Helen Oyeyemi! Ryan Chapman! Marie-Helene Bertino! 26 books out in paperback this March.

March, miraculously, is here, the third month in a new year that has already felt like a year or two compressed into these first few months. But, even as 2025 seems defined by chaos so far, there are certainties to cling to, like the monthly promise of new books to read. And this month is no different. Instead of focusing on the corybantic tumult of the world, instead of letting these literary lights be missed in all the high-beam madness of it all, let us take a moment, instead, to focus on some wonderful books to consider picking up this month, each out in a fresh new paperback edition. These books deserve our attention, especially if you missed them in hardcover, or just want to pick them up in softcover (because why not?).

And there’s much to delight in. In fiction, you’ll find scintillating work from Marie-Helene Bertino, Eskor David Johnson, Helen Oyeyemi, Ferdia Lennon, Marissa Higgins, and many others. There are engaging poetic experiments from Mary Ruefle and Rowan Ricardo Phillips. And, in nonfiction, you’ll see an array of intriguing work, including Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe on indigenous-American life through a punk queer lens; Adam Phillips on the surprising virtues of giving up; Emily Raboteau on what it means to mother against apocalypse; Caroline Crampton with a cultural and literary history of hypochondria; and much more.

No matter the tumult of the world, let’s read on. Add some, or many, of these to your to-be-read lists, worthy companions, perhaps, in a world where we need companionship of all kinds—including literary—more than ever.

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Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland
(Picador)

“In Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Adina (maybe an alien, maybe a troubled human, always both) takes the tired old world and describes it so perfectly that we see it as if for the first time. Sparkling and alive, funny and magnificently true, this book woke me up. It made me weep with appreciation for the hard, strange, small-but-huge lives we lead. It made me fall back in love with this universe.”
–Ramona Ausubel

Ryan Chapman, The Audacity
(Soho Press)

“Chapman’s skewering of the rich, the very rich and the ultrarich as they debate the world’s ills is as incisive as it is hilarious.”
–The Washington Post

Eskor David Johnson, Pay as You Go
(McSweeney’s)

“A madcap odyssey through the hellscape that is the metropolis of the near future. […] Like Dante, [the protagonist] Slide wanders in circles, soaking in weirdness, tragedies, and occasional flashes of beauty. And like Joyce, Johnson builds a world that, for all its improbabilities, is recognizable. […] An inventive, beautifully written debut that will leave readers wanting more.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits
(Holt)

“A stunning (and stunningly fun) meditation on companionship, humanity and the role of performance in keeping us all afloat….In a contemporary moment of war, Lennon’s sharp eye for the barbarism that can accompany society’s theatrical coping mechanisms feels almost too relevant….[A] thrilling and heartbreaking debut novel.”
–The Washington Post

Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe, Thunder Song: Essays
(Counterpoint)

“Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe gives us glimpses into her life as an Indigenous woman in America in her brilliant new essay collection, Thunder Song. She boldly proclaims her heritage, her queerness, and her punk-ness. I can’t wait for people to read this!”
–Ashley Kilcullen

Adam Phillips, On Giving Up
(Picador)

“Phillips has rendered the term ‘giving up’ spacious and flexible, having woven together psychology and literature to reveal suggestive points of contact….Phillips makes an ambitious case: that giving up is as important to our psychological well-being as hope and love are.”
–Los Angeles Review of Books

Emily Raboteau, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse”
(Holt)

“As the world burns, Emily Raboteau is paying attention as a mother, as a writer and as a pilgrim in search of beauty and justice. At a time when the disconnect between the violence and inequities surrounding race and the climate crisis is too often unseen and ignored, Raboteau makes this relationship clear through her moving inquiries and observations. Lessons for Survival has wings. This beautiful, soaring book is its own pilgrimage and prayer.”
–Terry Tempest Williams

Mary Ruefle, The Book
(Wave Book)

“There is something quite magical in the way her pieces exist within this collection, this ‘book,’ offering the notion of genre as something wonderfully fluid. Within compact lines and wonderful flow, she offers intimate and lyric slivers of life and thinking, meditations on ordinariness that is never truly ordinary, or spectacular simply because of that ordinariness. The variations on her prose structures hold an enormity, packing nuance into every phrase.”
–Rob McLennan

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Silver
(FSG)

“To meet an increasingly isolating and terrifying era, Phillips retrenches in poetry, which, he claims, can be found everywhere. ‘The imagination hides in plain sight.’ Poetry stands by us, ready, Phillips seems to say, to console us with the truth, whether or not we want to hear it.”
–NPR

Carys Davies, Clear
(Scribner)

“A jewel of a new novel…It’s hard to overstate how deftly and viscerally Davies’s prose conveys this world. We see and hear and smell it, shiver with it….I dare not give away more of this splendidly imagined story, while longing to quote from it at greater length….I found myself rereading the novel’s last pages with wonder, wanting to revisit (and reconsider) just how they unfold.”
–The Washington Post

Marissa Higgins, A Good Happy Girl
(Catapult)

“I am a sucker for any sapphic literary fiction, but the malaise of the protagonist and her unique voice quickly drew me in….Helen’s voice is entirely singular, and you’ll keep reading not only because of the impeccable sentences—each one carrying so much weight—but also to find out how deep into desperation Helen will let herself slip before asking to be saved.”
–Kim Narby

Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot
(Penguin)

“A critical favorite that deserves the lavish praise, [Headshot] is as slim and fierce as the teenage boxers that occupy its pages….Bullwinkel’s writing is immersive but never self-indulgent; you can read her debut in one sitting, but you’ll want to make the pleasure of it last much longer
–ELLE

William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
(Vintage)

