The Worst Books of 2025: Fiction
As mentioned, 2025 was a rough year for fiction. Some of the rot simply extended from last year and the year before that: the bratty entitlement of identity politics, the bland hospital-lounge wallpaper of MFA-generated autofiction, etc. But this year’s fiction was more thickly clogged with simple incompetence and something even more annoying: lazy Dudebro cynicism raised to pretensions of profundity. In future lists, when authors are openly using AI in order to generate piles of pages, these same annoying flaws will seem like the good old days. But for now, they combined to produce a great heaping number of awful books. These were the worst of them:
10 The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)
Vuong’s extremely protected privileged status, coupled with his ability to turn a phrase roughly once in 100 pages, has shielded him from most criticism, but the flat technical incompetence of this latest attempt at a novel has pushed even the most long-suffering reviewers right to the edge of abandoning the Progressive Stack in favor of, you know, critical evaluation.
9 The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (WW Norton)
Every year like clockwork, some pretentious author decides to try a little carpetbagging by slumming in the lower genres. They’ll decide on a whim to write a Western and then populate their Dakota territory with modern identity politics; they’ll mistakenly think that if they write a book in which somebody is murdered, they’ve written a murder mystery; or, in the case of this endlessly boring new book by Madeleine Thien, they’ll attempt to write science fiction without doing any of the world-building the genre used to require.
8 Never Flinch by Stephen King (Scribner)
There’s a particular category of writer that often shows up on this list but maybe ought never to, the kind of writer who’s inherently bad, to the point where calling their latest book gawd-awful becomes the equivalent of calling earthquakes unsettling. The list this time includes two such writers, but since Stephen King has been writing utterly inept books like Never Flinch (once again featuring the insufferable Holly Gibney but alas, not her immolation — a scene I’d enjoy, even though King would of course botch it) for half a century, he gets mentioned before Gary Shteyngart.
7 Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead Books)
Since Taylor carries the same personal privilege as writers like Ocean Vuong, he becomes likewise an author who’s unlikely ever to learn his craft or be asked to or be required to. Instead, he appears to be set on a course of turning out books like this one, full of ill-informed posturing by paper-thin figures for page after pointless page.
6 The New New Me by Helen Oyeymi (Riverhead Books)
One inevitable side-effect of over-praise from critics who should know better is that those authors sometimes start dreaming big. This seems like the most likely explanation for the narrative complexity Oyeyemi attempts but cannot even remotely pull off in her new multiple-viewpoint novel.
5 Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Random House)
It’s by now become a truism that Shteyngart is a cliche’s living embodiment: a debut with a glimmer of talent, followed by its author sinking into navel-gazing hackery; by now it’s become almost pointless to include him on this list – except that this latest novel is so egregiously lazy, so sloppily unformed, that warning against it merited perhaps this author’s last inclusion.
4 Vaim by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls (Transit Books)
As bad as laziness and incompetence are, especially when they’ve become tent-poles of the genre under the label of “autofiction,” there was something darker running through some of the worst fiction of the year, the literary equivalent of Brutalism, great granite blocks of prose assembled by very similar male writers in order to be owned and praised (but not read) by very similar male customers. This book, horrifyingly the first in a series, is a dismayingly perfect example, not only of its prevalence but of its ultimate dangerous pointlessness.
3 A Short Introduction to Anneliese by James Elkins (The Unnamed Press)
The problem – one of the many problems – with these Brutalist Dudebro books is exemplified in this new novel by Elkins, which bills itself as the second in a series (there we go again): they clearly think impenetrability and interminability are values in prose, or else they think they’ll be valued by young male customers, desperate for gibberish that’s both incomprehensible and largely free of meaningful female characters (whether they show up in the title or not). Elkins goes on and on endlessly, drops more names than a phone book falling off a building, and serves up literally nothing.
2 Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz, translated by Max Lawton (Deep Vellum Publishing)
Another problem – one of the many – with these Brutalist Dudebro monstrosities (all four of them on this list are essentially the same book), apart from their arrogant formlessness, apart from their condescending performative verbosity, is the sheer overwhelming level of their pretentiousness. That particular quality reaches its peak this year with this intolerably patronizing and meandering pile of navel-gazing critic-suborning garbage.
1 Tom’s Crossing by Mark Danielewski (Pantheon)
Probably the worst problem – of the many, many problems – with these Brutalist Dudebro monstrosities is their implicit (sometimes explicit) contention that the conventional novel, in all its infinite variety and potential, is played out somehow, in need of being subverted or augmented or outright replaced by text-things that mainly act as word-puzzles and shelf-badges for their young male customers. This implied contention has been Mark Danielewski’s entire literary career, reaching what normal non-performative readers can only hope is its word-limit with this direly rotten long book.