Check out these highly anticipated new releases featuring fiction and nonfiction titles. Click on the title to request a copy or get your name on the waitlist. Don’t forget to watch for more featured releases next month!
NONFICTION
The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild by Bryan Burrough. Burrough (coauthor of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth) offers a captivating exploration of the Wild West, delving into the era of gunfighters with literary flair and historical depth. He makes the case that Texas was the locus of gun violence in the 19th century (with the highest murder rate per capita in U.S. history), particularly due to its hostile borders with Comanche territory and with Mexico, the coexistence there of Confederate and Union supporters, and the surging cattle business, which was often accompanied by rustlers, gamblers, and vigilantes. However, Burrough also argues that the violent reality of Texas was inflated by sensationalistic journalism, creating a morass of myths and facts. While focusing on activities in and around Texas, Burrough's book is also a more nuanced portrayal of figures such as Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, and Wyatt Earp than often appears in popular history accounts. The book is fascinating and will be widely popular due to its subject matter, plus it offers two 16-page sets of photos and illustrations and six helpful maps. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding the enduring legacy of the Wild West, in which Burrough expertly separates fact from folklore. VERDICT A fascinating work of history that challenges readers to reconsider the role of the West's legendary gunfighters in shaping the identity of the United States. Copyright 2025 LJ Express.
Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson by Mark Kriegel. This sinewy biography from journalist Kriegel (
The Good Son) traces Mike Tyson’s early life and career. Born in 1966, Tyson came of age in Brooklyn amid financial insecurity, moving constantly as his mother struggled to find work and turning to petty crime by the age of 10. He first became interested in boxing after Muhammad Ali visited the Spofford Juvenile Detention Center where he’d been sent at age 12, and he started training under the supervision of a counselor who happened to be a former champion. Fueled by the rage he carried toward childhood bullies who taunted him for his lisp and glasses, Tyson quickly distinguished himself in the ring and caught the attention of star manager Constantine “Cus” D’Amato during a showcase set up by his counselor. He moved to Upstate New York and began training under the supervised parole of D’Amato, winning his inaugural bout at age 14 with an uppercut that propelled his opponent’s mouthpiece six rows into the crowd. Kriegel’s nuanced portrait notes the many hardships Tyson faced growing up, including watching his mother’s boyfriends brutalize her and getting molested by a stranger, without excusing his flaws, most notably his hair-trigger temper and physical abuse of his first wife. It’s an unflinching glimpse into the formative years of a troubled boxing great. Photos. Copyright 2025 Publishers Weekly.
Present: A Fatherhood Playbook for Healing Relationships and Connecting With Your Kids by Charles Daniels. This sensitive debut guide from therapist Daniels encourages men to take active roles in their children’s lives, noting studies that found children of absentee fathers are more likely to underperform in school and experience depression. Daniels’s empathetic approach recognizes that absentee parents are often suffering from their own trauma, such as addiction, financial insecurity, incarceration, or childhood abuse. Case studies from Fathers’ Uplift, a family counseling nonprofit founded by Daniels, illustrate strategies for healing. For instance, he recounts encouraging a teen father of two who spent over a year in juvenile detention to connect with his “inner child,” which helped him better understand the needs and perspectives of his children while allowing him to work through the pain he carried from witnessing his own parents’ nonstop fighting as a kid. Though Daniels includes a few practical suggestions, such as reciting affirmations to stay calm during stressful moments, the guidance largely focuses on self-forgiveness, as when he counsels readers to judge themselves not by their past missteps but by “how well we coexist with our mistakes and the lessons we applied from them.” Compassionate and psychologically insightful, this is a must for fathers wondering how to better show up for their kids. Copyright 2025 Publishers Weekly.
