possibility of “eternity”; and John’s white rose, luminous against the dark, “like some figures in Caravaggio’s painting,” delivers “a message of confirmation: ‘What stands does so forever.’”

The letters, then, attempt not so much to interpret as to enliven the paintings, to make them speak with the viewer and with the world. If his father’s watercolor rose reminds Yves of Caravaggio’s works, certain details in Caravaggio’s works—such as “[t]he horse’s lifted foreleg and the man’s standing leg” in The Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1601)—are, in John’s words, “oceanic in their depth and their force.” Such language may seem to court abstraction, for if we can hitch Caravaggio’s horse to the adjective “oceanic,” then we can do the same with any number of land-bound subjects. It is also quite a leap that John makes, in his response to Yves, from “the ‘conversation’ between […] two jars” in Morandi’s studio to the conversation “[b]etween satellites and the earth.” Or how, for that matter, do we picture what Yves calls the “gap between […] the visible and the invisible”?

Yet the impossibility of picturing may be precisely the point: to an unusual degree for a book on visual art, Over to You dwells on the formless and the unseen, on painting as “the recuperation of the invisible.” The phrase first occurs during John’s discussion of Moss Roses in a Vase (1882). In his interpretation, Édouard Manet’s still life is not still at all: “Within the glass, the natural forms […] are decomposed. They become nonfigurative. We are looking through the glass at antecedent raw material.” This reads like a statement on the artwork’s prehistory—on what it had been before it became an artwork. But John goes still further: what fascinates him, and his son, is “whatever it is that precedes and follows existence.”

 This fascination is obvious in how often water—widely thought to have brought forth the first forms of life—seeps into the conversation. Water is not only in Manet’s vase or (metaphorically) in Caravaggio’s painting. It also glistens from a window of the train where Yves is writing one of the letters; it runs under the bridge of his childhood recollection; it engulfs a meditation on the act of painting, when Yves compares the lure of artmaking to the lure of the sea depths (as evoked in Luc Besson’s film Le Grand Bleu).

Like continents, the paintings in the book are connected by these oceanic undercurrents, appearing as fruits less of individual creative geniuses than of nature itself. (Indeed, the way the book uses water to link the paintings and the natural world reminds me of how Jeff Wall links nature and photography in his essay “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” as well as of Kaja Silverman’s perceptive reading of this essay in The Miracle of Analogy.) For some images in the book, this is almost literally true: in the visual essay, among father and son’s drawings, we encounter a print from a honeycomb and a photograph of an outline traced by Yves on a snow-covered bench—a rabbit with a wood knot for an eye. 

But nature also collaborates with the two artists in subtler ways, and the descriptions of this collaboration are among the most memorable passages in the book. John recalls how, as an art student, he mixed paint using cobalt powder, whose dazzling blue “[was] there before any eye had evolved.” While preparing titanium white, Yves achieves “[a] fresh honey-like texture,” then lets his eyes wander to the beehives visible through an open window. Painting—and writing about painting—become a celebration of the vitally concrete.

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