This is what the Defector staff read and enjoyed in 2025.
The Trials of Gabriel Ward Murder Mystery Series, by Sally Smith
Thanks to Wake Up Dead Man, I have reentered my murder mystery phase, which hasn’t been this strong since I was in middle school and checking out volumes from the Bantam Books Agatha Christie Mystery Collection five at a time. But I’m not sure that I’m exactly looking for the same thing I was then: murder mystery as just murder mystery, something quick and snappy to sandwich in between A Song of Ice and Fire volumes, Hercule Poirot as the certainly not French detective with his little gray cells.
But I confess that for all of my Christie evangelism, I have been very endeared to the Benoit Blanc style of more modern murder mystery that is inclined to center and engage a bit moralistically with social commentary. At Brandy’s recommendation, I devoured the Pentecost and Parker series by Stephen Spotswood, which pretty much perfectly scratches that itch, and despite the differences in style, timeframe, and locale, I have similarly delighted in the Trials of Gabriel Ward series by Sally Smith.
The series is set in early 1900s England, specifically in the Inner Temple, which is one of those institutions that seem like it can’t possibly be real but somehow is, and that’s why some British people are Like That. As it turns out, all barristers in England and Wales must belong to their own special little Inn of Court, which is part professional association and part boarding school, and Sir Gabriel Ward KC is one such barrister. The concept is hilariously niche, and Smith—who was a practicing lawyer and member of the Inner Temple herself—commits fully to engaging with her setting.
If you’re inclined toward murder mysteries at all, I highly recommend giving the series a go. Smith’s narration is charmingly removed, which lends greatly to the lawyerly effect and pairs well with her reserved, reluctant detective, but doesn’t undermine any of the books’ heart or humor. The series itself is also formally clever: Each book so far pairs Ward’s Inner Temple investigation with a parallel legal court case, and both deftly flesh out Ward’s own character, which I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did. I personally found the mystery in the first book to be better than that of the second (I found the answer, if not the finer details, a bit obvious in the second, though your mileage my vary), but the second book has one of my favorite literary characterizations of a cat that I’ve ever read. Delphinium, you are my queen.
My other considerations for this blurb were Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, which had me hootin’ and hollerin’ to start but lost contention in its final 200 pages, and Consent by Jill Ciment, which was profound and well-worth reading, but let down, unfairly, by my own expectations of what it would address, and how. Anyway, sometimes it is pleasurable to remember what it was like to be 14 again, and the singular pleasure of a book—or two!—that you can crush in an afternoon. - Kathryn Xu
Stoner, by John Williams
I was looking into a future where, for a time, I would be without television, video games, or a home office. Also—and the timing on this one was tough—I had resolved to quit my Kindle, for reasons of wanting to get out of business with Amazon. English-language books would be hard to come by for a while.
So I needed some paperbacks, a small library I could jam into a suitcase. This is not a new complexity of our modern age. Used to be that if you were going someplace and wanted to read while there, you would have to bring some physical books. It wasn't a bad deal, we all managed it, and in fact we did a lot more reading back then. Also we used maps to get there, and we listened to the radio. But I'm getting sidetracked.
I was pretty broke and out of time, so I needed some good luck during a last-minute trip to the local bookshop. I found some cool things: a hard-used copy of Slow Horses, a thin and clean George Steiner, a never-opened Wolf Hall, two Colson Whiteheads. I even scored an Eric Ambler. The best find of all was Stoner, by John Williams.
The novel follows the life and career of William Stoner, a farm lad who surveys an English course at the state university and falls deeply in love with literature. That sounds boring. It's an intense book, I swear, and Williams is at his propulsive best: Stoner takes the lit course on page 10; before the bottom of page 14, he has been transformed so dramatically that he no longer precisely inhabits himself. Williams devotes none of the book to convincing the reader of, like, the sublime powers of poesis; the story isn't about literature or language. It's about a person who changes, does things, and learns what they can and cannot do. Shit, that also sounds really boring.
Listen, man, it's a surprising and challenging book. Stoner studies and matures, he enters academia, he makes friends and marries, he has a kid. His vibrant belonging in his life's work is a sort of heartbreaking contrast with the docility with which he moves through the other parts of his life. The parts of the story that bowled me over, that caused me to lower the book and to sit and stare, were moments when Williams allows his character's out-of-office passivity to develop consequences that another author might prevent, like the pen of God descending from the clouds to bless the proceedings with some flash of heroism or simple good fortune. Though Stoner is basically a good man, Williams is not willing to cheat on his behalf. The honesty in the book is, at times, downright astonishing, and deeply fucking painful.
