This year, we asked our contributors, our readers, our current and former interns, and other friends of the Review for their favorite books of the past year. Here’s what they said.
Service by John Tottenham is a novel about a disgruntled, begrudging, malcontent man who works in a bookstore and is also a writer. So immediately you understand why he is disgruntled, begrudging, and malcontent. He is robustly rude to everyone, delivering diatribes on the customers’ vapidity and eviscerating his own brooding arena of envy and failure as well. At first this is entrancing. Soon it becomes too one-note; we seek even the slimmest hint of redemption. But you must persevere—maybe skim the complaining a bit—as the novel eventually becomes a discourse on the vagaries of writing: obstacles, setbacks, successes, tricks of the trade. Pills are involved.
—Nancy Lemann, author of “A Person and a Robot”
Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo (translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood) follows Sara Machina, an architect tasked with drafting a new tower to house convicted criminals—in comfort. The novel troubles staid discourse about crime and punishment in a tone so perfect I realized I’d been waiting for it too long. Querying our capacity to create anything right alongside language and history, representation and reality, Qudan never overplays her hand, nor does she smooth over the rough edges of difference or difficulty via sociological, philosophical, or even narrative retreat. With its subtle lyricism, this book is a masterclass in how to consider the instability of the present without falling into the strict trappings of the topical. I’m still thinking about its dedication to inquiry, existence, and the idiosyncrasies of thought.
—Joseph Earl Thomas, author of “I Got Snipped: Notes after a Vasectomy”
Mike Powell’s New Paltz, New Paltz follows Ben, a New York gossip-mag fact-checker, as he blunders, detached, through the magazine world. For Ben (and maybe for Powell, who once held such a job for Us Weekly), the work of a fact-checker seems to consist of deconstructing narrative into its essentials—the paltry and random moments that together make up Ben’s life. I read Powell’s debut in the midst of doing an intensive fact-check, and steeled myself against the adoption of Ben’s laconic and sort of miserably curious temperament (which I presumed to be a side effect of the profession). Ben’s disposition didn’t stick with me, but the book did; New Paltz, New Paltz is keen and economical—an easy read. “The truth of certain moments,” Powell writes, “can only be attained when the facts are set aside.”
—Hazel Byers, former intern
I always like stories about strange, small towns. This year I read Someone to Watch Over You by Kumi Kimura, translated from the Japanese by Yuki Tejima: a shimmering, unsettling little novel about two people trying to get through each day. A sense of the profound bleakness of an average life pervades the book. But this oppressiveness is cut by instances of sharp, poetic sadness, such as a description of a train briefly held up in the dark after it runs over a “large, soft” animal. It’s the kind of novel that feels like looking out of a window at night.
—Hua Xi, author of “Toilet”
In For an Ecology of Images (translated from the French by Marco Roth), Peter Szendy thinks about the divergent temporalities at work in an image: his uncle Imre Kinszki’s photograph Wing of a Lacewing, which leads him to consider the unspeakably slow evolutionary development of an insect wing, the ephemeral one-day life of the insect, and the instantaneous ferrying of the tens of millions of photos we circulate every day on social media. He thinks about these images in transit through the framework of Western myth, the structure of the mycelium, and the evolution and lifespan of the elephant hawk moth, while avoiding the traps of anthropocentric teleology. This book made me feel wild reverence, joy, and wonder for everything Szendy looks at—like a six-year-old who, having just learned about sharks, corners you to tell you about “the coolest thing in the world.”
—Sara Gilmore, author of “Safe camp”
Garielle Lutz’s Worsted, reprinted by Calamari Archive this year, is a collection of plotless stories that tunes its reader to the moods of a washed-out life. Scenes circle around laundromats, Burger Kings, shitty apartments. I love the precision of Lutz’s sentences, almost machinelike in their craftedness: “You could tell that the waiter—a petulant lollipop of a kid, aspiringly bearded—was intent on sensing something.” Even within the tight confines of the sentence, the words here are so expressive; it’s as if each one is dancing in place, like bright clothes in the window of a well-spun washing machine.
