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Time Magazine
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
The 14 Best Books of 2025 So Far
There's no better time than the start of summer to take a pause and reset your priorities. And, if we may be so bold, one of those priorities really should be to dig into one of the many great new books that have been published this year. It's only June, and yet we've already been blessed with a wealth of heart-rending memoirs, absorbing novels, and mind-expanding nonfiction. Meander through the beguiling mind of a theater actress, take a siblings road trip that challenges the very notion of family, or delve into a deep, personal secret. Here, the 14 best books of the year so far. The Antidote, Karen Russell It feels like the U.S. has lived 100 lifetimes since Karen Russell's much-lauded 2011 debut Swamplandia!, but it's safe to say that her highly anticipated follow-up The Antidote was worth the wait. An American epic that takes place in the 1930s in the fictional town of Uz, Neb., the story centers on a prairie witch who calls herself 'the Antidote.' A healer of sorts, the Antidote, like other prairie witches, is a keeper of others' thoughts—a memory vault who absorbs the heaviness of people's grief so they may have a chance at feeling lightness again. But when a dust bowl devastates the town, it takes the witch's memory deposits with it and leaves her fearful for her safety. What will happen to her when people can no longer unload their worst—and have to actually live with themselves? Told from the vantage point of multiple inhabitants of Uz, The Antidote is a sprawling yet meticulous story that implores us to see American history in its fullness, scars and all.— Rachel Sonis Audition, Katie Kitamura's taut and incisive follow-up to Intimacies, begins on a rich premise. The narrator, a successful actress navigating a difficult new role, goes to a Manhattan restaurant to meet a younger man, Xavier, who claims he's her son. It's impossible. The actress, who goes unnamed, has never given birth or been a parent. But the strange encounter isn't their last; Xavier begins working on the same play, and his bold assertion prompts her to unravel the many choices and performances that have brought her to this particular moment, on stage and in life. Halfway through, Audition changes realities, completely redefining the relationship between the two. Kitamura's tantalizing novel asks a lot of the reader, offering multiple versions of the same life that circle around an idea raised by the protagonist herself:'As you get older things become less clear.' —Mahita Gajanan In his second novel, Ocean Vuong sheds the epistolary conceit of his acclaimed debut, 2019's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The result is a more sprawling yet direct coming-of-age tale animated by the specificity of its characters. When we meet 19-year-old Hai, he's standing ominously on a bridge in his depressed hometown of East Gladness, Conn. His first love is dead of a fentanyl overdose and his mom believes the flimsy lie that he's at medical school, leaving Hai with a craving for opioids and nowhere to go. Before he can do anything drastic, he's spotted by a dementia-stricken elderly woman, Grazina, who must sense his fundamental gentleness, because she says he can move into her place if he'll care for her. Along with his misfit coworkers at a fast-food joint, Grazina anchors the lost boy, even as her own mind drifts from its moorings. A premise that a lesser writer might churn into inspiration porn becomes, in Vuong's hands, a vivid, funny, emotionally realistic case study in the life-altering potential of community.— Judy Berman There are many debut novels about young people finding love and seeking purpose, but few are as perceptive about the connection between those pursuits as Naomi Xu Elegant's ruminative Gingko Season. Stubbornly fixated on a college boyfriend who broke her heart, 20-something narrator Penelope Lin works at a Philadelphia museum, pores over the city's history, and maintains a modest social life, largely disconnected from her family. When she meets a guy, Hoang, who has just confessed to freeing mice marked for death at the lab where he works, their excruciatingly slow-moving courtship pushes Penelope to think harder about her own principles and priorities. Elegant's writing is as unassuming as her heroine, yet the questions she raises about how to live with integrity in a compromised world can be startlingly profound.