With the calendar flipped to 2025, we wanted to take a look at some of the books that are coming out in the weeks and months to come.
Mark Athitakis, Valley-based book critic, joined The Show to discuss, starting with the big picture and what trends he’s expecting in the new year.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Mark, let's start with the big picture. What trends are you expecting in the new year?
MARK ATHITAKIS: Well, we have a second Trump administration coming in, so it's deja vu all over again. One thing that we learned the first time around with Trump is that he is very happy to be vindictive toward anybody who is demonstrating what he perceives as criticism of what he's doing. We saw this in the case where he and ABC News reached a $15 million settlement.
And, you know, he has had ongoing litigation against Bob Woodward and Simon and Schuster for a book that Woodward published, and I think the issue is specifically in the legal terms about his use of actual recordings Donald Trump's voice, but I mean, in a broader sense, this is part of a pattern of trying to chill journalists and journalism.
So it will be interesting slash frustrating to see how the publishing community responds to this.
BRODIE: So in the non-politics realm, what are you looking forward to in nonfiction?
ATHITAKIS: Oh, there's, it looks to be a promising year so far and so there are a few books that I wanted to highlight. One comes out in January by Kyle Poaletta called “American Oasis,” and what it is, it's a journalistic study of the current American Southwest. And I think living here in Phoenix, we are very used to people who are not in the Southwest, telling us who we are …
BRODIE: And scolding the kind of parachute in and tell everybody else how bad it is …
ATHITAKIS: Right. And that Phoenix should not exist and that this is an unsustainable part of the country, etc. And Poaletta is critical of the history of the Southwest and how it has overexploited its resources, but he's also mindful of the fact that most of the United States is facing a drought, that issues of sustainability and how we work with Native land, and how we build relationships and manage that relationship, and how we talk about the history of the land here.
Because he goes back to, he's an Albuquerque native and he talks about, you know, the errors of the conquistadors and how Native history has been erased in some ways to kind of make the Southwest more appealing. So, you know, he's suggesting that the Southwest is an interesting mirror for the whole of America, and the whole of contemporary American life.
So,, another interesting novel that is coming out in early January is “The Life of Herod the Great” by Zora Neale Hurston. Now, Zora Neale Hurston is most famous for her novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and this is an unfinished novel that almost didn't see the light of day. When she died in 1960, the people who were cleaning out her house were setting various things on fire …
BRODIE: Oh my gosh …
ATHITAKIS: … to stuff including a chest that contained some unpublished manuscripts. Now, a friend of hers who was driving by saw this and recognized that a chest owned by a famous author was something that may have contained something important. So he stopped, got a garden hose, put out the fire and recovered the novel. And this has been, it is unfinished.
It is a story about King Herod and Hurston's take is that not that Herod was an evil New Testament villain, but was in many ways sort of a precursor to the Jesus Christ story.
BRODIE: We often hear in times of divisiveness or difficult times, I mean, obviously, you know, the economy for a lot of people is not great right now, that it, it can be difficult for day to day life but can lead to some unbelievable art and, you know, writing and things like that. Is there a sense that there that, you know, people writing about what's going on now could lead to really interesting either fiction or nonfiction in 2025.
ATHITAKIS: I, I think so. And I think one other novel that I believe exemplifies this coming out in March is Laila Lalami's “The Dream Hotel.” We all recognize that we are being surveilled in various ways by our apps, by our TV viewing habits. Everything seems to be fed into an algorithm, and we've almost just made peace with the fact that that is, you know, just part of what it means to be a living connected human being these days.
And I think this is a very dark dystopian novel that talks about the end consequences of that. So, I think there is maybe a feeling more, more of an obligation amongst many writers these days to be on the news and be aware of, you know, there's a cliche in the world, say like, you know, fiction reveals what it means to be human. And that's true, but I think the questions of like, what sort of things do people have agency to do? What can we do? What can we not do? What sort of things are going to be policed? I think those things are thrown in the sharper relief, so I think maybe what we'll be seeing out of writers is more close attention to that.
BRODIE: Interesting. You and I talked not that long ago about sort of the prominence and and prevalence of political books, especially 2024 being an election year. Is 2025 going to be a break from that? We talked about some of the concerns publishers might have about being sued, for example, by the Trump administration or the Trump team. But in general, are we getting a break from political books this year?
ATHITAKIS: I don't think we're getting a break from political books this year because we never do. But you know, the publishing moves on a pace and we are still going to see celebrity biographies. The second volume of Cher's memoir is going to come out. Beyonce's mother has a memoir that is coming out. There's a Brooke Shields memoir. So there'll be a lot of that.
I'm also one thing maybe that sort of kind of splits that divide between how do we talk about politics and how do we talk about celebrity. There's a couple of books that may be of interest related to that. Lorne, there's a biography of Lorne Michaels, who is the founder of …
BRODIE: “SNL ...”
ATHITAKIS: … “Saturday Night Live,” which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. And the book does an interesting job of getting into not just Lorne Michaels sort of rise to the position of comedy royalty, but also about, you know, what does political satire look like now? Lorne Michaels has obviously infuriated various viewers and some of his cast members by inviting, say, Donald Trump or Elon Musk to host the show. His attitude is that you know, comedy and satire should have no friends, really, it should be willing to attack anybody and everything. So it's interesting to read a book like that in the context of the current moment.
There's also a book that I found very entertaining called “Funny Because it's True,” which is a history of The Onion. Which is the satirical newspaper, which started out simply as just a cheap sort of almost like kind of a coupon clipper newspaper at the University of Wisconsin Madison campus that grew, but the interesting thing about the book, which is written by Katherine Wentz, who was an editor very early on is that The Onion started as a very Gen X way of sort of sticking it to the man, that it was satirizing the corporatized system.
Now, of course, what happened with The Onion is that it became a very popular, successful, corporatized kind of publication, and it gets into some of the issues and kind of the hypocrisies of, you know, having to deal with the ownership and dealing with, you know, what is it, what is it like to satirize the state of corporate America while you're actually exemplifying some of its worst characteristics.
