Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Ryan Pfluger, Publishers
I’m a stand-up comedian. Not a book critic. I don’t want to be a book critic. And writing about books is really fucking hard. I don’t want to recap the plots or write shit like “languorous prose.” I can’t even remember character names, much less general themes, and I have zero interest in “what the author is trying to say.” That said, I read a lot of fucking books, and I particularly enjoy reading fiction as soon as it is released to the public. It gives me a pleasure I can only describe as watching a film the Friday it hits theaters, as opposed to two weeks later once the critics and the public at large have weighed in.
As I’m writing this piece, I have read 51 novels that were released in 2025. I chose what to read either based on the description written by the publisher, or because I recognized the author’s name and enjoyed their previous work. For the past five years, I’ve kept a list of everything I’ve read and then gone back through and created a top-ten list of novels I’ve read from that year for social media to admire and/or make fun of. This year, I’ve graduated to publishing my list on Vulture, behind a paywall. So here are my ten favorite novels of the year — all novels that I put down and thought, Well, that was fucking awesome.
A heartbreaking story about suicide and responsibility, flawlessly executed by the author. It’s about the dangers of artificial intelligence on a personal level and the effects it can have on a family with the best intentions. It is a mystery and a horror story about how AI can affect children like secondhand smoke. Stories about suicide are always brutal, but this one packs an extra punch. It’s a melancholy novel that will stay with the reader long after it is over. “Whatever it is he wanted, I don’t think he got it” is maybe the hardest line of dialogue I read this year.
This one takes a big swing and knocks it out of the park. The protagonist is the most vile human being I have ever had the displeasure of spending 250 pages with. This is The Picture of Dorian Gray without the picture. The novel was promoted as “a dumb American Psycho,” but I think that sells it short. The fucking balls on this author to write such a furious book, designed to be hated. Imagine if the biggest piece-of-shit narcissist you went to high school with dropped out of college, moved to New York City, and lied to everyone about selling real estate. You will hate this main character from the first page to the last. You will want to punch this book in the face. Your stomach will drop when he starts using hard drugs that accelerate the cruelty. And you feel hope for the world when he gets what’s been coming to him since the front cover. This novel is not for everyone, but that’s why I loved it so much. Just a brutal, miserable, incredible book.
I love a good story about toxic male friendship. Best friends get together with their wives and daughters to celebrate the 50th birthday of the more successful and financially well-off of the pair. That successful friend also happens to be going through a midlife crisis. After having too much to drink, the birthday boy finds himself alone with his best friend’s daughter. The reprehensible happens, and the shockwaves propel the reader through the rest of the novel. One man is guilty of sexual assault, one daughter stands up for herself, and everyone else — mother, husband, wife, and friend — cower in fear of upsetting the status quo. The gut-punch finale is the saddest ending to a book I read this year. I love a novel I finish and throw across the room before calling my best friend to demand he read it immediately while he’s on vacation with his beautiful family.
This one is just pure rock and roll. Everyone is a villain and a victim. The writing is funny, and the characters are brutal. Imagine an episode of The Sopranos that opens with Tony finding out someone murdered Meadow. Bodies are buried everywhere, and they all have to be dug up. Everything is packed with gunpowder. Everything explodes. The protagonist is terrifying, and the antagonists are a supernatural evil. This page-turner was the most fun I had with a book all year. I loved it so, so much and spent the rest of the year wishing there were more novels just like this one. It’s just a shame there can never be a sequel. And that’s not a spoiler. It’s in the fucking title.
A collection of three short stories and a titular novel, all vastly different genres taking place at different points in time. This is not a book about trans people. It’s a book about identity, the way we see ourselves, and the very human way we almost always let ourselves down. The novel here, Stag Dance, is haunting, unforgettable, and full of terminology I will never forget, like skooch. But “The Masker” was the standout for me. It’s a short story so absolutely terrifying, human, and gut-wrenching that it puts the author up there with Stephen King — and I do not make that comparison lightly. I loved this book so much that I immediately went out and purchased Torrey Peters’s award-winning Detransition, Baby. And I liked Stag Dance better.
Absolute fucking banger of a novel. It’s about a slick finance bro who returns home to help out his family in a small southern town: a father in a coma who may or may not have murdered his wife, a sister begrudgingly running the family crematorium business, and a little brother in trouble with a local gang. The villains are so terrifying that I was convinced the main character was going to get murdered on page 30. And yes, the crematorium absolutely gets a lot of work on both the living and the dead. Every novel should have a crematorium. This book piles mystery on top of mystery. The violence is visceral, and the tension doesn’t let up until a week after you’ve finished the book. S.A. Cosby just keeps getting better.
I have read all of Brandon Taylor’s novels, and this is his best. It’s a loosely plotted hangout novel that follows a disillusioned artist who is disgusted with the modern New York art scene and ambivalent and skeptical about his own minor successes. This is a beautiful novel about the nature of art, happiness, and judging those around you while trying to love yourself. This book really resonated with me; I found it easy to apply “art scene” to “comedy scene.” But I think whoever reads Minor Black Figures will see themselves here in any of the countless, perfectly drawn characters who inhabit the story.
This is a very simple novel that’s perfectly written. It’s a rags-to-riches story about a man starting life at the bottom and making it to the top because he is too apathetic to let his disadvantages get him down. Life is not fair, but at least he’s really good-looking. I love the way this novel flows. The writing is sparse and superb. Time in prison is presented in the same way as having an affair with one of the wealthiest people on the planet. There is no one to root for in this book. It’s just about a guy trying to do his best in life and not caring too much about who he hurts along the way. This novel reminded me of Stoner by John Williams, which I would argue is the Great American Novel. Flesh is a nasty, cynical piece of work; all of the characters are dripping with contempt for themselves and each other. This is a mean book in the best possible way.
Sometimes books can feel like the equivalent of Oscar bait — art that exists mostly to be important and win awards. I hate 90 percent of that shit, but the 10 percent that works can really knock you on your ass. I was skeptical going into What We Can Know, but this book rules. It’s set 100 years in the future when the world has really gone to shit in a “climate change is real” sort of way, and people are too busy fighting for survival to care much about history and art. It follows two historians as they track down a famously obscure poem, written by a famous poet, read aloud once at his wife’s birthday party, the only copy presented to her as a gift. Then the novel goes about taking the piss out of the whole thing. The poem is a bore and the poet is an asshole, but the lives of those who attended the party are fascinating. The novel begins as a meditation on the importance of art and ends up deciding that it’s not really so important after all. The lives we live are more precious than the art we leave behind. I won’t spoil the mystery, but I will say that this is the only thing that made me cry in 2025. It is a masterpiece.
This one is tough to describe without using some version of the word “perfect.” It’s about a young couple of “digital creatives” who can work from anywhere in the world. They choose Berlin at a time when living in Berlin was the coolest thing anyone could possibly do with their youth. They party a lot, make a bunch of friends, and more or less get by financially. They form friendships with other like-minded expats, most of whom inevitably disappear by returning home after tiring of the Berlin winters, burning out, and/or getting pregnant. At some point, the main characters find that as they get older, Berlin is changing around them, so they move on and try to find the “new Berlin.” There are false starts, mistakes, and retreats. This is a novel that reads like a 22-year-old’s fantasy for the first half and then settles into a 30-year-old’s insecurity that perhaps better choices could have been made. Reading Perfection felt like drinking a glass of room-temperature water when you had no idea you were very, very thirsty. It is not just the only novel I read twice this year, but also the only one I read in one sitting, riveted by the vivid description of a life many of us consider, but few choose to pursue.
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