— Judy Berman The argument that flows from this book is simple: rivers, for all of the essential nutrients, biodiversity, and transportation possibilities they provide, deserve to be treated with the same respect as other living organisms. Robert Macfarlane visited three rivers, starting with the River of the Cedars in an Ecuadorian cloud forest, recently threatened by mining companies. He surveyed waterways in Chennai, India, which flood streets with crocodiles and catfish after cyclones. And he visited Mutehekau Shipu in Quebec, the first Canadian river to be given rights, including the right to be pollution-free. The author of Underland lends his expertise to raise awareness about a part of nature that is often taken for granted. Readers see that while rivers can be easily wounded, they can also quickly heal—if given the right care.— Olivia B. Waxman Ron Chernow, the author of the best-selling tomes Alexander Hamilton and Grant, offers a frank assessment of Mark Twain, the first major literary celebrity in the U.S. and a leading pundit of the Civil War era whose writings helped Americans make sense of life after slavery. While his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became classics, Twain made poor financial decisions that bankrupted him and forced him to flee the country and spend nearly a decade in exile. Chernow's biography gives the encyclopedic treatment to the writer, boasting about 1,200 pages based on his books, letters, and unpublished manuscripts. —Olivia B. Waxman In this dystopian speculative fiction novel, Vietnamese Americans are shipped to internment camps following a terrorist attack, with their civil rights and dignity stripped in the name of national security. While the premise could result in an overly dour or preachy book, Nguyen's novel zips forward with page-turning suspense, humor, and nuance. The book revolves around four half-siblings as they each confront difficult ethical choices and navigate their relationships with an oppressive state, cultural expectations, and each other. While parts of the novel are carefully grounded in history—especially in the experience of Japanese-American incarceration during World War II—the book also crackles with modern culture and proves gaspingly relevant in an era of division and heightened surveillance.— Andrew R. Chow At the center of Nicole Cuffy's O Sinners! is Faruq Zaidi, a Brooklyn-based journalist grieving the recent death of his devout Muslim father. After learning about a cult called 'the nameless,' whose followers abide by teachings like "create beauty" and "do not despair at death," Faruq—a skeptic who has felt disconnected from faith and religion since he was a teenager—travels to their compound in the California Redwoods to report a story. But as he grows closer to the group's inscrutable leader, a Black Vietnam War veteran called Odo, Faruq begins to question more than just the secret inner-workings of the cult itself. O Sinners! is driven by three alternating narratives: Faruq's present day work trip, Odo's tour of duty in Vietnam, and the screenplay of a documentary about a legal battle between the cult and a fundamentalist church in Texas. In weaving together these stories, Cuffy explores the varying shapes that grief, belief, and belonging can take. —Erin McMullen In late October 2023, Omar El Akkad started to outline his feelings about the war in Gaza, and how it feels to be a person unanchored from home. In his urgent nonfiction debut, the writer—who was born in Cairo, grew up in Doha, moved to Canada, and now lives in rural Oregon—wrestles with his disillusionment with the West and its institutions, particularly given the indifference he's observed in so many as the war rages on. This memoir-manifesto could be seen as hopeless, and there is certainly no shortage of carnage in its pages. But, in the determination of those standing up for their beliefs, El Akkad manages to find hope amid the fantasy of Western liberalism.— Meg Zukin In Kevin Wilson's latest novel, Mad spends her days working on a farm with her mom. She hasn't seen her dad in two decades and she's settled into a routine that's not particularly fulfilling, but she's made her peace with that. Then, a stranger appears at her front door and announces that he's her older half-brother, and that their father pulled a disappearing act on not just him and Mad, but other families too. He convinces her to join him on a cross-country road trip to round up their other siblings and find their father. What ensues is an often hilarious and sometimes devastating exploration of what really makes a family. Like Wilson's other fiction, including Nothing to See Here and Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Run for the Hills gently tugs at the heart.