LARB Staff's Book Favorites

LARB's editors pick their best reads of 2025, and what their favorite books from the year were.

By LARB StaffFebruary 25, 2026

What did the Los Angeles Review of Books team love in 2025? Our editors and staff sound off about their favorite books they read this year (whether it was a 2025 release or just new to them), and why.

A. J. Urquidi: Popular Longing by Natalie Shapero

Natalie Shapero read at LITLIT last fall, where I discovered that her poems are hilarious, darkly disorienting, and full of non sequiturs that morph into a meaningful piece of each poem's puzzle. The ones in her 2021 collection feel like a map of how my own brain works; I barreled through the whole book over the course of a single train commute.

Eli Diner: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad

Ellie Eberlee: New Paltz, New Paltz, by Mike Powell and Samuel M. Moss

Svelte, sharp portrait of an unambitious yet deeply feeling fact-checker for a magazine in New York. Trusts its reader; prose reads at once as restrained and lived-in.

Emily Szpiro: The Gadfly, by Ethel Lilian Voynich

19th-century book from the wonderful Mandylion Press. Off-the-wall story involving hidden identities, Catholic guilt, and firing squads.

Emily VanKoughnett: A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, by Harry Crews

I discovered Harry Crews this year. This book is a lot of things (dark, southern, funny), but also served as a reminder to me how many important, singular writers are lost to publishing cycles and what goes in and out of print.

Irene Yoon: Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami

Came to this book both late and at exactly the right time, which seems somehow fitting for this delightfully strange and casually familiar two-part exploration of female forms and motherhood.

Lindsay Ehrenpreis: Flesh, by David Szalay

István is one of the most culpable protagonists I've enjoyed. Like István himself, the author is laconic at times, and yet the story is sprawling, tropey (coming-of-age meets rags-to-riches) but resistant to cliché. The prose is exceptional, delicate and declarative at precisely the right moments, with too many quotable sentences to count.

Lindsay Wright: On the Calculation of Volume, by Solvej Balle

The Groundhog Day premise might have piqued my interest, but what kept me on the edge of my seat through all three volumes is the sense of the boundlessness of time, the infinite possibility of each moment. Nothing happens, and yet everything that matters happens on the 18th of November. I want to linger with Balle there a little longer.

Liz Dosta: The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene

This year was a year of ruts for me, so I read what is perhaps the most re-readable "story of hate" of all literary time: The End of the Affair. It's obssesive, but thoughtuflly so.

Medaya Ocher: Things in Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li 

A work of genius.

Rob Latham: Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

A work of sublime madness.

Zosha Millman: Sucker Punch, by Scaachi Koul

In a year when divorce stories were all the rage, Scaachi Koul's collection of essays easily stands out. It is what good essays need to be—introspective, thoughtful, generous, juicy, fun—but what astounded me most is the way Koul wove together themes and vignettes, building something more striking with every chapter.

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Image: John Singer Sargent. Resting, 1880-1890. Courtesy Joseph F. McCrindle Collection, 2010.93.1. Accessed 22/12/2025.