Clockwise from top left: Rachel Carson (Cleveland Botanical Garden), Ursula K. Le Guin (Wikimedia Commons), John Guare (Whiting Foundation), Helen Vendler (The Poetry Foundation), Octavia E. Butler (octaviabutler.com), and George Templeton Strong (Public Domain)
When it comes to championing our nation’s literature, Library of America has never rested on its laurels, and our lineup for the Fall 2025 season is no exception. From a major curatorial project years in the making to a celebration of one of our greatest living playwrights, we continue our commitment to preserve the best and most significant writing our country has produced. Meanwhile, our special publications and paperbacks extend our reputation for editorial excellence in fresh and ambitious directions, encompassing essays from a revered critic, holiday tales to share with friends and family, and a compendium of poems and drawings dealing with that most captivating of American subjects: cats.
Browse the list below for information about contents and publication dates and click here for a full description of each new release.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA SERIES
John Guare: Plays
Tony Kushner, Michael Paller, and Anne Cattaneo, editors
Library of America #392 / ISBN 978–1–59853–816–8
September 2025
Octavia E. Butler: Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy
Dawn • Adulthood Rites • Imago
Imani Perry, editor
Library of America #393 / ISBN 978–1–59853–818–2
September 2025
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century
Volume One: Brockden Brown to Twain
John Stauffer, editor
Library of America #394 / ISBN 978–1–59853–820–5
October 2025
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century
Volume Two: Harte to Dunbar-Nelson
John Stauffer, editor
Library of America #395 / ISBN 978–1–59853–822–9
October 2025
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century (two-volume boxed set)
ISBN 978–1–59853–824–3
October 2025
George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries
Geoff Wisner, editor
Library of America #396 / ISBN 978–1–59853–825-0
November 2025
Rachel Carson: The Library of America Collection
The Sea Trilogy • Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment
Sandra Steingraber, editor
Library of America volumes #307 and #352 / ISBN 978–1–59853–835–9
October 2025
SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS
Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays
Helen Vendler
ISBN 978–1–59853–827–4
September 2025
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats
ISBN 978–1–59853–829–8
October 2025
O. Henry for the Holidays: Seven Classic Thanksgiving and Christmas Stories
ISBN 978–1–59853–833–5
October 2025
PAPERBACK
Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand
Ursula K. Le Guin
ISBN 978–1–59853–831–1
October 2025
One of the major American dramatists of the past half century, beloved by actors, fellow writers, and theatergoers alike, John Guare joins the Library of America series with this collection of his essential plays, prepared in consultation with the author by volume editor Tony Kushner. Best known for his 1990 masterpiece Six Degrees of Separation, Guare has written more than twenty works for the stage. The thirteen gathered here include such standouts as The House of Blue Leaves, his Obie-winning 1971 play about the mania for fame and celebrity; Landscape of the Body, an unforgettable portrait of 1970s Greenwich Village; and the late masterpiece A Free Man of Color, a historical drama set in New Orleans that imaginatively confronts the legacy of race in America.
In 2021, LOA’s first volume of Octavia E. Butler’s novels and stories became one of our top-selling titles of the past decade. Now we follow up with Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, gathered here for the first time in a hardcover collector’s edition. A classic of Afrofuturist science fiction, the novels Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago comprise a wild, post-apocalyptic exploration of what it means—at the level of biology and metaphysics—to be human. In their prescient exploration of how the intertwining forces of race, technology, and gender shape our culture, these three works remain, like all of Butler’s output, startlingly fresh today. This new edition sports a stunning cover portrait of Butler by award-winning graphic novelist John Jennings, as well as a revelatory introduction by National Book Award–winning author Imani Perry.
As much a nineteenth-century American invention as baseball, the cotton gin, and the steamboat, the short story has yet to be fully appreciated for its innovation and stylistic range. The ambitious two-volume anthology The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century, masterfully assembled by Harvard scholar John Stauffer, promises to transform our understanding of the form’s origins and evolution while offering a scintillating and surprising tour of our country’s past. Unprecedented in scope, the anthology gathers more than one hundred stories by fifty writers, from the haunting fragments of Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe to the humorous tales of Mark Twain. Bret Harte’s midcentury accounts of the Gold Rush and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s poignant story of racial passing lead into Gilded Age masterpieces by Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Kate Chopin. The major writers LOA readers know and love are amply represented with stories both familiar and unexpected, but unfairly forgotten writers like Rose Terry Cooke, the Black physician James McCune Smith, and Fitz-James O’Brien offer an eye-opening counterpoint to the familiar canon with their own bracingly original visions.