— Annabel Gutterman Sky Daddy is a love story, but one we're willing to bet is unlike any love story you've previously encountered. Drawing inspiration from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Kate Folk's debut novel revolves around one woman's pursuit of her own white whale: finding her aircraft 'soulmate.' That's really the premise: our eccentric protagonist, Linda, wants to fall in love with a plane—and, in a morbid twist, she wants to 'consummate' that relationship by dying in an aviation accident. Linda is a San Francisco transplant who makes $20 an hour moderating hate comments for a video-sharing platform and devotes as much of that meager salary as possible to exploring the aircraft dating pool by catching flights. Linda is determined to keep her unusual proclivities a secret, but after her work friend, Karina, invites her to a monthly 'Vision Board Brunch' with some old college friends, Linda's attempts to manifest her idea of romantic bliss end up setting her on a path to radical self-acceptance. Sky Daddy is as poignant as it is bizarre— Megan McCluskey The Tell, Amy Griffin Rarely, if ever, has a book been endorsed by all three titans in the celebrity book club world—Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bush Hager—but Amy Griffin's The Tell is no ordinary memoir. For readers of Tara Westover's Educated or Chanel Miller's Know My Name, The Tell is one of those deeply personal stories that manages to feel universal at the same time. Griffin was thriving as a businesswoman and happily married mother of four in New York City when a session with an MDMA therapist flooded her mind with long-buried memories. Suddenly, she remembered the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a teacher starting when she was 12 years old. Shattered and enraged, Griffin struggled to reconcile her past with her carefully constructed self-image and grappled with the weight of carrying such a harrowing secret. Her memoir retraces her steps through her private grief and isolating pursuit of justice, and, ultimately, her powerful realization that to tell is to heal.— Lucy Feldman After her teenage son James dies by suicide, Yiyun Li begins writing. It's what she knows how to do. The prolific author has, tragically, been in this position before. Her older son, Vincent, died by suicide in 2017. In her transcendent new book, she writes that she does not ruminate on grief, because to grieve suggests a process to which there is an end. She knows that to continue living is to accept that she will be a parent to her children for the rest of her life. In sparing prose that cuts deeply, Li examines the relationship between language and loss, honoring the sons who she carries with her, always.— Annabel Gutterman Emma Pattee's Tilt is an apocalyptic nightmare come to life. Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping at Ikea when Oregon is hit with 'the big one'—the earthquake that people in the Pacific Northwest have been anticipating for years. Pattee's thrilling debut tracks Annie's journey through rubble, chaos, hope, and despair as she searches for her husband amid the disaster. Tilt is a propulsive account of survival, and how humanity shows up under the pressure of a catastrophe. As she treks across Portland, Annie flashes back to moments that shed light on her life choices thus far. Her marriage and career are thrust under a microscope as she encounters others in crisis: the wounded, the searching, the lost, and the desperate. Best read in one sitting, Tilt is a raw examination of motherhood and its most extreme demands.— Meg Zukin
Washington Post
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Karen Russell's ‘The Antidote' is a dazzlingly original American epic
In 2011, Karen Russell cast a spell over readers with her uncanny debut novel, 'Swamplandia!' She wasn't kidding about that exclamation point. The story involves a plucky 13-year-old girl determined to revive her family's alligator park. 'Swamplandia!' went on to become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. That year, Russell's novel was up against an unfinished manuscript by an author who'd died in 2008 and a revised version of a novella published in the Paris Review almost a decade earlier. Historically speaking, being above ground with a new, finished novel has been a great advantage when it comes to winning a Pulitzer. But, alas, that year, in its inscrutable wisdom, the Pulitzer board decided not to give a prize for fiction.
Los Angeles Times
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Karen Russell's Dust Bowl ‘Antidote' is even more ambitious than ‘Swamplandia!'
