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The 2025 Pulitzer Prize Winners in Books

S. Zainab Williams

Executive Director, Content

S. Zainab would like to think she bleeds ink but the very idea makes her feel faint. She writes fantasy and horror, and is currently clutching a manuscript while groping in the dark. Find her on Twitter: @szainabwilliams.

Welcome to The Best of Book Riot, our daily round-up of what’s on offer across our site, newsletters, podcasts, and social channels. Not everything is for everyone, but there is something for everyone.

Here are the Winners of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize

Since its founding in 1917, the Pulitzer Prize has recognized excellence in journalism, arts, and literature. You can see the winners in all categories, including 15 Journalism categories, at the Pulitzer website. You can also watch the ceremony in full on YouTube below.

20 Must-Read New Queer Books Out in May 2025

May is one of the biggest publishing months of the year, and it’s delivering a deluge of fantastic queer books! Usually, I highlight ten of the most exciting titles, but I had to extend that to 20 this time—and that barely scratches the surface. My spreadsheet of queer books out this month has about 150 titles on it!

Whatever you’re in the reading mood for, there’s a new queer book out in May to match it. We’ve got trans literary fiction, dreamy F/F romances, bears in bakeries, sapphic dark academia, nonbinary time travel, queer memoirs and biographies, and even a bisexual picture book!

May’s Best New Books

The best releases for each month have been hard to narrow down this year, and May is no different.

This month, as with other, recent months, I’ve gathered a list of highly recommended books by Book Riot writers who regularly cover the genres they’re recommending books for. There’s a sci-fi mystery with a mysterious woman from Nigeria, an Indigenous coming-of-middle-age novel, a queer young dragonslayer on a quest, and much more.

But, Baby, It’s Mold Outside: 5 Fun(gal) SFF Reads

As spring keeps springing, I thought I would carry on with recommendations about things that start to grow and crawl when the weather gets warmer. I covered parasites a few weeks ago, and for this post, I have chosen the fungus among us. That’s right, insidious, damp, creeping stuff moves through the pages of these five great sci-fi and fantasy novels. If you want spore books that give you chills, you must make mushroom on your shelves for these reads! (Sorry, not sorry.)

There’s a reimagining of a Poe story; a revolutionary stuck on a desolate planet with her nemesis and a fungal blight; a mind-altering fungus affecting the survivors of a climate disaster; a new mother escaping the religious compound where she was raised; and an upcoming romantasy about a woman who reads blood memories. What spore could you want? Let’s go!

12 Book Club Picks For May 2025

It’s May and a bunch of great book clubs have selected their picks for the month! Whether you’re curious what everyone is reading, looking for your next solo or buddy read, or looking to join a book club—as little or as much as you’d like—this is a great selection of books. All the book clubs are different from each other, but all offer a virtual component while some meet in person, and many times, there is author interaction.

So what do we have this month? There’s a literary dystopian centering books, a graphic novel with a boy using fairy tales to figure out life, Beyoncé’s mom’s memoir, a novel with a comp to Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, a novel about redemption, a blockbuster author’s recent novel, a YA fantasy series opener, a classic mystery with an adaptation starring Denzel Washington and more!