example of a creative nonfiction story

Become a Bestseller

Follow our 5-step publishing path.

Fundamentals of Fiction & Story

Bring your story to life with a proven plan.

Market Your Book

Learn how to sell more copies.

Edit Your Book

Get professional editing support.

Author Advantage Accelerator Nonfiction

Grow your business, authority, and income.

Author Advantage Accelerator Fiction

Become a full-time fiction author.

Author Accelerator Elite

Take the fast-track to publishing success.

Take the Quiz

Let us pair you with the right fit.

Free Copy of Published.

Book title generator, nonfiction outline template, writing software quiz, book royalties calculator.

Learn how to write your book

Learn how to edit your book

Learn how to self-publish your book

Learn how to sell more books

Learn how to grow your business

Learn about self-help books

Learn about nonfiction writing

Learn about fiction writing

How to Get An ISBN Number

A Beginner’s Guide to Self-Publishing

How Much Do Self-Published Authors Make on Amazon?

Book Template: 9 Free Layouts

How to Write a Book in 12 Steps

The 15 Best Book Writing Software Tools

Examples of Creative Nonfiction: What It Is & How to Write It

When most people think of creative writing, they picture fiction books – but there are plenty of examples of creative nonfiction. In fact, creative nonfiction is one of the most interesting genres to read and write. So what is creative nonfiction exactly? 

More and more people are discovering the joy of getting immersed in content based on true life that has all the quality and craft of a well-written novel. If you are interested in writing creative nonfiction, it’s important to understand different examples of creative nonfiction as a genre. 

If you’ve ever gotten lost in memoirs so descriptive that you felt you’d walked in the shoes of those people, those are perfect examples of creative nonfiction – and you understand exactly why this genre is so popular.

But is creative nonfiction a viable form of writing to pursue? What is creative nonfiction best used to convey? And what are some popular creative nonfiction examples?

Today we will discuss all about this genre, including plenty of examples of creative nonfiction books – so you’ll know exactly how to write it. 

This Guide to Creative Nonfiction Covers:

Need A Nonfiction Book Outline?

What is Creative Nonfiction?

Creative nonfiction is defined as true events written about with the techniques and style traditionally found in creative writing . We can understand what creative nonfiction is by contrasting it with plain-old nonfiction. 

Think about news or a history textbook, for example. These nonfiction pieces tend to be written in very matter-of-fact, declarative language. While informative, this type of nonfiction often lacks the flair and pleasure that keep people hooked on fictional novels.

Imagine there are two retellings of a true crime story – one in a newspaper and the other in the script for a podcast. Which is more likely to grip you? The dry, factual language, or the evocative, emotionally impactful creative writing?

Podcasts are often great examples of creative nonfiction – but of course, creative nonfiction can be used in books too. In fact, there are many types of creative nonfiction writing. Let's take a look!

Types of creative nonfiction

Creative nonfiction comes in many different forms and flavors. Just as there are myriad types of creative writing, there are almost as many types of creative nonfiction.

Some of the most popular types include:

Literary nonfiction

Literary nonfiction refers to any form of factual writing that employs the literary elements that are more commonly found in fiction. If you’re writing about a true event (but using elements such as metaphor and theme) you might well be writing literary nonfiction.

Writing a life story doesn’t have to be a dry, chronological depiction of your years on Earth. You can use memoirs to creatively tell about events or ongoing themes in your life.

If you’re unsure of what kind of creative nonfiction to write, why not consider a creative memoir? After all, no one else can tell your life story like you. 

Nature writing

The beauty of the natural world is an ongoing source of creative inspiration for many people, from photographers to documentary makers. But it’s also a great focus for a creative nonfiction writer. Evoking the majesty and wonder of our environment is an endless source of material for creative nonfiction. 

Travel writing

If you’ve ever read a great travel article or book, you’ll almost feel as if you've been on the journey yourself. There’s something special about travel writing that conveys not only the literal journey, but the personal journey that takes place.

Writers with a passion for exploring the world should consider travel writing as their form of creative nonfiction. 

For types of writing that leave a lasting impact on the world, look no further than speeches. From a preacher's sermon, to ‘I have a dream’, speeches move hearts and minds like almost nothing else. The difference between an effective speech and one that falls on deaf ears is little more than the creative skill with which it is written. 

Biographies

Noteworthy figures from history and contemporary times alike are great sources for creative nonfiction. Think about the difference between reading about someone’s life on Wikipedia and reading about it in a critically-acclaimed biography.

Which is the better way of honoring that person’s legacy and achievements? Which is more fun to read? If there’s someone whose life story is one you’d love to tell, creative nonfiction might be the best way to do it. 

So now that you have an idea of what creative nonfiction is, and some different ways you can write it, let's take a look at some popular examples of creative nonfiction books and speeches.

Examples of Creative Nonfiction

Here are our favorite examples of creative nonfiction:

1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

No list of examples of creative nonfiction would be complete without In Cold Blood . This landmark work of literary nonfiction by Truman Capote helped to establish the literary nonfiction genre in its modern form, and paved the way for the contemporary true crime boom.  

2. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast is undeniably one of the best creative memoirs ever written. It beautifully reflects on Hemingway’s time in Paris – and whisks you away into the cobblestone streets.  

3. World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

If you're looking for examples of creative nonfiction nature writing, no one does it quite like Aimee Nezhukumatathil. World of Wonders  is a beautiful series of essays that poetically depicts the varied natural landscapes she enjoyed over the years. 

4. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is one of the most beloved travel writers of our time. And A Walk in the Woods is perhaps Bryson in his peak form. This much-loved travel book uses creativity to explore the Appalachian Trail and convey Bryson’s opinions on America in his humorous trademark style.

5. The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln

 While most of our examples of creative nonfiction are books, we would be remiss not to include at least one speech. The Gettysburg Address is one of the most impactful speeches in American history, and an inspiring example for creative nonfiction writers.

6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Few have a way with words like Maya Angelou. Her triumphant book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , shows the power of literature to transcend one’s circumstances at any time. It is one of the best examples of creative nonfiction that truly sucks you in.

7. Hiroshima by John Hershey

Hiroshima is a powerful retelling of the events during (and following) the infamous atomic bomb. This journalistic masterpiece is told through the memories of survivors – and will stay with you long after you've finished the final page.

8. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

If you haven't read the book, you've probably seen the film. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is one of the most popular travel memoirs in history. This romp of creative nonfiction teaches us how to truly unmake and rebuild ourselves through the lens of travel.

9. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Never has language learning brought tears of laughter like Me Talk Pretty One Day . David Sedaris comically divulges his (often failed) attempts to learn French with a decidedly sadistic teacher, and all the other mishaps he encounters in his fated move from New York to Paris.

10. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Many of us had complicated childhoods, but few of us experienced the hardships of Jeannette Walls. In The Glass Castle , she gives us a transparent look at the betrayals and torments of her youth and how she overcame them with grace – weaving her trauma until it reads like a whimsical fairytale.

Now that you've seen plenty of creative nonfiction examples, it's time to learn how to write your own creative nonfiction masterpiece.

Tips for Writing Creative Nonfiction

Writing creative nonfiction has a lot in common with other types of writing. (You won’t be reinventing the wheel here.) The better you are at writing in general, the easier you’ll find your creative nonfiction project. But there are some nuances to be aware of.

Writing a successful creative nonfiction piece requires you to:

Choose a form

Before you commit to a creative nonfiction project, get clear on exactly what it is you want to write. That way, you can get familiar with the conventions of the style of writing and draw inspiration from some of its classics.

Try and find a balance between a type of creative nonfiction you find personally appealing and one you have the skill set to be effective at. 

Gather the facts

Like all forms of nonfiction, your creative project will require a great deal of research and preparation. If you’re writing about an event, try and gather as many sources of information as possible – so you can imbue your writing with a rich level of detail.

If it’s a piece about your life, jot down personal recollections and gather photos from your past. 

Plan your writing

Unlike a fictional novel, which tends to follow a fairly well-established structure, works of creative nonfiction have a less clear shape. To avoid the risk of meandering or getting weighed down by less significant sections, structure your project ahead of writing it.

You can either apply the classic fiction structures to a nonfictional event or take inspiration from the pacing of other examples of creative nonfiction you admire. 

You may also want to come up with a working title to inspire your writing. Using a free book title generator is a quick and easy way to do this and move on to the actual writing of your book.

Draft in your intended style

Unless you have a track record of writing creative nonfiction, the first time doing so can feel a little uncomfortable. You might second-guess your writing more than you usually would due to the novelty of applying creative techniques to real events. Because of this, it’s essential to get your first draft down as quickly as possible.

Rewrite and refine

After you finish your first draft, only then should you read back through it and critique your work. Perhaps you haven’t used enough source material. Or maybe you’ve overdone a certain creative technique. Whatever you happen to notice, take as long as you need to refine and rework it until your writing feels just right.

Ready to Wow the World With Your Story?

You know have the knowledge and inspiring examples of creative nonfiction you need to write a successful work in this genre. Whether you choose to write a riveting travel book, a tear-jerking memoir, or a biography that makes readers laugh out loud, creative nonfiction will give you the power to convey true events like never before.  

Who knows? Maybe your book will be on the next list of top creative nonfiction examples!

Protagonist vs Antagonist: The Difference Explained

Elite Author T. Lynette Yankson Teaches Perseverance in Her Children’s Book About a True Story

Children's Book, Non-Fiction

Elite Author Peder Tellefsdal Is On a Mission to Rebrand the Church with His New Book

Non-Fiction

Join the Community

Join 100,000 other aspiring authors who receive weekly emails from us to help them reach their author dreams. Get the latest product updates, company news, and special offers delivered right to your inbox.

TRY OUR FREE APP

Write your book in Reedsy Studio. Try the beloved writing app for free today.

Craft your masterpiece in Reedsy Studio

Plan, write, edit, and format your book in our free app made for authors.

Guides • Perfecting your Craft

Last updated on Feb 20, 2023

Creative Nonfiction: How to Spin Facts into Narrative Gold

Creative nonfiction is a genre of creative writing that approaches factual information in a literary way. This type of writing applies techniques drawn from literary fiction and poetry to material that might be at home in a magazine or textbook, combining the craftsmanship of a novel with the rigor of journalism. 

Here are some popular examples of creative nonfiction:

• The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang
• Intimations by Zadie Smith
• Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
• I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Creative nonfiction is not limited to novel-length writing, of course. Popular radio shows and podcasts like WBEZ’s This American Life or Sarah Koenig’s Serial also explore audio essays and documentary with a narrative approach, while personal essays like Nora Ephron’s A Few Words About Breasts and Mariama Lockington’s What A Black Woman Wishes Her Adoptive White Parents Knew also present fact with fiction-esque flair.

Writing short personal essays can be a great entry point to writing creative nonfiction. Think about a topic you would like to explore, perhaps borrowing from your own life, or a universal experience. Journal freely for five to ten minutes about the subject, and see what direction your creativity takes you in. These kinds of exercises will help you begin to approach reality in a more free flowing, literary way — a muscle you can use to build up to longer pieces of creative nonfiction.

If you think you’d like to bring your writerly prowess to nonfiction, here are our top tips for creating compelling creative nonfiction that’s as readable as a novel, but as illuminating as a scholarly article.

Write a memoir focused on a singular experience

Humans love reading about other people’s lives — like first-person memoirs, which allow you to get inside another person’s mind and learn from their wisdom. Unlike autobiographies, memoirs can focus on a single experience or theme instead of chronicling the writers’ life from birth onward.

For that reason, memoirs tend to focus on one core theme and—at least the best ones—present a clear narrative arc, like you would expect from a novel. This can be achieved by selecting a singular story from your life; a formative experience, or period of time, which is self-contained and can be marked by a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

When writing a memoir, you may also choose to share your experience in parallel with further research on this theme. By performing secondary research, you’re able to bring added weight to your anecdotal evidence, and demonstrate the ways your own experience is reflective (or perhaps unique from) the wider whole.

Example: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking , for example, interweaves the author’s experience of widowhood with sociological research on grief. Chronicling the year after her husband’s unexpected death, and the simultaneous health struggles of their daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking is a poignant personal story, layered with universal insight into what it means to lose someone you love. The result is the definitive exploration of bereavement — and a stellar example of creative nonfiction done well.

📚 Looking for more reading recommendations? Check out our list of the best memoirs of the last century .

Tip: What you cut out is just as important as what you keep

When writing a memoir that is focused around a singular theme, it’s important to be selective in what to include, and what to leave out. While broader details of your life may be helpful to provide context, remember to resist the impulse to include too much non-pertinent backstory. By only including what is most relevant, you are able to provide a more focused reader experience, and won’t leave readers guessing what the significance of certain non-essential anecdotes will be.

💡 For more memoir-planning tips, head over to our post on outlining memoirs .

Of course, writing a memoir isn’t the only form of creative nonfiction that lets you tap into your personal life — especially if there’s something more explicit you want to say about the world at large… which brings us onto our next section.

Pen a personal essay that has something bigger to say

Personal essays condense the first-person focus and intimacy of a memoir into a tighter package — tunneling down into a specific aspect of a theme or narrative strand within the author’s personal experience.

Often involving some element of journalistic research, personal essays can provide examples or relevant information that comes from outside the writer’s own experience. This can take the form of other people’s voices quoted in the essay, or facts and stats. By combining lived experiences with external material, personal essay writers can reach toward a bigger message, telling readers something about human behavior or society instead of just letting them know the writer better.

Example: The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison's widely acclaimed collection The Empathy Exams  tackles big questions (Why is pain so often performed? Can empathy be “bad”?) by grounding them in the personal. While Jamison draws from her own experiences, both as a medical actor who was paid to imitate pain, and as a sufferer of her own ailments, she also reaches broader points about the world we live in within each of her essays.

Whether she’s talking about the justice system or reality TV, Jamison writes with both vulnerability and poise, using her lived experience as a jumping-off point for exploring the nature of empathy itself.

Tip: Try to show change in how you feel about something

Including external perspectives, as we’ve just discussed above, will help shape your essay, making it meaningful to other people and giving your narrative an arc. 

Ultimately, you may be writing about yourself, but readers can read what they want into it. In a personal narrative, they’re looking for interesting insights or realizations they can apply to their own understanding of their lives or the world — so don’t lose sight of that. As the subject of the essay, you are not so much the topic as the vehicle for furthering a conversation.

Often, there are three clear stages in an essay:

• Initial state 
• Encounter with something external
• New, changed state, and conclusions

By bringing readers through this journey with you, you can guide them to new outlooks and demonstrate how your story is still relevant to them.

Had enough of writing about your own life? Let’s look at a form of creative nonfiction that allows you to get outside of yourself.

Tell a factual story as though it were a novel

The form of creative nonfiction that is perhaps closest to conventional nonfiction is literary journalism. Here, the stories are all fact, but they are presented with a creative flourish. While the stories being told might comfortably inhabit a newspaper or history book, they are presented with a sense of literary significance, and writers can make use of literary techniques and character-driven storytelling.

Unlike news reporters, literary journalists can make room for their own perspectives: immersing themselves in the very action they recount. Think of them as both characters and narrators — but every word they write is true. 

If you think literary journalism is up your street, think about the kinds of stories that capture your imagination the most, and what those stories have in common. Are they, at their core, character studies? Parables? An invitation to a new subculture you have never before experienced? Whatever piques your interest, immerse yourself.

Example: The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

If you’re looking for an example of literary journalism that tells a great story, look no further than Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World , which sits at the intersection of food writing and popular science. Though it purports to offer a “plant’s-eye view of the world,” it’s as much about human desires as it is about the natural world.

