Summer Reads 2025 from Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly

The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America

Mark Whitaker (Simon & Schuster)

This roving look at the many ramifications of Malcolm X’s life and death on American culture has lots of fascinating threads, from the publishing industry to hip-hop, and features a particularly excellent overview of the summer after Malcolm’s assassination when protesters and artists around the country were galvanized by his slaying to demand change. Readers will be swept up by Whitaker’s sprawling saga.

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The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland

Michelle Young (HarperOne)

Young’s inspiring tale features a clever art historian who kept track of the Nazis’ art thievery right under their noses. Paris museum curator Rose Valland had to smooth-talk her way through dangerous situations and connect with French Resistance fighters while keeping the paranoid Nazis occupying her museum off her back, an adventure which Young relays in thrilling style.

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Dianaworld: An Obsession

Edward White (Norton)

After countless biopics, documentaries, and think pieces, readers would be forgiven for assuming there’s little left to say about the Princess of Wales. Biographer White proves skeptics wrong by looking at what she meant to people across the globe. Presenting Diana as a kind of cipher, this probing inquiry doles out profound insights into the nature of fame and celebrity with precision and style.

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The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year without Sex

Melissa Febos (Knopf)

Febos, a former dominatrix, reflects on being celibate for a year “as an attempt to grow my world” in this liberating self-portrait. She catalogs the benefits and drawbacks of her experiment with clear eyes and a sharp wit, prodding readers to reconsider their own relationships with intimacy in the process.

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The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties

Dennis McNally (Da Capo)

The author of the Grateful Dead biography A Long Strange Trip delivers a scintillating overview of 1950s and ’60s bohemianism. With a colorful and expansive cast of characters that spans from pop music to high art, and an engrossing focus on how governments around the world targeted bohemians with censorship, this fresh and nuanced look at the era makes for entertaining and immersive reading.

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The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains

Pria Anand (Washington Square)

Neurologist Anand debuts with a captivating and energetic tour through the mysteries of the mind. Drawing on literature, case studies, and stories from her own patients, she vividly brings to life the brain’s inner workings while revealing how medicine is intimately shaped by narratives—the ones patients tell doctors, the ones doctors record, and the cultural myths that influence both.

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The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog: And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science

Carly Anne York (Basic)

Science writing doesn’t get more enjoyable than York’s quirky survey of strange discoveries with unexpectedly profound consequences. Exploring how algae paved the way for the Human Genome Project, a beached whale changed wind turbine design, and uncrushable cockroaches led to the creation of more flexible robots, this takes readers for a walk on the weird side of scientific research.

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Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness

Michael Koresky (Bloomsbury)

Hays Code–era Hollywood was more queer than casual viewers might have noticed, argues Koresky, studying how Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy, and William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour “constructed an entirely new language” for exploring “sublimated desire” while escaping the notice of censors. Film buffs will relish the behind-the-scenes stories and whip-smart analysis.

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Warhol’s Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine

Laurence Leamer (Putnam)

In this riveting group biography, Leamer chronicles how a series of “superstars”—attractive, well-connected socialities like Edie Sedgwick—helped catapult Andy Warhol to fame before being discarded when they were no longer of use to him. Enriched by kaleidoscopic detail, it’s an enthralling window into the making of a legendary artist and the beginnings of celebrity culture, set against the volatile art scene of 1960s and ’70s New York City.

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The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay

Christopher Clarey (Grand Central)

Nadal’s dominance of the French Open is recounted here in crackling detail. Readers can practically hear Nadal’s grunts as Clarey recreates some of the tennis legend’s biggest matches, including his defeat of Mariano Puerta for his first Open title in 2005 and his triumph over Roger Federer in 2008. Propelled by fleet-footed storytelling and sharp insights into Nadal’s technique, this is ideal courtside reading.

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