New Pages Summer 2025
Plenty of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in the first half of 2025!
Meet Me at the Crossroads [fiction]
HarperCollins/Amistad, 2025
From Kirkus Reviews (starred): "No one knows where the doors came from. They just appeared one day, seven doors around the world that open to a magical, confusing world. Ayanna and Olivia, twin Black girls, are born into this world...that feels both extremely relatable and unknowingly mystical, Ayanna’s meditations on grief, love, and belonging mixing with ghosts, alien drugs, and door cults. The writing is an engaging mix of witty and cutting. The characters have great depth, and Ayanna’s college experiences, especially, stand out for a touching mix of standard early 20s angst, deep depression, and the feeling of freedom that comes with being an adult for the first time. A brilliant, magical tale of grief and growth."
I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always [poetry]
Wave, 2025
From Poets & Writers: “This is a trickster of a book, one that requires its reader to pay close attention to what is overt as well as what lurks beneath—in other words, to listen to ‘that loud-assed colored silence’ and to watch one’s ‘shadow, yo(u)’ (which happen to be the titles of the fifth and sixth sequences of the book). The book is both weighty and whimsical. It plays with and on words, and as Kearney points out, it challenges its own methodology in a way that speaks to the precarious nature of Black life in America, this palimpsest of physical, economic, and existential vulnerability that many Black artists have grappled with—and managed to create beauty from—since birth.”
Fierce Delight: Poems of Early Motherhood [poetry]
North Star, 2025
From the publisher: "With a journalist’s eye for detail and a poet’s capacity for wonder, Bright captures the intense moments of early motherhood. Here are the worry and the fierce delight, the 3 am wake-ups, and the floor strewn with Cheerios. These poems read like snapshots, freeze-framing days that feel both fleeting and unending, even while the rest of the poet’s life hums in the background, waiting for its turn to thrive."
We Love the Nightlife [fiction]
Berkley, 2024
From Cosmopolitan: "The vampire renaissance is among us, and there is no one better to bring us to the next level than Rachel Koller Croft. The author is taking us all the way to the 1970s for this wild story. Disco, broken friendships, and a giant mystery are just the beginning. Two vampires that are the absolute life of the party are opening up their own nightclub together, but not everything is as it seems as one of them hatches a plan to escape from the other’s grasp. Ready to have a bloody good time?"
The Illegible Man: Disability and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America
Indiana University Press, 2025
From the publisher: "How does the sudden onset of disability impact the sense of self in a person whose identity was, at least in part, predicated on the possession of what is culturally understood to be an 'able' body? How does this experience make visible the structures enabling society's shared notions of heteronormative masculinity? In the United States, the Second World War functioned as a key moment in the emergence of modern understandings of disability. The Illegible Man examines depictions of disability in American film and literature in postwar contexts, continuing through America's war in Vietnam. A new understanding of disability, masculinity, and war in American culture."
Weird Sad and Silent [children's fiction]
Rocky Pond, 2025
From Kirkus Reviews (starred): "It’s been years since 10-year-old Daisy and her mother escaped her mother’s abusive ex-boyfriend, but the young girl still lives in fear. But when new student Austin arrives, she starts to emerge from her shell. McGhee adeptly balances a candid yet sensitive portrayal of domestic violence and its lasting impacts with a nuanced exploration of self-discovery and the power of friendship. In Daisy, she’s crafted a protagonist with a rich inner life. A beautiful story of unvarnished honesty and tender hope—this courageous protagonist will capture every heart."
Enter [poetry]
Graywolf, 2025
From author CJ Evans: "Even when the horrors of environmental collapse or childhood sexual trauma pull themselves to the center, Moore works his way back to beauty. This is a book stuffed with the things humans have made as antidotes to suffering, from Tsvetaeva’s poems to Caravaggio’s paintings, Spoleto, Seward Park, skateboards. But none of that feels like overworked reverence, but rather a poet finding, sometimes painstakingly, his way to believe it when he writes, 'Say what you will, I stayed / as long as I could. I was often alone, / but not lonely. I was sad, / but not only.'"
North Sun [fiction]
Deep Vellum, 2025
From Kirkus Reviews (starred): "Following a couple of well-received story collections, Rutherford makes an audacious leap as a novelist. Cadences that recall Melville or Coleridge are suffused with an environmentalist urgency and existential dread. In 1878 Massachusetts, during the waning days of the whaling industry, Arnold Lovejoy arrives in New Bedford with a letter for the Ashleys, the leading family of whaling. The letter says that one of their ships had been crushed by ice. The Ashleys commission Lovejoy to voyage in search of the lost ship and captain. Amid bad weather and considerable bloodshed, the voyage proceeds into the heart of oceanic darkness, where the true nature of the mission unfolds."
Animal Instinct [fiction]
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025
From Oprah Daily: "Set against the backdrop of the spring 2020 lockdowns, Rachel Bloomstein, a recently divorced—and very horny—mother of three, joins a dating app and reawakens her latent sexual desires. The quippy and no-holds-barred dialogue will remind you of gossiping with your best friends immediately after a first date. From celebrating women in mid-life embracing their sexual liberation to revealing (rather devastatingly) our co-dependency on technology to build emotional intimacy, Shearn’s novel is at once genuinely provocative, deeply heartwarming, and aware of its time."
A Catalog of Burnt Objects [YA fiction]
Dial, 2025
From Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books: "Caprice wants to escape from Sierra, her tiny California mountain town, but she also wants to finish senior year with her best friend Alicia, make sure her just-returned-from-rehab older brother Beckett stays stable, and maybe meet the cute new guy. [Then] a wildfire tears through town, burning it to the ground. Youngdahl’s gorgeous worldbuilding, where the reader can almost smell the ponderosa pines, makes the fire even more jarring, and Caprice’s narrative voice is interspersed with short essays from townsfolk about the things they lost in the fire, which adds depth without slowing the pace of this unputdownable story."