Through the history of four different plants and human’s efforts to cultivate them, Pollan uses first-hand research as well as archival facts to explore how we attempt to domesticate nature for our own pleasure, and how these efforts can even have devastating consequences. Pollan is himself a character in the story, and makes what could be a remarkably dry topic accessible and engaging in the process.

Tip: Don’t pretend that you’re perfectly objective

You may have more room for your own perspective within literary journalism, but with this power comes great responsibility. Your responsibilities toward the reader remain the same as that of a journalist: you must, whenever possible, acknowledge your own biases or conflicts of interest, as well as any limitations on your research. 

Thankfully, the fact that literary journalism often involves a certain amount of immersion in the narrative — that is, the writer acknowledges their involvement in the process — you can touch on any potential biases explicitly, and make it clear that the story you’re telling, while true to what you experienced, is grounded in your own personal perspective.

Approach a famous name with a unique approach 

Biographies are the chronicle of a human life, from birth to the present or, sometimes, their demise. Often, fact is stranger than fiction, and there is no shortage of fascinating figures from history to discover. As such, a biographical approach to creative nonfiction will leave you spoilt for choice in terms of subject matter.

Because they’re not written by the subjects themselves (as memoirs are), biographical nonfiction requires careful research. If you plan to write one, do everything in your power to verify historical facts, and interview the subject’s family, friends, and acquaintances when possible. Despite the necessity for candor, you’re still welcome to approach biography in a literary way — a great creative biography is both truthful and beautifully written.

Example: American Prometheus  by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Alongside the need for you to present the truth is a duty to interpret that evidence with imagination, and present it in the form of a story. Demonstrating a novelist’s skill for plot and characterization, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus is a great example of creative nonfiction that develops a character right in front of the readers’ eyes .

American Prometheus follows J. Robert Oppenheimer from his bashful childhood to his role as the father of the atomic bomb, all the way to his later attempts to reckon with his violent legacy.

FREE COURSE

How to Develop Characters

In 10 days, learn to develop complex characters readers will love.

The biography tells a story that would fit comfortably in the pages of a tragic novel, but is grounded in historical research. Clocking in at a hefty 721 pages, American Prometheus distills an enormous volume of archival material, including letters, FBI files, and interviews into a remarkably readable volume. 

📚 For more examples of world-widening, eye-opening biographies, check out our list of the 30 best biographies of all time.

Tip: The good stuff lies in the mundane details

Biographers are expected to undertake academic-grade research before they put pen to paper. You will, of course, read any existing biographies on the person you’re writing about, and visit any archives containing relevant material. If you’re lucky, there’ll be people you can interview who knew your subject personally — but even if there aren’t, what’s going to make your biography stand out is paying attention to details, even if they seem mundane at first.

Of course, no one cares which brand of slippers a former US President wore — gossip is not what we’re talking about. But if you discover that they took a long, silent walk every single morning, that’s a granular detail you could include to give your readers a sense of the weight they carried every day. These smaller details add up to a realistic portrait of a living, breathing human being.

But creative nonfiction isn’t just writing about yourself or other people. Writing about art is also an art, as we’ll see below.

Put your favorite writers through the wringer with literary criticism

Literary criticism is often associated with dull, jargon-laden college dissertations — but it can be a wonderfully rewarding form that blurs the lines between academia and literature itself. When tackled by a deft writer, a literary critique can be just as engrossing as the books it analyzes.

Many of the sharpest literary critics are also poets, poetry editors , novelists, or short story writers, with first-hand awareness of literary techniques and the ability to express their insights with elegance and flair. Though literary criticism sounds highly theoretical, it can be profoundly intimate: you’re invited to share in someone’s experience as a reader or writer — just about the most private experience there is.

Example: The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Take The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, a seminal work approaching Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Written as a conversation between two friends and academics, this brilliant book reads like an intellectual brainstorming session in a casual dining venue. Highly original, accessible, and not suffering from the morose gravitas academia is often associated with, this text is a fantastic example of creative nonfiction.

Tip: Remember to make your critiques creative

Literary criticism may be a serious undertaking, but unless you’re trying to pitch an academic journal, you’ll need to be mindful of academic jargon and convoluted sentence structure. Don’t forget that the point of popular literary criticism is to make ideas accessible to readers who aren’t necessarily academics, introducing them to new ways of looking at anything they read. 

If you’re not feeling confident, a professional nonfiction editor could help you confirm you’ve hit the right stylistic balance .

Give your book the help it deserves

The best editors, designers, and book marketers are on Reedsy. Sign up for free and meet them.

Learn how Reedsy can help you craft a beautiful book.

Is creative nonfiction looking a little bit clearer now? You can try your hand at the genre , or head to the next post in this guide and discover online classes where you can hone your skills at creative writing.

Join a community of over 1 million authors

Reedsy is more than just a blog. Become a member today to discover how we can help you publish a beautiful book.

Structure your memoir for maximum impact

Use our free template to plan an unputdownable memoir.

1 million authors trust the professionals on Reedsy. Come meet them.

Enter your email or get started with a social account:

Most Read in 2021

Year-End Lists!

We don’t publish a lot of lists. But this year, having launched this new website with nearly complete access to 30 years of magazine archives, we thought it seemed like a good time to look back at the stories that resonated with our readers. 

In that spirit, we’ve compiled the most-read pieces published on our website in 2021, as well as the most-read work from our archives. 

And for good measure, we’ve pulled together a few pieces worth an honorable mention; our favorite Sunday Short Reads ; CNF content that was republished elsewhere; and the best advice, inspiration, and think pieces from some of our favorite publications.

Finally, if you enjoy what follows, please know there’s plenty more! We have a soft paywall on our site, which allows for three free reads a month. To get unlimited access for as little as $4/month, simply subscribe today.

Top 10 Published in 2021

• Almost Behind Us A dental emergency interrupts a meaningful anniversary // JENNIFER BOWERING DELISLE
• El Valle, 1991 An early lesson in strength and fragility // AURELIA KESSLER
• Stay at Home All those hours alone with a new baby can be rough // JARED HANKS
• The Desert Was His Home There are many things we don’t know about Mr. Otomatsu Wada, and a few things we do // ERIC L. MULLER
• Just a Big Cat The dramatic boredom of jury duty // ERICA GOSS
• What Will We Do for Fun Now? Her parents survived World War II and the Blitz just fine … didn’t they? // JANE RATCLIFFE
• Harriet Two brothers and a turtle // TYLER McANDREW
• Rango Getting existential at a funeral for a lizard   // JARRETT G. ZIEMER
• Mouse Lessons from a hamster emergency // BEVERLY PETRAVICIUS
• Roxy & the Worm Box Trying to recapture a childhood love of dirt // ANJOLI ROY

Top 5 from the Archive

• Picturing the Personal Essay A visual guide // TIM BASCOM
• The 5 Rs of Creative Nonfiction The essayist at work   // LEE GUTKIND
• The Line Between Fact & Fiction Do not add, and do not deceive // ROY PETER CLARK
• The Braided Essay as Social Justice Action The braided essay may be the most effective form for our times // NICOLE WALKER
• On Fame, Success, and Writing Like a Mother#^@%*& An interview with Cheryl Strayed   // ELISSA BASSIST

Honorable Mention ( ICYMI Essays)

• Latinx Heritage Month Who do you complain to when it’s HR you have a problem with? // MELISSA LUJAN MESKU
• Women’s Work Sometimes, freedom means choosing your obligations // EILEEN GARVIN
• Bloodlines and Bitter Syrup Avoiding prison in Huntsville, Texas, is nearly impossible // WILL BRIDGES
• Stealth A nontraditional couple struggles with keeping part of their life together private while undertaking the public act of filing for marriage // HEATHER OSTERMAN-DAVIS
• Something Like Vertigo An environmental writer sees parallels between her father’s declining equilibrium and a world turned upside down   // ELIZABETH RUSH

Our favorite Sunday Short Reads from our partners 

from BREVITY

• What Joy Looks Like SSR #128  // DORIAN FOX
• How to Do Nothing SSR #156 // ABIGAIL THOMAS

from DIAGRAM

• At 86, My Grandmother Regrets Two Things SSR #134 // DIANA XIN
• The Seedy Corner SSR #140 // KIMBERLY GARZA

from RIVER TEETH

• Waste Not SSR #131 // DESIREE COOPER
• This Is Orange SSR #141 // JILL KOLONGOWSKI

from SWEET LITERARY

• The Pilgrim’s Prescription SSR #122  // CAROLYN ALESSIO
• Leaves in the Hall SSR #160 // ANNE GUDGER

Our favorite stories from around the internet. 

Advice & Inspiration

• In Praise of the Meander Rebecca Solnit on letting nonfiction narrative find its own way (via Lit Hub )
• What’s Missing Here? A Fragmentary, Lyric Essay About Fragmentary, Lyric Essays Julie Marie Wade on the mode that never quite feels finished (via Lit Hub )
• Getting Honest about Om A brief essay on audience (via Brevity )
• Using the Personal to Write the Global Intimate details, personal exploration and respect for facts (via Nieman Storyboard )
• Fix Your Scene Shapes And quickly improve your manuscript (via Jane Friedman’s blog)

The State of Nonfiction

• What the NYT ‘Guest Essay’ Means for the Future of Creative Nonfiction Description (via Brevity )
• How the Role of Personal Expression and Experience Is Changing Journalism On the future of the newsroom (via Poynter )
• 50 Shades of Nuance in a Polarized World An essayist ponders when to write black-and-white polemics that attract clicks, and when to be more considered (via Nieman Storyboard )
• These Literary Memoirs Take a Different Tack Description (via NY Times )
• The Politics of Gatekeeping On reconsidering the ethics of blind submissions (via Poets & Writers )

100 Major Works of Modern Creative Nonfiction

Hero Images/Getty Images 

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Essays , memoirs , autobiographies , biographies , travel writing , history, cultural studies, nature writing —all of these fit under the broad heading of creative nonfiction , and all are represented in this list of 100 major works of creative nonfiction published by British and American writers over the past 90 years or so. They're arranged alphabetically by author last name.

Recommended Creative Nonfiction

• Edward Abbey, "Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness" (1968)
• James Agee, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941)
• Martin Amis, "Experience" (1995)
• Maya Angelou , "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (1970)
• Russell Baker, "Growing Up" (1982)
• James Baldwin , "Notes of a Native Son" (1963)
• Julian Barnes, "Nothing to Be Frightened Of" (2008)
• Alan Bennett, "Untold Stories" (2005)
• Wendell Berry, "Recollected Essays" (1981)
• Bill Bryson, "Notes From a Small Island" (1995)
• Anthony Burgess, "Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess" (1987)
• Joseph Campbell, "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" (1949)
• Truman Capote , "In Cold Blood" (1965)
• Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring" (1962)
• Pat Conroy, "The Water Is Wide" (1972)
• Harry Crews, "A Childhood: The Biography of a Place" (1978)
• Joan Didion, "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction" (2006)
• Joan Didion, "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2005)
• Annie Dillard, "An American Childhood" (1987)
• Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" (1974)
• Barbara Ehrenreich, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" (2001)
• Gretel Ehrlich, "The Solace of Open Spaces" (1986)
• Loren Eiseley, "The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature" (1957)
• Ralph Ellison, "Shadow and Act" (1964)
• Nora Ephron, "Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women" (1975)
• Joseph Epstein, "Snobbery: The American Version" (2002)
• Richard P. Feynman, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" (1964)
• Shelby Foote, "The Civil War: A Narrative" (1974)
• Ian Frazier, "Great Plains" (1989)
• Paul Fussell, "The Great War and Modern Memory" (1975)
• Stephen Jay Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History" (1977)
• Robert Graves, "Good-Bye to All That" (1929)
• Alex Haley, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (1965)
• Pete Hamill, "A Drinking Life: A Memoir" (1994)
• Ernest Hemingway , "A Moveable Feast" (1964)
• Michael Herr, "Dispatches" (1977)
• John Hersey, "Hiroshima" (1946)
• Laura Hillenbrand, "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption" (2010)
• Edward Hoagland, "The Edward Hoagland Reader" (1979)
• Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)
• Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" (1963)
• Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, "Farewell to Manzanar" (1973)
• Langston Hughes , "The Big Sea" (1940)
• Zora Neale Hurston , "Dust Tracks on a Road" (1942)
• Aldous Huxley, "Collected Essays" (1958)
• Clive James, "Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James" (2001)
• Alfred Kazin, "A Walker in the City" (1951)
• Tracy Kidder, "House" (1985)
• Maxine Hong Kingston, "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts" (1989)
• Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962)
• William Least Heat-Moon, "Blue Highways: A Journey Into America" (1982)
• Bernard Levin, "Enthusiasms" (1983)
• Barry Lopez, "Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape" (1986)
• David McCullough, "Truman" (1992)
• Dwight Macdonald, "Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture" (1962)
• John McPhee, "Coming Into the Country" (1977)
• Rosemary Mahoney, "Whoredom in Kimmage: The Private Lives of Irish Women" (1993)
• Norman Mailer, "The Armies of the Night" (1968)
• Peter Matthiessen, "The Snow Leopard" (1979)
• H.L. Mencken, "A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing" (1949)
• Joseph Mitchell, "Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories" (1992)
• Jessica Mitford, "The American Way of Death" (1963)
• N. Scott Momaday, "Names" (1977)
• Lewis Mumford, "The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects" (1961)
• Vladimir Nabokov, "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited" (1967)
• P.J. O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores" (1991)
• Susan Orlean, "My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere" (2004)
• George Orwell , "Down and Out in Paris and London" (1933)
• George Orwell, "Essays" (2002)
• Cynthia Ozick, "Metaphor and Memory" (1989)
• Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1975)
• Richard Rodriguez, "Hunger of Memory" (1982)
• Lillian Ross, "Picture" (1952)
• David Sedaris, "Me Talk Pretty One Day" (2000)
• Richard Selzer, "Taking the World in for Repairs" (1986)
• Zadie Smith, "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays" (2009)
• Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation and Other Essays" (1966)
• John Steinbeck, "Travels with Charley" (1962)
• Studs Terkel, "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression" (1970)
• Lewis Thomas, "The Lives of a Cell" (1974)
• E.P. Thompson, "The Making of the English Working Class" (1963; rev. 1968)
• Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" (1971)
• James Thurber, "My Life and Hard Times" (1933)
• Lionel Trilling, "The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society" (1950)
• Barbara Tuchman, "The Guns of August" (1962)
• John Updike, "Self-Consciousness" (1989)
• Gore Vidal, "United States: Essays 1952–1992" (1993)
• Sarah Vowell, "The Wordy Shipmates" (2008)
• Alice Walker , "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose" (1983)
• David Foster Wallace, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments" (1997)
• James D. Watson, "The Double Helix" (1968)
• Eudora Welty, "One Writer's Beginnings" (1984)
• E.B. White , "Essays of E.B. White" (1977)
• E.B. White, "One Man's Meat" (1944)
• Isabel Wilkerson, "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" (2010)
• Tom Wolfe, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968)
• Tom Wolfe, "The Right Stuff" (1979)
• Tobias Wolff, "This Boy's Life: A Memoir" (1989)
• Virginia Woolf , "A Room of One's Own" (1929)
• Richard Wright, "Black Boy" (1945)
• A List of Every Nobel Prize Winner in English Literature
• What is a Familiar Essay in Composition?
• Creative Nonfiction
• Direct Objects in English Grammar
• Definition Examples of Collage Essays
• detail (composition)
• What Is a Personal Essay (Personal Statement)?
• List (Grammar and Sentence Styles)
• Definition and Examples of Vignettes in Prose
• What You Should Know About Travel Writing
• How to Define Autobiography
• The Essay: History and Definition
• Definition and Examples of Overwriting
• What Is Literary Journalism?
• Classic British and American Essays and Speeches

• Bookfox Academy (All Courses)
• Write Your Best Novel
• How to Write a Splendid Sentence
• Two Weeks to Your Best Children’s Book
• Revision Genius
• The Ultimate Guide to Writing Dialogue
• Your First Bestseller
• Master Your Writing Habits
• Writing Techniques to Transform Your Fiction
• Triangle Method of Character Development
• Children’s Book Editing
• Copy Editing
• Novel Editing
• Short Story Editing
• General Books
• Children’s Books

50 Creative Nonfiction Prompts Guaranteed to Inspire

But not to worry. I present one whole hefty list of prompts just for creative nonfiction writers.