It takes an unconventional fabulist to address something so vast as American history. Karen Russell is known for surreal storytelling and fantastic language in work marked by slanted perspective and outlandish scenarios which illuminate dormant truths. She's brought her skills to bear on acclaimed short fiction collections and her one previous novel, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist, 'Swamplandia!' While that novel chronicled the decline of a Floridian carnival family clinging to family legend and land, her new novel, 'The Antidote,' looks westward to the fictional Nebraska town of Uz during the 1930s. Russell's Uz is a desolate, ravaged Dust Bowl town where farmers have lost their crops and residents have perished thanks to extreme weather. A string of murdered women adds to the paranoia gripping the town. Understandably, many of its remaining residents flee this wasteland. Those left behind are a desperate lot: A renegade sheriff takes the law into his own hands. Teenage girls find solace playing basketball on a dwindling team without a coach. Uncomfortably so, a bachelor second-generation farmer finds himself with the only thriving crop in town. And drunks find comfort at the bar in the Country Jentleman. Upstairs from the bar in the boarding house, lost souls confess their secrets to a prairie witch named the Antidote. Their confessions are known as deposits, complete with a numbered slip. This transaction reduces the prairie witch into 'a room for rent. A vault to store the things people cannot stand to know, or bear. To forget.' Removed from the community and yet an integral part of it, the Antidote is an orphaned Sicilian immigrant named Antonina Rossi who knows that 'pain is never any one thing, it is always moving.' This prairie witch's origin story is rooted in the loss of her only son and escape from the abusive home for unwed mothers where she was forced to wait out her pregnancy and give birth. All too familiar with the psychic weight of secrets, the Antidote remarks that 'Memories are living things. When you house as many as I did, your bones begin to creak.' The caustic nature of memory and secrets seizes Russell's fascination. Historians and biographers work around archival gaps to delicately stitch together suppressed histories, but fiction writers can take more creative liberties to reconcile the past. As history becomes more threatened by censorship, fiction helps shape public discourse. Enter the new relevance of historical novels: Examples include Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' 'The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois' and Daniel Mason's 'North Woods,' which each tackle expansive themes across contentious historical periods. Most directly, 'The Antidote' harkens to Eleanor Catton's Booker award winning 'The Luminaries,' which centers around the mysteries of a gold rush port town in New Zealand. Both books are rife with mystery and the spoils of greed. All these books ask their readers to juggle multiple plot threads and a cascade of characters. Their success is dependent on sustaining your fascination for secrets behind the surface. Big books make enormous demands: Readers tend to love them or hate them. And while Russell's career took off thanks to the universally riotous praise for her short stories, I'd argue that she takes even bigger risks in her novels. They offer a more complicated and thus greater reward. With crackling pastoral language and thematic Lynchian undertones, 'Swamplandia!' probed the growing tension in Russell's home state of Florida between an endangered fecund wilderness and encroaching development. In it, her young heroine remarks, 'At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.' Russell has taken these words to heart. With 'The Antidote,' Russell raises the stakes of her efforts as a novelist. Gripped by the legacy of land theft and the forced migration of Native Americans, Russell constructed a novel underpinned by an elaborate embroidery of social, geological, historical, and environmental research on the impact of American Western expansion. She speaks to this extensive work in an author's note and a land lost acknowledgment. Her prairie witch carries the moral burdens of a bankrupt society that shames women and strips the land of its resources as well as its native inhabitants, leaving little for those left behind. Russell could have written a smaller, less ambitious, book centered only around the Antidote and her immediate clients. However, drawing from her skills as a short story writer, she effortlessly weaves in other characters whose unique gifts shed light on the lacunae of history. Cleo Allfrey is a WPA photographer and somewhat androgynous Black woman assigned to document the West. Despite the strict guidelines that steer her work into the realm of propaganda, her work is something beyond commercial art. What develops in the darkroom are visions that speak to the possibility of a harmonious future, signal to a prosperous past, and highlight present horrors. The memories she captures are tangible in ways that the Antidote's are not. Each woman recognizes the mercurial power of memories. Together, they find sanctuary on the only unblemished farmland in Uz, which belongs to Harp and Dell Oletsky. If this sounds like a dense novel, you're only halfway right. The book is threaded with more subplots and histories as well as characters than I can elaborate upon here. However, her