I picked up Stoner because I loved Butcher's Crossing, a Western novel so vivid and unflinching that it caused me to rethink my feelings about Cormac McCarthy, who I now view as a supremely talented flim-flamist. Stoner has that same quality of imparting on the reader a sense of having accessed some huge-seeming truth, gnarly and tragic, yes, but so clear and nourishing that encountering it feels almost like plunging into cool water. John Williams had moves, man. - Chris Thompson
This Way Up, by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman
Nerd-lit is not an official genre as we know it, but This Way Up by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman comes close, because as "Map Men" they have been a YouTube hit for years and finally distilled their best stuff therein (example: "Weird maps win elections - Gerrymandering explained"). It is basically "Monty Python Does Cartography," which is too weird not to want to absorb, and the knowledge that it will win no awards while providing occasional amusement is in some ways the ideal book for our short attention spans. Learning who owns Antarctica is not interesting in and of itself, but finding out that it's nearly everyone in the way they explain it is exactly that. - Ray Ratto
The Children’s Bach, by Helen Garner
The Australian writer Helen Garner practices many forms—novel, diary, memoir, non-fiction—but a certain slipperiness binds all her work. Writing about her own life, she is riddled with self-doubt. She retreats and redoubles, never quite sure of her worth. That Garner exposes herself on the page this way can seem like an ironic act of bravery. Her novels find her characters in equally precarious places, headed for something new and unfamiliar, their grasp on things beginning to slip. In The Children’s Bach, those characters are Dexter and Athena, a couple whose sleepy equilibrium is upset when an old friend of Dexter’s comes back into his life.
Garner’s gift is for crisp and lucid prose that can still leave a reader feeling jittery. Take The Children’s Bach’s first paragraphs, which I just had to linger over. She opens describing a photo of the poet Alfred Tennyson and his family. Slowly, the portrait turns menacing. Garner notices one son’s “weak and rueful expression,” the other son’s distance from the rest, the gaunt face and sunken eyes of Tennyson’s wife. Quietly, she sets up the domestic drama she’ll soon deliver: “Dexter stuck this picture up on the kitchen wall, between the stove and the bathroom door. It is torn and stained, and coated with a sheen of splattered cooking grease. It has been there a long time. It is always peeling off, swinging sideways, dangling by one corner. But always, before it quite falls off the wall, someone saves it, someone sticks it back.” - Maitreyi Anantharaman
No Logo, by Naomi Klein
I read No Logo when I was in college, but I was an idiot then and I don't remember anything in it except Nike = bad. I decided to reread it this year and was blown away by Klein's prescient read on the ways corporations would encroach on media, art, and lives. There's a part where she talks about how businesses are increasingly interested in selling stories rather than products, and it reminded me of Megan Greenwell's book, which looks at the next evolution of that idea: private equity as product. I realized that so much of the way I think about economics and media is influenced by Klein's thinking, and it was exciting to read the source text.
Sometimes, when I read something from the past that feels so contemporary, I'm overwhelmed with despair about the moral arc of the universe, and whether things can ever really get better. But sometimes, reading about ghouls complaining about identity politics 40 years ago puts the cancel-culture scolds into perspective. These people aren't firebrands bravely standing up to encroaching illiberalism; they're the same old jokers dressed up in new clothes, and they're scared. - Alex Sujong Laughlin
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
In speculative fiction, you’ve got worldbuilding, and you’ve got plot. Most authors can’t do both well. Robert Jordan, Harry Turtledove? Worldbuilders. David Weber, Dan Simmons? Plotters. (Brandon Sanderson is bad at both.) It is a rare gift to be able to both conceive of a setting that is plausible, compelling, and constantly astonishing, and also set a genuinely good story in it.
Children of Time has an immediately grabby setup: A planet where genetically altered jumping spiders evolved human-like levels of intelligence, with no competitors. It’s a fascinating sandbox to play around in: What might non-human sapience even look like? How could a human author portray it in words? What would the spiders’ world be like? Their technology? How would they go to war? What would be threats to them? Right around the time they started using domesticated ant colonies as a kind of analog computer, I was hooting and hollering.
