January 3, 2025, 4:22am

Well, well. 2025, miraculously and mundanely, is here. For many readers in America and the world at large, this January represents the beginning of new cycles in more than one way, including the start of a new political reign in the White House that will certainly usher in just the opposite of certainty for America and the globe more broadly. But some things remain certain, like the fact that the wheel of the year will always turn, no matter what that year looks like. January will always slip into February.

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And as you perhaps search for things to occupy yourself with in this curious month, you’ll be pleased to know that there are plenty of new books out to find solace in, as well as to steer your mind in new, rousing directions. I’ve assembled twenty-one books that may do just that, each newly out in fresh paperback editions this month. You’ll find a stellar cast of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, covering a remarkable swathe of topics and genres, from the cozy to the outright revolutionary.

It may be a month of rampant uncertainties, Dear Readers, but let’s not let that deter us from doing what we love. Curl up with one (or many) of these if you missed them in hardcover, or simply because there’s something delightful about holding a paperback in your hands.

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Stephen McCauley, You Only Call When You’re in Trouble
(Holt)

“icture F. Scott Fitzgerald with tongue in cheek and you get the gift of Stephen McCauley’s You Only Call When You’re in Trouble. I loved these deliciously flawed characters and every thought that runs through their heads. As with all things Stephen McCauley, it has the highest of wit and the sharpest of social commentary plus tenderness and much love.”
–Elinor Lipman

Christina Cooke, Broughtupsy
(Catapult)

“The idea of ‘going home’ is, for many members of the LGBTQ+ community, a complicated one. Take, for example, Akúa, the protagonist of Christina Cooke’s debut novel, Broughtupsy, who returns to Jamaica from Canada to connect with her sister after…[a] loss….Akúa is soon forced to question what it means to belong as a young, queer, grief-stricken woman….Cooke’s narration, at once poetic and conversational, lends Akúa’s story a sense of urgency and resonance.”
–Vogue

Alexander Sammartino, Last Acts
(Scribner)

“Sammartino is extraordinarily good at balancing the farcical nature of contemporary America with the complex humanity of his characters. He’s also a magnificent sentence writer, with a gift for pulling poetry out of an American vernacular that recalls the early work of George Saunders….While many novelists are struggling to figure out how best to address the state of the nation…Sammartino seems to have cracked the code.”
–Dan Chaon

Annie Liontas, Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery
(Scribner)

“Sex With a Brain Injury is a rhythmic genre-bender: Maggie Nelson meets concussion; Olivia Laing of the walking wounded. Annie Liontas writes like an alchemist, braiding humor, humanity, and history into the personal narrative of her injuries and healing. I loved this book.”
–Melissa Broder

Jonathan Eig, King: A Life
(Picador)

“Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable….The first comprehensive biography of King in three decades…and it supplants David J. Garrow’s 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King, as Garrow himself deposed recently….[Eig’s is] a clean, clear, journalistic voice, one that employs facts the way Saul Bellow said they should be employed, each a wire that sends a current….Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.”
–The New York Times

Patrick Stewart, Making It So: A Memoir
(Gallery Books)

“Patrick’s early life is a Dickensian tale of domestic violence and misfortune, transformed by chance and some good folk into the actor internationally admired and loved. He writes as well as he acts, with insight, truth, and passion. Another Stewart Triumph!”
–Sir Ian McKellan

Katie Peterson, Fog and Smoke: Poems
(FSG)

“Each line shines in the sun like stained glass. Fog and Smoke is a triumph of observation and intimacythat invigorates the reader to act for the natural world.”
–Booklist

Erika Howsare, The Age of Deer
(Catapult)

“Howsare acknowledges the deep, often mysterious connection humans feel with this large, beautiful mammal, citing the cultural, economic, and environmental impact the species has had throughout history. A nature writer with a poet’s eye and a scholar’s acuity.”
–Booklist

Cynthia Zarin, Inverno
(Picador)

“A beautiful, tricky, compressed gem of a book that seems determined to upend your expectations of it….Though Inverno is Zarin’s first novel, it carries the grace and intellectual heft of her decades as a poet….Its stream-of-consciousness narration evokes Virginia Woolf or Italo Calvino.”
–The Washington Post

Laurie Frankel, Family Family
(Holt)

