The last month of the year can be a strange month for new releases. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t gems to be found in publishers’ catalogs; it just means that the books due out in the last month of the year tend to be more eclectic — but that can be, as they say, a feature rather than a bug. When a cohort of books includes everything from an annotated guide to the lyrics of The Mountain Goats to a beloved character actor’s latest foray into fiction, it’s a good sign for compelling reading to come. As an added bonus, several of these books would make terrific gifts should you be in a gifting mode this month.
John Darnielle, This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days (Dec. 2)
Over the decades since he first began recording music under the Mountain Goats name, both solo and with a variety of collaborators, John Darnielle has written an absurdly large number of great songs. In This Year, Darnielle explains the origins of 365 of his compositions, all the while telling the story of his life and the evolution of the Mountain Goats along the way. It’s a candid and often moving exploration of a beloved songwriter’s discography — and the experiences that informed these songs.
Roy Christopher, Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (Dec. 2)
In a recent installment of his newsletter, Roy Christopher described his new book as “a grim survey of all the ways we attempt to escape the limitations of our physical forms.” Given Christopher’s wide-ranging interests — his bibliography encompasses everything from an in-depth analysis of hip-hop to a surreal science fiction collection — this premise provides a way to cover a range of subjects, including cybernetics and the most extreme forms of music.
Terese Svoboda, Hitler and My Mother-In-Law (Dec. 2)
How do you reckon with the legacy of someone who was both an industry pioneer and had a penchant for bending the truth? That’s the question that Terese Svoboda reckons with in her new book Hitler and My Mother-In-Law, in which she ponders the life and legacy of the journalist Pat Hartwell, who covered World War II and the fall of the Axis. Hartwell’s life was fascinating, but — as Svoboda has pointed out — not every detail she shared with her loved ones was entirely accurate. With this book, Svoboda seeks to find the borders between facts and falsehoods.
Tim Blake Nelson, Superhero (Dec. 2)
Tim Blake Nelson has had an interesting year, turning up as a depressed man with a fondness for Jim Thompson novels in The Lowdown and a superpowered genius in Captain America: Brave New World. A wide range of roles isn’t the only thing Nelson has on his plate for 2025; this year also sees the publication of his latest novel, following 2023’s City of Blows. Superhero is, as its title suggests, a fictional look at blockbuster-scale filmmaking; given that Nelson first made a name for himself as a playwright, it’s impressive to see him branching out even more.
Legacy Russell, Asma Naeem and Katherine Brinson, Jordan Casteel (Dec. 10)
In a 2020 article for Vulture, Jerry Saltz hailed the work of painter Jordan Casteel, which he called “a new level of charged and alive American social portraiture, one that doesn’t overfreight its subjects with struggle.” This new monograph provides readers with a fantastic overview of Casteel’s art, along with commentary on it from a trio of talented writers and curators.
A.S. Hamrah, Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019-2025 (Dec. 2)
The best criticism can help point readers to work they might come to love, and help them see old favorites in a new light. With his second book of the year, following the evocatively-titled Last Week in End Times Cinema, A.S. Hamrah brings together six years’ worth of his writing on film. He’s a writer who is unafraid to put forth a singular perspective on films, and some of his observations in a recent interview — including “I’ve always said the trailers exist to make movies look worse than they are.” — give a good sense of the aesthetic behind the keyboard.
Ben Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives (Dec. 30)
Upon its publication in the U.K. earlier this year, Ben Markovits’s novel The Rest of Our Lives was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s the story of a middle-aged man who takes an impromptu road trip across the country, wrestling with questions of his past as he makes his way west. In a review for The Guardian, Marcel Theroux compared it to Miranda July’s All Fours in its emotional complexity and noted that its “great literary qualities are understatement and self-effacement.”
John Darnielle Loves Talking About Records Almost as Much as He Loves Making Them
The Mountain Goats singer holds forth on Bonnie Raitt, Depeche Mode and … the Mountain Goats
W. Patrick McCray, README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (Dec. 2)
If you’ve been following industry news related to AI companies, you’ve probably read about a number of writers suing the likes of Anthropic because of pirated books. Those lawsuits are far from the first time that the worlds of publishing and computing have crossed over; in the new book README, University of California, Santa Barbara professor W. Patrick McCray takes the reader back in time to chronicle the interconnectedness between these two ways of reckoning with information.
Cristina Florea, Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland (Dec. 16)
Many years in the making, Cristina Florea’s new book explores a region of eastern Europe which is currently part of Romania and Ukraine. This is Bukovina, and to tell its story is to reckon with centuries of conflicts, disputes and wars — and to trace the way this one particular region has been shaped and reshaped by them. Florea, who teaches at Cornell, has written about the issues facing the larger region elsewhere; this looks to be a powerful exploration of the way larger historical trends can trickle down.
Jamie Woodward, A Little History of the Earth (Dec. 9)
A book that purports to tell the history of our planet in just over 300 pages might sound like a daunting task. Based on the reception that this book by University of Manchester professor Jamie Woodward has received, it instead sounds like the most compelling seminar imaginable. Kirkus’s review observed that “the book is more accurately about the ever-changing nature of earth’s history, making it more teaser than textbook.” If you’re looking to better understand the world we live in this winter, this is an excellent place to start.
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