Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! Contributing editor Stephanie Wong recommends Wanting by @clairejia.bsky.social.

Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! Public Streets editor Abigail Struhl recommends “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” by Kiran Desai.

Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! Culture Industries co-editor @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social recommends Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya.

Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! Lit in Translation & Sports co-editor @becquer.bsky.social recommends Luis Martín-Santos's "Time of Silence" (trans. Peter Bush) & @johnnysmith135.bsky.social & Randy Roberts's "The Fight of His Life."

"These two texts help us imagine what it might have felt like to touch Braille and be able to read a book as a blind person for the first time, or to have dysfluent speech accurately captured in a literary text.”

Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! Print/Screen editor Leah Price recommends “Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century” by @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and Johanna Winant.

Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! Literary fiction co-editor Tara K. Menon recommends "Sakina’s Kiss" by Vivek Shanbhag (trans. Srinath Perry), "The Holy Innocents" by Miguel Delibes (trans. Peter Bush), & "First Love" by Rio Shimamato (trans. Louisa Heal Kawai).

“Warne’s text pairs journalistic, medical, and sociological coverage of reading by touch with literary depictions.” New at PB: Christian Lewis reviews By Touch Alone by Vanessa Warne (@uofmpress.bsky.social).

“We believe that learning is the result of human grappling with the parts of the world that resist us and our capacity to understand.”

Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! Sports editor Frank Andre Guridy recommends "King of the North: Martin Luther King’s Life of Struggle Outside of the South" by @jeannetheoharis.bsky.social.

For Public Picks, Global Black History editor @taoleighgoffe.bsky.social recs @imaniperry.bsky.social's "Black in Blues," Nicholas Boggs's "Baldwin: A Love Story," Joycelyn Longdon's "Natural Connection" & @dorothyjberry.bsky.social's "The House Archives Built."

“We write from the perspective of 2025. But we also write as historians looking back at a lineage of educators and students who have resisted the incursions of technosolutionism, technocapitalism, and technofascism in higher education.”

Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! B-Sides series editor John Plotz recommends Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser (@catapultbooks.bsky.social).

Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! Global Black History co-editor Marlene L. Daut recommends "Savings and Trust" by Justene Hill Edwards and "Queen Mother" by @drashleydfarmer.bsky.social.

Dysfluent in Fiction, Riley McGuire argues should think of dysfluency “as a form of communication with its own literary conventions, ideological implications, and social insights.” New at PB: Read @christianlewis.bsky.social's review.

Promises that tech will transform education are nothing new. What’s remarkable is how little they have changed and how consistently they have failed to deliver.

For Public Picks, our co–EIC @njdames.bsky.social recommends Peter Brooks's “Henry James Comes Home,” Solvej Balle's “On the Calculation of Volume III,” & @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social & @johannawinant.bsky.social's “Close Reading for the 21st Century.”

“Disability studies has always been committed to the body, but this current movement of new crip materialism recenters the body and the ways it has left enduring marks upon the literary and historical record.”

Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! Managing editor @megancummins.bsky.social recommends “Disintegration Made Plain and Easy” by Kiki Araki-Kawaguchi (@pizamapress.bsky.social).

What were the books of 2025 that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us? New at PB: Our 2025 Public Picks are here! Browse our editors’ favorite titles:

PB editors @megancummins.bsky.social, @njdames.bsky.social, Marlene L. Daut, @taoleighgoffe.bsky.social, Frank Guridy, Tara K. Menon, Leah Price, @becquer.bsky.social, @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social, Abigail Struhl, and Stephanie Wong share their fave books of 2025.

“Once, universities saw their computational power exploited by researchers working for the Department of Defense. Today, universities are being infiltrated by a commercial industry.”

Dysfluent in Fiction by Riley McGuire (@ohiostatepress.bsky.social) and By Touch Alone by Vanessa Warne (@uofmpress.bsky.social) “gesture toward a new trend for the field of Victorian disability studies: increased attention to materialism.”

“Blindness wasn’t the only disability to be transformed in the Victorian era.” New at PB: @christianlewis.bsky.social reviews two new books that are part of a burgeoning movement of new crip materialism.

“We envision a resistance that is a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises.” Universities are racing to AI in FOMO-like fashion. @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social & @cnygren.bsky.social look at ways to resist.

New at PB: @christianlewis.bsky.social reviews two new books—Dysfluent in Fiction by Riley McGuire (@ohiostatepress.bsky.social) and By Touch Alone by Vanessa Warne (@uofmpress.bsky.social)—that explore Victorian materialisms and crip realities.

