January 14, 2025, 4:34am
Hello, hello, Dear Readers! It’s just about the middle of January, and what a start to the year it has already been, a year already defined, it seems, by its inability to be pinned down, by its chaotic tumult of weather and world affairs alike. For all too many of us, it has already been a time marked by loss, incredulity, and horror. And yet we must go on, must not go too gentle or too soon into the night of the self. We must keep on. And it really does help to have books by your side when the world feels like too much or too little or too who-even-knows.
To that end, I’ve selected no less than twenty-seven new ones out today (and one out last Friday) to consider in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, spanning a truly incredible range of topics and themes. There’s so much to delight in here, so much to ponder, so much to be surprised by from well-loved and new names alike.
I hope these keep you company as the month rolls on. Keep going, and, when you need to pause, let one of these shift the world for you a bit. Be safe and literary, everyone.
*
Aria Aber, Good Girl
(Hogarth Press)
“Good Girl charts with more precision and poetry than any novel I know the heavy inheritance that children of immigrants carry. It is stunning, suspenseful, boldly defiant, and masterfully crafted; I only put this novel down to marvel at its prose.”
–Fatima Farheen Mirza
Bradford Morrow, The Forger’s Requiem
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
“Love is strange. It ennobles some people, makes fools of others, and occasionally leads to murder. In Bradford Morrow’s lovely literary mystery, The Forger’s Daughter, the love of books causes all of the above….The elaborate artistic details that go into a literary forgery is itself a work of art.”
–The New York Times Book Review
Tom Lamont, Going Home
(Knopf)
“[A] fine and spirit-lifting debut novel of friendship, fatherhood, growth and forgiveness. A bluff song of praise to North London, peopled by engaging, fallible characters, and rich in glinting turns of phrase.”
–David Mitchell
Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence
(Riverhead)
“Luminous…the author brilliantly illuminates philosophical insights about the nature of the self, the world, and how silence serves as a conduit between the two, often in elegant, evocative prose….This is stunning.”
–Publishers Weekly
Freda Epum, The Gloomy Girl Variety Show: A Memoir
(Feminist Press)
“In the luminous, formally inventive memoir The Gloomy Girl Variety Show, Freda Epum interrogates ideas of home and safety as a Black woman with mental illness. Epum’s genius is her ability to weave lyric fragments, cultural and political criticism, and her own photographs and art into an incisive, cohesive constellation. This work, like her journey, is ‘both festering and healing.’ I have been waiting for a book like this all my life.”
–Jami Nakamura Lin
Lee Hawkins, I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Discovering My Family’s History Set Me Free
(Amistad Press)
“Hawkins’s memoir is deeply reflective and transparent about his personal story and family history, sharing the love, restrictions, violence, and trauma he experienced throughout his life as a Black man living in a post-civil rights movement world. This work is vitally important and essential to understanding the magnitude of the impact of racism and violence.”
–Library Journal
Maria Zoccola, Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems
(Scribner)
“Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993 brings Helen to life in the twentieth-century American South—Sparta, Tennessee, where she shops at Piggly Wiggly, calls her sister Clytemnestra on the phone…and lists her pregnancy cravings….Zoccola’s use of persona and anachronism are transformative, and the formal daring of these poems, including golden shovels from the Iliad, thrilled me. Helen of Troy, 1993 is the most imaginative debut I’ve read in years.”
–Maggie Smith
Mia S. Willis, the space between men
(Penguin)
“[P]rofound and evocative…Mia S. Willis commands each line with a dazzling attention to language–its failures and its gaps, its lyric potential and holy plainspokenness, its politics and cultural specificities–illuminating the spaces between and within all of us. Ranging from imagistic to cerebral, humorous to heartbreaking, these poems trace a journey to self-understanding and self-permission [and] toward building a self—specifically, a Black, queer self—and learning to ‘not be afraid to birth yourself beautiful.’”