One small note before you dive in: don’t be afraid to mix and match the prompts. Each suggestion was meant to highlight a specific line of inspiration. There is absolutely no reason that two or three of these can’t be explored within one piece.

In fact, just use my tiny suggestions as springboards. Good luck!

1. Explore a scene or story from your memory by reimagining it from an alternate perspective. Write the event from the point of view of a passing bystander, another person close to the event, a pet, or even an inanimate object. When choosing your narrator, pay attention to how objective they would have been, what they would have paid attention to, and what sort of background knowledge they would have had about the scene.

2. Tell the nonfiction story that you don’t want your mother to read. You know the one. Don’t censor yourself.

3. Recall a moment in which you felt a strong spiritual or unidentifiable energy. Describe the scene in vivid detail, with special attention to the senses. Connect that scene to your relationship with your own religious beliefs or lack thereof. Examine how you incorporated that experience into your worldview.

4. Create a timeline of events depicting your life by using newspaper headlines. Try to focus on events that didn’t involve you directly, but connect them to the pivotal events in your life.

5. Tell the story of one of your family holiday gatherings. Identify any of your family’s common trademarks, such as your one aunt that seems to tell the same joke at every Christmas, or your two uncles that always hide from the rest of the family by doing the dishes. Explore how you are linked within this family dynamic, and how these little quirks evolved and changed over the years.

6. Tell the story of a location. Possibly one that is very close to your heart that you already know well, or a new one that inspires your curiosity. Pay particular attention to your own connection to the location, however small or large that connection may be.

7. Choose a location that you’ve come to know as an adult. Compare how you interact with this setting now to how you interacted with similar settings when you were a child. How has your perspective changed?

8. Describe a time in which you expected or wanted to feel a religious or spiritual moment, but couldn’t. What were you hoping would happen? How do you choose to interpret that?

9. Recall a key lesson that parents or family members tried to impart onto you as a child. For example: “live with a healthy mind and healthy body,” or “put others before yourself.” Revisit that lesson as an adult and connect it to how you have come to interpret it as you grew up or in your adult life. Feel free to pick a less serious lesson and have a little bit of fun with it.

10. Revisit a special birthday from when you were younger. Describe specific details, with emphasis upon the senses. Now that you have years of context, how do you feel about what your parents and family did or did not do for you? What does that event mean to you now?

11. Choose an event in your life that someone else remembers differently. Describe both memories and debate the differences. Who do you think is right? Why do you think you remember it differently?

12. Choose a strong emotion and think of two memories associated with it. What are the links between those two memories?

13. Think of a lesson you learned recently and apply it to a memory. How would your behavior have changed if you had applied the lesson back then?

14. Choose a commonplace or otherwise unremarkable memory and describe it in the most dramatic and absurd way possible. For inspiration, I’m leaving you with some quotes from Douglas Adams. “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” “He leant tensely against the corridor wall and frowned like a man trying to unbend a corkscrew by telekinesis.” “It was a deep, hollow malevolent voice which sounded like molten tar glurping out of a drum with evil on its mind.”

15. Have you seen those bizarre Illuminati videos in which some automated voice tries to prove that Arch Duke Ferdinand is actually alive and has a monopoly on the world’s dairy farms? For this prompt, think of people in your life who have believed in crazy conspiracy theories, and write about the time they first shared them with you. Think of how your beliefs might seem naïve to them, and explore the tension between the competing versions of history.

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

16. What do you want more than anything in your life? Write about the burning hot core of your desire, and how that desire has changed over your life.

17. Recall what stressed you out most as a child. Was it the creaking stairs leading to the basement? Or being lost at the store? Explore your current relationship to that stressor. Did you ever move past that fear or anxiety? How do you interact with it now?

18. What relationship in your life has caused the most pain? Write the key scene in that relationship, when everything was at stake.

19. Write about a road trip you took, and about where all your fellow travelers ended up in life versus where you ended up. Are you glad you didn’t end up where they did, or are you jealous?

20. How has your identity changed over the course of your life? Write a scene from your teenage years that epitomizes the type of person you were, and then write a scene from recent life that shows how you’ve changed.

21. What event in your life has angered you the most? Write the scene where it happened, and tell us what you would do if it happened again.

22. What single experience most shaped who you are? Describe the experience in a single, vivid scene.

23. Who was your first friend to die? Write about how you learned of their death, and how you and their other friends mourned them.

24. Choose a happy or comfortable memory and write it in a way that makes the memory creepy or eerie to the reader. Don’t change the basic facts of the event, only select different facts and present them differently.

25. Show yourself in a scene pursuing the thing you want most in the world. Try to show the reader, without telling them, about your character flaws.

26. If you could throw five items into the fire, what would they be and why? To be clear, by throwing them in this fire, there would be no trace of them left anywhere, even if it’s something on the Internet or a memory. This is a very powerful fire. What would the consequences be?

27. What physical object or family heirloom ties together your grandparents, your parents, and yourself? Describe this object in great detail, and what it has meant to generations of your family.

This is seriously the best anthology out there for creative nonfiction.   

Lee Gutkind and Annie Dillard have created a fantastic repository of classics.

In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction

28. Tell a story from your life in inverted chronological order. Start with the end, then backpedal to the middle, then tell the beginning, and then fill in the rest of the gaps.

29. Write about your favorite trip or journey, and how that high level of happiness was eventually threatened.

30. Look at some photographs of your childhood. Look at the pictures of your old room, the clothes you wore, and the places you had been. Try to remember a friend from that time period, and describe the first memory of a time when they pressured you or made you uncomfortable or angry.

31. Take a small, boring moment that happened today and write as much as you can about it. Go overboard describing it, and make this boring moment exciting by describing it in intense detail with ecstatic prose. Eventually connect this small, boring detail with the grand narrative of your life, your bigger purpose and intentions.

32. Describe the best meal you ever ate. Then describe a conflict you had with the people you shared it with, one that happened before, during, or after.

33. Recall an individual that you particularly hated. Describe their cruelty to you, and try to write yourself into an understanding of why they might have done it.

34. What was the best/worst letter you ever received or wrote? Write about the situation surrounding that letter, and why it was so important.

35. Recall a name you’ve given to a toy, a car, a pet, or a child, and tell us the story of how you and your family selected that name. Who fought over the name? What was the significance of that name? What happened to the animal or thing you named?

36. Write about experiencing the craziest natural event you’ve ever seen — tornado, earthquake, tsunami, hurricane. Dramatize the physical danger of the natural event as well as the tension between you and the people you were with.

37. Tell the story of the most important person that has shaped your town and its culture (you might have to do some research). How did the activity of that person  influence the way you grew up or live currently?

How do you find good creative nonfiction stories?    

This book masterfully teaches you how to discover the stories others will want to hear.

Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life

38. Scientists have wondered for years how nature and nurture plays into the development of human minds and their choices. Explore where you and your siblings are today and the choices that brought you there. Would you like to trade places with your sibling? Would you be happy living in their shoes? How have your personal choices differed over the years?

39. Write a scene of a time when someone older than you gave you advice, and write about how you followed it or ignored it and the consequences.

40. Write a single, three-paragraph scene when your sexual desire was thwarted by yourself or someone else.

41. Describe a scene when you were stereotyping someone. Did someone challenge you, or if you only felt guilty by yourself, how did you change your behavior afterwards?

42. Describe the biggest epiphany of your life, then backtrack and tell the lead-up to that scene or the aftermath. In the lead-up or aftermath, show how the epiphany was either overrated or every bit as valuable as you’d previously thought.

43. Write about a fork in the road in your life, and how you made the decision to go the direction you did.

44. Explore an addiction you had or currently have. Whether the addiction is as serious as alcohol or cigarettes, or something much more mundane like texting, video games, or internet usage, describe in vivid detail the first time you tried it. If you quit, tell the story of how you quit.

45. Recall a scene in which you chose to remain silent. Whether it was your boss’s racist rant, or just an argument not worth having, explore the scene and why you chose not to speak.

46. Revisit a moment in your life that you feel you will never be able to forget. What about that moment made it so unforgettable?

47. What makes you feel guilty? Revisit a moment that you are ashamed of or feel guilty for and explore why that is. Describe the scene and the event and communicate why you feel this way.

48. Write about a moment in which you acted selflessly or against your own benefit. What motivated you to do so? What were the circumstances? How did you feel after words?

49. Write about the most pivotal scene in a relationship with someone in your extended family — Uncle, aunt, cousin, grandmother. Describe the tension or happiness you shared, and how that came to affect your relationship from that point onward.

50. If all else fails, try a writing-sprint. Set an alarm for 5, 10, or 15 minutes and write as much as possible within that time span. Even if you begin with no inspiration, you might be surprised with what you come up with by the end.

The definitive guide to creating riveting true life stories.     

Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction

For added pressure, try these writing websites:

• Write Or Die

If you stop writing for more than 5 seconds, everything you’ve written disappears. It’s like writing with someone with a whip behind your chair. But with this new update you can choose to get positive reinforcements, too, like a kitten or candy, or to have your words disemvoweled rather than disappear.

A points-based system to encourage writers to write 750 words every single day. You get bonus points for not skipping days, and bonus points for writing more than 750 words.

• Written? Kitten!

Every 100 words you write, you get shown a picture of a kitten. Ah, simple motivation. No word whether a dog version of the site is in the works for those who are more dog people.

For more on creative nonfiction writing, I suggest Creative Nonfiction . This website works with its print magazine counterpart to specifically cater to creative nonfiction writers and operates as an excellent starting point for more inspiration. Happy writing!

Related posts:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Thank you for adding Written Kitten to the list, Bridget! We have bunnies and dogs now!

Thank you for this. Very helpful for a useless person like me

Stfu, you are amazing, and no one in this entire universe is useless, except for me, so love yourself.

This is super awesome & I am so happy to have some new ideas… creative block has been beyond bad. this is what I have needed to start unclogging it!

do you have topics i can write about

This is very helpful!

I am searching for non-fiction writing topics

Every writer NEEDS this book.

It’s a guide to writing the pivotal moments of your novel.

Whether writing your book or revising it, this will be the most helpful book you’ll ever buy.

50 Short Nonfiction Books You Can Read in a Day (Or Two)

Sarah Ullery

Sarah suffers from chronic sarcasm, and an unhealthy aversion to noise. She loves to read, and would like to do nothing else, but stupid real life makes her go to work. She lives in the middle of a cornfield and shares a house with two spoiled dogs and a ton of books.

View All posts by Sarah Ullery

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln is an excellent book. I have no doubt. But by the time you’re done reading all 916 pages, there’s a real chance you’ll have developed carpal tunnel in your wrists.

Big books are heavy! They take FOREVER to read. And you know there’s going to be boring parts. Nonfiction is intimidating enough without the extra worry of physical pain that might be associated with reading it.

That’s why it’s nice to have a good selection of short nonfiction books on your TBR. Books that are easy on the wrists. Books that get to the point and stay on point without the requisite “boring parts” of larger books. Books that can be read in a day (or two). Books that are fun, but leave you feeling like a better person or better reader for having read them.

Nonfiction does not have to be long to be important. In fact, many of the titles I’ve listed below are the absolute best nonfiction books I’ve ever read. All of the books (except one) are under 300 pages, and the books closer to the 300-page mark are so absorbing and fast-paced that they can be read in a single sitting. I’ve also included graphic memoirs and other graphic nonfiction that can be read quickly. Nonfiction can be just as fun as fiction as long as you find a subject that interests you and don’t feel bogged down by an endless number of pages.

I like my books short too! So let’s share the love…

Short Nonfiction Books Under 100 pages

Notes on nationalism by george orwell (52 pages).

“In this essay, Orwell discusses the notion of nationalism, and argues that it causes people to disregard common sense and become more ignorant towards factuality. Orwell shows his concern for the social state of Europe, and in a broader sense, the entire world, due to an increasing amount of influence of nationalistic sentiment occurring throughout a large number of countries.”

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (80 pages)

“In 1903, a student at a military academy sent some of his verses to a well-known Austrian poet, requesting an assessment of their value. The older artist, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), replied to the novice in this series of letters—an amazing archive of remarkable insights into the ideas behind Rilke’s greatest poetry.”

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau (48 pages)

“ Civil Disobedience argues that citizens should not permit their governments to overrule their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing their acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War, but the sentiments he expresses here are just as pertinent today as when they were first written.”

Lifeboat No. 8: An Untold Tale of Love, Loss, and Surviving the Titanic by Elizabeth Kaye  (70 pages)

“One hundred years after that disastrous and emblematic voyage, Elizabeth Kaye reveals the extraordinary, little-known story behind one of the first lifeboats to leave the doomed ship.”

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (53 pages)

“With humor and levity, here Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century—one rooted in inclusion and awareness.”

The Art of War by Sun Tzu (72 pages)

“Twenty-Five Hundred years ago, Sun Tzu wrote this classic book of military strategy based on Chinese warfare and military thought. Since that time, all levels of military have used the teaching on Sun Tzu to warfare and civilization have adapted these teachings for use in politics, business and everyday life. The Art of War is a book which should be used to gain advantage of opponents in the boardroom and battlefield alike.”

Africa’s Tarnished Name by Chinua Achebe (56 pages)

“Electrifying essays on the history, complexity, diversity of a continent, from the father of modern African literature.”

Short Nonfiction Books Under 200 pages

Difficult women: a memoir of three by david plante (184 pages).

“ Difficult Women , the book with which David Plante made his name, presents three portraits—each one of them as detailed, textured, and imposing as the those of Lucian Freud—of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women, while also raising intriguing and in their own way difficult questions about the character and motivations of the keenly and often cruelly observant portraitist himself.”

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel (translator) (188 pages)

“While training for the New York City Marathon, Haruki Murakami decided to keep a journal of his progress. The result is a memoir about his intertwined obsessions with running and writing, full of vivid recollections and insights, including the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, here is a rich and revelatory work that elevates the human need for motion to an art form.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli (128 pages)

“Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation,  Tell Me How It Ends  (an expansion of her 2016  Freeman’s  essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction of the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants with the reality of racism and fear both here and back home.”

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (106 pages)

“At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two ‘letters,’ written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.”

Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (115 pages)

“At long last, Mary Beard addresses in one brave book the misogynists and trolls who mercilessly attack and demean women the world over, including, very often, Mary herself. In  Women & Power , she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial.”