—Charlie Medeiros, reader
My favorite book of the year was Ariane Bankes’s The Dazzling Paget Sisters: The English Twins Who Captivated Literary Europe, a personal history of Bankes’s mother, Celia, who, together with her twin sister, Mamaine, personified literary London of the thirties. It’s also a sweeping social history, full of the people the women knew: the Mitford sisters, George Orwell, Albert Camus. In a time when the contemporary novel feels like a thesis statement on “current events,” or a commentary on social media–trending topics, nonfiction is still a place to find the human heart in conflict with itself.
—Scott McClanahan, author of “Fights!”
This year I read an advance copy of Television by Lauren Rothery, which took me by surprise: at once classic and of the moment, it skips across storylines like a flat stone over a deep lake. Thoughts on success and beauty plausibly shift as we move between the heads of male or female characters: jaded industry people who participate in cheesy blockbuster production by day and then watch Turner Classic Movies at home. High-drama scenes are only as cinematic as the real lives of such types. Mostly I was happy to find a new novelist hitting a stride usually saved for later, with confidence that feels from another, less nervous era.
—Natasha Stagg, author of “Tour Diary, 2008”
Little Lazarus by Michael Bible (released in Europe as Goodbye Hotel) was my favorite novel of 2025. It’s about all of life’s love and pain as told through the story of two fortune-telling tortoises, lonely lovers, a maybe-missing girl, and a man in a seersucker suit at the heart of the mystery. Little Lazarus is a wildly ambitious novel of lyrical beauty. As I’ve come to expect from other Michael Bible novels, the sentences astonish, the story moves, the incredible characters become friends.
—Bud Smith, author of “Skyhawks” and “My Truck Desk”
Hon Lai-Chu’s Mending Bodies is a surreal tale set in a dystopian city that may or may not be Hong Kong, in which married couples are not just legally bound but surgically attached to each other. The narrator, a university student who is writing a dissertation on this phenomenon, ends up getting conjoined to a man she does not love. When the full horror of her situation dawns on her, she must take desperate measures to regain her freedom. Hon’s language, vividly translated by Jacqueline Leung, has a pleasing sharpness and bite.
—Jeremy Tiang, translator of “The Hedgehog” and “Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky”
Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic is often annoying and I love it anyways (how I hope people feel about me). Dark, comic, cathartic, and formally bonkers, this debut novel surprised me more than anything I read this year.
—Whitney Mallett, author of “Meow!”
Overstaying by Ariane Koch, translated from the German by Damion Searls, is the story of a guest who stays too long, rendered as a mad mashup of Robert Walser, Shirley Jackson, Bruno Schulz, and Edward Gorey’s The Doubtful Guest. I fell for this book twice, once when I got my hands on the galley and felt like I was the only person privy to the uncanny emotional geometry of its sentences, which are freighted with lust, terror, boredom, and wild ambivalence, and the second time when I taught it to a group of talented students who helped me unpack the allegory of emigration, asylum, and dispossession that lurks inside the book’s scheme.
—Jonathan Lethem, author of “Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist: Philip K. Dick and Palestine”
Reading Sebastian Castillo’s Fresh, Green Life is like being inside the brain of the world’s most insufferable person. That brain belongs to a man also named Sebastian Castillo, a self-hating adjunct professor and literature snob who is contemplating ending a year of self-imposed isolation, silence, and bodybuilding for the chance to woo his college crush at a former professor’s New Year’s Eve party. Written in the stilted tone of a wannabe Bernhard character, Fresh, Green Life is almost unbearably good at satirizing the philosophy-guzzling, self-improvement-obsessed sensitive young man. However, the book’s second half takes an unexpected turn from the first’s manic monologue that I found satisfying—and maybe even touching? The slim novel is worth picking up if nothing else for the chance to see the word tatterdemalion in print.
—Liam Archacki, intern
Hilary Plum’s novel State Champ has a pulpy, political premise that is complemented by an arresting structure and complex characterization. After the passage of a so-called “heartbeat” law results in the closure of an abortion clinic, Angela, a former employee, holes herself up in the clinic and begins a hunger strike in protest. The protestor-narrator is equally abrasive, self-defeating, and heroic. She tells her story in diary format, beginning on day two: “Anyone who counts day 1 of a hunger strike is not going to make it. You just ate.” Angela’s antagonists are also given humanity even as the book remains unapologetically pro-abortion rights. As I sped toward the finale, I continually weighed what I wanted to happen against what I thought would happen, and wondered what that said about my own political imagination.