“Not only is ‘AI’ not especially new; protesting it has a long history.” New at PB: @cnygren.bsky.social & @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social take inspiration from a 1971 protest against the use of Stanford’s computational resources for America’s war machine in Vietnam.

New at PB: @cnygren.bsky.social & @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social offer four frictions to resist the AI takeover of education.

“What do the United States look like for a European Latino, that is, a South American immigrant naturalized in Europe?”

“One of the benefits of lab lit is its potential to slow the pathological creep of anti-scientific sentiment, its capacity to help people from all walks of life understand and identify with scientific workers.”

“Nicaraguan poet and lover of French letters Rubén Darío declared in his autobiography, 'I dreamed of Paris since my birth.'” New at PB: Melanie Shi on the “Paris Latino.”

New at PB: 6 novels prompt readers to conceive of new possibilities for better artistic futures.

“Now that lab lit is cohering into a stable, identifiable genre, it is time to think carefully about its conventions and ask how they work.” In a new essay at PB, John MacNeill Miller (@snarlsdickens.bsky.social) discusses the rules of “lab lit.”

In a new article for Public Books, Melanie Shi traces the ways Latin American immigration to Europe has influenced the food, music, and intellectual thought in Paris and elsewhere.

“Writing about the ‘most conservative’ performing art, these novelists present especially nuanced critiques of racial exclusion, gendered violence, sexual abuse, and labor exploitation.” New at PB: The classical music novel, from @sdraucker.bsky.social.

“During the 1960s and 1970s, connections between France and Latin America increased, with important consequences for European intellectual history.” New at PB: Melanie Shi details the history of Latin American immigration to Europe.

“In an era when science is consistently under fire from do-your-own-research dilettantes and dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorists, lab lit does as much to stoke anti-science conspiracy theories as it does to allay them.”

New at PB: @sdraucker.bsky.social reviews 6 books that look at “the ways in which the classical music world extracts and exploits performers’ bodily labor, presenting—often in agonizing detail—the physical pain that music making requires.”

“Gómez has even argued that the term ‘Latino’ has little meaning outside of the US. But that hasn’t prevented Latin American migrants in Europe from adopting the term, in part as a way of arguing that they are part of a broader transnational diaspora.”

“Many writers who incorporate scientists into their fiction avoid depicting the laboratories where their characters spend their days.” New at PB: John MacNeill Miller (@snarlsdickens.bsky.social) on the importance of grappling with the laboratory in fiction.

“After North and sub-Saharan Africans, Latin Americans are one of the main migrant groups in France and Europe as a whole; some 3 to 5 million Latin Americans live there.” New at PB: Melanie Shi on European Latinos.

“The perfect laboratory is not a place at all: it is an abstract space, a delimited zone where the human mind exerts control over all elements of the environment.” New at PB: Given this, how do we best represent labs in fiction?

“Fiction provides a space for writers not only to critique the classical music world’s repressive culture, but also to reimagine it.”

New at PB: Melanie Shi explores the long history of Latin Americans in Paris.

What happens when literature refuses readers entry into the laboratory? New at PB: In a time of suspicion and conspiracy, @snarlsdickens.bsky.social argues that it’s imperative we don’t treat laboratories in fiction as unexplored and unexplorable territory.

“Classical music is having a moment in popular culture.” New at PB: From Tar to Maestro to headline-making “orgasm” at a 2023 LA Philharmonic concert, @sdraucker.bsky.social explores the ways other art forms are taking classical music as their subject.

New at PB: @snarlsdickens.bsky.social looks at "lab lit"—a niche genre that advocates for more accurate representations of science in fiction. But even among the titles that meet the strictest criteria, readers are often kept out of the lab.

“Recent novels by Brendan Slocumb, Ryka Aoki, Imogen Crimp, Jessie Tu, Deborah Levy, and Ling Ling Huang expose—and, in some cases, reimagine—some of the classical music world’s most troubling traditions.” New at PB: Can literary fiction save classical music?

New at PB: In a new review of 6 recent novels about classical music, @sdraucker.bsky.social explores the authors' invitations to imagine the "most conservative performing art" not as a space of elitism and exclusion but as one of justice, community, and care.

“My book Instrument of War contends that soldiers’ lives have long been suffused with music.” New at PB: A new roundtable uses the book Instrument of War to prompt thinking about matters of war, military institutions, race, violence, trauma, and more.