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (160 pages)

“The  Tao Te Ching , the esoteric but infinitely practical book written most probably in the sixth century BC by Lao Tsu, has been translated more frequently than any work except the Bible. This translation of the Chinese classic, which was first published twenty-five years ago, has sold more copies than any of the others. It offers the essence of each word and makes Lao Tsu’s teaching immediate and alive.”

The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison (114 pages)

“America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?”

Why I Write by George Orwell (120 pages)

“Whether puncturing the lies of politicians, wittily dissecting the English character or telling unpalatable truths about war, Orwell’s timeless, uncompromising essays are more relevant, entertaining and essential than ever in today’s era of spin.”

The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir (162 pages)

“In The Ethics of Ambiguity , Madame de Beauvoir penetrates at once to the central ethical problems of modern man: what shall he do, how shall he go about making values, in the face of this awareness of the absurdity of his existence? She forces the reader to face the absurdity of the human condition and then, having done so, proceeds to develop a dialectic of ambiguity which will enable him not to master the chaos, but to create with it.”

The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria by Helon Habila (128 pages)

“On April 14, 2014, 276 girls from the Chibok Secondary School in northern Nigeria were kidnapped by Boko Haram, the world’s deadliest terrorist group. Most were never heard from again. Acclaimed Nigerian novelist Helon Habila, who grew up in northern Nigeria, returned to Chibok and gained intimate access to the families of the kidnapped to offer a devastating account of this tragedy that stunned the world. With compassion and deep understanding of historical context, Habila tells the stories of the girls and the anguish of their parents; chronicles the rise of Boko Haram and the Nigerian government’s inept response; and captures the indifference of the media and the international community whose attention has moved on.”

The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science by Joyce Sidman (160 pages)

“One of the first naturalists to observe live insects directly, Maria Sibylla Merian was also one of the first to document the metamorphosis of the butterfly. In this visual nonfiction biography, richly illustrated throughout with full-color original paintings by Merian herself, the Newbery Honor–winning author Joyce Sidman paints her own picture of one of the first female entomologists and a woman who flouted convention in the pursuit of knowledge and her passion for insects.”

Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard (177 pages)

“Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.”

The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry (151 pages)

“Grayson Perry has been thinking about masculinity—what it is, how it operates, why little boys are thought to be made of slugs and snails – since he was a boy. Now, in this funny and necessary book, he turns round to look at men with a clear eye and ask, what sort of men would make the world a better place, for everyone?”

Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place by Scott McClanahan (169 pages)

“When Scott McClanahan was fourteen he went to live with his Grandma Ruby and his Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy.  Crapalachia  is a portrait of these formative years, coming-of-age in rural West Virginia.”

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot (143 pages)

“ Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma.”

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury (158 pages)

“Zen in the Art of Writing  is more than just a how-to manual for the would-be writer: it is a celebration of the act of writing itself that will delight, impassion, and inspire the writer in you. Bradbury encourages us to follow the unique path of our instincts and enthusiasms to the place where our inner genius dwells, and he shows that success as a writer depends on how well you know one subject: your own life.”

A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape From North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa, Risa Kobayashi (159 pages)

“In this memoir translated from the original Japanese, Ishikawa candidly recounts his tumultuous upbringing and the brutal thirty-six years he spent living under a crushing totalitarian regime, as well as the challenges he faced repatriating to Japan after barely escaping North Korea with his life.”

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (165 pages)

“Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival.”

The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography by Deborah Levy (144 pages)

“The Cost of Living  explores the subtle erasure of women’s names, spaces, and stories in the modern everyday. In this ‘living autobiography’ infused with warmth and humor, Deborah Levy critiques the roles that society assigns to us, and reflects on the politics of breaking with the usual gendered rituals. What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage?”

Short Nonfiction Books Under 300 pages

Ain’t i a woman by bell hooks (205 pages).

“A groundbreaking work of feminist history and theory analyzing the complex relations between various forms of oppression.  Ain’t I a Woman  examines the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the historic devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism within the recent women’s movement, and black women’s involvement with feminism.”

Can You Tolerate This? By Ashleigh Young (256 pages)

“A dazzling – and already prizewinning – collection of essays on youth and aging, ambition and disappointment, Katherine Mansfield tourism and New Zealand punk rock, and the limitations of the body.”

The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir by Yrsa Daley-Ward (224 pages)

“From the poet behind  bone , a lyrical memoir—part prose, part verse—about coming-of-age, uncovering the cruelty and the beauty of the wider world, and redemption through self-discovery and the bonds of family.”

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung (238 pages)

“From a childhood survivor of the Cambodian genocide under the regime of Pol Pot, this is a riveting narrative of war crimes and desperate actions, the unnerving strength of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit.”

Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear (240 pages)

“A writer’s search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this intimate and exuberant meditation on creativity and life—a field guide to things small and significant.”

Teaching Community: a Pedagogy of Hope by bell hooks (200 pages)

“Teaching Community  tells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues—among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning—these values motivate progressive social change.”

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton (280 pages) (it has pictures!)

“The Architecture of Happiness  starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and it argues that it is architecture’s task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.”

Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich (236 pages)

“On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe.  Voices from Chernobyl  is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy.”

Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth About Cuba Today by Yoani Sanchez (256 pages)

“Yoani Sánchez is an unusual dissident: no street protests, no attacks on big politicos, no calls for revolution. Rather, she produces a simple diary about what it means to live under the Castro regime: the chronic hunger and the difficulty of shopping; the art of repairing ancient appliances; and the struggles of living under a propaganda machine that pushes deep into public and private life.”

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell (273 pages)

“When the unconventional Durrell family can no longer endure the damp, gray English climate, they do what any sensible family would do: sell their house and relocate to the sunny Greek isle of Corfu.”

The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Oscar Martinez (224 pages)

The book has pictures, which is so helpful in nonfiction! It chronicles the migrant trail through Mexico to the U.S. border. “The Beast” is the freight train that migrants cling to as they make their way north. Oscar Martinez is a fantastic writer. I love this book but I would also like to recommend A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America—both are harrowing and important stories.

The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail, translated by Max Weiss (240 pages)

“Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women.  The Beekeeper , by the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, tells the harrowing stories of several women who managed to escape the clutches of Daesh.”

What Are the Blind Men Dreaming? By Noemi Jaffe, translated by Julia Sanches (266 pages)

“A groundbreaking use of storytelling to bear witness to the Holocaust features three generations of women’s own voices—Liwia’s diary written upon liberation from Auschwitz; daughter Noemi Jaffe exploring the power of memory, survival, and bearing witness; and granddaughter Leda, Noemi’s daughter, on the significance of the Holocaust and Jewish identity seventy years after the war.”

Everything Lost is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho by Will McGrath (224 pages)

“Funny and heartfelt, this amalgamation of memoir and essay collection tells the story of twenty months the author spent in Lesotho, the small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, surrounded by people who take strangers’ hands as they walk down the road, people who—with sweetest face—drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded pride incites murder and families are devastated by the AIDS epidemic.”

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester (242 pages)

“The Professor and the Madman , masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the  Oxford English Dictionary —and literary history.”

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (232 pages)

“In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father.

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the  Fun Home.  It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.”

Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 by Albert Marrin (210 pages)

“From National Book Award finalist Albert Marrin comes a fascinating look at the history and science of the deadly 1918 flu pandemic—and the chances for another worldwide pandemic.”

Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and Schools Closings in Chicago’s South Side by Eve L. Ewing (240 pages)

An unflinching look at Chicago Public Schools and the damage inflicted on communities when schools are shutdown.

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt (224 pages)

“As an aging, tenacious Elizabeth I clung to power, a talented playwright probed the social causes, the psychological roots, and the twisted consequences of tyranny. In exploring the psyche (and psychoses) of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, and the societies they rule over, Stephen Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the catastrophic consequences of its execution.”

Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug (288 pages)

“A revelatory, visually stunning graphic memoir by award-winning artist Nora Krug, telling the story of her attempt to confront the hidden truths of her family’s wartime past in Nazi Germany and to comprehend the forces that have shaped her life, her generation, and history.”

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing (282 pages)

“In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice. For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world.”

The Little Book of Feminist Saints by Julia Pierpont, Manjit Thapp (Illustrator) (208 pages)

“This inspiring, beautifully illustrated collection honors one hundred exceptional women throughout history and around the world.”

Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, and Future by Lauren Redniss (261 pages)(Graphic Novel)

“Weather is the very air we breathe—it shapes our daily lives and alters the course of history. In  Thunder & Lightning , Lauren Redniss tells the story of weather and humankind through the ages.”

Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga, Jordan Stump (translator) (250 pages)

“Scholastique Mukasonga’s  Cockroaches  is the story of growing up a Tutsi in Hutu-dominated Rwanda—the story of a happy child, a loving family, all wiped out in the genocide of 1994. A vivid, bittersweet depiction of family life and bond in a time of immense hardship, it is also a story of incredible endurance, and the duty to remember that loss and those lost while somehow carrying on. Sweet, funny, wrenching, and deeply moving,  Cockroaches  is a window onto an unforgettable world of love, grief, and horror.”

Over 300 pages (Bonus)

Arbitrary stupid goal by tamara shopsin (336 pages).

It’s my mission in life to get everyone to read this book! I mean, if the title didn’t draw you in, or the cover; well, maybe my mission is a lost cause…I can promise that it’s a really fast and funny read that you’ll have no problem finishing in a day!

I’ll admit that I’ve listened to a good amount of these books as audiobooks, so for more great, short, nonfiction audiobook ideas, check out 50 of the Best Short Nonfiction Audiobooks Under 10 Hours —or, if you’re just interested in more great nonfiction ideas, check out Book Riot’s nonfiction page !

You Might Also Like

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Lit Century
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade

In which we cheated..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , the best memoirs of the decade , and the best essay collections of the decade. But our sixth list was a little harder—we were looking at what we (perhaps foolishly) deemed “general” nonfiction: all the nonfiction excepting memoirs and essays (these being covered in their own lists) published in English between 2010 and 2019.

Reader, we cheated. We picked a top 20. It only made sense, with such a large field. And 20 isn’t even enough, really. But so it goes, in the world of lists.

The following books were finally chosen after much debate (and multiple meetings) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Twenty

Michelle alexander, the new jim crow (2010).

I read Michelle Alexander’s  The New Jim Crow  when it first came out, and I remember its colossal impact so clearly—not just on the academic world (it is, technically, an academic book, and Alexander is an academic) but everywhere. It was published during the Obama Administration, an interval which many (white people) thought signaled a new dawn of race relations in America—of a kind of fantastic post-racialism. Though it’s hard to look back on this particular zeitgeist now (when, and I still can’t believe I’m writing this, Donald Trump is president of the United States) without decrying the ignorance and naiveté of this mindset, Alexander’s book called out this the insistence on a phenomenon of “colorblindness” in 2012, as a veneer, as a sham, or as, simply, another form of ignorance. “We have not ended racial caste in America,” she declares, “we have merely redesigned it.” Alexander’s meticulous research concerns the mass incarceration of black men principally through the War on Drugs, Alexander explains how the United States government itself (the justice system) carries out a significant racist pattern of injustice—which not only literally subordinates black men by jailing them, but also then removes them of their rights and turns them into second class citizens after the fact. Former convicts, she learns through working with the ACLU, will face discrimination (discrimination that is supported and justified by society) which includes restrictions from voting rights, juries, food stamps, public housing, student loans—and job opportunities. “Unlike in Jim Crow days, there were no ‘Whites Only’ signs.” Alexander explains. “This system is out of sight, out of mind.” Her book, which exposes this subtler but still horrible new mode of social control, is an essential, groundbreaking achievement which does more than call out the hypocrisy of our infrastructure, but provide it with obvious steps to change.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010)

In this riveting (despite its near 600 pages) and highly influential book, Mukherjee traces the known history of our most feared ailment, from its earliest appearances over five thousand years ago to the wars still being waged by contemporary doctors, and all the confusion, success stories, and failures in between—hence the subtitle “a biography of cancer,” though of course it is also a biography of humanity and of human ingenuity (and lack thereof).

Mukherjee began to write the book after a striking interaction with a patient who had stomach cancer, he told The New York Times . “She said, ‘I’m willing to go on fighting, but I need to know what it is that I’m battling.’ It was an embarrassing moment. I couldn’t answer her, and I couldn’t point her to a book that would. Answering her question—that was the urgency that drove me, really. The book was written because it wasn’t there.”

His work was certainly appreciated. The Emperor of All Maladies won the 2011 Pulitzer in General Nonfiction (the jury called it “An elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.”), the Guardian first book award, and the inaugural PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; it was a New York Times bestseller. But most importantly, it was the first book many laypeople (read: not scientists, doctors, or those whose lives had already been acutely affected by cancer) had read about the most dreaded of all diseases, and though the science marches on, it is still widely read and referenced today.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)

As a strongly humanities-focused person, it’s difficult for me to connect with books about science. What can I say besides that public education and I failed each other. When I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks , I found myself thinking that if all scientific knowledge were part of this kind of incredibly compelling and human narrative, I would probably be a doctor by now. (I mean, it’s possible .) Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, and her cells (dubbed HeLa cells) which were cultured without her permission, and which were the first human cells to reproduce in a lab—making them immensely valuable to scientists in research labs all over the world. HeLa cells have been used for the development of vaccines and treatments as well as in drug treatments, gene mapping, and many, many other scientific pursuits. They were even sent to space so scientists could study the effects of zero gravity on human cells.

Skloot set a wildly ambitious project for herself with this book. Not only does she write about the (immortal) life of the cells as well as the lives of Lacks and her (human, not just cellular) descendants, she also writes about the racism in the medical field and medical ethics as a whole. That the book feels cohesive as well as compelling is a great testament to Skloot’s skills as a writer. “ Immortal Life  reads like a novel,” writes Eric Roston in his Washington Post review . “The prose is unadorned, crisp and transparent.” For a book that encompasses so much, it never feels baggy. Nearly ten years later, it remains an urgent text, and one that is taught in high schools, universities, and medical schools across the country. It is both an incredible achievement and, simply, a really good read.  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (2010)

Timothy Snyder’s brilliant Bloodlands has changed World War II scholarship more, perhaps, than any work since Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, an apt comparison given that Bloodlands includes within it a response to Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil (Snyder doesn’t buy it, and provides convincing proof that Eichmann was more of a run-of-the-mill hateful Nazi and less a colorless bureaucrat simply doing his job). Snyder reads in 10 languages, which is key to his ability to synthesize international scholarship and present new theories in an accessible way. But before I continue praising this book, I should probably let y’all know what it’s about— Bloodlands is a history of mass killings in the Double-Occupied Zone of Eastern Europe, where the Soviets showed up, killed everyone they wanted to, and then the Nazis showed up and killed everyone else. By focusing on mass killings, rather than genocide, Snyder is able to draw connections between totalitarian regimes and examine the mechanisms by which small nations can suddenly and horrifyingly become much smaller.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010)

Wilkerson’s history of the Great Migration is a revelation. When we talk about migration in the context of American history, we tend to focus on triumphalist stories of immigrants coming to America, but what about the vast migrations that have happened internally? Between 1920 and 1970, millions of African-Americans migrated North from the prejudice-ridden South, lured by relatively high-paying jobs and relatively less racism. It takes a whole lot to make someone leave their home, and Wilkerson does an excellent job at reminding us how awful life in the South was for Black people (and still is, in many ways). The Warmth of Other Suns is not only fascinating—it’s also thrilling, taking us into the lives of hard-scrabble folk who were equal parts refugees and adventurers, and truly epic, telling a great story on a grand scale. Don’t think that means there aren’t small moments of humanity seeded throughout the book—for every sentence about the conduct of millions, there’s a detail that reminds us that we’re reading about individuals, with their own hopes, wishes, dreams, and struggles.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2012)

While Robert Caro first came to prominence for The Powerbroker, his 1974 biography of divisive urban planner Robert Moses, it’s Caro’s ongoing multi-volume biography of LBJ, America’s most unjustly maligned president (fight me, Kennedy-heads!), that has cemented his legacy. It’s hard to pick one in particular to recommend, but The Passage of Power, which covers the years 1958-1964, captures the most tumultuous period of LBJ’s life in politics, as he went from feared senator, to side-lined VP, to suddenly becoming the post powerful figure in the world. There’s something profoundly moving about the vastness of these works—Caro is 83 now, and has dedicated an enormous part of his life to this singular project. His wife is his only approved research assistant, and together, they’ve upended half a century of LBJ criticism to reveal the complex, problematic, but always striving core of a sensitive soul.