—Mark Leidner, author of “Sissy Spacek” and “Business Plan“
I loved Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere, a truly unusual tale of male obsolescence that is, like the best books (like the best men?) brave. It follows a soft-canceled neotranscendentalist college professor through a psychosexual encounter with a real estate agent—what ensues is a heady romp written with moral seriousness and real comedy, like Iris Murdoch soundtracked by Enya. Books can be funny!
—Milo Walls, interviewer, The Art of Nonfiction No. 13 with Maggie Nelson
After withdrawing from the world to “become real through writing,” the unnamed narrator of Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Time of the Novel thinks, “I had written myself into a strange sarcophagus.” I thought of Tove Ditlevsen—childhood is long and narrow like a coffin. With a child’s hunger for first principles, the book writhes inside the desire for deathless beauty with the fluctuating will of someone clearing the falling soil from the lid of her casket. Both crisp and ambient, emphatic, anhedonic, as matte and colorful as its cover art, this is a book I read in a muted daze that felt adequate to a year in which it was unclear if things that I knew mattered really did, when the cold world conspired to make us feel like bitter children. We suffer because we long and fail to join words to the world, I know!—and that’s just part of the problem. But reading Montes’s drama of syntax, I was like, okay, so maybe there’s a chance … though it’s small, fleeting … might still have to throw myself overboard …
—Benjamin Krusling, author of “Drake, in Search of Lost Time”
I read very few new books this year, few enough that it feels misleading to crown one my favorite. But I was ecstatic when one day in August, browsing the shelves at my childhood bookstore, I discovered an English translation, by Oonagh Stransky, of Domenico Starnone’s latest novel, The Old Man by the Sea. Somehow the news of its publication had missed me. I found its elderly narrator, a writer masquerading as a judge, initially mystifying, slightly annoying, difficult to follow—and then suddenly, I was charmed: by his desperate, if misplaced, search for his mother and lost loves in the women who populate the dunes around him; by the awkward and unsubtle ways he coaxes them into his fantasies; by his struggle to animate those fantasies in language without relying on cliché. In the end, I was sad, my sadness heightened by the warm, stale days of late summer, which, like the novel, seemed to be working against the creep of expiration.
—Maya Binyam, advisory editor
In 1987, the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar commanded a giant screen in Times Square to convey a curt message: “This is not America,” superimposed on an outline of the United States. Jaar’s point—that the U.S.’s takeover of the name of its continent is a metaphor for its commercial, productive, and military supremacy over the region, imposed by violence and profiteering—underpins America, América, a book of narrative scholarship by the Yale historian Greg Grandin. Most moving and convincing are its portraits, among others that of Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish priest who made it his life’s mission to push back against the colonial authorities after witnessing a massacre in Cuba, and of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, the Colombian liberal leader assassinated in 1948, whom Grandin uses to narrativize the history of the Marshall Plan. Grandin deploys narrative irony and carefully selected quotations to devastating effect, as well as primary sources like personal diaries, to help us feel the hope and tragedy inherent in our shared past. What emerges is a picture of a particular kind of Latin American humanist internationalism, both inspiring and compelling, that many Americans (in the widest sense) cling to despite a long history of defeat.
—Cristóbal Riego, intern
In Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child (translated by Martin Aitken), we find ourselves in Denmark in 1620, observing a true history unfold—the last years of Christenze Kruckow, who was beheaded on charges of witchcraft in a series of well-known trials. The story is told or rather whispered to us under the cover of night, by a wax baby figurine that Christenze has crafted with care. Christenze, a noblewoman, has chosen a life away from men, preferring to drink red wine and ride horses in solitude or in the company of other women, whose lives revolve around births, deaths, and the passing seasons. Men press into the narrative from the margins—knocking at the door of the birthing chamber or setting rules from a faraway household. The wax child speaks in a series of journal-entry-length chapters and spells jotted down in a hurry: one to get rid of the hiccups, another to exorcise forbidden love for another woman. We watch along as Christenze moves toward her death and, in the words of our unlikely narrator, “the Earth turns slowly into modernity.”
—Elinor Hitt, reader
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