–Morgan Parker
Danielle Legros Georges, Three Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haitian-Congo Story
(Beacon Press)
“As the poet moves us through landscapes lost, discovered, and found again, from Port-au-Prince, Kinshasa, to the banks of the Rio Grande, we discover voices displaced, exiled, and scorned, with love for their shared African roots even as these move from one geography to another. Sweeping in its breadth and historical coverage, Three Leaves, Three Roots is a triumph of poetic quietude in the midst of the chaos that surrounds depictions of Haiti today.”
–Myriam J. A. Chancy
Daniel Black, Isaac’s Song
(Hanover Square Press)
“Isaac’s Song is not just a novel; it is an intimately personal story buried inside a multi-generational saga. It is a detailed account of a journey of self-discovery and a collective oral history. Dr. Daniel Black beautifully chronicles one man’s heroic quest to find the source of his generational trauma, a cure for his pain, and ultimately, himself.”
–Michael Harriot
Tom Ross, Miss Abracadabra
(Deep Vellum)
“Miss Abracadabra: As the World Turns fulfills the challenge and demand Toni Morrison once named for American literature as ‘a non-racist, racialized account of human experience’….Tom Ross accurately recreates on the page a pitch-perfect rendering of American racism narrated and experienced beyond the self-reproducing, self-defeating, limiting, and finally dead-end confines of racism’s psychologically deforming affects and effects.”
–Peter Dimock
Catherine Airey, Confessions
(Mariner Books)
“I was mesmerized from the very first pages of Catherine Airey’s startling debut, Confessions. The story of Maire and Roisin, two Irish sisters living an ocean apart, proceeds with an almost hypnotic power and grace—it has the certainty of fable and the true originality of a powerful new voice in fiction.”
–Tara Conklin
Pagan Kennedy, The Secret History of the Rape Kit
(Knopf Doubleday)
“The Secret History of the Rape Kit is stunning: part thriller, part feminist reclamation, part personal journey, fully a page-turner. How did we not know about Marty Goddard? How have we not recognized her crucial role in establishing rape as an actual crime? I finished this book angry and inspired, but mostly grateful to both Marty Goddard and Pagan Kennedy for their brave and brilliant work.”
–Peggy Orenstein
Caroline Eden, Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Journals
(Bloomsbury)
“In her subterranean kitchen in Edinburgh, Scotland, Eden recreates the flavors of her travels, reconnecting to these far-flung destinations with the comfort of her dog at her side….Cold Kitchen is an invitation to appreciate every morsel of the present moment.”
–BookPage
Manuel Betancourt, Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies
(Catapult)
“Hello Stranger is a thoughtful and fearless exploration of the oft-overlook relationships that matter as much, if not more, than our romantic relationship with our ‘better half.’ With his brilliant examinations and keen observations, Betancourt illustrates what we might discover about ourselves (and others) when we start unpacking these intimate (and sometimes fleeting) relationships through an unfamiliar lens.”
–Zachary Zane
Steven Duong, At the End of the World There Is a Pond: Poems
(Norton)
“At the End of the World There is a Pond is a momentous debut collection and a dazzling tribute to the ambivalence of living. Steven Duong is not the first writer to attend to the apocalyptic tenor of contemporary existence, but he might be the first to do it with language this exuberant, particular, and humorous. These poems delight, surprise, and dive deeply into tricky relational waters, keeping us attuned to a sparkling aliveness even as we chart the true darkness of despair.”
–Gabrielle Bates
Sarah V. Schweig, The Ocean in the Next Room: Poems
(Milkweed)
“‘We are / the kind of animal that bequeaths / love and hatred,’ Sarah Schweig writes. How often do we stand in ruins with that love or that hatred? We carry ruin on our devices. We write poems while the world is lost….The Ocean in the Next Room troubled my sleep, disordered my thinking and made it anew, made me listen to my own troubled breathing, kept me by light. Schweig’s second collection is an astonishing miracle.”