I had a teacher in high school who spent 20 years working on her dissertation on LBJ. She’d spend each weekend at the LBJ Library at UT Austin, while working full time as a public school teacher, and kicked ass at both. There’s something about LBJ that inspires people to dedicate their entire lives to trying to figure him out, and in the process, trying to understand the world that made him, and that he made. Thanks to Caro, we can all understand LBJ a little bit better.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (2012)

Tom Reiss opens his biography of Thomas Alexandre-Dumas, father of author Alexandre Dumas, with a scene that seems right out of an academic heist film. At a library in rural France, Reiss convinces a town official to blow open a safe whose combination was held only by the late librarian. What Reiss discovers are the rudiments of a grand and, until then, largely unknown story of the man who inspired some of his son’s most beloved tales.  The Black Count  is also a case study of complex racial politics during the age of revolutionary France. Dumas was born in 1762 in Saint-Domingue, the French Caribbean colony that would become Haiti. As the son of a French marquis and a freed black slave, Dumas was subject both to the privileges of the former and the kind of indignities suffered by the latter. His father, for instance, sells him into slavery when he is 12 only to purchase his freedom later and bring him to France, where the young man receives an aristocratic education. A final rift from his father prompts Dumas to join the military. Reiss creates a dynamic, if somewhat speculative portrait of Dumas based on letters, reports from battlefields, Dumas’ own writings, and more. By the time he is 30, Dumas has vaulted in the ranks from corporal to general and commands a division of more than 50,000 soldiers. It’s no accident that the thrilling militaristic feats Reiss describes sound like events out of  The Count of Monte Cristo  or  The Three Musketeers . Though the general becomes a cavalry commander under Napoleon Bonaparte, Reiss suggests that it was Napoleon himself who ruined Dumas not only from a personal standpoint, but civilizational as well. Napoleon reintroduced slavery in Haiti, after all, in contradiction to the republican dreams of Dumas’ contemporary, Toussaint Louverture, another rare and successful 18th-century general of African descent. Reiss unearths the ultimately tragic story of a man who was infamous in his own time for enjoying social and professional advantages that would’ve been unheard of for a mixed-race man in the US, a nation which of course went through its own revolution one generation earlier.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (2014)

The premise of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book is a simple scientific fact: there have been five mass extinctions in the history of the planet, and soon there will be six. The difference, Kolbert explains, is that this one is caused by humans, who have drastically altered the earth in a short time. She points out on the first page that humans (which is to say,  homo sapiens , humans like us) have only been around for two hundred thousand or so years—an incredibly short amount of time to do damage enough to destroy most of earthly life. Kolbert’s book is so unique, though, because she combines research from across disciplines (scientific and social-scientific) to prepare an extremely comprehensive, sweeping argument about how our oceans, air, animal populations, bacterial ecosystems, and other natural elements are dangerously adapting to (or dying from) human impact, while also tracing the history of both the approaches to these things (theories of evolution, extinction, and other principles). It’s a depressing and horrifying argument on the face of it, but it’s made so delicately, even poetically—Kolbert’s concerned, occasional first-person narration, and her many interviews with professionals capable of the pithiest, most perfect quotes (not to mention that she interviews these experts, sometimes, over pizza) make this book a conversation, more than a treatise. Kolbert talks us through the headiest, most complicated science, breaking down this mass disaster morsel by morsel. This might be  The Sixth Extinction’ s greatest achievement—it is so smart while also being so quotidian, so urgent while also being so present. And this fits the tone of her argument: our current mass extinction doesn’t feel like an asteroid hitting the planet. It’s amassed by the small ways in which we live our lives. We are crawling, she illuminates, towards the end of the world.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me 1) won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015, 2) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and 3) was deemed “required reading” by Toni Morrison. What else is there to say? To call it “timely” or “urgent” or even “a prime example of how the personal is, in fact, political” (as I am tempted to do) does not quite capture the unique, grounding, heartbreaking experience of reading this book. Framed as a letter to his teenage son, Between the World and Me is both a biting interrogation of American history and today’s society and an intimate look at the concerns and hopes a father passes down to his son. In just 152 pages, this book touches on the creation of race (“But race is the child of racism, not the father”), the countless acts of violence enacted on black bodies, gun control, and anecdotes from the writer’s own life. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic , exercises a journalist’s concision and clarity and fuses it with the flourish of a novelist and the caring instinct of a father. It is a wonderful hybrid. The way the topics, the tones, bleed into one another reads so naturally: “I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, and that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store…” The list, of course, goes on. Between the World and Me brilliantly forces us to confront these tragedies again—to remember our own experiences watching the news coverage, to see them in the context of history filtered through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ unsurprised perspective, and to see them anew through the eyes of his disillusioned young son. There is an amazing generosity to these personal glimpses, the moments when the writer turns to his son (says “you”). They catch you off guard. (There are even photographs throughout, like a scrapbook you aren’t sure if you’re allowed to look through.) There have been many books about race, about violence and institutionalized injustice and identity, and there will be more, but none quite so beautifully shattering as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature (2015)

Andrea Wulf’s 2015 biography of 18th-century German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt—one of the most famous men of his time, for whom literally hundreds of towns, rivers, currents, glaciers, and more are named—is so much more than the story of a single life. Aside from chronicling a remarkably fertile moment in the history of European ideas (Von Humboldt was good buddies with his neighbor in Weimar, Goethe) Wulf reveals in Humboldt a true forebear of present-day ecology, a jack-of-all-trades scientist less concerned with the reduction of the natural world into its constituent specimens than with our place in a broader ecosystem.

And while it doesn’t seem particularly radical now, Humboldt’s proto-environmentalist ideas about the wider world, much of which he mapped and explored, stood in stark contrast to prevailing notions of Christian dominion, that dubious theological position conjured up in aid of empire. Insofar as Humboldt was among the first to understand and articulate the complex systems of a living forest, he was also the first to sound the alarm about the impacts of deforestation (much of which he encountered on his epic journey across the northern reaches of South America). Part adventure yarn, part intellectual history, part ecological meditation, The Invention of Nature restores to prominence an exemplary life, and reminds us of the tectonic force of ideas paired to action.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Stacy Schiff, The Witches (2015)

It’s surprising that with a topic as popular and recurring in American culture as the Salem witch trials there have not been more books of this kind. Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the bestselling Cleopatra, Stacy Schiff takes to the Salem witch trials with curiosity and a historian’s magnifying glass, setting out to uncover the mystery that has baffled, awed, and terrified generations since. She pokes at the spectacle that Salem has become in mainstream and artistic depictions—how it has blended with folklore and fiction and has hitherto become a sensationalized event in American history which nonetheless has never been fully understood. Schiff writes that despite the imagination surrounding the Salem witch trials, in reality, there is still a gap in their history of—to be exact—nine months; so the impetus of the book and the intent of Schiff is to penetrate the mass hysteria and panic that ripped through Salem at the time and led to the execution of fourteen women and five men. In her opening chapter, Schiff chillingly sets up the atmosphere of the book and asks key questions that will drive its ensuing narrative: “Who was conspiring against you? Might you be a witch and not know it? Can an innocent person be guilty? Could anyone, wondered a group of men late in the summer, consider themselves safe?” At the heart of Schiff’s historical investigation is the Puritan culture of New England—but part of her masterful synthesis is that she picks apart at each thread of Salem’s culture and evaluates the witch trials from every perspective. Praised for her research as well as her prose and narrative capabilities, Schiff’s The Witches has been described by The Times (London) as “An oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller”; Schiff herself, by the New York Review of Books as having “mastered the entire history of early New England.” A phrase that still haunts me for its resonance throughout human history, is: “Even at the time, it was clear to some that Salem was a story of one thing behind which was a story about something else altogether.” –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Svetlana Alexievich, tr. Bela Shayevich, Secondhand Time (2016)

A landmark work of oral history, Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time chronicles the decline and fall of Soviet communism and the rise of oligarchic capitalism. Through a multitude of interviews conducted between 1991 and 2012 with ordinary citizens—doctors, soldiers, waitresses, Communist party secretaries, and writers—Alexievich’s account is as important to understanding the Soviet world as Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago . Second-hand Time first appeared in Russia in 2013 and was translated into English in 2016 by Bella Shayevich. As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker , “There are many worthwhile books on the post-Soviet period and Putin’s ascent…But the nonfiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history…” It is shockingly intimate, Alexievich’s interviewees sharing their darkest traumas and deepest regrets. In their kitchens, at gravesites, each character tells the story of a nation abandoned by the Kremlin. Like much of Alexievich’s work, it is radical in its composition, challenging with its polyphony of distinctive, human voices the “official history” of a society that presented itself as homogeneous and monolithic—an achievement the Nobel committee recognized when it cited the Belorussian journalist for developing “a new kind of literary genre…a history of the soul.” Like her more recent The Unwomanly Face of War and Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II , Alexievich’s project is one of the most important accounts being produced today.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Jane Mayer, Dark Money (2016)

In addition to being an incredible work of reporting, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is a historical document of what happened to America as a small group of plutocrats funded the rise of political candidates who espoused policies and beliefs that had been, until then, considered a part of the fringe right wing of the Republican Party. Mayer describes this group as “a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and voted.” Mayer’s painstakingly reported work is a monumental achievement; she lays out, in as much detail as could possibly be available, the mechanisms that allowed this group to channel their wealth and power, with the help of federal law, to a set of institutions that aim to fight scientific advancement, justice-oriented movements, and climate change. In doing so, they have overhauled American politics. As Alan Ehrenhalt put it in a review of the book for The New York Times, she describes “a private political bank capable of bestowing unlimited amounts of money on favored candidates, and doing it with virtually no disclosure of its source.”

The stakes here extend beyond American politics; Mayer points out that Koch money upholds some of the institutions most vigorously fighting climate activism and defending the fossil fuel industry. In 2017, she told the Los Angeles Times , “There are many things you can fix and you can bring back, and there are sort of cycles in American history and the pendulum swings back and forth, but there are things you can damage irreparably, and that’s what I’m worried about right this moment … And that’s why this particular book—because it’s about the money that is stopping this country from doing something useful on climate change.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

David France, How to Survive a Plague (2016)

To call How to Survive a Plague extensive would be an understatement; France’s account of the epidemic’s earliest days is overwhelmingly generous, letting the reader experience those days, and everything that followed, from within the community that faced it first. France recounts the ways in which scientists and doctors first responded to the virus, tracing the evolution of that understanding from within a small circle to a broad cry for awareness and resources; meanwhile, he shows how a community of people fighting for their lives mobilized alternative systems of communication, education, and support while facing an almost inconceivable wall of barriers to that work. The importance of language in this fight is at the forefront here, from the scientific question of what to call the virus, to its reputation in popular culture as “gay cancer,” to the disagreements within activist groups about how to tell their stories to an unsympathetic world.

This is an enraging history, one of various institutional failures, missed opportunities, hypocrisies, and acts of malice toward a community in crisis, motivated by hatred and horror of queer people and gay men in particular. But I felt equally enraged and in awe. This is a humbling history to read, especially if, like me, you come from a generation of queer people that has been accused of forgetting it. I’m grateful for France’s testimony; it won’t let any of us forget.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery (2016)

Reséndez’s The Other Slavery is nothing short of an epic recalibration of American history, one that’s long overdue and badly needed in the present moment. The story of the assault on indigenous peoples in the Americas is perhaps well-known, but what’s less known is how many of those people were enslaved by colonizers, how that enslavement led to mass death, and how complicit the American legal system was in bringing that oppression about and sustaining it for years beyond the supposed emancipation in regions in which indigenous peoples were enslaved. This was not an isolated phenomenon. It extended from Caribbean plantations to Western mining interests. It was part and parcel of the European effort to settle the “new world” and was one of the driving motivations behind the earliest expeditions and colonies. Reséndez puts the number of indigenous enslaved between Columbus’s arrival and 1900 at somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million people. The institution took many forms, but reading through the legal obfuscation and drilling down into the archival record and first-hand accounts of the eras, Reséndez shows how slavery permeated the continents. Native tribes were not simply wiped out by disease, war, and brutal segregation. They were also worked—against their will, without pay, in mass numbers—to death. It was a sustained and organized enslavement. The Other Slavery also tells the story of uprising—communities that resisted, individuals who fought. It’s a complex and tragic story that required a skilled historian to bring into the contemporary consciousness. In addition to his skills as a historian and an investigator, Resendez is a skilled storyteller with a truly remarkable subject. This is historical nonfiction at its most important and most necessary.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies (2016)

One night, facing a brief gap between plans with different people, I took Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies to a bar. A few minutes after I ordered, deep in Traister’s incredible, extensive history of single women in America, a server came over to offer me another, more isolated seat at the end of the bar, “so you don’t feel embarrassed about being alone,” she said, quietly. I assured her I was okay, trying not to laugh. She was just so worried.

I turned back to my book to find Traister describing this kind of cultural distress— a woman, alone, in public?! —at a new generation of unmarried adult women, who are more autonomous and numerous today than ever before. Far from marking a crisis in the social order, Traister writes, this shift “was in fact a new order … women’s paths were increasingly marked with options, off-ramps, variations on what had historically been a very constrained theme.” She examines the history of unmarried women as a social and political force, including the activists who devoted their lives to establishing a greater range of educational, familial, and economic choices for women, with particular attention to the ways in which that history is also one of racial and economic justice in the US. Traister also highlights the networks of social support that women have created in order to survive patriarchy and establish lifestyles that did not depend on it; intimacy and communication among unmarried women, she shows, were the backbone of activist and reform movements that successfully challenged the dominant order.