sharp narrative grasp guides the reader from character to character as the book unfolds. Russell's vivid characters retain an element of mystery, which speaks to the novel's larger point. History makes clear the gap between what we know and what we can only presume to be true. Russell is at her strongest in moments of intimacy — be it maternal or conventionally romantic. There's an awkward and unspoken bond between her band of misfits. Independent of one another, they're untethered and grossly misunderstood. As a unified front, they manage to reveal the town's most sinister mysteries. Harp, the lone man among this chosen crew, reflects: 'Anything that is yours alone can become a curse, even good fortune. This understanding hit me with the force of revelation. Words alone won't do it justice.' Russell works with imagined backstories and harsh facts to draw connections between unexplained phenomena like extreme weather and inexplicable cruelty. Just as Allfrey's photographs were 'crowded with lifetimes,' so is Russell's novel, a work suffused with the 'mystery of kindness' and the banality of violence. LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Antidote by Karen Russell review – a magical realist Dust Bowl tale
The latest novel from Karen Russell, author of the highly acclaimed Swamplandia!, is set in a 1930s Nebraska town called Uz, after the home of the biblical Job. The name is apt; it's the time of the Dust Bowl, when the Great Plains states of the US suffered drought and colossal dust storms that blighted agriculture and turned a generation of farmers into climate refugees. The book has four protagonists, all with some connection to uncanny powers. The Antidote of the title is a 'prairie witch' with the ability to take away people's unwanted memories and hold them against the day the owner is ready to remember. Harp Oletsky is a farmer who finds his land is miraculously spared from the catastrophic 'Black Sunday' dust storm; in its wake, the sky is blue over his fields alone, and they fill with healthy wheat. His teenage niece, Dell, is dealing with the murder of her mother by obsessively playing basketball and apprenticing herself to the Antidote as a trainee witch. Cleo Allfrey is a black photographer, sent to Nebraska by the New Deal's Resettlement Administration to document the suffering of farmers. She buys a camera in a local pawn shop that turns out to have uncanny powers of its own: its photographs show scenes from potential futures and forgotten pasts. The novel also has brief sections from the perspectives of a haunted scarecrow and a stray cat. The great theme of The Antidote is deliberate amnesia – particularly that of white people about the ethnic cleansing of Native peoples that set the stage for the Dust Bowl. Under the care of the Pawnee, these prairies were lush, vibrantly living places, with crops and agricultural practices adapted to regional drought cycles; after the massacres and forced relocations that removed them, the topsoil has risen into the air as a vicious ghost that burns the eyes and lungs. Since this is magical realism, the storms aren't just a physical consequence, but a haunting, a supernatural judgment on the people who inherited the fruits of a genocide. To heal, the community must first remember. The Antidote and Cleo Allfrey, with her haunted camera, are well positioned to kickstart this process. The most salient quality of The Antidote is the beauty and power of Russell's writing, especially in documenting horrors. Here is a jack drive, where rabbits are driven into an enclosure to be slaughtered as pests: 'The rabbits are crying and dying, the clubs coming down, down, down … Grey skins are splitting, slipping under bootheels and wooden bats … Quiet comes at last. The men's arms rest against their sides like tools in a shed. Women are hanging the dead jacks to dry by their long ears … Inside of you, the screaming continues.' The book also abounds in small delights such as, 'Poor guitar! I sometimes stared, with sympathy, at the shocked hole in its centre,' or this description of trying to silence a guilty conscience: 'The thought was like a loose knot I had to keep retying.' There are, however, two weaknesses that rob the book of much of its potential power. First, the plot is frustratingly scattered. Developments that initially seem crucial are left with no resolution; a narrative about the string of murders that included the killing of Dell's mother is especially odd, as we're asked to just stop caring about it midway through the book. Many scenes are devoted to Dell's basketball career, while the crimes against Natives on which the story turns happen entirely off stage. Through this, Russell is easily good enough to keep us engaged. No writer, however, could be good enough to make it a feature and not a bug. Second, Russell's narrators seem more like 21st-century liberals than rural citizens of 1930s Nebraska. The white protagonists start out anti-racist, then go through an awakening that has them devoting their lives to atoning for their historical complicity in genocide. Meanwhile, they never worry about feeding themselves, though it's unclear how this is possible for the Oletskies, since Harp is a no-yield farmer with huge debts to the bank, and his new miracle crop hasn't yet been sold. Some elements feel jarringly anachronistic: Dell plays on an integrated girls' basketball team, and when she falls in love with a teammate, she understands and embraces