Reading for the New Year: Part Two

To commencement the caller year, New Yorker writers are looking backmost connected the past one, sifting done the immense fig of books they encountered successful 2025 to place the experiences that stood out. This is the 2nd installment successful a bid of their recommendations (read the archetypal here) that volition proceed successful the coming weeks. Stay tuned for the adjacent 1 and, successful the meantime, should you privation to turn your to-be-read heap further, you tin ever consult the magazine’s yearly database of the year’s champion caller titles.

Out of My League

by George Plimpton

Years ago, I wrote a bid of articles for my assemblage paper astir competing successful contests for which I was comically unprepared: limb wrestling, archery, Scrabble. The compulsion to neglect dramatically continued into my freelance penning career, erstwhile I finagled my mode into the beforehand corral astatine the Los Angeles Marathon. (I stuck with the élites for each of 2 100 meters.) My inclination was Plimptonian. In 1961, George Plimpton, the co-founder of The Paris Review, published “Out of My League,” successful which helium recounts floundering epically connected the shot field. Plimpton did not invent participatory sports journalism—in 1922, the newsman Paul Gallico submitted himself to Jack Dempsey’s fists—but helium mastered its dependable accumulation of masochistic micro-detail. His publication is simply a brutally comic chronicle of an day astatine Yankee Stadium—“unbelievably vast, startlingly green”—where he, a erstwhile prep-school pitcher, “built alternatively similar a vertebrate of the stiltlike, wader variety,” threw a fractional inning of an accumulation crippled against Major League All-Stars. The climax finds Plimpton, marooned connected the mound wearing a child’s mitt, having thing similar a panic onslaught arsenic helium faces Willie Mays and company. Following a chaotic pitch, Plimpton writes, “I felt I had to marque immoderate comment; what I’d done was excessively undignified to walk unnoticed, and truthful erstwhile again I hurried disconnected the mound calling out, ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ ”—Charles Bethea

American Mermaid

by Julia Langbein

For me, the champion books to prime up during the quiescent weeks astir the holidays are literate novels, peculiarly those from caller talents. One of my favourite finds of the past fewer years is “American Mermaid.” Langbein, an American expat who present lives adjacent Paris, is thing of a polymath; she earned a Ph.D. astatine the University of Chicago and has authored a monograph, “Laugh Lines,” astir drama successful nineteenth-century France. In the aboriginal two-thousands, she did standup successful New York, and wrote a fashionable wit blog, “The Bruni Digest,” successful which she critiqued the Times columnist Frank Bruni’s edifice reviews with, arsenic a newsman for Food & Wine erstwhile wrote, “almost Talmudic attention.” “American Mermaid,” which came retired successful 2023, is Langbein’s archetypal enactment of fiction, but has the assurance of a tenth. The communicative follows an English teacher, Penelope Schleeman, who has written a début caller astir the adventures of a feisty mermaid surviving successful a matriarchal pod. The book, which has a decidedly feminist bent, becomes a astonishment best-seller, and soon Penelope finds herself successful Hollywood, surrounded by blowhard executives and puerile antheral screenwriters who privation to accommodate her enactment into a blockbuster. What unfolds is simply a spot of a nightmare, arsenic the manufacture campaigns to soften the edges of her subversive story, and besides a spot of a magical-realist fantasy: Penelope starts believing that possibly mermaids really exist—or possibly she’s simply going crazy? It’s a publication wrong a publication wrapped successful a parable, and I adored it. I laughed retired loud, respective times, and hardly wanted it to end. And, if you work it now, you’ll beryllium capable to accidental you were aboriginal to Langbein earlier her adjacent novel—“Dear Monica Lewinsky,” astir a pistillate who begins to commune to Lewinsky arsenic a secular saint—arrives successful April.—Rachel Syme

Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather

My workfellow Katy Waldman precocious wrote an appreciation of Mary McCarthy’s “One Touch of Nature,” an effort from 1970 connected the diminution of scenery successful fiction. Melville’s oceans and Fenimore Cooper’s forests were charged with grandeur, McCarthy writes; by her ain time, readers had to beryllium contented with Hemingway’s sportfishing and the masculinist idealization of Southwestern “ranch life.” Strangely, McCarthy overlooks 1 of twentieth-century American literature’s top observers of nature: Willa Cather, and, particularly, the wondrous, ruminative New Mexico of her 1927 caller “Death Comes for the Archbishop.”

Cather’s protagonist, Father Latour, is simply a French priest, who is appointed bishop of New Mexico pursuing its 1851 annexation. The gringos are coming, and Latour indispensable enactment up the diocese, trekking betwixt isolated haciendas and pueblos with his quasi-spousal companion Father Vaillant. (Cather was a lesbian, and her communicative conforms to Leslie Fiedler’s contention that American lit is fixated connected the homoerotics of the frontier.) They meander done a bid of hardscrabble vignettes, succoring the mediocre and rooting retired parochial corruption. The existent communicative is Latour’s brushwood with the territory—transfigured, by Cather’s prose, into a metaphysical battleground and a sphinxlike witness.