Notable Literary Deaths in 2025
Dreaming of writing your novel this year? Rip up all the rules!
If your New Year’s resolutions involve getting to work on that novel you’ve been meaning to write, novelist Elizabeth McCracken has some general advice to offer.
Books That Open the Mind
Writers for The Atlantic offer “recommendations for literature that challenges and expands.”
Joan Lowell and the Birth of the Modern Literary Fraud
“A century ago, an aspiring actress published a remarkable autobiography. She made up most of it.”
Michael Waters writes in The New Yorker:
“The Cradle of the Deep” appeared just as the publishing industry was consolidating a new kind of influence in popular culture, in concert with new forms of mass media. And Lowell weathered the inevitable controversy in a manner that feels distinctly contemporary: with a seeming awareness that, these days, fame of any kind can be profitable.
A Bizarre, Challenging Book More People Should Read
“The true pleasure of literature can be found in demanding works such as Your Name Here, by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff.”
Writing that “this era of declining literacy and unsteady sales has led publishers to seek out writing that is summarizable, adaptable, and even, sometimes, readable,” Robert Rubsam calls for more challenging books like Your Name Here, an “abstruse” novel that “often indulges in . . . existential pessimism.”
“Your Name Here does not treat readers like passive audience members to whom meaning is dictated. It demands work from them, and brazenly risks being misunderstood.”
Obscure and Ill-Fated
A few novels, the best ones, stick with me longer than the rest. One of those novels has been The Mars Room (2018) by Rachel Kushner.
I was therefore drawn to this article by Kushner, adapted from a lecture at the conference “Incarceration and Imagination” at Yale University in 2022. In this piece Kushner examines the portrayals of prisons and prisoners in earlier fiction and explains how and why fiction should not shy away from presenting “the portion of society that is normally invisible to the mean demographic of those who typically read fiction.”
5 books that explore change, from the heartfelt to the hilarious
One of the drawing points of fiction is that it can encapsulate the process of personal growth by portraying how understanding our experiences can lead to change. Here Heidi Daniel writes that she’s recently been examining “books that explore change in all its forms” and offers some reading recommendations.
Reading Is a Vice
“Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive.”
Adam Kirsch laments the statistics indicating that reading in the U.S. has been declining for decades. He further laments that pleading with people to read more literature because reading is good for society has been unsuccessful. So he offers a counter suggestion:
It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
As we know, banning a book is the quickest way to get a young person to read it.