Hapax Legomenon's 3 favorite reads in 2025

The woman trembled slightly in the chill breeze, her long hair stirring about her shoulders. Her dancer's body was a sculptor's dream. She stared straight ahead of her, and what the men behind her could not see was that a soaring sweep of sparkling awareness had captured her eyes. It was a bizarre tabeau: the nuder and and superbly balanced woman at the edge of the precipice and the heavily clothed and armed men unable to get near her And then came the cry. 'Please, don't jump" For Martha Seligson, the totality of everything she had been taught, been made… show more.

A powerful, sensuous new novel from the critically acclaimed author of 'Evening'.

'Mesmerising.' Vogue

'The bedspread was sloughing off the foot of the bed, the white sheets were as flat as paper. This is not what she'd pictured when she asked him over for lunch today. It really wasn't.'

Taking one single interlude - two bodies entwined on a bed at midday, lovers rekindling an old affair - Susan Minot's new novel chronicles a relationship from the alternating perspectives of a man and a women.

Thoughts cascade through Benjamin's mind, memories of the chest thumping moment when he first met… show more.

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability--at the level of literature, history, and politics--to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today's climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the… show more.