But Tchaikovsky nails the landing by introducing a second threaded narrative. Earth has become unlivable, and the last humans (who long ago created the uplifted spiders) are aboard a generation ship that’s gradually breaking down. Their last hope of a habitable planet is—you guessed it—the spider world. Throw in a glitchy, insane AI that’s trying to kill the humans, and which the spiders worship as their god, and it’s all building toward inevitable showdown between two races, both of which the author has engendered sympathy toward, but one of which is clearly more deserving of survival.
Perfect setup, perfect follow-through, perfect ending. Tchaikovsky would go on to write sequels with diminishing but still substantial returns (smart octopus planet; smart raven planet), but Children of Time is like lightning striking twice. - Barry Petchesky
The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
I guess I will only pop up in this roundup in years where I read Edith Wharton, because nothing can possibly be better than an Edith Wharton novel. Nobody is better at turning central truths about being alive into these precisely constructed narratives that just build and build into some of the best writing ever produced. I'll see you here in 2027 when after I finally get to Ethan Frome. - Tom Ley
The World As I Found It, by Bruce Duffy
In late spring, I saw a friend for the first time in months after he'd been driven to near-madness by a PhD process apparently spent questioning the foundations of biology. He was just getting his head back above water; we were talking about Benjamin Labatut. The Chilean writer's fictionalized biographies of science's titans, men driven to the same frenzy that my friend had glimpsed, portrays the harrowing cost of shaking the tree of science (particularly When We Cease to Understand the World) in a fairly stunning way, even if the prose can be slightly overcooked from time to time. It's historical metafiction, writing that dramatizes the internal turmoil of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. I wondered if this was a Labatutian innovation. I told him I'd like to read something in the Labatut style, but about a different field than physics. He recommended Bruce Duffy's The World As I Found It.
Duffy's 1987 opus follows three of the most influential philosophers of the turn of the last century: Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and, most centrally of all, Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is a tome of incredible scope, encompassing two World Wars, innumerable births and deaths, some of the most formative struggles over the theory of knowledge, and three detailed biographies of three thinkers who wrested philosophy away from its gnarled predecessors and into its modern form. Detailed, yes, but also lived in. We see the world through each of their eyes, and see the ways their variously stifled upbringings sowed the seeds of their eventually revolutionary ways of thinking. We see their personal triumphs and devastations: Russell's imprisonment for protesting the First World War, Moore's fear of talking to women, and Wittgenstein's retreats from the burden of society, first in the Norwegian woods and then in a small German backwater. There is a commitment not to judging any of the protagonists but to understanding them.
That extends from their personal lives to their intellectual ones. Duffy does not take sides as he shows the intellectual sutures and schisms connecting and dividing the works of all three philosophers. Wittgenstein is drawn in particularly great detail, a genius riven by the contradictions and pains of his own life as well as the substance of his very genius. He grew up stifled by his father and devastated by the death of his brother, forcing him into the unenviable position of carrying forth a legacy he never wanted to deal with. Duffy writes him with a care and delicacy, and I was so sad when the book ended. Not sad enough to seek out the primary source text and actually read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but I did read The MANIAC afterward and it didn't hit nearly as hard. - Patrick Redford
Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess Of Powers, by Cheryl Misak
Rigorous yet fun biography of one of the craziest brains ever, who made big advances in philosophy, math, and economics before dying at 26. Basically, as you read it, this young dude keeps meeting all the most famous minds of the Western world, and they all almost instantly realize he's smarter than them. Ramsey's reputation still lags way behind his influence but this book makes great efforts to correct that. It evokes a lovely sense of right time, right place: He was let loose on disciplines young enough that he could write a single paper and birth a whole-ass subfield that endures today. It's difficult to find an intellectual history of a philosopher that operates at the right level of generality for me—often they're either zoomed too far out, or too caught up in the weeds—but Misak strikes the ideal balance, contextualizing Ramsey's broad genius and inviting subject-area specialists to write little inset features about his most important ideas. Also a very dishy book, with a revolving door of colorful Cambridge and Bloomsbury types living like dirtbags. Great flavor on what it's like to hang out with Wittgenstein (really not a great hang). And through it all, Ramsey just seemed like such a sweetie. R.I.P. - Giri Nathan
Pacific, by Simon Winchester
If you see any book on sale with the words “by Simon Winchester” along the spine, buy it. Don’t question it. Just buy it. I’m going to use Pacific as an example here, because Winchester manages to tell the story of the Pacific Ocean, a rather expansive subject, via 10 fascinating stories that took place in its waters. You’ll learn that modern scientists regard the year 1950, not the calendar year 0, as the year when modern history began. You’ll learn that this is because the hydrogen bomb tests that America conducted in the Pacific that year spread so much radioactive fallout worldwide that it rendered any carbon dating attempts past that year unreliable. You’ll also learn that we REALLY fucked over the Marshall Islands in the process, too. Killer book. - Drew Magary
The Power Broker, by Robert Caro
Yeah, that’s right. I read a big book. Please hold your applause until the end.