“The Rigor of Angels—the title is taken from a phrase in a Borges story— is a remarkable synthesis of the thoughts, ideas, and discoveries of three of the greatest minds that our species has produced. The richness of the book cannot be fully acknowledged in the space of a review. Mr. Egginton advances a great many knotty arguments and propositions, but he is never less than exciting, provocative, and illuminating.”
–John Banville

Caroline Crampton, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria
(Ecco)

“A Body Made of Glass is a masterful and very readable account of the history of hypochondria as a concept in human history, and its implications for how we think about what is real, what is normal, and how we relate to our bodies. And the writing is beautiful. This is a profound work, especially when Crampton weaves in her own story of illness anxiety and trauma. I read it [in] a sitting.”
–Gwen Adshead

Cynthia Car, Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar
(Picador)

“Candy Darling willed herself to be beautiful, and she succeeded: she was uniquely, spectrally beautiful. But the world made her pay for it. Cynthia Carr’s minute reconstruction of her life is brilliant and profoundly sad. As if Candy’s ghost were dictating the terms, it keeps her an enigma, a consummate life actress who never dressed down.”
–Lucy Sante

Helen Oyeyemi, Parasol Against the Axe
(Riverhead)

“Oyeyemi’s language, along with her ability to drop clues and invite questions without clear answers, makes the reading experience a world unto its own….The pleasure of Parasol Against the Axe lies in figuring out what is real and what is imag­ined—and if, in Oyeyemi’s world, the differ­ence even matters.”
–BookPage

Maurice Carlos Ruffin, The American Daughters
(One World)

“The always-inventive author of the Pen/Faulkner finalist We Cast a Shadow returns with an electrifying work of historical fiction centered on a gutsy former slave girl who joins a clandestine band of female spies working to undermine the Confederacy.”
–Electric Literature

Lottie Hazel, Piglet
(Holt)

“Piglet is luscious and disturbing and propulsive, and I completely devoured it. It’s a book about hunger and secrecy and women made small by convention. And it’s a book that tears at the surface of things to reveal the vast, messy truth of a body with a beating heart.”
–Catherine Newman

David Coggins, The Believer
(Scribner)

“Coggins plumbs connections between angling and life with loved ones; his account of negotiating the Patagonia trip with his girlfriend is a masterful analysis of gender relations. Glimpses of Bruce Chatwin, Butch Cassidy, Rainer Maria Rilke, bad beer, and a polo match bring Coggins’ celebration of fly fishing to life.”
–Booklist

J. C. Hallman, Say Anarcha: A Young Woman a Devious Surgeon and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health
(Holt)

“This compelling, extremely well-researched account of the life of an enslaved Black woman changes the historical narrative surrounding J. Marion Sims and engages us in a sober reckoning over the legacy of slavery, medical experimentation and gynecology…extraordinary…’Anarcha’ is a name we should say, remember and reflect upon as we still contend with a history of racial injustice…[and] racial disparities in health care, injustice and unnecessary suffering.”
–Bryan Stevenson

David Toomey, Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal About Life Itself
(Scribner)

“This engaging survey of animal play—from bees to humans—not only reveals the astonishing array of play behaviors but the motivations behind such escapades as octopuses tossing balls and crows devising their own snow sleds. Toomey also searches for an overarching explanation for animals’ playful inclinations and finds it in natural selection, Darwin’s key driver of evolution. Overall, a fun and thought-provoking examination of why we and all animals play.”
—Virginia Morell

Eliza Barry Callahan, The Hearing Test
(Catapult)

“Callahan uses the narrator’s sudden deafness—and the questions that abound from such a radical transformation in how she engages with the sensory world—to claw at the underbelly of experience, to investigate conscious life at the most basic of units….There’s consistent humor, little bursts of observational wit…[and] transcendentally lucid prose.”
–Stuart Beal

Allison Pataki, Finding Margaret Fuller
(Ballantine Books)

“Pataki digs into the fascinating and all-too-short life of Margaret Fuller, a trailblazing nineteenth-century writer…all of us who later benefitted from the march toward equal rights for women should read this book, which honors an early feminist icon who broke nearly every rule laid out for her and in doing so, inspired a generation and led the way into a brighter future with courage and heart.”
–Kristin Harmel

Chris Harding Thornton, Little Underworld
(Picador)

“Little Underworld is so vivid it feels like reading a movie. Straightforward in its telling and subtle in its beauty, this ingenious novel is what might happen if the Coen Brothers set an episode of Peaky Blinders in 1930s Omaha. A lively, unforgettable masterpiece starting with a very personal murder and twisting through an American city’s brutal political machine, while never losing sight of hope and grace almost within reach.”
–Steve Weddle

Abrahm Lustgarten, On the Move: How Climate Disasters Are Changing Where We Live
(Picador)

“Poignant and meticulously researched….A compelling call to understand, prepare for, and act on the climate crisis . . . Combining rigorous research and engaging storytelling….A crucial examination of the impacts—realized and projected—in our own backyards and how these changes are remaking society….Both a call to action and a blueprint for how to weather the coming storm.”
–Science

Vaishnavi Patel, Goddess of the River
(Redhook)

“In her retelling of the Mahabharata, Patel has once again narrowed her version of a famous epic onto one compelling, female protagonist. Fans of the original as well as fans of mythological fantasy and retellings will enjoy Ganga’s fierce independence and well-told journey as well as the twists and turns that spell out Bhishma’s destiny in this complex story.”
–Booklist

Jennifer Thorne, Diavola
(TOR Nightfire)

“Imagine The Exorcist meets The Haunting of Hill House in a creepy Tuscan villa with lots of atmosphere and a vein of dark humor running throughout. Brilliant!”
–Gabriel Dylan