“Frankel’s back! Without giving away too much of her dizzying plot, which is supercharged with cliffhanger chapter endings and parallel reveals, the novel is dedicated to the premise that not every adoption story is one of trauma—along the way we will enjoy many fine young characters (Kevin Wilson fans who haven’t yet tried Frankel should) and classic Frankelisms….Full of warmth, humor, and sound advice.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Deborah Jowitt, Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham
(Picador)

“In [Errand into the Maze] the iconic dancer and choreographer is made new, and radical, again….A complete delight to read….The convergence of these two dance champions, Graham and Jowitt, is so special as to make this book nothing less than a fully realized gift.”
–Candice Thompson

Nikki M. Taylor, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance
(Cambridge University Press)

“Brooding Over Bloody Revenge is a brilliant tour-de-force. This powerful set of case studies create a prism for illuminating African American women’s intellectual arc, their lived experience as enslaved bodies, and their powerful response to slavery’s lash and legacy. Nikki Taylor’s voice offers remarkably fresh and convincing insights concerning violence, gender, and American slave culture.”
–Catherine Clinton

Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
(Picador)

“Absorbing….Shatz …is a mostly steady hand in turbulent waters. His chosen title highlights a side of Fanon that often gets eclipsed by the larger-than-life image of the zealous partisan—that of the caring doctor….What gives The Rebel’s Clinic its intellectual heft is Shatz’s willingness to write into such tensions.”
–Jennifer Szalai

Maria Hummel, Goldenseal
(Counterpoint)

“Maria Hummel probes the complexities of female friendship with a deeply immersive writing style, showcasing her poetic chops and skill in crafting nuance. In this entrancing novel—her fifth—the author weaves a complex tapestry of nostalgia, regret, betrayal, and love against the backdrop of Los Angeles in fading splendor.”
–The Rumpus

Abbott Kahler, Where You End
(Holt)

“Where You End is haunting, suspenseful and beautifully written–a modern-day gothic that explores the peculiar bond between twin sisters and the twisted power of cults; the mysteries of memory and the ineluctable pull of the past. It unnerves and beguiles in ways reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”–but it’s a true original.”
–Margaret Talbot

Venita Blackburn, Dead in Long Beach, California
(Picador)

“[Blackburn’s] sentences zing with lively precision…as the narrative scaffolding stabilizes, we see how Coral’s grief is braced within it—held alight, too, by the disarming humor and vivacity of Blackburn’s prose. Told by machines from the future, Blackburn’s idiosyncratic grief novel is as freshly devastating as they come.”
–The New York Times Book Review

Jonathan Blitzer, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
(Penguin)

“Capacious, stirring….Blitzer assiduously chronicles this dark history with a keen eye for individual lives; the personal is literally political….Blitzer’s research and reporting are extensive and impeccable….But perhaps his most resonant, if damning, argument is just how oblivious Americans have been—and still are—to widespread suffering committed in our name….Blitzer never shirks from his duty: to show us who we truly are. His is a vital, momentous book.”
–Minneapolis Star Tribune

Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
(Vintage)

“[Filterworld] brings stark clarity to the formulas that guide our behaviors online…it does the near impossible: It makes algorithms, those dull formulas of inputs and outputs, fascinating…This is a book about technology and culture. But it is also, in the end—in its own inputs and outputs and signals–a book about politics.”
–Megan Garber

Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
(Scribner)

“Klaas poses the question, ‘If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same?’….He finds his answers in a multi-disciplinary survey of political science, philosophy, economics, evolutionary biology, geology and more, synthesizing and juxtaposing winningly….Fluke is engagingly written and Klaas has a nice way of broadening out anecdotes to make wider points….Some of these stories are quite gripping.”
–The Arts Desk

Keren Blankfeld, Lovers in Auschwitz: A True Story
(Back Bay Books)

“A tale so incredible, so improbable, that it could only be true; a story so moving, so poignant, that it could only be inspired by love. Your Holocaust library is incomplete without this book.”
–Larry Loftis

Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
(Metropolitan Books)

“An indispensable new book….Recoding America isn’t just about tech. It’s about the American administrative state, and it’s a call for paring back the rigid rules that make it so hard to govern, and for rebuilding government’s ability to do its job effectively.”
–The Atlantic