I’d known for a long time that The Power Broker—the story of urban planner Robert Moses and his Machiavellian tactics for making New York more friendly to cars and more hostile to minorities—was the book for anyone who wanted to act like they knew anything about the politics of New York City. What I didn’t know until I began was just how much of a frickin’ page-turner it is. Robert Caro’s reputation as a biographer is built on his exhaustive, obsessive research, but this tome is in no way just a regurgitation of facts. The former Newsday reporter never takes your attention for granted, constantly justifying your continued investment in the Great Builder and the bodies who revolve around him. The Power Broker is filled with juicy drama and conflict, but it’s an enduring classic in large part because Caro doesn’t take himself out of the equation. He’s filled with tangible disgust at the negligence of the most prominent newspapers, like the Times, that covered Moses during his reign. He’s venomous about the way public transit infrastructure was allowed to crumble because it was useful to poor people. And he pulls no punches in laying out just how stupid it was that New York invested in all this “progress” only for everyone’s—even the rich man’s—commute to be the most miserable part of their day. The Power Broker is explosive and cathartic, and yet it explains everything so clearly even when it’s dripping with disdain. I wish Robert Moses were still alive today, so I could give him the middle finger. Or maybe just throw this four-pound book at his racist mug. - Lauren Theisen
"What Made the Irish Famine So Deadly," by Fintan O'Toole
The greatest thing I read this year was somebody else writing about a great thing they read this year: The Irish writer Fintan O’Toole’s review of Padraix X. Scanlan’s book, Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine. The piece ran in the New Yorker’s March 17, 2025 issue. Yeah, St. Patrick’s Day.
The book mulls the hows and whys of what the Irish called An Gorta Mór in Gaelic, or the Great Hunger. Potato crops all over Europe were blighted at the same time, but the impact was far deadlier in Ireland. Spoiler alert: The Brits are evil.
All my grandparents were Irish immigrants and I get more into my roots by the year. Mainly that means watching lots of Gaelic football and hurling and babbling lots about the evil Brits. But I’ve visited Ireland several times as everybody should and eventually realized at some point that bashing the imperialist oppressors is more an Irish-American pastime than it is for the folks who live there. Scanlan’s Canadian, and has made a career out of righteous and scholarly Brit-bashing. But O’Toole’s a “real” Irish guy, born in Dublin, and his strong stamp of approval for the book make me feel better about my own Anglophobic proselytizing. There’s just so much in O’Toole’s piece to fuel such hate.
Some horrific stats from the genocidal famine, the impact of which was intensified by the evil Brits' oppression and persecution of the indigenous people: “Only about one in three people born in Ireland in the early eighteen-thirties would die at home of old age.” The other two-thirds died in the famine or left the country. According to O’Toole, even though Ireland has experienced a slight population boom in recent decades, “the island has a million fewer inhabitants than it had in 1841.”
O’Toole includes contemporaneous takes on the evil Brits, like this verse from 1847 from Oscar Wilde’s mother, Jane: “But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses, / From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses, / A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand, / And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.”
It's as if the Irish have a way with words... - Dave McKenna
The Ladies' Paradise, by Émile Zola
If you just read it in passing, you wouldn't know that Émile Zola's classic Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise in English) was set in 1860s France. When it opens, the newly orphaned Denise, Pépé, and Jean have arrived in Paris, hoping to move in with their uncle. But their uncle is going through his own difficulties, with his drapery shop losing business to the nearby Ladies’ Paradise, a massive dazzling department store that offers an array of fabrics in seemingly every cut imaginable. In fact, a quick tour of Uncle Baudu's neighborhood finds that a lot of the neighborhood stores are falling behind the Ladies' Paradise, and fear they will soon be forced to close as the massive department store manages to offer more selection in an environment designed to sell, sell, sell. It's doubtful anyone would think of Amazon (and, before that, Walmart) as dazzling, but the similarities are impossible to ignore.
