March 25, 2025, 4:41am

The wheel of the year continues, as ever, to turn, and, also, as ever, to feel at once too fast and too slow, a year in which there has been so much daily political chaos that it feels as if years, rather than months, have elapsed. And when it all feels too heavy, too painful, too strange, I take comfort where I can find it. Having a new book to read remains one of those comforts—and I’m grateful that, in a cultural moment defined in part by the suppression of speech and dignities and rights, we still have beloved and bold new literary voices to turn to.

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Today, I bring you twenty-four new books to consider in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, ranging just about as far as one can range, from the world of Oz to American cults to Harriet Tubman being resurrected as a contemporary pop star to underreported humanitarian crises. It’s an excellent day, indeed, for new books, and I hope you’ll find something to add to your piles of tomes-to-be-read. These deserve your attention.

Be safe, as always, my readers, and curl up with something delightful. You, after all, deserve that, as well, after so many months of the world being too much.

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Lynne Tillman, Thrilled to Death: Selected Stories
(Soft Skull)

“Of course, it would be this way, that the stories Lynne Tillman has bestowed all these years now record a kind of cyclone of sensations: the public and private affairs and catastrophes, the art and music we pulled close to us in order to survive, the city streets on fire with human noises and glances, the exhausting joy and delirious loneliness of living through it all. What a superb compendium of voices she’s given us.”
–Jonathen Lethem

Colum McCann, Twist
(Random House)

“Colum McCann gives us a powerfully realist novel of men at sea, literally, emotionally, and metaphorically. It speaks of the brokenness of our time, the successful and unsuccessful attempts at repairs, and the vulnerability of our world. The spirit of Joseph Conrad hovers over the text, but here the heart of darkness lies at the bottom of the ocean.”
–Salman Rushdie

Gregory Maguire, Elphie: A Wicked Childhood
(William Morrow)

“Hot on the heels of…the film adaptation of the musical Wicked, a new prequel about Elphaba’s childhood….Fans of Elphaba and of Maguire’s work will be thrilled to once again venture into Oz and discover new characters, cities, and adventures besides….Elphie is an emotional coming-of-age story that thrums with injustice, regret, and the complicated characters who made a young girl into the serious, stubborn witch destined to take on all of Oz.”
–Booklist

Jamie Hood, Trauma Plot: A Life
(Pantheon)

“Kaleidoscopic….Trauma Plot severs perspectives, then reassembles them again in a shape that feels, if not whole, then fully awake to its edges. The writer runs her fingers along every seam….Trauma Plot is a refusal of the silence around sexual violence, a tapestry woven by bloody fingers. Why write about rape in a world devoid of justice? Hood asks how you could write about anything else.”
–The Rumpus

Janet Todd, Living with Jane Austen
(Cambridge University Press)

“Jan Todd invents a new genre, part memoir, part literary criticism, to tell the captivating story of a life of reading. Benefiting from extensive study of Jane Austen and her world, Janet Todd shows us how to live with Austen’s novels, to read them and reread them and weave them into the texture of our lives. Witty and inviting, this book offers both a fresh perspective on Austen and a moving record of the struggles of feminist scholarship in the academy.”
–Maud Ellman

Graydon Carter, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines
(Penguin Press)

“[A] rollicking memoir and heartfelt paean to the big, glossy, influential magazines of yore….Carter’s zestful accounts of his editorial visions and their implementation are fascinating, as are his vivid profiles of writers, photographers, and Hollywood stars. Carter’s delight in the chaos, effort, stress, and exhilaration of his editorships generate the effervescence and depth of this enthusiastically detailed chronicle.”
–Booklist

Wayne Miller, The End of Childhood: Poems
(Milkweed)

“Wayne Miller’s sixth book of poems is his most moving and most spooky. Permeated by the damages of history, the brutalities of modernity, and the turmoil of consciousness, Miller’s poems are haunted into a gray lyric radiance. Often situated in wintry aftermaths, the poems have the lapidary quality of last-ditch communications….These poems achieve the beautiful, uncanny fusing that Miller defines as poetry itself.”
–Rick Barot

John Kinsella, The Darkest Pastoral: Selected Poems
(Norton)

“The Darkest Pastoral, in its sheer persistent brilliance of imagination and language, is a tour de force—John Kinsella demoting lyric alarms facing down the hungry maw of a bulldozer moving against a forest. Kinsella’s is an essential voice for our time and these poems are the elegant dispatches from the frontline of the twenty-first century by one of our true poetic giants.”
–Kwame Dawes

Nezahualcóyotl, Ilana Stavans, Lamentations of Nezahualcóyoyl: Nahuatl Poems (illustrated by Cuauhtémoc Wetzka)
(Restless Books)

“The poet king of Texcoco has returned! Ilan Stavans journeys to the pre-Hispanic underworld to recover a lost tradition. If Nezahualcóyotl rebelled against the fugacity of life in an epoch defined by war and human sacrifices, Stavans reverses oblivion to articulate a stunning utopian retrospective for our present. The beauty and sharpness of these poems is such that it allows us to feel the obsidian edge of history. A classic of the fifteenth century reaches us with the divinatory power of dreams.”
–Juan Villoro

Boris Fishman, The Unwanted
(Harper)

“The Unwanted is Boris Fishman’s best book yet—one of the best books I’ve read in years, in fact. But don’t call it an allegory. It’s entirely too convincing, too human, and too humane for that. In telling the story of a family pushed to the brink by events and perceptions they can do nothing to alter, Fishman has delivered something truly sophisticated—sophisticated artistically but also morally. A harrowing novel for equally harrowing times.”
–Tom Bissell

Chaim Grade, Sons and Daughters (trans. Rose Waldman)
(Knopf)

