The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Best Best Dressed of 2025

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.

READING FRANKENSTEIN IN SEPTEMBER

Let me say that I too wanted to die. Wanted
to abandon my post, listening at the bathroom door

for the sound of my father finishing his work, expelling
the body’s refuse. I listened not out of a curiosity, but out

of warning: an assurance he wouldn’t fall, or hit his head
on something. I listened to ensure one of us lived.

There was no snow-slicked tundra here, no ship locked
in the embrace of ice. In fact, I sweated through my shirt,

the last, hot tongues of summer teasing along my neck.
My father kept the apartment chilled, a bottle of white wine

held at the closure. And when I cut his toenails, I did so
with the devotion of a child confronted with their father’s mortality

for the first time: fearful, a little nervous. I shouldn’t
have worried. The clippers sliced through the thickened edge

of the nail efficiently. Their sick noise sounded in the silence,
while I knelt at the foot of my creator. I could have spent my life stitching

what is precious together again: the line between my first initial
and the middle name of his other daughter, the one who died.

I could have spent my life chasing the ideal female:
her name was Rebecca. Her little fists opened and closed,

then opened again. Her lungs: little birds in flight.

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