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This year, we asked our contributors, our readers, our current and former interns, and other friends of the <\/em>Review for their favorite books of the past year. Here\u2019s what they said.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Service<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019 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\u2014maybe skim the complaining a bit\u2014as the novel eventually becomes a discourse on the vagaries of writing: obstacles, setbacks, successes, tricks of the trade. Pills are involved. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014<\/span>Nancy Lemann, author of \u201c<\/b>A Person and a Robot<\/b><\/a>\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rie Qudan\u2019s <\/span>Sympathy Tower Tokyo<\/span><\/i> (translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood) follows Sara Machina, an architect tasked with drafting a new tower to house convicted criminals\u2014in comfort. The novel troubles staid discourse about crime and punishment in a tone so perfect I realized I\u2019d 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\u2019m still thinking about its dedication to inquiry, existence, and the idiosyncrasies of thought. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Joseph Earl Thomas, author of \u201c<\/b>I Got Snipped: Notes after a Vasectomy<\/b><\/a>\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Mike Powell\u2019s <\/span>New Paltz, New Paltz<\/span><\/i> 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 <\/span>Us Weekly<\/span><\/i>), the work of a fact-checker seems to consist of deconstructing narrative into its<\/span> essentials\u2014the paltry and random moments that together make up Ben\u2019s life. I read Powell\u2019s debut in the midst of doing an intensive fact-check, and steeled myself against the adoption of Ben\u2019s laconic and sort of miserably curious temperament (which I presumed to be a side effect of the profession). Ben\u2019s disposition didn\u2019t stick with me, but the book did; <\/span>New Paltz, New Paltz<\/span><\/i> is keen and economical\u2014an easy read. \u201cThe truth of certain moments,\u201d Powell writes, \u201ccan only be attained when the facts are set aside.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Hazel Byers, former intern<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I always like stories about strange, small towns. This year I read <\/span>Someone to Watch Over You<\/span><\/i> 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 \u201clarge, soft\u201d animal. It\u2019s the kind of novel that feels like looking out of a window at night. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Hua Xi, author of \u201c<\/b>Toilet<\/b><\/a>\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In For an Ecology of Images<\/em> (translated from the French by Marco Roth), Peter Szendy thinks about the divergent temporalities at work in an image: his uncle Imre Kinszki\u2019s photograph Wing of a Lacewing<\/em>, 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\u2014like a six-year-old who, having just learned about sharks, corners you to tell you about \u201cthe coolest thing in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014Sara Gilmore, author of \u201cSafe camp<\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Garielle Lutz\u2019s <\/span>Worsted<\/span><\/i>, 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\u2019s sentences, almost machinelike in their craftedness: \u201cYou could tell that the waiter\u2014a petulant lollipop of a kid, aspiringly bearded\u2014was intent on sensing something.\u201d Even within the tight confines of the sentence, the words here are so expressive; it\u2019s as if each one is dancing in place, like bright clothes in the window of a well-spun washing machine. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Charlie Medeiros, reader<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n My favorite book of the year was Ariane Bankes\u2019s <\/span>The Dazzling Paget Sisters: The English Twins Who Captivated Literary Europe<\/span><\/i>, a personal history of Bankes\u2019s mother, Celia, who, together with her twin sister, Mamaine, personified literary London of the thirties. It\u2019s 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 \u201ccurrent events,\u201d or a commentary on social media\u2013trending topics, nonfiction is still a place to find the human heart in conflict with itself. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Scott McClanahan, author of \u201c<\/b>Fights!<\/b><\/a>\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n This year I read an advance copy of Television<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n \u2014Natasha Stagg, author of \u201cTour Diary, 2008<\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Little Lazarus<\/span><\/i> by Michael Bible (released in Europe as <\/span>Goodbye Hotel<\/span><\/i>) was my favorite novel of 2025. It\u2019s about all of life\u2019s 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. <\/span>Little Lazarus<\/span><\/i> is a wildly ambitious novel of lyrical beauty. As I\u2019ve come to expect from other Michael Bible novels, the sentences astonish, the story moves, the incredible characters become friends. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Bud Smith, author of “Skyhawks<\/a>” and \u201c<\/b>My Truck Desk<\/b><\/a>\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u200b\u200bHon Lai-Chu’s <\/span>Mending Bodies<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019s language, vividly translated by Jacqueline Leung, has a pleasing sharpness and bite. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Jeremy Tiang, translator of “The Hedgehog<\/a>” and \u201c<\/b>Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky<\/b><\/a>\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sophie Kemp\u2019s<\/span> Paradise Logic <\/span><\/i>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. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Whitney Mallett, author of \u201cMeow<\/a>!\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Overstaying<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019s <\/span>The Doubtful Guest<\/span><\/i>. 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\u2019s scheme. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Jonathan Lethem, author of \u201c<\/b>Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist: Philip K. Dick and Palestine<\/b><\/a>\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Reading Sebastian Castillo\u2019s <\/span>Fresh, Green Life<\/span><\/i> is like being inside the brain of the world\u2019s 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\u2019s New Year\u2019s Eve party. Written in the stilted tone of a wannabe Bernhard character, <\/span>Fresh, Green Life<\/span><\/i> is almost unbearably good at satirizing the philosophy-guzzling, self-improvement-obsessed sensitive young man. However, the book\u2019s second half takes an unexpected turn from the first\u2019s manic monologue that I found satisfying\u2014and maybe even touching? The slim novel is worth picking up if nothing else for the chance to see the word <\/span>tatterdemalion<\/span><\/i> in print. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Liam Archacki, intern<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hilary Plum\u2019s novel <\/span>State Champ <\/span><\/i>has a pulpy, political premise that is complemented by an arresting structure and complex characterization. After the passage of a so-called \u201cheartbeat\u201d 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: \u201cAnyone who counts day 1 of a hunger strike is not going to make it. You just ate.\u201d Angela\u2019s 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. <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Mark Leidner, author of \u201c<\/b>Sissy Spacek<\/b><\/a>\u201d and “Business Plan<\/a>“<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I <\/span>loved Makenna Goodman\u2019s Helen of Nowhere<\/em>, 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\u2014what ensues is a heady romp written with moral seriousness and real comedy, like Iris Murdoch soundtracked by Enya. Books can be funny! <\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Milo Walls, interviewer, The Art of Nonfiction No. 13<\/a> with Maggie Nelson<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n