A lawyer and civic leader in New York City, where he was born in 1820 and lived his entire life, George Templeton Strong remained an obscure figure until 1952, when the historian Allan Nevins published a selection from the massive diary Strong had kept faithfully from the age of fifteen. That edition, derived from archives at the New-York Historical Society, was a revelation: here was an American Samuel Pepys, an engrossing stylist who vividly conveyed the feeling, texture, and daily uncertainties of life in nineteenth century America. Strong served on the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, meeting Lincoln, Grant, and other leaders, but mostly experienced the conflict through newspapers. His diary, alternating between despair and exultation and punctuated by crises and explosive episodes, unfolds like a great historical novel. A central presence in Ken Burns’s landmark PBS series The Civil War, where he was voiced (in full patrician splendor) by George Plimpton, Strong comes vividly alive in these pages, drawn directly from the original manuscripts by scholar Geoff Wisner.
Rachel Carson: The Library of America Collection gathers the LOA editions of the pathbreaking marine biologist and nature writer’s Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment (2018) and The Sea Trilogy (2021) in a beautiful collector’s boxed set for the first time. Each volume includes restored original illustrations from the books’ first editions, as well as sixteen glossy pages of photographs.
When Helen Vendler died last April at ninety, she was remembered in The New York Times as a “Colossus of Poetry Criticism.” A professor of English at Harvard for more than thirty years, she reached a large popular audience as poetry critic for The New Yorker and frequently judged for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Starting in 2020 and continuing until the last days of her life, Vendler contributed to Leon Wieseltier’s journal Liberties, for which she crafted thirteen brilliant reflections bringing new life and understanding to the works of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Adrienne Rich, Wallace Stevens, Ocean Vuong, and many more. Inhabit the Poem gathers these essays for the first time, constituting Vendler’s final word on the poems and poets she loved best. Featuring a new preface written just days before her death, this volume invites readers to engage with American verse through the eyes of one of its greatest interpreters.
Ursula K. Le Guin, whose work now spans seven volumes in the LOA series, with more on the way, loved cats—though “loved” may not be the right word. She was fascinated by them, entranced and endlessly amused by them and their “catness,” at once inscrutable and silly, mysterious and madcap. As she described it, “the presence of a cat keeps me in touch with the mystery, the unreasonableness, the beauty, the stubborn wildness of the nonhuman world.” This experience inspired a lifetime of poems, drawings, meditations, blog posts, and even a hand-drawn comic. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats catalogs this feline fixation in a charming volume featuring Le Guin’s own artwork and hand lettering. Included are The Art of Bunditsu, a rare 1982 chapbook written under the pen name Bunto Ursura about the natural zen of cats; more than two dozen cat poems; a series of letters between the cats of Le Guin and her daughter Elizabeth, revealing the inner workings of kitty psychology; and the Cat Tai Chi, which is more or less what it sounds like. Newly researched biographical notes detail the many cats in Le Guin’s life. An irresistible holiday gift for Le Guin’s legions of fans, this book is sure to be catnip for literary cat lovers everywhere.
With the possible exception of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, no story is more synonymous with Christmas than O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” An unforgettable parable of love, sacrifice, and the transformative power of giving, the piece, first published in 1905, has remained a holiday touchstone for generations of readers. But this was not O. Henry’s only Christmas story. In fact, he wrote four others, plus two more centered on Thanksgiving, that range from the comedic to the suspenseful and stretch from New York to New Orleans to the American Southwest, chronicling the season in all its contours. Showcasing the author’s incomparable knack for argot, irrepressible humor, and penchant for twisty endings, O. Henry for the Holidays: Seven Classic Thanksgiving and Christmas Stories brings these timely tales together in one irresistible treat.
Among Ursula K. Le Guin’s most earthbound novels, Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand, first published in 1991, is also one of her most inventive. Told through a series of interconnected short stories, it recalls classics like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and contemporary hits like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, enabling readers to vividly experience life in a community over time. Set in a small coastal village in Oregon, the novel echoes Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as it explores Le Guin’s abiding themes of gender, love, and the creative spark. Longtime fans and Le Guin newcomers alike will find themselves immersed in this intriguing and original book by a modern literary giant.
