Sea, Poison | Caren Beilin
Caren Beilin, Sea, Poison, 2025, book cover. Courtesy: New Directions
Cumin Baleen, the protagonist of Caren Beilin’s Sea, Poison, has a solid excuse for her writer’s block. The fish and wine shop employee, whose name tellingly resembles the author’s own, is a victim of ‘Medical OuLiPo’: a scam eye surgery that perforated her brain, impeding her ability to link together clauses and thus complete her book. From plot and structure down to the level of syntax, Sea, Poison is a deeply weird read – unsettling and funny in turn. The daily frustrations of creative life, the generative power of constraints, the failure of the US healthcare and housing systems, a donkey that somehow resembles Daniel Day-Lewis: it’s all in there.
– CASSIE PACKARD, assistant editor
Thrilled to Death | Lynne Tillman
Lynne Tillman, Thrilled to Death, 2025, book cover. Courtesy: Peninsula Press, London
I heard Lynne Tillman read an excerpt from her novel American Genius, A Comedy (2006) late last year, and the experience completely changed how I approach her writing. Notorious for her evasive yet expertly crafted prose – where words move in errancy and sentences are composed with rhythmic precision – Tillman’s work asks to be read out loud. In her upcoming publication, Thrilled to Death, which gathers short stories written over the course of her extensive career, enigmatic characters traverse the terrains of life, death, art and politics, constantly contemplating the real within reality. In a society relentlessly seeking instant gratification, Tillman’s writing offers a remedy for the restless mind: a voice that, in spirit and substance, will reverberate long after reading.
– BROOKE WILSON, image researcher
Hauntings | Vernon Lee
Vernon Lee, Hauntings, 2025, book cover. Courtesy: Unnamed Press, Los Angeles
This autumn brings the reissue of Vernon Lee’s Hauntings (1890), a collection of ghost stories whose unease still cuts through sharply in the present. The collection gathers together four supernatural narratives: a historian becomes fatally enthralled by a medieval noblewoman’s ghost; an artist, hired to paint a country lady’s portrait, is ensnared in her obsession with a dead poet; a composer is undone by the spectral song of a castrato; and a shipwreck survivor grows into a pagan-like figure whose beauty and presence wreak havoc on a seaside town. Published by Smith & Taylor Classics – an imprint of Unnamed Press, launched last year by Allison Miriam Smith and Brandon Taylor to ‘uplift the unlikely and unexpected from around the world’ – the novel is an excellent read for the dark, cold evenings to come.
– IVANA CHOLAKOVA, assistant editor
Art and Revolution, A Seventh Man and From A to X | John Berger
John Berger, Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist, 2025, book cover. Courtesy: Verso Books, New York
As part of their ongoing project of reissuing John Berger’s books, Verso will publish Art and Revolution (1969), A Seventh Man (1975) and From A to X (2008) at the end of this month. These short works demonstrate the range of the author of Ways of Seeing (1972), from the idiosyncratic Marxist humanism behind his analysis of Ernst Neizvestny’s socially focused sculpture, to his searing insights into the lives of Europe’s migrant workers, to his elliptical storytelling via an epistolary form. I look forward to reading these texts in the lead-up to Berger’s centennial in 2026 – and to spending time with Jean Mohr’s powerful and affecting photographs, which illustrate A Seventh Man and attest to the collaborative nature of Berger’s practice.
– MARKO GLUHAICH, senior editor
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye | Claire-Louise Bennett
Claire-Louise Bennett, Big Kiss, Bye Bye, 2025, book cover. Courtesy: Fitzcarraldo Editions, London
Claire-Louise Bennett’s latest novel is a quietly brilliant exploration of desire, memory and the peculiar – and often frustrating – rhythms of relationships. Following her narrator through past loves and fleeting encounters, including a failed relationship with an older ex-partner, Xavier, Bennett deftly captures and skewers the idiosyncrasies of our attempts at connection and the inevitability of unresolved endings. Each chapter shifts perspective, reflecting the inherently unpredictable nature of life – and ourselves – through its changing geographical locations, its intimacies and its heartbreaks.
– VANESSA PETERSON, senior editor
Lyrical Diary: Lieder from Franz Schubert to Wolfgang Rihm | Christian Gerhaher
Christian Gerhaher, Lyrical Diary: Lieder from Franz Schubert to Wolfgang Rihm, 2025, book cover. Courtesy: Faber & Faber Ltd
As the days begin to shorten, little seems more appealing than sitting in a dimly lit room, listening to one of Christian Gerhaher’s many lieder recordings and reading his stylish, intelligent and deeply humane study of a life spent interpreting these works – poems set to music by many of the great composers, from Beethoven to Schumann. The book is at times a little more technical than I find interesting, but just as often Gerhaher steps out to consider the broader sweep – romantic, societal or purely personal – of some of the great lieder, offering the insights of someone who has spent a career living with and interpreting these songs.
– LOU SELFRIDGE, assistant editor
Lonely Crowds | Stephanie Wambugu
Stephanie Wambugu, Lonely Crowds, 2025, book cover. Courtesy: Little, Brown and Company
At the end of summer, I heard Stephanie Wambugu read as part of London’s Soho Reading Series. We were celebrating her debut novel, about the New York art world in the early 1990s, which published this month in the US and will be released this autumn in the UK. Instead of reading from Lonely Crowds, however, Wambugu shared a brilliant short story about a man addicted to baptism. In just a few pages, she spun an extraordinary and humorous portrait of obsession and the lengths we will go in order to feel part of a community. It left me even more excited for her novel.
– ANDREW DURBIN, editor-in-chief
The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift, Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson, The Slicks, 2025, book cover. Courtesy: Penguin Random House/Fern Press
What do the world’s most famous living pop star and a cult feminist poet have in common? Their ambition, according to Maggie Nelson, who argues in this book – republished by Penguin this November – that these women are ‘twin hosts of the female urge toward wanting hard, working hard and pouring forth’. As a Swiftie who strongly identified with Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) when I read it as a teen, I am anticipating this release with almost as much excitement as I did the Eras Tour.
– CHLOE STEAD, associate editor