To start the new year, New Yorker writers look back on the latter, sifting through the vast array of books they encountered in 2025 to identify the most prominent events. This is the second part in a series of their recommendations (read the first part). Here), which will continue in the coming weeks. Stay tuned, but in the meantime, if you want to add to your stack of books worth reading, you can always check out the magazine's annual list. best new games of the year.
Out of my league
George Plimpton
A few years ago I wrote a series of articles for the student newspaper about competitions for which I was ridiculously unprepared: arm wrestling, archery, scrabble. The pressure to fail continued into my career as a freelance writer when I made it to the front corral of the Los Angeles Marathon. (I stayed among the elite for the entire two hundred meters.) My inclinations were Plymptonian. In 1961, George Plimpton, co-founder Paris Reviewpublished an article called “Out of My League,” in which he gives an epic account of floundering on the baseball field. Plimpton didn't invent participatory sports journalism (in 1922, reporter Paul Gallico surrendered to the fists of Jack Dempsey), but he mastered its constant accumulation of masochistic micro-details. His book is a wickedly funny chronicle of a day at Yankee Stadium—“impossibly huge, startlingly green”—where he, a former prep school pitcher “built rather like a stilt-like bird of the shorebird variety,” pitched half an inning of an exhibition game against a Major League All-Star. In the climax, Plimpton, abandoned on a hill wearing a child's glove, experiences something of a panic attack when he runs into Willie Mays and company. After his wild speech, Plimpton writes: “I felt I had to comment on something; what I did was too undignified to go unnoticed, and so I hurried off the hill again, shouting, “Sorry! Sorry!” »—Charles Bethea
American Mermaid
Julia Langbein
In my opinion, the best books to purchase in the quiet weeks before the holidays are literary novels, especially those written by new talent. One of my favorite finds of the last few years has been American Mermaid. Langbein, an American expatriate who now lives near Paris, is something of a polymath; she received her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and is the author of Laugh Lines, a monograph on comedy in nineteenth-century France. In the early 2000s, she performed in New York and ran the popular humor blog “The Bruni Digest,” in which she criticized Time columnist Frank Bruni's restaurant reviews as a reporter Food and wine once wrote: “Almost Talmudic attention.” “American Mermaid,” released in 2023, is Langbein's first work of fiction, but has only a tenth of its credibility. The story follows English teacher Penelope Schliemann, who wrote her debut novel about the adventures of a feisty mermaid living among a matriarchal herd. The book, with an overtly feminist slant, becomes an unexpected bestseller, and Penelope soon finds herself in Hollywood, surrounded by brash executives and childish male screenwriters who want to turn her work into a blockbuster. What unfolds is something of a nightmare as the industry tries to soften the edges of her subversive story, as well as a bit of magical-realist fantasy: Penelope begins to believe that maybe mermaids really exist – or perhaps she's just going crazy? It's a book within a book wrapped in a parable, and I love it. I laughed out loud several times and didn't want it to end. And if you read this now, you'll be able to say that you came to Langbein early for her next novel…Dear Monica Lewinsky” about a woman who begins to pray to Lewinsky as a secular saint, comes out in April.—Rachel Syme
Death comes for the archbishop
Willa Cather
My colleague Katie Waldman recently wrote appreciation Mary McCarthy”One touch of nature“, a 1970 essay on the decline of landscapes in fiction. Melville's oceans and Fenimore Cooper's forests were filled with grandeur, writes McCarthy; in her time, readers had to make do with Hemingway's sport fishing and a masculinist idealization of Southwestern “ranch life.” Ironically, McCarthy leaves out one of the greatest observers of nature in twentieth-century American literature: Willa Cather and, in particular, the wonderful, brooding New Mexico of her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Cather's protagonist, Father Latour, is a French priest appointed bishop of New Mexico after its annexation in 1851. The Gringos are closing in, and Latour must strengthen the diocese by traveling between isolated haciendas and pueblos with his quasi-husband companion Father Vaillant. (Cather was a lesbian, and her narrative fits Leslie Fiedler's contention that American literature is fixated on frontier homoeroticism.) They meander through a series of difficult vignettes, helping the poor and rooting out local corruption. The real story is Latour's encounter with the territory transformed by Cather's prose into a metaphysical battlefield and a sphinx-like witness.