Like so many great novels, the plot is a love story about Denise charming the man behind The Ladies’ Paradise, Octave Mouret. But it wasn't the love story that captured me. It was the eerily similar figure that Mouret and Denise cut as they moved through 1860s Paris. The way Mouret used his wealth and power to hobnob with the highest echelons of Parisian society and then employ those connections to make even better business for his growing empire. Meanwhile, Denise tries to find work in a smaller shop to help earn her keep with her uncle, but nobody has work to offer her, forcing her to get a job at The Ladies’ Paradise—which still earns the ire of her uncle. At her new job, she's mocked by her new coworkers for not fitting in. It might be prose originally crafted in French more than a century ago, but the angst, pressure, and lack of options, none of them good, could be a story from today.
You can still visit the inspiration for The Ladies’ Paradise, Le Bon Marché, one of the first department stores in the world and one of the most luxurious department stores in Paris. I still think about how I felt the first time I stepped in the store, in awe of its glamour and luxury, after a friend and I spent several minutes gawking at its Christmas-themed holiday windows, which were so elaborate they seemed more like plays in miniature than pieces of commerce designed to sell, sell, sell. Except that is what they were, and they worked. I went inside and bought a purse.
This year, around the holidays, I found myself in Arkansas, the home of Walmart, and inside its version of a membership wholesale store, Sam's Club. It could not have been more different than Le Bon Marché: all fluorescent lighting, garish signs, and plain boxes piled sky high. And yet, those prices! They were so low! Maybe I do need a Samsonite tote bag! It had the exact same effect as Le Bon Marché.
I still remain unsure what to make of how much Zola's words remain prescient of the present-day United States, but they have in some ways helped me understand what is happening. We tell ourselves our observations, our battles, our obstacles are novel, special to us and our generation. Almost always, they are not. Big business destroying small, beloved neighborhood businesses has been a problem for quite a while, and nothing captures that self-fulfilling prophecy more than The Ladies’ Paradise. - Diana Moskovitz
East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
It's a fundamental truth that your tastes change. This is why I am a big proponent of quitting in the middle of a book. If something that you have on good authority is great does not hook you, is not holding your attention, that doesn't necessarily mean that you don't like it or it doesn't work for you. It only means it isn't working for you at that moment. Maybe later, at a different moment, it will work wonders.
This is what happened to me with East of Eden, John Steinbeck's gorgeous multi-generational saga set in Southern California. I have tried to read East of Eden perhaps every year for more than a dozen years. I started trying to read it in college. I've moved this unread copy of East of Eden with me across the country, into new homes, and new phases of life, never making it past the first few sentences. I just never really wanted it the way I think you should hunger for a book of that size.
But this summer, it all fell into place. I opened the book randomly in June and then couldn't get enough of it. I read it at bars and on the bus. I carried it around even though it was heavy and large, because of the simplicity of the language and the breadth of the story. To create a whole world the way Steinbeck did, to make it breathe and ache and dry up, is the goal of any novelist. There's heartache in that book that I think I will be able to call up at will any time I think of it from now on. - Kelsey McKinney
The Unseen, by Nanni Balestrini
Part of the “fun” of the year-end best-of enterprise is the perspective it affords on whatever it was you were on about over the previous 12 months. I was under no illusions on whether I was “having a blast” or not in 2025, but going back over the books I read confirmed it. My list was split pretty cleanly in thirds, with the largest of those being sports-related books I read for the Squawkin’ Sports reading series I do with Patrick Sauer in Brooklyn, and roughly equal portions divided between the little genre treats I give myself (three more Eric Ambler novels, all delightful, are the highlight here) and novels about people living in and through moments of societal decay/collapse/defeat. There’s a decent amount of overlap there, given how much of recent American history fits under the “societal decay/collapse/defeat” heading; Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, both of which I read this year, are absolutely at the dead center of the latter two categories.
