The best fake novels not coming out this year
a response to market demand
Dear “readers”—
It has come to my attention that demand for hype lists of non-forthcoming novels that mostly do not exist is at an all-time high. As an MBA-novelist myself, I am both well acquainted with the laws of supply and demand and ideally positioned in the literary market to take advantage of this critical shortage of fictitious fiction, thanks to my prestigious blog (please subscribe).
Unlike those sloppy rogues at the Chicago Sun-Times, here at “quite useless” I have long promised to shill “only the very highest quality nothing” imaginable. Today, I deliver on my brand like never before. I present: the nine best non-vels you will never be able to read anywhere this year—because alas, they do not exist.
Disclaimer: some of these non-vels were not written by friends of mine. Before anyone accuses me of boosterism, I want to assure you I didn’t read them well before we were ever acquainted, and I would only ever recommend the most brilliant unwritten books anyway, regardless of their non-authorship. (Please buy and read their real books.)
Nine unbelievable non-vels you can’t help but miss in 2025!
FOUR POSTER by Miranda July - In the fully menopausal sequel to her 2024 peri-phenomenon, All Fours, July’s wry, elaborate-bed-loving narrator navigates the fateful day exactly one year after her final period, spent mattress shopping to find something that “sleeps cool enough.” An exuberant, Joycean hot flash of a novel perfect for aging fans of My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
REALITIPHOBIA by - Stratman follows up her Saturnically biting debut, Cheat Day, with a pandemic novel par excellence. Realitiphobia follows a pair of longtime acrimonious Brooklyn neighbors who move into the Red Hook IKEA together after being infected by a burgeoning pathogen that causes life-threatening allergic reactions to reality. Critics are already salivating over status galleys after what was rumored to be a seven-figure deal.
NO NOTES by - Dobrenko debuts with a hilarious and timely novel following an online writing group’s successful plot to drive a harmless mega-guru off their favorite newsletter platform, only to face the devastating consequences of their own continued irrelevance. Hard to predict the alt-lit reaction to such a fictional boon for Substack yet crushing blow to the pretend problem of white-male-novelist aggrievement.
I AM ALSO A MALE NOVELIST by Martin Riker - In his third novel (following the wonderfully bizarre The Guest Lecture), Riker again deploys his extraordinary talents for historical surrealism and ultra-intelligent female stream-of-consciousness to inhabit the mind of George Eliot in the process of writing Middlemarch. It shouldn’t work on so many levels—and yet it does on all of them, because Riker’s execution again lives up to his wack.
LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS by - Kaplan’s follow-up to her nationally bestselling debut, NSFW, achieves that rare Batumanian feat: writing well about Harvard. In Large Language Models, sophomores Kate and Naomi grow increasingly disillusioned with campus life and redirect their capacious vocabularies toward talking their way onto the runways of New York Fashion Week. Think David Lodge meets The Devil Wears Prada—a film adaptation (also written by Kaplan) has already been greenlit by A24.
THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR by Erin Somers - sure to be a big fall book, The Ten Year Affair expands Somers’s rightfully lauded 2021 short story into a full-length non-vel [oops! It appears THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR is actually a real big fall book, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster on October 21, 2025. Normally I would just quietly correct an error like this before publishing, but I thought maybe it would be good to show what the most basic editorial sentience looks like! (Also: preorder Erin’s book.)]
IT’S A TRAP by - Following her beautiful historical novel Maddalena and the Dark, Fine returns to her fairy-tale roots with her fourth, a modern retelling of Peter Pan. He’s a millennial, duh! It’s a great Hook, but Fine’s prose is the real second-star-to-the-right here, shining brightly as ever.
DIALECTIC by
and - The philosopher-CEO and NYU cultural historian team up in this formally innovative debut, structured as a hypothetical conversation between Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger. From being and time to creative household provisioning, Dialectic brims with dualistic, isomorphic novel “I”s, while still managing to remain accessible to those who prefer Dasein Within Reach.BAD OYSTERS by Elizabeth Winkler - The ingenious author of Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature makes her highly anticipated foray into fiction, debuting with a humorous moral drama about a young woman who nearly dies after eating bad oysters at an Irish castle. Was it all her own folly—or has there been foul play? The Merry Wives of Windsor meets the best of Beautiful World, Where Are You in this partially epistolary gem.
WIT AND WISDOM by Jane Austen - In her triumphant return from the grave, the GOAT delivers unto us—don’t worry—a new marriage-plot comedy positively teeming with status strategy. Early whispers were a seventh Austen novel could only be “The Entertainment” foretold in Infinite Jest, but I assure you these fears are baseless. Has Jane Austen ever failed to totally and completely deliver on a title? The only fair comp for this book is the Bible. I think Wit and Wisdom is better.
This is too much fun not to join in:
Cromwell's Ghost by Hilary Mantel: A sequel to the Cromwell trilogy discovered on Mantel's computer, Thomas Cromwell's ghost awakens in the 21st Century and becomes the sidekick with a charming female detective in the Yorkshire countryside investigating a missing person cold case. Will premiere first on Acorn as a six part series with Mark Rylance as the irreverent ghost.
Can’t wait to read No Notes — soooo relevant and timely to these times.