favorite reads from the first half of 2025...
The Seers, Sulaiman Addonia
From its opening lines The Seers rages and burns; wildly original in both its form and the manner in which it approaches its subjects, Addonia’s writing is presented in a block of unbroken text, a stream of consciousness black hole to be sucked down into. The story follows Hannah, a refugee seeking asylum in London, where sex becomes her way of achieving selfhood, forming a hypnotizing, visceral portrait of the body, pleasure, and life as a refugee. Amongst the poetry of carnage and debauchery, this book is a desire for self and identity in a colonialist world, a journey that is conducted through bodies.
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño
The Savage Detectives, by the legendary Roberto Bolaño, is an epic novel that follows two aspiring poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, and the poetry movement they have formed, Visceral Realism. The novel places its two main characters at a distance; rather than adhering to any kind of conventional narrative perspective, the novel drifts between over fifty different voices, characters who encounter Arturo, Ulises, and Visceral Realism. The accounts move through time as the two poets travel from Mexico to France, Spain to Africa, never showing the reader the pair’s poetry, but instead, the hopeful wanderings of two artists transfixed by the past as they romanticize figures like Rimbaud and Lautréamont. The novel is a scoping love letter to literature and poetry while also being a partly autobiographical story— Arturo Belano being a stand-in for Bolaño— and a document on the idealization, naivety, and self-importance of youth.
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, Cookie Mueller
Most well-known for her roles in early John Waters films, Cookie Mueller was an icon of the cult and underground art movements of the 70s and 80s. This book is an indispensable compilation from a one-of-a-kind mind, an assortment of autobiographical stories, fictional stories, advice columns, and letters written by Mueller recounting her often humorous, sometimes horrifying stories about growing up in the 60s and 70s, her friendships with people like John Waters, Divine, and Nan Goldin, and even some advice for her at-home cures for various ailments, however strange or obscene they may be. All of the writing in this book is infused with an irreverence, fierce imagination, and resilience. A priceless companion and account of a moment in time that can never be again. This book is a searing, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking look into all that was cool, alternative, and weird in the 70s and 80s.
Poems, Pierre Reverdy
A collection of prose and verse poetry by the French surrealist and avant-garde poet, Pierre Reverdy. Friends with people like Pablo Picasso, Reverdy’s writing feels like a Cubist or Surrealist painting, himself being both hugely inspired by and a large influence on the Surrealist movement. His prose pieces read almost like parables; Reverdy writes about spiraled staircases that ascend to nowhere, eyes that connect and form a bridge between faces, and forgotten keys that unlock something unknown. Reverdy’s work defies reality, instead settling into a plane of emotional and lyrical depth, engulfed in a shadowed and surreal atmosphere that teeters on the edge of the gothic.
The Visiting Privilege, Joy Williams
This is a towering collection from a true titan of the short story, Joy Williams. The Visiting Privilege is a journey into the dusty recesses of American life; if there is a theoretical spotlight trained onto the world, Williams writes about the people in the shadows, her attention is focused on the fringes of society: the weirdos and the othered. She has this completely singular way of setting reality out of joint through moments sometimes so subtle, a character stopping to pluck a hair off their tongue, or in grander displays, a woman channeling the grief of her husband’s death into the Sisyphean construction of a massive turtle enclosure, creating an atmosphere of utter strangeness while never losing an emotional charge. There isn’t a weak story in this collection; each sentence builds to a powerful, strange, and immersive gust, showing the disturbed and deranged that exist beneath the surface. A perfect book.