what she's feeling without any panic or dissonance about the implications of being gay. There is no sense that Cleo Allfrey's status as a black female photographer makes her an almost unbelievable exception to every rule. She also never seems culturally black, which, in the heavily segregated 1930s, calls for an explanation that is never forthcoming. While such fudging of history can work in some contexts (Bridgerton being an obvious example), it feels inappropriate in a work of political fiction about the moral imperative to accurately remember the past even when it makes us uncomfortable. The Antidote is clearly the work of a writer with prodigious gifts. But every novelist with a long enough career will ultimately produce a book where they've bitten off more than they can chew, or chewed and swallowed something they should have spat out. Despite The Antidote's laudable ambitions and interesting conception, I'm afraid, for Russell, this is that book. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion The Antidote is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99) on 13 March. To support the Guardian and Observer, buy your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Witches, storms, America – this novel is a mess
It's the 1930s, Dust Bowl Nebraska. The town of Uz, named after the Biblical home of Job, has been all but destroyed by storms. 'The Antidote' – real name Antonia Rossi – is a 'prairie witch', who makes a living by relieving others of unwanted memories and 'storing' them in their bodies. (Customers are given a deposit slip and can retrieve them later.) But Rossi wakes up in the local prison to find her own 'vault' emptied, and as the town packs to leave, the farmers want their memories back. Rossi and her assistant Asphodel must cook up a plan to forge the stories she's lost. At the same time, when the sheriff, Rossi's long-term abuser, gets wind, he decides to use their ruse to his own nefarious ends. That, however, is barely the half of it. In The Antidote, Karen Russell's first novel since the Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! in 2011, she populates her world with a large, engaging but ultimately unwieldy cast of narrators. In addition to Rossi, whose own past – she was robbed of her son in a home for 'unwed mothers' – is as important to the book as her present, other narrators include Asphodel, a young girl whose mother was recently murdered, supposedly by the very same 'Rabbit Foot Killer' the sheriff is after; Cleo Alfrey, a government-sponsored photographer whose pictures, hole-punched by her belittling editor, pop up throughout the text; and Harp, Asphodel's down-to-earth uncle, whose own fields, rippling with an unearthly, impossible colour, are the only ones unscathed by the storms of dust. And Asphodel has a regional basketball tournament to win – and she's in love with her best friend. Unsurprisingly, even with 400 pages to work with, no single story has time to develop. The core themes – the hidden histories of women in the West, the destruction of the Native American world – build up, but it isn't clear who or what is driving the plot or why we're hearing from any one narrator at any one time. Some transitions are pure TV. 'You asked me once how I became a prairie witch,' Rossi tells Asphodel. 'I'm ready to tell you now, if you still want to know.' More problematically still, every narrator sounds more or less the same, and more or less like a novelist. Rossi, Cleo, Asphodel, Harp and the rest are all capable of beautiful style ('waves of earth crashing over the prairie… the sky exhaling all her birds') and perfectly weighed aphorisms on the West's history ('Freedom turned out to be a territory we occupied'); but none sound like themselves. In the meantime, Russell's more unusual narrative tricks – Alfrey's photographs, or the poetry-delivering scarecrow in Harp's fields – are intriguing but underexplored. Above all, for a book so concerned with the use and abuse of the stories we tell ourselves, Russell's prose shows remarkably little interest in the way memory feels. The work of the witches is a potent, overdetermined metaphor: customers make their 'deposits' by speaking into an antique 'ear horn' while the witch themselves drifts into a trance; in return, they receive a deposit slip, which if read back to the witch will retrieve the memory, though the witch has no notion of what is hidden in their body. In short, a rich invention. Yet when we encounter the process in the text, the experience is underwhelming: one crucial passage, in which a long-lost memory from a previous generation draws parallels between the 'devouring of the Poles' in 19th-century Prussia and the colonisation of Native America, reads like a textbook, complete with an exact quote from Bismarck. The events are shocking and the comparison is brave, but I learnt more than I felt. The Antidote is a deeply-researched book about the power and importance of stories, but as a novel, it too often seems to lose its faith in the very medium in which it's working. At times it wants to be a history lesson, at times an eight-part series. Russell's narrators stop at every opportunity to answer questions that were already raised and might otherwise have been left hanging by her enchanted conceits – not least in the final, action-packed confrontation between storytellers, townsfolk and the sheriff. It all raises a question of its own: if novelists won't believe in the novel, who will?