–Ricardo Maldonado
John Rolfe Gardiner, North of Ordinary: Stories (trans. Maria Nicklin)
(Bellevue Press)
“What dazzling stories John Rolfe Gardiner writes. His characters, in the best way, are earthbound, caught in the web of work and school and family, past and present. Each story is a world, perfect and complete, and when I read the last one I marveled that so much wisdom and beauty could be contained in a single volume: North of Ordinary.”
–Margot Livesy
Hannah Stoltenberg, Near Distance (trans. Wendy Harrison Gabrielsen)
(Biblioasis)
“Near Distance tells the tragedy of missed communication and the awkwardness of familial love in a mother/daughter enmeshment. In Karin and Helene, Stoltenberg has created two of the most alive characters I’ve read in some while. With an uncanny grasp on weaving together the past, while keeping sharp focus on the present, Near Distance is a philosophical, disarming and devastatingly true depiction of women alive today—an utterly compelling trip.”
–Elaine Feeney
Graham Norton, Frankie
(Harpervia)
“The new novel by Graham Norton is his best yet! Frankie is about a quiet woman who’s dismissed and disrespected but lives an extraordinary life. Packed with surprises, it’s moving, riveting and enriching. And it’s bound to cement Norton’s reputation not just as a great storyteller but a hugely accomplished writer.”
–Matt Cain
Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life
(Norton)
“Agnes Callard gives us a brilliant and vivid account of what a truly philosophic life could be. Her Socrates is a magnificent figure: uncompromisingly open, brave enough to live life without foundations and to pursue truth at all costs, yet no loner, but a man convinced that thinking is something we must do together. The book is both a challenge and an inspiration.”
–John Ferrari
Michelle Adams, The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North
(FSG)
“It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the federal courts were committed to the pursuit of racial justice. In her mesmerizing new book, Michelle Adams re-creates the landmark case that shattered that commitment. The Containment is a history you have to read to understand the nation we’ve become.”
–Kevin Boyle
Carol Atack, Plato: A Civic Life
(Reaktion Books)
“Philosophy is just the beginning in Carol Atack’s page-turner. From Plato’s own travels and troubles to the strange life and peculiar death of his teacher Socrates, the struggles of his city at the hands of enemies at home and abroad to the efforts of its citizens to make sense of things in an era of unending crisis, this is a gripping account of Classical Athens under siege told through the sharp eyes and shifting ideas of its most notable son.”
–Josephine Quinn
Layne Fargo, The Favorites
(Random House)
“Part Wuthering Heights and part Daisy Jones & The Six, this novel is as brilliantly choreographed as a gold medal performance and will keep you guessing until its last page.”
–Jodi Picoult
Zeinab Badawi, An African History of Africa
(Mariner Books)
“Both a tour d’horizon and a tour de force, marvelously readable and beautifully written. This is a book that should be read by anyone who is interested in Africa, by anyone who thinks they know all they need to know about Africa, and above all by anyone who has no interest in Africa at all. It will transform their views of the continent, its peoples and its histories. I cannot recommend it too strongly or praise it too highly.”
–Sir David Cannadine
Kyle Paoletta, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest
(Pantheon Books)
“A deeply engaging work—superbly written and powerfully researched—American Oasis is destined to play an important role in debates about the future of arid climate survival and the built environment. Paoletta is going on the shelf next to Gretel Ehrlich, Gary Nabhan, Luis Urrea, and other inspiring thinkers who critically consider the West and the complexities of settlement.”
–Raquel Gutiérrez
Kurt Gray, Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground
(Pantheon Books)
“Outrage has become our culture’s poorly chosen wallpaper: it’s ugly, everywhere, and all we can do is get used to it. In this brilliant book, Kurt Gray challenges us to think differently. A leader in the science of morality, Gray convincingly paints a new picture of outrage, as a response to harm. This new lens can revolutionize our perception of conflict and what we can do about it….[B]y applying more curiosity, we can rediscover common values.”
–Jamil Zaki
