The Best New Book Releases Out May 20, 2025

Bechdel, the lesbian cartoonist so iconic as to have a tool named after her that measures representation in media, is back with a funny and biting look at the life of a pygmy goat sanctuary manager and cartoonist named Alison Bechdel. Alison found success with her first graphic memoir about growing up with a taxidermist father, which got adapted into an award-winning show. But then her outdoorsy partner goes viral for a how-to wood-chopping video, and suddenly Alison is jealous and having to contend with her own privilege.

Li starts her memoir with “There is no good way to say this,” then details how she lost both of her children to suicide years apart. She explores her grief and how she has learned to be and to do—everything from gardening to playing the piano—with the constant presence of grief and thoughts of death.

“The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” 

From the author of the bestselling The Three Mothers comes a book that hits right at one of the biggest cultural issues of the moment. In Erased, Tubbs looks at America’s particular brand of patriarchy and what it has costed us. She uses academic research to explore how, despite this country’s history of enforcing a strict gender binary that is bound to whiteness, there has always been freedom fighters who fought against patriarchy despite necessary, oppression-fighting tools being hidden. Those tools, Tubbs contends, are available to us now.

Creepy-gothic-queen and author of The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence has granted us a medieval fever dream of a novel in our time of need.

Right as Aymar Castle is on its last rations—and certain extreme measures start to be considered—from being under siege for six months, miraculous saviors arrive. Suddenly, the food is replenished and divine figures of saints have arrived, even though the gates have been barricaded. What’s more, the castle inhabitants fall into a hedonistic stupor, courtesy of their saviors. That is, except for war hero Ser Voyne, nun-turned-sorceress Phosyne, and serving girl Treila. The three women are the only ones to resist falling completely into the widespread debauchery that happens within the castle, despite the army waiting just outside its walls. But they aren’t totally immune, from the mysterious and terrible saviors or each other. Eventually, they realize that a vast world restructuring will need to transpire to save the castle. But first, violence.

Here, Tourmaline brings luster to the life of Marsha P. Johnson, who was said to have thrown the first brick during the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. This is actually the first official biography of Marsha, and through it, we see the queer icon as an activist and a performer who worked alongside RuPaul and the drag troupe The Hot Peaches.

This trippy, temporally fluid novel starts as Lina and her father find themselves at The Sea. The Sea is mysterious, it shifts its shape as well as its time, and while there, Lina find friendship with a 17th-century Jewish scholar in Amsterdam, a 1930s philosopher fleeing Nazi persecution, and a Tang Dynasty poet. Through their guidance, she begins to face her father’s role in her family’s trauma.