The book draws on interviews from dozens of women of varying backgrounds, and their firsthand accounts are a portrait of life amid a historic shift toward female autonomy. Their stories, and Traister’s analysis, make it clear that even as options for many women are expanding, those options are not equally available or beneficial to all women. This is a stunning reckoning with the state of women’s independence and the policies that still seek to curtail it.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires (2017)

Prairie Fires , Caroline Fraser’s Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder is not just a painstakingly researched and lyrically realized account of how the Little House on the Prairie author decanted the poverty and precarity of her homesteader family’s existence into narratives of self-reliance and perseverance—although it is that—it is also a meditation on the human need “to transform the raw materials of the past into art.” Full disclosure, I did not read the Little House on the Prairie books as a child and have no sentimental attachment to Laura, Pa or Ma. But in looking at the life behind the books, Wilder emerges as a tenacious, sometimes fragile figure, and as a literary operator of uncommon nous and self-awareness. Drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Prairie Fires has all the essentials of a great history book. Most importantly, Fraser’s great skill is in pulling back the veils of mythology that have enshrouded her subject and the era her works helped to define, enabling us to see both the real people and the myths themselves with fresh, critical eyes. There is no romanticizing of the Frontier, and a very real understanding of the sentimentality and bias of an overtly racist understanding of “westward expansion.” It is a remarkable book.   –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom  (2018)

In 2017, monuments commemorating heroes of the Confederacy were being debated, defaced and toppled throughout the United States. That same year, months before President Trump signed a law creating a commission to plan for the bicentennial of Frederick Douglass’ birth, he infamously seemed to suggest that Douglass was still around, doing an “amazing job” and “getting recognized more and more.” The irony was hard to miss: it was easy to eulogize a past that was not comprehensively, nor even fundamentally understood. One achievement of historian David Blight’s monumental study of the former slave turned abolitionist is the thoroughness with which it examines the man’s development across three autobiographies he produced in the span of ten years. The popular image of Douglass has long been that of a bushy-haired man affixed to Abraham Lincoln’s side, delivering rousing speeches on abolition and the sins of slavery. And while there is basic truth to that, Blight sets out to fill the gaps in public understanding, guiding readers from the Maryland slave plantation where Douglass was born to the many stops along his European speech circuit, when he established himself as one of the world’s most recognizable opponents of slavery. The vague circumstances of Douglass’ birth (he was born to an enslaved woman and a white man who may also have been his owner) later compelled him to create his own life narratives, a task that he accomplished both in writing and oratory. Blight’s engagement with Douglass’ writing also marks the biography as a triumph of public-facing textual criticism. For decades before  Prophet of Freedom  astonished critics and general readers, Blight had been making his name as one of the leading Douglass scholars in the US. Blight’s work was not historical revisionism, but rather a considered analysis of a man who relied on actions as much as words. Many may be surprised to learn, for example, what a vocal supporter Douglass was of the Civil War and violence as a necessary means to dismantle the system that had nearly destroyed him. Prophet of Freedom  feels as definitive as a Robert Fagles translation of Homer—we hope it’s not the final word, though it will take quite the successor to produce a worthwhile follow-up.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (2019)

One hesitates to label any book by a living writer his “magnum opus” but Macfarlane’s Underland —a deeply ambitious work that somehow exceeds the boundaries it sets for itself—reads as offertory and elegy both, finding wonder in the world even as we mourn its destruction by our own hand. If you’re unfamiliar with its project, as the name would suggest, Underland is an exploration of the world beneath our feet, from the legendary catacombs of Paris to the ancient caveways of Somerset, from the hyperborean coasts of far Norway to the mephitic karst of the Slovenian-Italian borderlands.

Macfarlane has always been a generous guide in his wanderings, the glint of his erudition softened as if through the welcoming haze of a fireside yarn down the pub. Even as he considers all we have wrought upon the earth, squeezing himself into the darker chambers of human creation—our mass graves, our toxic tombs—Macfarlane never succumbs to pessimism, finding instead in the contemplation of deep time a path to humility. This is an epochal work, as deep and resonant as its subject matter, and would represent for any writer the achievement of a lifetime.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True History of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland (2019)

Attempting, in a single volume, to cover the scale and complexity of the Northern Ireland Troubles—a bloody and protracted political and ethno-nationalist conflict that came to dominate Anglo-Irish relations for over three decades—while also conveying a sense of the tortured humanity and mercurial motivations of some of its most influential and emblematic individual players  and  investigating one of the most notorious unsolved atrocities of the period, is, well, a herculean task that most writers would never consider attempting. Thankfully, investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (whose 2015  New Yorker  article on Gerry Adams,  “Where the Bodies Are Buried”,  is a searing precursor to  Say Nothing ) is not most writers. His mesmerizing account, both panoramically sweeping and achingly intimate, uses the disappearance and murder of widowed mother of ten Jean McConville in Belfast in 1972 as a fulcrum, around which the labyrinthine wider narrative of the Troubles can turn. The book, while meticulously researched and reported (Radden Keefe interviewed over one hundred different sources, painstakingly sorting through conflicting and corroborating accounts), also employs a novelistic structure and flair that in less skilled hands could feel exploitative, but here serves only to deepen our understanding of both the historical events and the complex personalities of ultimately tragic figures like Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and McConville herself—players in an attritional drama who have all too often been reduced to the status of monster or martyr. Once you’ve caught your breath, what you’ll be left with by the close of this revelatory hybrid work is a deep and abiding feeling of sorrow, which is exactly as it should be.   –Dan Sheehan, BookMarks Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011)

Maggie Nelson, if evaluated from a first glance at her authored works, may appear to be a paradox. That the author of Bluets, a moving lyric essay exploring personal suffering through the color blue, also wrote The Red Parts , an autobiographical account of the trial of her aunt’s murderer, may seem surprising. Not that any person cannot and does not contain multitudes but the two aesthetics may seem diametrically opposed until one looks at The Art of Cruelty and understands Nelson’s fascination with art on the one hand, and violence on the other. Nelson hashes out the intersection of the two across multiple essays. “One of this book’s charges,” she writes, “is to figure out how one might differentiate between works of art whose employment of cruelty seems to me worthwhile (for lack of a better word), and those that strike me as redundant, in bad faith, or simply despicable.” The Art of Cruelty is a self-proclaimed diagram of recent art and culture and does not promise to take sides, to deliver ethical or aesthetic claims masquerading as some declarative truth on the matter. So cruelty is very much approached from Nelson’s poetic sensibility, with a degree of nuance, and an attitude of reflection and curiosity but also one of a certain distance so that all the emotions—anger, disgust, discomfort, thrill etc.—can be viewed as part of a whole rather than in isolation. Cruelty, counterbalanced with compassion—especially with reference to Buddhism—is certainly not hailed by Nelson as a cause for celebration but worthy of rumination and analysis so that it is not employed tacitly and without recourse. No book could ever, I think, provide an exhaustive evaluation of this topic, nor is Nelson’s approach that of a philosopher or art-historian looking to propose a theory. Nevertheless, she dexterously, and creatively, manages to hold a mirror to our culture’s fascination with cruelty and invites us to reflect on our personal reasons for indulging it.  –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Óscar Martinez, The Beast (2013)

For over a decade, Martinez has been a witness and a chronicler of the ground-level effects of the war on drugs, reporting from across Latin America with a special focus on Central America and his home country of El Salvador, where more recently he’s been writing about the bloody culture of MS-13 and other narco-cliques that have expanded their power. Before that, he was charting the plight of migrants running the terrible gauntlet across borders and through narco-controlled territories. Martinez rode the dreaded train known as “The Beast” and collected the stories of those traveling north on this perilous journey. While crime isn’t strictly the focus of the book, Martinez looks at the direct effects of mass crime at a regional/global level, as well as the outlaw communities springing up to prey on the vulnerable. The subject matter is dark, but Martinez writes with the terrible, piercing clarity of a Cormac McCarthy. The Beast is a dispatch from a nearly lawless land, where families struggle and suffer, narcos get richer, violence spreads, the drugs head north, the guns head south, and so it goes on. Forget the rhetoric, the politics, and the propaganda. The Beast is the real story of the drug war. “Where can you steer clear of bandits?” Martinez asks. “Where do the drugs go over? Where can you avoid getting kidnapped by the narcos? Where is there a spot left with no wall, no robbers, and no narcos? Nobody has been able to answer this last question.” To call this book prescient disregards how long our problems have persisted, and how long we’ve managed to ignore the chaos our country’s policies have created.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Matthew Desmond, Evicted (2016)

There are more evictions happening now, per capita, in the United States, than there were during the Great Depression. As it turns out, there’s a lot of money to be made from poverty—not, course, for those who need it, but for the landlords who orchestrate the kind of housing turnover that traps people in deeper and longer cycles of debt. Poverty in America has long been conflated with moral failure, but as Matthew Desmond’s Evicted illustrates in great detail, if there’s any moral failing happening, it’s with those who would take advantage of such systemic and generational iniquities.

Desmond, a Princeton-trained sociologist and MacArthur fellow, went to see for himself in 2008, at the height (depths?) of the housing crisis, undertaking a year-long study of eight Milwaukee-area families, spending six months in a mobile home and another six months in a rooming house, creating much more than a journalist’s snapshot of life as an American renter. With Evicted , Desmond has widened our perspective on cyclical hardship and its disproportionate impact on people of color, illustrating (with neither the leering nor the condescension of so much reporting on the poor) that eviction is more often a cause of poverty than a symptom.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government (2017)

I recommend this book to those who wish to demonstrate their physical strength in public and show off that they can read a giant Russian history book one-handed, but also I recommend this book to everyone, ever, in the world, because it’s so fantastic. At first glance, this is a lengthy tome inspired by a Tolstoyan approach to lyrical history, ostensibly concerned with the history of an apartment complex that was home to much of the early Soviet elite—and was subsequently depopulated by Stalinist purges. Within this apartment building, however, lay the central irony of the revolution—those who believed deeply enough in an idealistic system to embrace violent, repressive means of revolution, were soon enough subjected to those same mechanisms of repression. From this central irony, Slezkine, always concerned with how the micro fits into the macro, zooms out to look at the Soviets as just another bunch of millenarians (and to understand what an insult that is, you’ll have to pick up the book).  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami (2017)

Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for The Times of London, begins his book by describing the way his office building in Tokyo shook in March 2011 when an earthquake hit the city. He called his family and checked that they were OK and then walked through the streets to see the damage. Used to quakes, this one seemed bad, but not the worst he had lived through. Less than an hour after the earthquake, though, a tsunami killed an estimated 18,500 Japanese men, women and children. In Ghosts , Parry focuses his story on Okawa, a tiny costal village where an entire school and 74 children washed away. In somewhat fragmentary threads, Parry explores the families that survived, the ghosts that follow them, and the landscape of a place that will never be the same. In localizing the story in one community, Parry is able to clearly define the painfully individual fallout of a national tragedy. It is emotionally draining to read, which is a warning I give everyone when I recommend the book (which I do constantly). But it is one of my favorite books and I would be remiss not to include in our list for best nonfiction of the decade.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019)

I grew up in a town named after a body of water—Rye Brook—and went to a high school also named after that body of water—Blind Brook—but growing up, no one seemed to actually know where the brook was, at least none of the kids. We didn’t talk about it, except to note its hiddenness— it’s behind the school, someone once told me, while another person said it was behind that hotel, behind the park, behind the airport . Recently, I decided to find it on a map and noticed, for the first time, that the brook, far from being a hidden thing, defines the majority of Rye Brook’s borders. Recognizing this foundational feature of my hometown for the first time, more than a decade after I left it, was disorienting, completely re-rendering my perception of the place I thought I knew best.

My search that day came after I read Jenny Odell’s account of her similar awakening to the ecology of her hometown, Cupertino, and all the features in or around it: Calabazas Creek, nearby mountains, and the San Francisco Bay. “How could I have not noticed the shape of the place I lived?” she writes, and, later, describing her own disorientation in a way that resonates with my own, added, “Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along.”

One way of describing the premise of this book is to say “that which has been present all along” is reality itself: each of us, from day to day, living our physical lives in a physical place. But in 2019, life doesn’t usually feel like that; it feels like an onslaught of forces that aim to turn our attention away from this reality and monetize it in a shapeless virtual space. In that environment, Odell writes, doing “nothing,” or finding any way to disrupt the capitalistic drive to monetize, is an act of political resistance, even as she recognizes that not everyone has the economic security or social capital to opt out. “Just because this right is denied to many people doesn’t make it any less of a right or any less important,” she writes. This book also draws on philosophy, utopian movements, and labor organizing to describe how various people have attempted to “do nothing” in their own way throughout history, with an outlook that is grounded in ecology. (And bird watching!) Ultimately, Odell writes, the act of doing nothing creates space for the kind of contemplation and reflection that is essential to activism and to sustaining life. I experienced this book as a space of sanity and as a beginning; I hope you do, too.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Peter Hessler, Country Driving (2010)  · Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (2010)  ·  Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy (2010)  · Marina Warner, Stranger Magic (2012)  · Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012)  · Oscar Martinez, The Beast (2013) · Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2013)  · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2013)  · David Epstein, The Sports Gene (2013)  · Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial (2013)  · David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service  (2013) ·  George Packer, The Unwinding  (2013)  · Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (2013) ·  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (2014) · Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (2014) ·  Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring (2014)  · Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald (2014) ·  Mary Beard, SPQR (2015) ·  Sam Quinones, Dreamland  (2015) ·  Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning (2016)  · Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson (2016) · Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers In Their Own Land (2016) ·  Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures (2016)  ·  Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life (2017)  ·  David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon (2017)  · Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart (2017) · Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals (2017) · Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown  (2017) · Michael Tisserand, Krazy (2017) · Lawrence Jackson, Chester Himes (2017)   ·  Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon (2018) · Beth Macy, Dopesick  (2018) · Shane Bauer, American Prison  (2018) · Eliza Griswold, Amity and Prosperity  (2018) · David Quammen, The Tangled Tree  (2018).

Emily Temple

Previous article, next article.

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

• Clear Water Press
• Writing Programs:
• Cover Story
• One Year Novel
• Other Worlds

10 Great Creative Nonfiction Books

• April 2, 2015
• Staff Writer
• Reviews: Books, Movies, Short Stories

Tineke Bryson, Staff Writer

Last week Tineke addressed writing about our own life experiences, sharing 8 ways to do creative nonfiction well . But if you found yourself wondering what exactly creative nonfiction (CNF) is, and what sorts of books represent the genre, you are not unusual.

A film of panic clouds the eyes of the Half Price Books employee looking at me from across the trade-in counter.

“Memoirs, for example,” I offer.

“Do you mean biographies?”

“Sure,” I say. That’s not it at all , but I hope the biographies might be somewhere close to the CNF section—if it exists. When I eventually locate the small block of shelves allotted to CNF, I find them labeled as “Essays,” “Memoirs,” and “Letters.” Letters…charmingly old-fashioned. These are not letters as we think of them; they are not written to a person, but you could say they are written to humanity .

I get why CNF is not widely understood. But I am sad that so many people are never disabused of the grade-school notion that nonfiction is just history textbooks, science fact books, newspapers, and encyclopedias .

I want to challenge that idea.

Yet when I tell people that CNF is nonfiction that uses all the tools of fiction—extended metaphor, symbolism, plot structure, etc.—I always feel frustration . Because I know how easy it is to ask, “But don’t scholarly articles use metaphors?” or “Isn’t there a plot in a biography?”

Yes. And, yes.

Creative nonfiction as a genre label is easy to define but difficult to restrict . The definition in Wikipedia, for example, sounds simple enough:

Creative nonfiction (also known as literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction) is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as technical writing or journalism, which is also rooted in accurate fact, but is not primarily written in service to its craft. 

Yet when I try to put myself in the shoes of a journalist, I think I would take issue with defining journalism as rooted in fact but not written “in service to” craft . Great journalism can be creative, and is definitely a craft.

And then I wonder if it could be said that personal blog posts are all CNF. That doesn’t go down easily either. Blog posts are not technical writing or journalism, but so few blog posts are crafted . (Or is it just me?)

What I want to do is scream, “Just read some examples and you will see what I mean!”

So this post is a virtual scream. Not because I am angry; just because I would love to see more writers and readers give CNF a go, and I think reading classic examples is more helpful than a definition.

What follows is a list of 10 books I consider compelling examples of the power and range of CNF . I have only included books I have read, so it should go without saying—yet must be said—that this is not a list of the ten best CNF books. They are also not in a particular order.

