Reading for the New Year: Part Three - The New Yorker

To start the New Year, New Yorker writers have been looking back on the last one, sifting through the vast number of books they encountered in 2025 to identify the experiences that stood out. This is the third installment in a series of their recommendations (read the first here, and the second here). Stay tuned for the next one and, in the meantime, should you wish to grow your to-be-read pile further, you can always consult the magazine’s annual list of the year’s best new titles.

by Muriel Spark

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Muriel Spark is best known today for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” her semi-autobiographical novel of growing up in Edinburgh. (The film based on the book won an Oscar for Maggie Smith in a bob.) But a new sharp biography by Frances Wilson has sent me back to reread some of her twenty or so other novels. Spark excelled in dark humor of a particular British type—apparently presentable people plotting ingeniously malignant crimes (think Roald Dahl)—and combined this with a gift for dry, demimondaine London dialogue in the style of, say, Anthony Powell.

“The Bachelors,” which Spark published in 1960, just before “Prime,” is one of my favorites. The handful or so of not-so-young London men of the title justify their marital status with casual misogyny and the safety of numbers: “These are the figures,” one reads to another from the 1951 Greater London census. “Unmarried males of twenty-one or older: six hundred and fifty nine thousand five hundred.” For them there’s plenty of sex to be had, and the rest of their day is their own. Weekends, however, test their mettle. “Funny how Sunday gets at you,” one comments, “if you aren’t given a lunch.”

This comic slice-of-life set piece jumps its gossamer-light rails when one of the bachelors, a talented clairvoyant—read: skillful fraud—named Patrick Seton, is accused of making off with a widow’s savings. While facing trial, he eyes his diabetic, pregnant girlfriend, Alice, with icy affection. How convenient it would be if she forgot her insulin, perhaps in some secluded rendezvous to which he lured her. Will Seton be convicted or will he escape justice and set off on a vacation with Alice to an isolated home in the Austrian mountains, from which he plans to return, happily, again a bachelor?—D.T. Max

by Megan Marshall

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Like many memorable books, “After Lives,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Megan Marshall, is hard to classify. It’s part memoir, part biography, part meditation on what we know and what we can know about ourselves and the lives of others. The book it most closely calls to mind is “Footsteps,” Richard Holmes’s fantastic collection of essays on his journeys as a biographer. But unlike that book, “After Lives” does not try to dazzle you. It does not overwhelm. Its charms are plainer, though no less finely constructed. Marshall’s subjects range widely—there is an essay on her mother’s left-handedness, and another on a classmate who was killed in a shootout, in 1970, after he had taken courtroom hostages in an attempt to free his brother, the author of a Black Power manifesto. There is one on Una Hawthorne, the oldest child of Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and one that takes place in Kyoto. What makes this book special is the way it shows how history lives in the present, clinging to the things we leave behind and in the stories we tell about them. Objects—an old writing desk, a painting, an ice pick—become repositories for intimacies. Marshall, who has been a mentor to me, has made this book one such object—a small, interesting thing which will stay with me.—Louisa Thomas

by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated, from the Spanish, by Lee Klein

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In the epilogue to the most recent Spanish-language edition of “El Asco. Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador,” the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya recounts the reaction the novel received upon its publication, in 1997. His mother, he says, received death threats from an enraged reader. One friend’s wife became so furious at the protagonist’s tirade against pupusas, the country’s national dish (“those horrible, greasy tortillas stuffed with pork rinds” that show “these people are dull-witted even in their palate”), that she threw her copy out of her bathroom window. The ferocity of the response sent Castellanos Moya into exile: first to Guatemala, then Mexico and Spain, and finally to the United States, where he lives now.

But the novel—which New Directions published in English in 2016 as “Revulsion”—survived the outrage, to the delight of readers who, like myself, savor an unrestrained rant. It unfolds as a long monologue by a professor, Edgardo Vega, who has returned to San Salvador from Canada, where he has lived for many years, to attend his mother’s funeral. At a bar, he unloads on his interlocutor, who shares the author’s last name, venting about everything he despises about his country. Conceived as an attempt to imitate Bernhard’s famous diatribe against Salzburg, Castellanos Moya admits he wrote his against El Salvador with “the relish of a resentful man at last getting even.”

I felt compelled to reread “El Asco” in 2025. Perhaps it was because the news kept pulling me back to El Salvador. Or perhaps I simply needed a good rant. Who doesn’t right now? A rant so seething it becomes cathartic—exactly the kind of release we all need as one year ends and another begins.—Graciela Mochkofsky

by William Rankin

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For years, the Yale professor Bill Rankin, a friend of mine, has been releasing stunning maps through his website, radicalcartography.net. This winter, I’ve been delighting in his recent treatise, “Radical Cartography.” Is it possible to care too much about colors, layers, boundaries, and projections? Apparently not. (Map projections got prime-time treatment in “The West Wing,” when the characters became enamored of the Africa-enlarging Peters Projection. “PLEASE NO, NOT THE PETERS!” Rankin writes. “Plenty of other maps can make accurate area comparisons with much less distortion!”)

Rankin’s real beef is with conventional cartography, which yields boring maps. “Radical,” for him, means questioning assumptions. The result is a series of mind-scrambling maps—of lightning, kissing, slavery, and the moon. My household ordered copies of Rankin’s book as holiday gifts—for all the avid, nerdy, details-sweating people in our lives.—Daniel Immerwahr

by Geoff Ryman

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Oz will never be over. The world that L.Frank Baum created in 1900 with “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” has long exerted a powerful thrall. The great Gore Vidal counted himself among the “most Americans” of his generation who had lost and found themselves in it: “In some mysterious way, I was translating myself to Oz, a place which I was to inhabit for many years while, simultaneously, visiting other fictional worlds as well as maintaining my cover in that dangerous one known as ‘real.’ ” Most Americans today, it’s safe to wager, owe their idea of Oz to the 1939 film adaptation and hunger, it would seem, for darkness as much as dazzle. For those, tired of the candy-floss fare of “Wicked” and its cinematic adaptations, I recommend Geoff Ryman’s 1992 novel.

Ryman’s narrative lands upon lives crossed in some way with Baum’s book, and cares less about upending fantasy than treating it seriously, as a shade of reality most Americans cannot live without—a necessity that, if devastating, often proves less so than the alternative. There is a child whose happy world is shattered when his friends from Oz cannot make the leap into what people around him consider to be reality. There is an elderly woman, Dotty, who spends her days revisiting her Kansas childhood, bleak but for the intervention of a twinkling substitute teacher, and part-time actor, named Mr. Baum. There is a makeup artist whose adolescent charge is the professional little girl who finds true home in the heat of M-G-M lights. “I am a fantasy writer who fell in love with realism,” Ryman writes in the postscript. “It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible. And then use them against each other.”—Lauren Michele Jackson

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