FICTION
So Far Gone by Jess Walter. Like Station Eleven and The Handmaid's Tale, this novel by Walter (
The Angels of Rome and Other Stories) feels both prescient and timely yet with a backward glance. The 2016 elections in the United States ignite a fight between Rhys Kinnick and his daughter's new husband, leading Rhys to move off the grid. Seven years later, his grandchildren show up on his front porch, and he has to learn, if not how to parent them, then at least how to reenter the world to save them from their dangerously fundamentalist father. Rhys learns to lean on the people and practices he left behind (including an ex-girlfriend and a journalism career) to find his daughter and salvage a life for her children. Gritty survivalist stories, from bunkers to bar rooms, converge in this propulsive novel that glances backward to 2016 while signaling what dangers come to fruition when people relinquish human bonds in favor of ideological fervor. VERDICT This work is a tremendous achievement: more literary and ambitious than Walter's previous popular books, with an urgency that may make it one of the strongest realist but dystopian novels of the present era.—Emily Bowles, Copyright 2025 Library Journal.
Flashlight by Susan Choi. Inspired by and building off the framework of Choi's 2020 short story of the same name, this much-anticipated novel spotlights the National Book Award-winning author's gift for illuminating the twisty, psychological aspects of identities and relationships. The story begins with a walk on the beach—10-year-old Louisa and her father talking as they stroll by the water, guided by the father's flashlight. Readers get the briefest glimpse of their conversation: the father telling Louisa that her mother gave her a gift in teaching her to swim. The next morning, in the next narrative moment, he has disappeared, and Louisa has washed up on the shore, barely alive. As the story rolls in and out with both tidal force and quiet currents, it shifts between past and present, each wave receding to reveal cultural and generational dislocation, all of which converges when past crashes into present. VERDICT Choi's follow-up to Trust Exercises proves she's a writer at the top of her game, capable of crafting a well-plotted and complex story while remaining attuned to small internal motivations, along with intersectional and cultural liminalities, those edges between surf and sand where so much violence happens, as much to bodies as to hearts, minds, and homes.—Emily Bowles, Copyright 2025 Library Journal.
. Azar's debut novel,
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, made LJ's list of the Best World Literature of 2020. Her second novel opens as an extended family gathers for a wedding, and the hosts cope with the appearance of the titular tree. Its fruits are legion and luscious. Thus begins the magical realism, which intensifies the brutal reality of Iran in the 1970s and spans 50 years, following 12 children who were lost inside a mysterious palace one night. The members of the family—children, young lovers, older folks—experience the devastating torment of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. Azar's lens of Persian spiritualism welcomes phenomena like intelligent balls of light, Lady Death with a peacock, and God in fine fettle, dancing at another wedding that closes the novel. Put into extraordinarily agile English from the original Farsi by a translator who is staying anonymous for security reasons, this work will establish Azar as one of Iran's most eloquent voices in exile. VERDICT It is not an exaggeration to compare Azar's work to Rushdie's Satanic Verses; they are continents apart but united in wild imagination and audacious style.—Barbara Conaty
Copyright 2025 LJ Express.
The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild by Bryan Burrough. Burrough (coauthor of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth) offers a captivating exploration of the Wild West, delving into the era of gunfighters with literary flair and historical depth. He makes the case that Texas was the locus of gun violence in the 19th century (with the highest murder rate per capita in U.S. history), particularly due to its hostile borders with Comanche territory and with Mexico, the coexistence there of Confederate and Union supporters, and the surging cattle business, which was often accompanied by rustlers, gamblers, and vigilantes. However, Burrough also argues that the violent reality of Texas was inflated by sensationalistic journalism, creating a morass of myths and facts. While focusing on activities in and around Texas, Burrough's book is also a more nuanced portrayal of figures such as Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, and Wyatt Earp than often appears in popular history accounts. The book is fascinating and will be widely popular due to its subject matter, plus it offers two 16-page sets of photos and illustrations and six helpful maps. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding the enduring legacy of the Wild West, in which Burrough expertly separates fact from folklore. VERDICT A fascinating work of history that challenges readers to reconsider the role of the West's legendary gunfighters in shaping the identity of the United States. Copyright 2025 LJ Express.
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