With so many great books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition by Paul B. Preciado and Requiem and Other Poems by Aharon Shabtai.
“Don’t get born, don’t be a person, don’t get born as a person to a family of people.” The Best People (Dzanc Books, April 2025) by Robert Lopez. Seventh book, fourth story collection. Agent: None. Editor: Michelle Dotter. Publicist: Chelsea Gibbons.
“I have seen deer split open on the road and thought / that’s exactly what / those / soft and gentle / fuckers / deserve.” Salvage (University of Wisconsin Press, April 2025) by Hedgie Choi. First book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editors: Sean Bishop, Jesse Lee Kercheval, and Dennis Lloyd. Publicist: Alison Shay.
“She was courting her own disgust, these days.” Atavists (Norton, April 2025) by Lydia Millet. Seventeenth book, third story collection. Agent: Maria Massie. Editor: Tom Mayer. Publicist: Elizabeth Riley.
“I had to declare myself insane.” Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition (Graywolf Press, April 2025) by Paul B. Preciado. Sixth book, nonfiction. Agent: PJ Mark. Editor: Ethan Nosowsky. Publicist: Caelan Ernest Nardone.
“He weeps, but makes sure to do it silently, stoically.” Lush (Bloomsbury, May 2025) by Rochelle Dowden-Lord. First book, novel. Agent: Julie Flanagan. Editor: Amber Oliver. Publicist: Lauren Ollerhead Fries.
“There is no good way to say this—when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence had not been ominous enough.” Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2025) by Yiyun Li. Twelfth book, second memoir. Agent: Jacqueline Ko. Editor: Mitzi Angel. Publicists: Rose Sheehan and Sarita Varma.
“The horror / the calamity / the disgrace, / the rubble of folly / and religion’s stupidities, / the dimness of vision / and violence of despair / won’t be repaired by an officer, / a bomb or a plane, / and not by still more blood.” Requiem and Other Poems (New Directions, April 2025) by Aharon Shabtai, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole. Twenty-third book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Barbara Epler. Publicist: Maya Solovej.
“His name was Red, like the dust of the earth that was his birthing table, his playground, and his father’s burial plot—the iron-rich soil that was now the stuff of memory alone.” The Height of Land (Orison Books, April 2025) by M. C. Benner Dixon. Second book, first novel. Agent: None. Editor: Jonathan Geltner. Publicist: Alana Baer.
“Which means the docent does not look at us confused.” Hardly Creatures (Tin House Books, May 2025) by Rob Macaisa Colgate. First book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Alyssa Ogi. Publicist: Becky Kraemer.
“The Commodore 64 was launched in the year I was born and went on to become the best-selling single computer model of all time; we wouldn’t own the Commodore ourselves until four or five years later, at which point it would become one of the focal points of my and my brother’s lives.” It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays (Rose Metal Press, May 2025) by Tom McAllister. Fourth book, first essay collection. Agent: None. Editors: Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney. Publicist: Kathleen Rooney.
“A few miles west of Madison begins a landscape like no other on the planet.” Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless (University of Minnesota Press, April 2025) by Tamara Dean. Second book, first essay collection. Agent: None. Editor: Kristian Tvedten. Publicists: Leah Paulos and Heather Skinner.
“I listen to the moon but it doesn’t say much about my life.” Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon Press, April 2025) by Yuki Tanaka. First book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Ashley E. Wynter. Publicist: Ryo Yamaguchi.