“One [Holocaust] survivor, the novelist Chaim Grade, made it his life’s mission to keep their memory alive….Now that [Sons and Daughters] is available in this superb translation by Rose Waldman, it can appeal to a new and universal audience. For those who would like a vivid picture of pre-war Jewish life in Europe; who appreciate a brilliant recreation of generational conflict in Jewish families…Grade’s novel may truly resonate.”
–Forward

Nell Zink, Sister Europe
(Knopf)

“Zink is one of the most humane writers we’ve got, and one of the best….As ever, Zink is funny in a way that requires careful observation and precision….The night narrated here feels like the kind of time outside of time in which classical comedies take place—a liminal space in which characters experience transformations impossible in the everyday world. Here, some characters find each other, some find their way home, and some get a bit closer to finding themselves.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Mike Tidwell, The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street
(St. Martin’s Press)

“Mike Tidwell tells the story of how climate change is unfolding in his literal backyard, following the changes he can see in a single neighborhood. He reminds us that the fight for our planet begins at home, revealing how the fate of our planet—and our neighbors—are inextricably linked. As a longtime climate leader, Tidwell has been on the frontlines of protecting our world for decades. An insightful, poignant read.”
–Leah Stokes

Leah Sottile, Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age
(Grand Central Publishing)

“I first heard about Love Has Won…when the mummified, glitter-covered body of the cult’s leader was discovered in Colorado. Leah Sottile explores how we got there, and it’s a stranger, sadder, and more fascinating journey than I ever expected…situates Love Has Won within the context of other mostly female-led esoteric groups over the past century, digging into alternative spirituality, conspiracies, and feminism. A must-read for anyone interested in the many strange corners of the human psyche.”
–Rachel Monroe

Matt Ridley, Birds, Sex, & Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin’s Strangest Idea
(Harper)

“This is a heady tour through the ideas about sexual selection, but it is more than a summary of the history of thought; it is also a commentary on how we share an appreciation of beauty with much of the natural world, whether that be in colour, movement or song. We are not alone in finding the world breathtakingly, mesmerically wonderful.”
–Mary Colwell

Emma Pattee, Tilt
(Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books)

“Tilt is a swift, exhilarating punch to the gut, the most embodied twenty-four hours of narrative I can remember reading. Through the eyes of the prickly, funny, and very pregnant narrator, we viscerally experience the surreal, unbearable, comic, and beautiful ways that humans behave in a crisis. The Road meets Nightbitch meets What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I loved this novel.”
–Lydia Kiesling

Joni Murphy, Barbara
(Astra House)

“Restless and inquisitive, Barbara is acutely sensitive to time, irony, the zeitgeist, metaphorical dimensions of filmmaking and nuclear physics, and power dynamics personal and professional. Murphy’s atmospheric, Didionesque portrait of a creatively brilliant and cruelly underestimated ‘permanent outsider’ is exquisitely perceptive and lushly resonant.”
–Booklist

Sophie Kemp, Paradise Logic
(Simon & Schuster)

“I loved this wild, roaming marvel of a debut, acutely aware that I was reading a book completely unlike any other, admiring this voice which metabolizes perennial concerns about love, identity and gender into some of the weirdest and funniest prose imaginable. It’s a privilege to spend time with Sophie Kemp’s singular mind.”
–Megan Nolan

David Pakman, The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America
(Beacon Press)

“Understanding how our political system has become broken in favor of reactionary ignorance is vital for saving our democracy. David Pakman accessibly explains how we got here and offers potential solutions for confronting the ongoing abandonment of critical thinking. In a time when political engagement is more crucial than ever, this is a must-read for every American looking to navigate the future of politics with clarity, purpose, and a commitment to preserving our democracy.”
–Barbara McQuade

Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
(Crown)

“A tremendous achievement in reporting, in narration, in emotional and intellectual understanding. Brian Goldstone’s book will stand with J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground and other works that tell the story of our country by telling the stories of our fellow citizens.”
–James Fallows

Jeanne Carstensen, A Greek Tragedy: One Day A Deadly Shipwreck and the Human Cost of the Humanitarian Crisis
(Atria/One Signal Publishers)

“Syria’s civil war and America’s debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq have forced millions to flee their homes. Thirty-five percent of these are children. Many refugees attempt to reach Europe. In response, Western nations have hardened their hearts, built walls, and reinforced border guards, but desperate families keep trying. Journalist Carstensen follows four subjects in her searing first book…A vivid snapshot of a broken asylum system.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Bob the Drag Queen, Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert
(Gallery Books)

“What if Harriet Tubman came back to life…and became a pop star? In Bob the Drag Queen’s debut novel, the historic abolitionist does just that, forming a hip-hop band with four enslaved people whom she freed to create an album and live show, which tells her story in a new way. Bob’s voice helps bridge those generation gaps, educating readers and imagining Tubman’s future with the same humor and effortless shade displayed on The Traitors.”
–Bustle

Nicholas Binge, Dissolution
(Riverhead)

“If Binge’s well-reviewed previous novel, Ascension (2023), was Lovecraftian, his latest work is straight out of Philip K. Dick….Binge transports Dick’s nightmare landscapes, surrealism, and paranoia to his native United Kingdom, which adds a soupçon of Agatha Christie to the mix. Dissolution, then, is a hat trick of a novel, combining science fiction, mystery, and adventure.”
–Booklist

Elie Mystal, Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws that Are Ruining America
(New Press)

“Elie Mystal offers a searing, deeply analytical but accessible critique of the prevailing legal regimes in the U.S., which are vestiges of the racism and misogyny that define much of our country’s history. Using the wit and insight he has become known for in his writing and commentary, Mystal makes the compelling case that there is a profound disconnect between the laws that we have and the laws that we need and want.”
–Russ Feingold