Nanni Balestrini’s The Unseen fits most clearly into the third tranche. The author was an artist and activist in Italy, making variously weird works in different genres before settling into writing fiction in the 1970s. The Unseen, which he wrote in 1989, is a chronicle of life as an activist during Italy’s chaotic Years of Lead in the 1970s, told from the perspective of a student radical who becomes part of the autonomia movement. It’s the story of a life spent in refusal and revolt, in a fractious moment when a wobbly government found its purpose in punishing those who refused and revolted, told both backward and forward in vivid, unpunctuated paragraphs. This makes it sound like a difficult read, but it is anything but: The timelines converge upon each other with an uncanny tension, as the success and failure of that movement’s various squats, pirate radio stations, and factory actions bear down upon the protagonist’s experience in the brutal prison system of a state that is collapsing less because of any principled left-wing resistance than under the weight of its own cynicism.
Nothing really implodes or ends, of course. It just gets dumber, and slower.
Along the way, Balestrini finds the details that matter most—in the dusty offices of the era’s dying labor movement; in the way the movement’s women calling out their male counterparts for failing to walk their high-minded talk; in the rioters, who had just seized control of a federal prison, pulling together to offer three distinct pasta offerings to their comrades until the truncheons finally fall. The translation, by Liz Heron, is urgent and colloquial and strange around the edges in the right ways. The story is as much of a bummer as it has to be, but no more so. It’s a story about resistance, and how it works, and where it ends. I read it for the same reason I kept going back to other stuff from and about the 1970s in 2025, which was to be reminded that it has been dark before, and that there are many ways to refuse that darkness, and that nothing really ever ends. “That period bequeaths us only an imperative,” Balestrini told Rachel Kushner in 2016. “That we need to change the world, and that this is possible, necessary, and urgent—even if we don’t immediately manage to realize it as we’d like.” - David Roth
Margery Kempe, by Robert Glück
I don’t exactly remember how exactly I finally came to pick up Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe, but when I read it, I was overcome by that particular wave of envy, fury, and bliss that arrives when you read a book that you know you should have read a long, long time ago. The book, which was first published in 1994, was reissued in 2020, when I think I saw some writers I admire posting about it. But Margery Kempe, to me, suffered from the same problem as the 2007 thriller Michael Clayton. I haven’t heard of that guy! So why would I read the book?
Unlike Michael Clayton, Margery Kempe was a real person, a Catholic mystic born in 1373 who dictated The Book of Margery Kempe, which many consider to be the first autobiography in English. Glück’s Margery Kempe is a retelling of this autobiography, which concerns Margery’s obsession with a twink-like Jesus, woven together with Glück’s own obsession with a Jesus-like twink. It is an uncategorizable book for whom horniness serves as a structural backbone. In an interview, Glück described the book as “a collaboration with Margery. The sentence in that book is half hers.” Indeed, the prose is strange and downright mystical and unrelenting; there is no single boring sentence in the book. For example: “One woman became a man when he jumped over an irrigation ditch and his cunt dropped inside out: gender is the extent we go to in order to be loved.” In moments like these, I found myself baffled and yet profoundly moved, perhaps the closest I will come to the experience of a mystic. What else could you want from a book? - Sabrina Imbler
Books From Seven Stories Press
I read a lot of books over the course of a year. I don’t keep track, but generally it’s somewhere north of 100. I’m not saying this to brag, but because it’s comparatively easy for me to read a lot: I don’t have kids, I have one full-time job, I don’t use TikTok, and I am not some kind of pervert gamer. Still, people often ask me how I do it, and the answer is that I am constantly reading things I will forget in short order. I can happily gobble up a five-part mystery series over the course of a few days and, two weeks later, be unable to recount who was revealed to be the killer in any of them. They make me happy in the moment, and keep me off my phone, so this is a satisfying arrangement.
Of course, sometimes you want something that will leave an impression. Rather than pick one title for my best of 2025, I’m going to tell you where I turn when I want to read a book that I will invariably describe as the best thing I’ve read in forever: Seven Stories Press. You can scroll through their catalog and basically pick titles at random. Heard all the girls are raving about Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men? They’ve just re-issued her witty, gender-bending novel Orlanda, which is as good or better. Eye of the Monkey, written by Hungarian poet Krisztina Tóth and translated by Ottilie Mulzet, turned my brain inside out. They’ve got an Annie Ernaux boxed set. They have Sad Tiger, which Annie Ernaux said “everyone should read.” They have never let me down. - Brandy Jensen