I defy anyone to read An American Childhood and not catch curiosity fever. Her powers of observation of the natural world are wonderful . She is esteemed both as a memoirist and as a riveting nature writer.

Henri Nouwen, evangelicalism’s favorite Catholic (yes, I know about Tolkien), kept a journal during a six-month stay at a Trappist monastery in Western New York. The result is this quiet, but grounding spiritual travel log —Nouwen is physically restricted, but slowly journeying to a wide and open peace in his inner life.

It’s a strong example of editing and re-sequencing a private journal to present to others . It’s also interesting because it manages to avoid being a devotional book while exploring devotion .

A celebration of childhood, Dandelion Wine is delightful while also sometimes somber, and is a provocative read for writers trying to work out what the balance should be between fact and storytelling in their own nonfiction work.

I enjoy comparing and contrasting this book to Dillard’s.

This book is a meditation on the power of landscape and climate to shape culture and the soul , and is also a tribute to place . It is by turns poetic and informative—a great example of writing about place without primarily writing about the self. The non-chronological structure of the book is also interesting.

Apart from saving me a lot of time, studying it in three contexts underlined for me how complex a work of CNF can be— a frank, crafted account of the self can be read on many levels  and stand among the classics of literature.

I am so glad I got past the cover and gave this book a chance. Stunning prose. Heartfelt and moving wrestle with God. Just switch out the jacket!

To read a shorter specimen of his, I recommend The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape , ( The Guardian ).

I find it more relatable than Lewis’s CNF, perhaps because Vanauken’s writing voice is not quite so gruff and he is less private.

This book tells of his beginnings as a pilot, meditates on legendary pilot adventures, and also documents in whimsical but vivid terms his stint as a commercial pilot in the Sahara, including his survival of a crash landing in the desert. I find it especially compelling for its strange blend of colonial ethnocentrism and warm sympathy for individual Africans.

He began writing entries at age 20. The book is interspersed with haiku-style poems, and covers many topics. The guiding idea of Markings is his search for meaning in everything he encountered and experienced.

What are some CNF books you like? I would love to read your recommendations in the comments!

Tineke Bryson works for One Year Adventure Novel as a kind of jane-of-all-trades, but her favorites trade of the lot is editing. Previous to OYAN, she graduated from Houghton College with an Honors in Writing and then worked as an editor for a large para-church organization.

Share this:

Mr. S. Reviews “The Space Merchants” by Pohl and Kornbluth

Mr. s. reviews “have spacesuit – will travel” by robert heinlein.

Mr. S. Reviews “My Friend the Enemy” by J. B. Cheaney

Kind of by accident, I stumbled into the travel writing section of the used bookstore several months ago and picked up /Notes from a Small Island/ by Bill Bryson, which I haven’t finished partly due to some crude language. But that got me interested in travel writing. I haven’t made much of it, being in college and all, but lots of these books look interesting.

Would you also consider nonfiction history books with conversational or narrative styles CNF? Your examples seem to be specifically rooted in one person’s experiences on some level. Books I’m thinking of in the history side are things like:

/Bomb: the Race to Build–and Steal–the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon/ by Steve Sheinkin – extremely based in fact but written in a very compelling way with a good plot shaped from historical events.

/The Killer Angels/ by Michael Shaara or even Jeff Shaara’s many books. These tend towards more historical fiction, I think. They follow historical fact but give dialogue and even thoughts to historical characters.

I just started reading a book called /Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings/ by Amy Kelly, which is giving historical fact but also painting a vivid picture of the times.

I re-read your definition part and I’m beginning to think that no, you wouldn’t include books like these. They seem a bit caught in-between genres, which is interesting. Being passionate about history and all, I’d love to see more of them. 🙂

I have the disadvantage of not being familiar with any of the books you mention, although I know some of Bill Bryson’s stuff is in the CNF category. There are many nonfiction books so well crafted, and that use elements of storytelling to great effect, that it is difficult to place them. If we see them on a continuum, we can manage; but if we try to put them in different boxes, we run into trouble. From your descriptions, I think the *The Killer Angels* sounds like it could be CNF…maybe. The others sound more like really well-written historical books. Historians are awesome because the field demands that they write history in a compelling way in addition to being accurate—something we can’t say of all fields of study. For example, Simon Schama’s history of Britain is very well-written. But not CNF.

What do you think of The Waterfront by Danny R. Martineau Jr.; I believe it is an example of a CNF novel.

I haven’t read it, but based on the author info on Amazon, it does sound like CNF. It’s just unusual that it is marketed as a novel. Lots of CNF reads like a novel, but it isn’t usual to call it that. Interesting!

Great post Tineke! I agree with R.G. that Bill Bryson is a good example of a creative non-fiction author. A Walk in the Woods is a solid instance that meets the definition. Also, the work of A.J. Jacobs is creative non-fiction — first-person acts of experimentation. If you are interested, I am the author of a new creative non-fiction book. The Things I Learned in College tells the amusing and true story of a year that I spent exploring the eight Ivy League schools. The book will be released next month, but I would be delighted to share an advance copy with you.

Thank you! Both for the recommendations and your very kind offer. Congrats! I would be honored to receive a free advance copy, but I do want to clarify that we don’t typically offer reviews on this blog. So I would happily look at it, and perhaps review it on Amazon or Goodreads, etc., but I would not be able to offer something like that on this blog here. If you would still like to send it, use the press address: Clear Water Press, ATTN: Tineke Bryson, PO Box 62, Olathe, KS 66051. All the best!

Hi, Tineke. I hope you received the copy of The Things I Learned in College. Amazon and Goodreads are ready for your review if you choose to post one. Thank you for your consideration!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

• previous post: How to Write a Personal Story So It Matters to More Than You
• next post: Bria: Behind the Scenes
• About the Curriculum
• Syllabus with Lesson Table
• Cloud Streaming Benefits
• Your Instructor
• Reviews & Testimonials
• Sample Lessons
• Summer Workshop
• Student Novel Contest
• Homeschool Curriculum Conferences
• Cloud Video Sign-in
• Online Quizzes
• How to Watch Webinars
• How to Join the Forum
• Student Forum Sign-in
• Good Books List
• Curiosity Saved the Cat
• Ask Us a Question
• Order Materials for a Group

21 Creative Nonfiction Writing Prompts to Inspire True Stories

by Sue Weems | 0 comments

If you've ever wanted to tell a true story using more literary techniques, then the genre you're exploring is creative nonfiction. Let's define creative nonfiction and then try some creative nonfiction writing prompts today. 

What is creative nonfiction?

Creative nonfiction is a literary genre of writing that uses fiction techniques and stylistic choices to express real-life experiences. It depends on story elements especially, so everything you've learned about structure will serve you well in creative nonfiction. 

It often includes personal essays, memoirs, biographies, and other related genres such as travel writing or food writing. Creative nonfiction writers strive to make their pieces engaging to readers with narrative techniques typically found in fiction, such as vivid descriptions and dialogue, but in addition to that, they approach their subject matter with a thoughtfulness about the larger meaning of experiences. 

It's an extremely flexible form. You can begin by writing out a personal experience and then layering it with narrative or thematic elements. You can infuse your writing with poetic elements to make the writing more lyrical. The possibilities for your writing practice are endless.

Because of that, it's the perfect form for practicing new techniques and experimenting with your storytelling. You could use any nonfiction prompt, but let me give you a few to try today. Remember the one thing you want to do is tell a true story (or as true as you can tell it!).

And if you've always dreamed of writing a memoir, check out our full guide to writing a memoir here . 

21 Creative Nonfiction Writing Prompts

1. Tell a personal story about a time you lost something that changed your life.

2. Relate a childhood experience where you felt locked out literally or figuratively. 

3. Think about a road trip—maybe not the epic, once-in-a-lifetime trip, but a smaller one that surprised you with something on the way. Write about the vivid details and what defied your expectations.

4. Write about finding unexpected love or friendship.

5. Tell a story about the last time you felt at home.

6. Relate a time when you had to leave something important or precious behind. 

7. Tell about a time you had to dig.

8. Write about the first time of drove or traveled alone and it changed you.

9. Tell about a painful or poignant goodbye.

10. Relate a favorite memory about a significant figure in your life. 

11. Write the story of the most difficult decision you made in each decade of your life. 

12. Tell the story of a birth: of a person, an idea, a business, a relationship.

13. Relate the most life-changing conversation you've had using only dialogue. (or stream-of-consciousness or alternating point of view)

14. Recreate the earliest significant experience you had with school or learning.

15. Write about a tiny object that changed your life. 

16. Tell the story of an argument that ended in a surprising or unexpected way. 

17. Recreate a scene where you had to defend yourself or someone else. 

18. Share a story about trying something new (whether you failed or met success).

19. Write about the moment you knew you had to keep a secret.

20. Tell about a time you interacted, viewed, or read a piece of art and it changed you. 

21. Share about a letter, email, or text that disrupted your life and caused you to change course. 

Put your writing skills to the test

Now it's your turn. Dig into those childhood memories or visceral experiences that have made you who you are. Tell the story and then look for ways to explore literary technique as you revise. 

Choose one of the prompts above and set your timer for fifteen minutes . Write the experience as vividly and direct as you can. Often, the magic of creative nonfiction comes in revision, so don't worry about focusing on too many stylistic choices at first. 

When finished, share your creative nonfiction piece in the Pro Practice Workshop here , and encourage a few other writers while you're there. 

Sue Weems is a writer, teacher, and traveler with an advanced degree in (mostly fictional) revenge. When she’s not rationalizing her love for parentheses (and dramatic asides), she follows a sailor around the globe with their four children, two dogs, and an impossibly tall stack of books to read. You can read more of her writing tips on her website .

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Submit Comment

Join over 450,000 readers who are saying YES to practice. You’ll also get a free copy of our eBook 14 Prompts :

Popular Resources

Book Writing Tips & Guides Creativity & Inspiration Tips Writing Prompts Grammar & Vocab Resources Best Book Writing Software ProWritingAid Review Writing Teacher Resources Publisher Rocket Review Scrivener Review Gifts for Writers

Books By Our Writers

You've got it! Just us where to send your guide.

Enter your email to get our free 10-step guide to becoming a writer.

You've got it! Just us where to send your book.

Enter your first name and email to get our free book, 14 Prompts.

Want to Get Published?

Enter your email to get our free interactive checklist to writing and publishing a book.

• Discover the Writing Routines of Literary Legends!
• Writing Routines
• Journalists
• AI in the Writer’s World
• Finding Muse & Beating Blocks
• Productivity & Routine
• Storytelling Craft

50 Creative Nonfiction Prompts to Spark Your Inspiration

Creative nonfiction is a unique blend of storytelling and reality, where the facts of life meet the art of narrative. It’s a genre that invites writers to explore their experiences, thoughts, and observations, weaving them into stories that resonate with truth and authenticity. In this realm, the line between the mundane and the extraordinary is often blurred, turning everyday experiences into captivating tales.

Prompts, in this context, serve as a starting point, a spark to ignite the imagination and draw out stories that might be hiding just beneath the surface. They encourage writers to dig deeper, reflect on their experiences, and discover the narratives that have shaped their perspectives. 

Whether it’s exploring personal memories, observing societal dynamics, or simply musing on the quirks of daily life, these prompts are designed to cover a wide array of themes. They offer a launchpad for anyone looking to delve into the rich and varied world of creative nonfiction, guiding them through a journey of self-discovery and storytelling.

Personal Reflections

• Recall an experience that changed your perspective on life.
• Describe a tradition in your family and its personal significance.
• Write about a moment of self-discovery or realization.
• Share an experience of overcoming a fear or phobia.
• Reflect on an encounter that left a lasting impression on you.

Life’s Milestones

• Describe your feelings on the day you left home for the first time.
• Write about the experience of meeting a significant other or a lifelong friend.
• Share the emotions and thoughts of a pivotal birthday or anniversary.
• Reflect on the experience of achieving a long-sought-after goal.
• Describe a moment of failure and what it taught you.

Challenges and Resilience

• Write about a time you faced a significant challenge at work or school.
• Share a story of a personal setback and how you bounced back.
• Reflect on a moment you had to stand up for yourself or someone else.
• Describe a period of life-changing adversity and its impact on you.
• Write about an unexpected challenge that you turned into an opportunity.

Travel and Exploration

• Share a memorable experience from a trip that changed your view of the world.
• Write about a place you visited that felt completely alien to you.
• Reflect on a journey that did not go as planned, but taught you something valuable.
• Describe a moment where you connected with a stranger while traveling.
• Share an experience of discovering something new in a familiar place.

Societal Observations

• Reflect on a current event that deeply affected you and why.
• Write about a time when you noticed a significant social change.
• Share your thoughts on a technological advancement and its impact on society.
• Describe an encounter that challenged your long-held beliefs.
• Write about a moment you witnessed community solidarity.

Creative Musings

• Reflect on what creativity means to you.
• Write about a book, film, or artwork that profoundly affected your life.
• Share a story about how a particular song or piece of music moves you.
• Describe a time when engaging in a creative activity helped you overcome a personal challenge.
• Reflect on an instance where you found beauty in an unexpected place.

Relationships and Connections

• Write about a relationship that taught you an important life lesson.
• Share a story of a chance encounter that led to a meaningful connection.
• Reflect on the evolution of a significant relationship in your life.
• Describe a conversation that had a profound impact on you.
• Write about the complexities of a family relationship.

Self-Discovery and Growth

• Reflect on an aspect of your identity that has shaped your life.
• Write about a habit you changed and the effect it had on you.
• Share a moment that made you question your beliefs or values.
• Describe a period of significant personal growth.
• Reflect on a time when you surprised yourself.

Miscellaneous Adventures

• Share a story about an unusual hobby or interest and why it fascinates you.
• Write about an unexpected adventure in an ordinary day.
• Describe an unusual or memorable event in your community.
• Share a story of a spontaneous decision that led to an unexpected journey.
• Write about a quirky or unique family story.

Moments of Joy and Happiness

• Reflect on an experience that made you laugh uncontrollably.
• Describe a surprise that turned out to be an incredible gift.
• Share a memory of a perfect day.
• Write about finding happiness in an unexpected place.
• Recall a time when a small act of kindness made a significant difference in your mood or day.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it – 50 stepping stones to get those words flowing and stories growing. Each prompt is a little nudge, pushing you to explore, reflect, and maybe even uncover something new about yourself and the world around you. Creative nonfiction is all about taking the real and weaving it into narratives that resonate and connect. 

These ones here are just the starting point. They’re here to break the ice, to get you thinking and, most importantly, writing. Whether you’re jotting down memories, musing over daily observations, or sharing life’s big moments, remember, every story you tell is adding your unique voice to the tapestry of human experience. So go ahead, pick a prompt, and let the adventure begin.

Further Reading...

10 Daily Habits to Overcome Writer’s Block

Crafting Multidimensional Characters: A Step-by-Step Guide

The Art of Subtext: How to Say More with Less in Your Writing

No comments, leave a reply cancel reply.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Interview with Jennifer Maritza McCauley: “It’s basically like switching between two different brains.”

Epistolary writing: crafting stories through letters and diaries.

