Year-End Lists

Vanity Fair: The 17 Best Books of 2025 You Need to Read

• Bad Company

  Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
  Megan Greenwell
• Flashlight
  Susan Choi
• Ruth
  Kate Riley
• North Sun

  Or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther
  Ethan Rutherford
• This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days
  John Darnielle
• Now Jazz Now

  100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings (1960-80)
  Byron Coley, Mats Gustafsson, and Thurston Moore
• Great Black Hope
  Rob Franklin
• Dead and Alive
  Zadie Smith
• All Consuming

  Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now
  Ruby Tandoh
• Toni at Random

  The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship
  Dana A. Williams
• The Dream Hotel
  Laila Lalami
• Forest Euphoria

  The Abounding Queerness of Nature
  Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
• Paper Girl

  A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America
  Beth Macy
• What We Can Know
  Ian McEwan
• King of Kings

  The Iranian Revolution—A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
  Scott Anderson
• Stag Dance

  A Quartet
  Torrey Peters
• Joyride

  A Memoir
  Susan Orlean