In the New Year

Sun on my face and the train slips

into the tunnel. Dim reflection confronts.

Perhaps I am lacking in something substantial

like iron, or virtue. How easy it is to hurt

someone, how hard to face what comes after.

My face, strangely lit, in the bathroom

mirror. Surrounded by friends, I felt a queasy

aloneness, didn’t know whose lap to cry into.

Someone spat out an olive pit. Someone tore

streamers off the wall. I distorted

through the stemmed glass. Already exhausted

in this angular year, where I hover

like a stranger to my own life.

No resolution in any of it.

Natasha Rao (2021)

For the past few weeks, I have been spending my downtime at work scouring publishing catalogs, magazine lists, Net Galley, reddit threads, etc to find books that are coming out in 2025. Of the ones I discovered, these are the ones I’m most excited about. I’ve also included some backlisted books in the mix too. Feel free to respond with books you’re hoping to read this year. <3

Fiction

• The Seers - Sulaiman Addonia (out in April)

• Perfection - Vincenzo Latronico (out in March)

• Paradise Logic - Sophie Kemp (out in March)

• On the Clock - Claire Baglin (out in March)

• Fish Tales - Nettie Jones (originally pubbed in 1983, getting re-released in April)

• Lonely Crowds - Stephanie Wambugu (out in July)

• Scaffolding - Lauren Elkin (2024)

• States of Emergency - Chris Knapp (2024)

• Beloved - Toni Morrison (1987)

• First Love - Gwendolyn Riley (2022)

• Oreo - Fran Ross (1974)

Poetry

• New Life - Ana Božičevic (2023)

• The Other Life - Henri Cole (out in July)

• […] - Fady Joudah (2024)

• Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season - Forough Farrokhzad (1973)

• Notebook of a Return to My Native Land - Aimé Césaire (1987)
  

Nonfiction

• Philosophy of the Tourist - Hiroki Azuma (2023)

• Mysticism - Simon Critchely (2024)

• This Fiction Called Nigeria - Adewale Maja-Pearce (2024)

• The Feminist and the Sex Offender - Judith Levine and Erica Meiners (2020)

• Cruel Optimism - Lauren Berlant (2011)

• Inventions of a Present - Frederic Jameson (2024)

• The Years - Annie Ernaux (2008)