*My* Great 2025 Book Preview, Pt. II: Fiction, Poetry, and Belles-Lettres
where the real action is... and where the real sense of inertia is, too
2025 in … Fiction (New)
What goes here are books that either a) belong to genres that also double as marketing categories (horror, romance, science fiction, etc.) (in which case we’re hoping for a rich and interesting plot written in language that at least doesn’t actively hurt) or b) belong to genres that don’t double as marketing categories (“old person looks back at life”; “siblings are forced to reckon with this or that”; “people do a bad thing and later feel bad about it”; “panoramic overview of X or Y society”; “any of several varieties of experiment”). If b), we can hope that the book is written in exquisite prose, prose of the sort that gets into things so precisely that it alters your perception like a great drug, because said book sure isn’t getting by on plot. When books of type b) go well, it can look like a range of things: anywhere from Henry James’s masterpieces to Samuel Beckett’s to one of those Dalkey Archive novels where a Mauritanian tax collector meditates on his own fictitiousness for 267 numbered paragraphs. When books of type a) go well, you have some or all of the satisfactions of books of type b), plus lasers/a murder/a city that has run afoul of the laws of physics/bodices ripping. When books of either type go badly, you get no satisfactions at all.