We’re excited to announce the finalists for the 2025 Big Other Readers’ Choice Award! The winner will be announced at the 2025 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony, which will be aired virtually (date and time to be announced).
Big thanks to the following superb writers for their lists: Kurt Baumeister, Stephen Delaney, Elaine Equi, Erika Goldman, Sam Lipsyte, Peter Markus, David Naimon, D.A. Powell, Jerome Sala, Rone Shavers, Christine Sneed, Constance Squires, Terese Svoboda, Ben Tanzer, Roberto J. Tejada, Tony Trigilio, Chris Vaughan, Hao Guang Tse, William Walsh, and Angela Woodward!
Without further ado, here are the finalists for the 2025 Big Other Readers’ Choice Award:
Diana Arterian’s Agrippina the Younger (Curbstone Press)
Kurt Baumeister’s Twilight of the Gods (Stalking Horse Press)
Kim Chinquee’s Contact with the Wild (Madhat Press)
Mónica de la Torre’s Pause the Document (Nightboat)
Elaine Equi’s Out of the Blank (Coffee House Press)
Molly Gaudry’s Fit Into Me (Rose Metal Press)
Kevin Killiam’s Padam Padam (Nightboat Books)
Michael Leong’s Dear Vase Already Shattered Against the Fragile Floor (Black Square Editions)
Norman Lock’s Eden’s Clock (Bellevue Literary Press)
Robert Lopez’s The Best People (Dzanc Books)
Jerome Sala’s Glop (BlazeVOX [books])
Amber Sparks’s Happy People Don’t Live Here (Liveright )
Constance Squires’s Low April Sun (University of Oklahoma Press)
Marc Vincenz’s Ironclad (Spuyten Duyvil)
Joy Williams’s The Pelican Child (Knopf)
Honorable Mention:
Giorgio Agamben’s The Body of Language, translated by Kevin Attell (Seagull Books)
António Lobo Antunes’s Midnight Is Not in Everyone’s Reach, translated by Elizabeth Lowe (Dalkey Archive Press)
DW Ardern’s Master of Starlight (Stalking Horse Press)
Duncan Barlow’s Awry (Bridge Eight Press)
Amie Barrodale’s Trip (FSG)
Molly Bendall’s Turncoat (Omnidawn)
Jesi Bender’s Child of Light (Whisk(e)y Tit)
Karen E. Bender’s The Words of Dr. L and Other Stories (Counterpoint)
Craig Bernardini’s 12 Oxen Under the Sea (New American Press)
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s Terry Dactyl (Coffee House Press)
Michael Bible’s Little Lazarus (Clash Books)
Laurie Blauner’s Swerve (Rain Mountain Press)
Tessa Bolsover’s Crane (Black Ocean)
Paula Bomer’s The Stalker (Soho Press)
Susan Briante’s 13 Questions for the Next Economy (Noemi Press)
Hannah Brooks-Motl’s Ultraviolet of the Genuine (The Song Cave)
Teresa Carmody’s A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others (Autofocus)
Julie Carr’s The Garden (Essay Press)
Susan Choi’s Flashlight (FSG)
Heather Christle’s In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf (Algonquin Books)
Leo Damosch’s Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (Yale University Press)
Lauren Davis’s The Nothing (YesYes Books)
Lydia Davis’s Into the Weeds (Yale University Press)
Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice (Catapult)
Mónica de la Torre’s Pause the Document (Nightboat)
Gilles Deleuze’s On Painting: Courses, March-June 1981, translated by Charles J. Stivale (University of Minnesota Press)
Darcie Dennigan’s Little Neck (Fonograf Editions)
Josh Denslow’s Magic Can’t Save Us (University of New Orleans Press)
Mark Doten’s Whites (Graywolf Press)
Marcella Durand’s A Winter Triangle (Fordham University Press)
Geoff Dyer’s Homework (FSG)
Kristin Dykstra’s Dissonance (University of Chicago Press)
Carol Emshwiller’s Moon Songs (Third Man Books)
Robert Fanning’s All We Are Given We Cannot Hold (Dzanc Books)
Thomas Fink’s Our Current Resident (Marsh Hawk Press)
Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness (Mariner Books)
Alex Foster’s Circular Motion (Grove Press)
Cal Freeman’s The Weather of Our Names (Cornerstone)
James W. Fuerst’s Distress Cries of Animals (Spaceboy Books)
Ramón García’s Strange Signatures: Poems (Walton Well Press)
Geoffrey Gatza’s Self Geofferential (BlazeVOX [books])
Amy Gerstler’s Is This My Final Form? (Penguin Books)
Robert Gibbons’s Anatomy & Geography (Stalking Horse Press)
Lee Matthew Goldberg’s Miles in Time (Wise Wolf Books)
David Greenwood’s The Cloud Intern (Under the BQE Press)
Sybille Grimbert’s The Last of Its Kind, translated by Aleshia Jensen (Book*hug Press)
Raquel Gutierrez’s Southwest Reconstruction (Noemi)
Caroline Hagood’s Death and Other Speculative Fictions (Spuyten Duyvil)
Brady Harrison’s A Journey to Al Ramel (Twelve Winters Press)
Barbara Henning’s Girlfriend (Hanging Loose Press)
Bodies Found in Various Places: The Selected Poems of Elvira Hernández, translated by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher (Cardboard House Press)
Daniel Hinds’s New Famous Phrases (Broken Sleep Books)
Giancarlo Huapaya’s [gamerover] (Phoneme Media), translated by Ryan Greene
Adam Johnson’s The Wayfinder (MCD)
Jonathan Johnson’s The Little Lights of Town (Carnegie Mellon)
