Books to read in May 2025

Bethanne Patrick review recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and non-fiction, to consider for your May reading list.

Each year, in a sign of hope, the perennials of the garden return, even when they have not received little care. This month's literature also flowers with hope, whether it is easily spotted – as in the spiritual self -fiction of Alison Bechdel and the biography of Ron Chernow of a great American humorist – or requires careful observation, as is the case with Yiyun Li account with sorrow and super -roman of Madeleine Thiien. Happy reading!

FICTION

The words of Dr. L.: And other stories
By Karen E. Bender
Counterpoint: 304 pages, $ 27
(May 6)

Fold it like Bender and you get stories that are straight out of “Black Mirror” – science fiction which is immediately relevant – but unlike this dark series, Bender's work always understands timeless empathy for characters, especially those who struggle with invisibility. From quarantine families during the world pandemic to a kidnapped therapist, his characters combine the familiar with the strange in a cool manner.

The emperor of joy: a novel
By Ocean Vuong
Penguin Press: 416 pages, $ 30
(May 13)

Vuong (“On earth we are briefly magnificent”) examines a trauma inherited from a lyrical narrative set in Connecticut. When the university dropout of 19 years desperately depressed, Hai, meets the 82 -year -old Grazina, he became his caregiver. Hai and his cousin Sony, whose Vietnamese families have escaped in America, realize how the Lithuanian refugees Grazina can teach them psychic survival.

The Book of Discs: a novel
By Madeleine Thien
WW NORTON: 368 pages, $ 29
(May 20)

In the tradition of “Eleven station” by Emily St. John Mandel and “Cloud Cukoo Land” by Anthony Doerr, the new work of Thien integrates almost in a transparent literary, historical and scientific way. Lina, 50 in her future, remembers the years she and her father Wui Shin have spent in a place known as sea, where the inhabitants cross space and time when they help other exiles to consider the possibility of redemption.

Spended: a comic novel
By Alison Bechdel
Mariner Books: 272 pages, $ 32
(May 20)

A great graphic memory practitioner, Bechdel (“Fun Home”) transforms his Gimlet eye to head in this hilarious story of a slightly autobiographical “Alison Bechdel”, who lives in a pygmy goat farm with his partner, Holly. Alison, adult adult, finds exhausting the mature age: earning a living, trying to live intentionally, maintaining artistic integrity and facing other people. Veridic, elegant and delicious.

That's all I know: a novel
By Elisa Levi, trans. Christina Macsweeney
Graywolf: 192 pages, $ 17
(May 20)

The end of the world is supposed to be at hand and a young woman talks about her home on the verge of a strange and threatening forest in Spain. Things are downright dark and also recall the Grimm brothers, although the narrator Little Lea did not know in 2013 that the predictions based on the mayor's mayor of the mayor will not be realized. At least not yet. For the troubled family of Lea, they could as well have it.

Non-fiction

Decolonize language and other revolutionary ideas
By Ngũg Cerry;
New press: 224 pages, $ 26
(May 6)

These essays of the famous African novelist and post-colonial theorist include pieces on important contemporaries, notably Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, but also immerse themselves in the links between language and identity. Thiong'o, whose first novel, “Weep Not, Child” in 1964, was published under the name of James Ngugi, stopped writing in English in the 1970s and began to compose in Gĩkũyũ, his first language in Kenya.

Second life: having a child in the digital age
By Amanda Hess
Doubleday: 272 pages, $ 29
(May 6)

Cultural criticism on the Internet Hess could have written on pregnancy in several ways, but in 2020, it found itself vulnerable to the very aspects of online life, it covered when an ultrasound of the last trimester detected an anomaly. Hess explores his own experiences, applications to discuss the influencer rooms (including defenders and pronatalists of “free-circle”), but also connects his experiences to excellent research.

What my father and I are not talking about: sixteen writers break the silence
Edited by Michele Filgate
Simon & Schuster: 320 pages, $ 30
(May 6)

This new collection follows Filgate Filgate “What My Mother and I'm not speaking”, which was born from a powerful essay that she wrote, and includes pieces by the editor herself as well as Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Kelly McMasters and Jaquira Díaz. Men can age, absent, sick or distant; But each writer approaches him with understanding and intention rather than anger or confusion.

Mark Twain
By Ron Chernow
Penguin Press: 1200 pages, $ 45
(May 13)

Washington, Hamilton, Grant; Perhaps Chernow needed a respite, so instead of writing on an imposing figure in politics or finance, this time he chose the author and humorist Samuel Clemens, whose name of nautical feather “Mark Twain” comes from the frame of the Mississippi river from some of his famous novels. The literary life of Twain, however, has as many ups and downs as the tides of this river; Expect to be fascinated.

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Things in the wild simply grow up
By yiyun li
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 192 pages, $ 26
(May 20)

“There is no good way to say these facts, which must be recognized. My husband and I had two children and both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. The two chose suicide, and the two died not far from their home. ” Li's astonishing record on the way she chose acceptance on despair shows why artists among us sometimes offer more wisdom than any other spirituality.