We asked Rabkin Prize winners and members of our writing community to share their best reads in 2025. Here’s what Re’al Christian, a writer and editor based in New York, had to say:
Tell us what you read in 2025 that …
… was a balm.
“Diasporic Landscapes of Longing” in Art on My Mind by bell hooks
… ripped open a rabbit hole that you fell down for a while.
The Time of the Novel by Lara Mimosa Montez
… introduced you to an artist that you didn’t know much about.
Can I Be Frank? by Morgan Bassichis
I began this year by rereading bell hooks’ seminal book Art on My Mind (The New Press, 1995). It’s a work I frequently come back to, but this year marks the book’s 30th anniversary. At Art Papers’ Art Writing + Publishing Symposium in September, I spoke about one particular essay: “Diasporic Landscapes of Longing,” in which hooks discusses the work of Carrie Mae Weems, beginning her essay with an epigraph from Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile. One of the reasons I always return to this essay is the way that hooks puts interrelated identities into a relational, spatial paradigm, creating an expansive reading of diaspora. She refers to “cartographies of experience,” the particular material and immaterial aspects of our identities, but also the lived dimensions of these identities, how they impact the ways we physically move through the world and with each other.
Lara Mimosa Montez’s The Time of The Novel (Wendy’s Subway, June 10, 2025) is told from the perspective of an unnamed protagonist who attempts to withdraw herself from society, attempting to become a full-time narrator, seeking “peace, privacy, and uninterrupted interiority.” In the book’s opening pages, the narrator either encounters or imagines a group of mutated rabbits. I found this imagery so compelling because, in an instant, we gain this understanding of a narrator at odds with herself and her own perception of reality, at what feels like a turning point in her shift toward interiority (As readers, we follow her down the literal and figurative rabbit hole toward achieving it.). On the surface, the book is about narration, but it’s embodied in such a way that uses the practice of fiction writing as a guise for an intricate study on a character ultimately seeking escape from her life. The book is both unsettling and uncannily soothing. Lara’s writing is masterful in that way — where the process of writing fiction becomes the fiction itself, giving way to cyclical returns. As a nonfiction writer, I’m often drawn to writers actively thinking about and messing with form, ways of crafting language in moments of absence, aphasia, or indecipherability.
Some forms of writing are meant to be enacted. I saw Morgan Bassichis’s Can I Be Frank? at SoHo Playhouse in New York over the summer. While I had seen the performance before, it was the first time I thought about it in relation to language, and I’ve continued thinking through how the choreography of the performance embodies a polyphonic space of writing. Can I Be Frank? introduces us to the work of comedian and performance artist Frank Maya (1950–1995), who became one of the first openly gay stand-up comedians to perform on network television in the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis. As Bassichis attempts to draw us into their obsession with Maya (successfully, at least in my case), they also enact a kind of conjuring, speaking through and alongside Maya’s jokes, rants, and songs about stardom, fickle love, and reliable neuroses. In one way or another,
I see in each of these works a form of relational writing, or a way of understanding oneself in relation to community, however one defines it.