Pierre Joris’s Poasis II (Wesleyan University Press)
Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic (Simon & Schuster)
John Kinsella’s Aporia (Turtle Point Press)
Arah Ko’s Brine Orchid (YesYes Books)
Shane Kowalski’s Are People Out There (Future Tense Books)
David Kuhnlein’s Ezra’s Head and Other Stories (Tragickal)
Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, translated by Sophie Hughes (The New York Review of Books)
Zachary Leader’s Ellman’s Joyce (Belknap Press)
Jonathan Lethem’s A Different Kind of Tension (Ecco)
Heller Levinson’s Crossfall (Black Widow Press)
Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth (Catapult)
Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You (Riverhead)
Michael Loughran’s Windower (CSU Poetry Center)
Denton Loving’s Feller (Mercer University Press)
Rob Macaisa Colgate’s Hardly Creatures (Tin House)
Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? (W. W. Norton & Company)
Carol Mavor’s Like the Sea: Dancing with Mary Glass (Fordham)
Erin L. McCoy’s Wrecks (Noemi Press)
Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom (Rescue Press)
Hosho McCreesh’s Psalms from the Badlands (DrunkSkull Books)
Miranda Mellis’s Crocosmia (Nightboat)
Lydia Millet’s The Atavists (W. W. Norton & Company)
Pascalle Monnier’s Touché, translated by Cole Swensen (Green Linden Press)
Shani Mootoo’s Starry Starry Night (Book*hug Press)
Mary Newell’s Entwine (BlazeVOX)
Colleen O’Brien’s Reel (CSU Poetry Center)
Lori Ostlund’s Are You Happy? (Astra House)
Ron Padgett’s Pink Dust (New York Review of Books)
Ed Park’s The Oral History of Atlantis (Random House)
Alan Michael Parker’s Bingo Bango Boingo (Dzanc Books)
Emma Pattee’s Tilt (Scribner)
Russell Persson’s These Threads Who Lead to Bramble (Dzanc Books)
Trace Peterson’s The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep (Saturnalia)
Jeffrey Pethybridge’s Force Drift: An Essay in the Epic (Tupelo Press)
Octavio Quintanilla’s Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press)
Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child (New Directions), translated by Martin Aitken
Amie Souza Reilly’s Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays (Wilfrid Laurier University Press)
Ariana Reines’s The Rose (Graywolf)
David Leo Rice’s The Squimbop Condition (11:11 Press)
Elizabeth Robinson’s Vulnerability Index (Curbstone Press)
Peggy Robles-Alvarado’s Burn Me Back (Four Way Books)
Esteban Rodríguez’s The Lost Nostalgias (CavanKerry Press)
C.D. Rose’s We Live Here Now (Melville House)
Tom Ross’s Miss Abracadabra (Deep Vellum)
Karen Russell’s The Antidote (Knopf)
Miranda Schreiber’s Iris and the Dead (Book*hug Press)
David Seung’s Silkworm’s Pansori (The Song Cave)
Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press)
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theory of Water (Haymarket Books)
Jared Singer’s Forgotten Necessities (Button Poetry)
Emily Skillings’s Tantrums in the Air (The Song Cave)
Erik Soto’s Inside the Umber Iris (What Books)
Matthew Specktor’s The Golden Hour (Ecco)
Susan Straight’s Sacrament (Counterpoint)
Terese Svoboda’s Hitler and My Mother-In-Law (OR Books)
Erika Swyler’s We Lived on the Horizon (Atria Books)
Arthur Sze’s Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press)
Ben Tanzer’s After Hours (Ig Publishing)
Yoko Tawada’s Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s Terror Counter (Deep Vellum Publishing)
Shayne Terry’s Leave (Autofocus Books)
Russell Thorburn’s And the Heart Will Not Quicken (Cornerstone)
Lynne Tillman’s Thrilled to Death (Soft Skull Press)
Olga Tokarczuk’s Mr. Distinctive, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, illustrated by Joanna Concejo (Seven Stories Press)
David Trinidad’s New Playlist (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Jimmy Vega’s Zirconium Ash (What Books)
Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (Scribner)
Gemini Wahhaj’s Katy Family (Jackleg Press)
Andrea Werblin Reid’s To See Yourself as You Vanish (Wesleyan University Press)
Patrick Wensink’s The Great Black Swamp (Belt Publishing)
Corrie Williamson’s Your Mother’s Bear Gun (River River Books)
D. Harlan Wilson’s Strangelove Country (Science Fiction, Filmosophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousness) (Stalking Horse Press)
Peter Wolf’s Waiting on the Moon (Little Brown and Company)
John Yau’s Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems 1974-2024 (Omnidawn Press)
Can Xue’s Mother River, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Open Letter Books)
Kevin Young’s Night Watch (Knopf)
Dead Code and Other Dramatic Entertainments (Anti-Oedipus Press), which includes Andrew Joron and Andrew C. Wenaus’s “An Aerobatic Alogue: Andrew ± Joron ± Wenaus on the Novum”
(Image: Roberto Matta’s Untitled (1939))