English 219 (Creative Nonfiction) Research Guide: Creative Nonfiction books

• Reference Resources
• Creative Nonfiction books
• Find Books & Media - Online Catalog
• Find Articles about Creative Nonfiction
• Citing Sources
• Your Feedback

Creative nonfiction anthologies

• Writing True: the art and craft of creative nonfiction Call Number: PE 1408 P43723 2014

The library collection includes an extensive collection of creative nonfiction books.  The following are some notable anthologies:

• To Show and to Tell: the craft of literary nonfiction Call Number: PN 145 L67 2013
• The Best Creative Nonfiction (3 volumes) Call Number: PS 659.2 B48 2007
• In Fact: the best of creative nonfiction Call Number: PS 681 I5 2005
• The Art of Fact : a historical anthology of literary journalism Call Number: PN 6014 A76 1998
• Best American Essays of the Century Call Number: PS 688 B482 2000
• Art of the Personal Essay:an anthology from the classical era to the present Call Number: PN 6141 A78 1994

Examples of creative nonfiction

The following are some well known examples of creative nonfiction. 

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Call Number: HV 6533 K3 C3 1992
• Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer Call Number: PS 3525 A4152 E89 1993
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe Call Number: TL 789.8 U5 W64 1983
• The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls Call Number: HV 5132 W35 2005
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi Call Number: PBK N
• Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert Call Number: PBK G
• Night Trilogy by Elie Wiesel Call Number: PQ 2683 I32 Z467 1987
• Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez Call Number: QH 84.1 L67 2001
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou Call Number: PS 3551 N464 Z77 1998
• Growing Up by Russell Baker Call Number: PS 3552 A4343 Z466 1984
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell Call Number: BL 313 C28 1949
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson Call Number: QH 545 P4 C38 1987
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Call Number: PS 3554 I33 Z63 2005
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich Call Number: HD 4918 E375 2001
• Ever Since Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould Call Number: QH 361 G65 1977
• A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway Call Number: PS 3515 E37 M69 1989
• Hiroshima by John Hershey Call Number: D 767.25 H6 H4 1985
• Dust Tracks on a Road: an autobiography by Nora Zeale Hurston Call Number: PS 3515 U789 Z465 1984
• The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston Call Number: CT 275 K5764 A33
• Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris Call Number: PS 3569 E314 M4 2000
• Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck Call Number: PS 3537 T3234 A6 2007
• Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel Call Number: E 806 T45 1986
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson Call Number: PN 4874 T444 A3 1998
• In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker Call Number: PS 3573 A425 Z467 1983
• One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty Call Number: PS 3545 E6 Z475 1984
• A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf Call Number: PR 6045 O72 R6 1989
• Black Boy by Richard Wright Call Number: PS3545.R815 Z5 1969
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe Call Number: HV 5825 W56 1968
• Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert Call Number: G 154.5 G55 A3 2006
• << Previous: Reference Resources
• Next: Find Books & Media - Online Catalog >>
• Last Updated: Apr 10, 2024 2:38 PM
• URL: https://library.carrollcc.edu/creativenonfiction

From journalism to instruction manuals, travel guides to historical CNF, nonfiction is one of the broadest and most versatile categories of writing. Indeed, we encounter many types of nonfiction genres in our everyday lives, including newspapers, social media, letters, reports, instruction manuals, and travel guides.

Rather than listing the numerous types of nonfiction in its broadest definition, this article will narrow our focus to creative nonfiction. Briefly defined, creative nonfiction is a genre of nonfiction that uses literary techniques more commonly used in poetry and fiction. This includes such techniques as dialogue, plot, and imagery. More to the point, the writer Lee Gutkind describes creative nonfiction as “true stories, well told.” If you’re interested in self-help, how-to-writing, and similar nonfiction writing forms, try Googling “prescriptive nonfiction” or “expository nonfiction.”

This article explores types of creative nonfiction—”true stories, well told.”

In this article, we will explore ten types of creative nonfiction genres, as well as the overlap between these genres and other types of nonfiction books we are more familiar with, such as historical nonfiction and autobiography. By the end of this article, you’ll also have a series of different types of nonfiction books to add to your reading list!

What are the types of nonfiction? Let’s examine common forms of the genre in detail.

One of the most common types of creative nonfiction, memoirs tell a story of the writer’s own life. Unlike autobiographies, however, memoirs do not need to be exhaustive. To understand the key similarities and differences between autobiographies and memoirs, check out this article on memoir-writing. It also offers a step-by-step guide to writing your own memoir, which is certainly one of the most accessible forms in creative nonfiction!

One of the most common types of creative nonfiction, memoir tells a story of the writer’s own life.

Memoirs are driven by narrative, and often connect the writer’s personal story to larger human themes, such as grief, family, and youth. To see what this means in action, check out Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk , which chronicles the year Macdonald spent training a northern goshawk following her father’s death. Other memoirs include William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life , Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House , Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir , and Tara Westover’s Educated .

Memoirs, however, can also be essay-length. A great example is David Sedaris’ “ The Youth in Asia .” Structured around Sedaris and his family’s memories of pets, this humorous essay is ultimately a story about grief, mortality and loss. This essay is excerpted from the memoir Me Talk Pretty One Day , and a recorded version can be found here . Other great examples of memoiristic essays include Alexander Chee’s “ Portrait of My Father ,” Megan Stielstra’s “ Here is My Heart ,” and Roxane Gay’s “ What We Hunger For. ” Memoiristic essays are often collected into essay collections, and can be a great way to approach writing your first book! Inspired? Check out this step-by-step guide to writing narrative essays !

2. Personal Essay

Like the memoir, the personal essay draws from the writer’s personal life and perspective, and often creates an intimate experience for the reader. However, personal essays are less narrative-driven. Instead, the action is often more internal and driven by thought. Great examples of thought-driven essays include Leslie Jamison’s “ The Empathy Exams ,” Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “ I Was Pregnant and in Crisis ,” and Yiyun Li’s “ To Speak Is to Blunder ,” an exploration of what it meant for the author to renounce her mother tongue. In this way, personal essays often deal with questions that have no easy answer. For the reader, the pleasure comes in witnessing the writer attempt to grapple with difficult conversations in a meaningful way. This is very much in line with the etymology of “essay,” which means “to try.”

Personal essays are less narrative-driven. Instead, the action is often more internal and driven by thought.

While memoirs gesture to larger human themes, personal essays draw direct connections between personal experience and societal stories. In fact, in many personal essays, personal experience is used as evidence for these societal stories. Often, personal essays engage the use of “braiding” – a structure that alternates between a personal story and a larger story – to illustrate the connections between the personal and the societal. Examples include: Eula Biss’ “ No Man’s Land ” and Clare Elena Boerigter’s “ Itasca, Alight ,” an essay that reflects on her experience as a wildfire-fighter. For book-length examples, check out Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby , D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir , and Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias .

3. Travel Writing

There are many different types of nonfiction travel writing, ranging from travel guides to blogs, journalism, and memoirs. Regardless of what form it takes, good travel writing helps your readers to imagine and experience an unfamiliar place. Travel writers thus use evocative prose that engages the senses with the details of a world you may not otherwise encounter. Classic examples include Jan Morris’ A mong the Cities and Ilija Trojanow’s Along the Ganges .

Good travel writing helps your readers to imagine and experience an unfamiliar place.

Sometimes, the adventure of travel is less important than the internal journey that the writer experiences. A great example of such a travel writing and memoir hybrid is Running in the Family . Twenty-five years after leaving for Canada, the writer Michael Ondaatje returns to his native Sri Lanka to sort out his family’s past. The book chronicles family stories, and a major plot point is Ondaatje’s seeking of reconciliation with a father he barely knew. Other books that fall into this category include Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail , Pico Iyer’s The Lady and the Monk , and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love .

There is yet another type of travel writing, one influenced by the flaneur tradition of writers who observe society by walking around without a particular destination in mind. Examples include Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot , Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust , and Roger Deakin’s Waterlog: a Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain , which puts a new spin on the flaneur genre in its use of swimming, rather than walking.

To get into travel writing yourself, check out our course Fundamental of Travel Writing with Jennifer Billock!

4. Literary Journalism

Sometimes called “immersion journalism,” “narrative journalism,” or “new journalism,” literary journalism is a type of nonfiction that combines reporting with techniques and strategies associated with creative writing, such as character development. Literary journalists often write in a third-person limited or first person point of view. The goal of such works is not simply to deliver facts, but to spark a larger conversation among its readers. Examples include Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed , Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine , and Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down .

Literary journalism is a type of nonfiction that combines reporting with techniques and strategies associated with creative writing, such as character development.

Literary journalism is a type of nonfiction that really came to the forefront in the 1960s with the New Journalism movement. Books that are a part of this tradition include Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem , Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood , described by the author as a “nonfiction novel.”

5. Features

A feature is a form of journalistic writing that is longer than a news story, whose primary goal is to keep the reader up-to-date on the facts of a story. Features can either offer a more in-depth cover, or provide a different perspective of a developing story. Importantly, features do not have to cover breaking news. This type of writing often considers a variety of angles and is more immersive. There is more room for the writer to play creatively in terms of style and structure.

A feature is a form of journalistic writing that is longer than a news story, whose primary goal is to keep the reader up-to-date on the facts of a story.

A feature can be, but is not always, a form of literary journalism. There is a spectrum of feature pieces, including news features, profiles, trend reports, immersive features, and more “creative” features that draw on the author’s personal experiences. Thus, features are published on a greater variety of platforms that range from newspapers to literary magazines. Check out Adam Gopnik’s “ The World’s Weirdest Library ,” Rebecca Brill’s “ The World Association of Ugly People ,” and Zadie Smith’s “Meet Justin Bieber!” which can be found in her book Feel Free ,

6. Cultural Criticism

This is a type of nonfiction that examines and comments on a cultural aspect or product. Importantly, “culture” here does not differentiate between what we traditionally think of as “highbrow” or “lowbrow.” In fact, one of the goals of cultural criticism is to expand the definition of what constitutes “culture.” Thus, underlying cultural criticism is a resistance of elitist definitions of what culture is and who gets to define it.

This is a type of nonfiction that examines and comments on a cultural aspect or product.

Cultural criticism often employs a more zoomed-out perspective to connect everyday phenomena with larger cultural contexts. This is not to say that cultural criticism is necessarily written in general and impersonal language. In fact, many cultural critics employ personal experience as entrances into larger cultural conversations. Jia Tolentino’s “ Athleisure, Barre, and Kale: the Tyranny of the Ideal Woman ,” Eula Biss’ On Immunity , Wayne Koestenbaum’s My 1980s and Other Essays , and Wendy Rawlings’ “ Let’s Talk About Shredded Romaine Lettuce ” are great examples of this type of nonfiction prose.

7. Ekphrastic Essays

Ekphrasis, which comes from the Greek word for “description,” traditionally describes poems written about a work of visual art. In the contemporary literature landscape, however, ekphrasis can be written in both prose and poetry and about all forms of art.

Ekphrasis is writing, in poetry or prose, about another work of art.

There are many different approaches to writing ekphrastic essays. These may include writing about a work of art critically, writing about your experience, or even taking the more imaginative approach of speculating about the elements in a work of art. In “ Find Your Beach ,” for instance, Zadie Smith weaves the description of a beer ad with commentary on the culture of individualism in New York City. In “ What We Hunger For ,” Roxane Gay braids her discussion of female strength in The Hunger Games with her personal experiences. In “The Blue of Distance,” a series of three essays collected in A Field Guide to Getting Lost , Rebecca Solnit builds on the idea of distance and intimacy through meditating on various works of art.

8. Lyric Essay

The term “lyric essay” was coined in 1997 by John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, editors at the literary journal Seneca Review . “The lyric essay,” write D’Agata and Tall, “partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.”

The lyric essay uses a type of nonfiction prose that is more poetic and compressed.

A relatively new genre, the lyric essay uses a type of nonfiction prose that is more poetic and compressed. Thus, it is often described as a hybrid of nonfiction and poetry. While it is difficult to pin down what a lyric essay is, the following are some characteristics of this genre:

• An emphasis on language and figurative elements, rather than on argument.
• An emphasis on exploration and experience, rather than reportage. While many lyric essays are research-heavy, they often draw on research in more suggestive ways, leaving gaps strategically to allow the reader to make connections
• A tendency to meditate. While lyric essays often draw on research and personal experience, they are less interested in crafting a linear narrative or plot, and more interested in meditative modes of writing.

Examples of lyric essays include Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric , Maggie Nelson’s Bluets , Amy Leach’s Things That Are , and Kathryn Nuernberger’s The Witch of Eye . For a more in-depth exploration of this form, check out this guide on the lyric essay .

9. Hermit Crabs & Other Borrowed Forms

Coined in 2003 by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their book Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction , the hermit crab adds a delightful variety to the types of nonfiction prose in contemporary creative nonfiction. The hermit crab is an essay that repurposes forms from everyday life – forms that we don’t generally regard as “literary” – as forms for creative nonfiction. For example, a hermit crab might use the forms of a how-to-manual, recipe, FAQs, or even a crossword puzzle.

The hermit crab is an essay that repurposes forms from everyday life—forms that we don’t generally regard as “literary”—as forms for creative nonfiction.

Often, such essays deal with topics that are tender or thorny (hence the reference to the soft-bodied hermit crab, which scavenge for shells to dwell in). In the writing process, the language and conventions of the form you’re borrowing can help to provide emotional distance between the writer and the content. An example is Dinty W. Moore’s “ Son of Mr. Green Jeans ,” an essay that uses the glossary form to write about the writer’s relationship to his father (it is also an abecedarian, which means that it is alphabetically arranged). Other examples are Randon Billings Noble’s “ The Heart as a Torn Muscle ” and Kristen Arnett’s short story “ Gator Butchering for Beginners .” For more inspiration, check out T he Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms , an anthology put together by Kim Adrian.

In addition to hermit crabs, essayists also often borrow forms from poetry. Examples include Brenda Miller’s “Pantoum for 1979” and Elizabeth Bradfield’s Toward Antarctica , which uses the haibun form. For inspiration, check out a list of poetic forms in this guide .

10. Flash Nonfiction

Flash nonfiction refers to essays that range from a few hundred to 2,000 words, though most publications cap the word count at 1,000. Flash nonfiction emphasizes compression and precision. It often plays with the limits of how much you can gesture to, or how much plot you can develop within the space of a few hundred words.

Flash nonfiction emphasizes compression and precision.

Writing a micro-essay is a great way to start writing, experiment with new techniques, and capture everyday moments. For inspiration, check out Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights , the literary journal Brevity , and The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction , an anthology edited by Dinty W. Moore.

Explore Different Types of Nonfiction Genres at Writers.com

With so many genres and forms at your disposal, there are infinite types of nonfiction stories you can tell. If you’re looking for additional feedback, as well as additional instruction on how to write a memoir, check out our schedule of nonfiction classes . Until then, pick a type of nonfiction and start writing!

[…] 10 Types of Nonfiction Books and Genres […]

It’s so interesting! But I want to study this types of Non – fiction writings. Help me, I need a tutor on that.

Salamat/THANK YOU!

Fabulous information. I never heard of hermit crab non-fiction and that it is the form that I use.

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Spring 2025 Semester

Undergraduate courses.

Composition courses that offer many sections (ENGL 101, 201, 277 and 379) are not listed on this schedule unless they are tailored to specific thematic content or particularly appropriate for specific programs and majors.

• 100-200 level

ENGL 201.ST2 Composition II: The Mind/Body Connection

Dr. sharon smith.

In this online section of English 201, students will use research and writing to learn more about problems that are important to them and articulate ways to address those problems. The course will focus specifically on issues related to the body, the mind, and the relationship between them. The topics we will discuss during the course will include the correlation between social media and body image; the psychological effects of self-objectification; and the unique mental and physical challenges faced by college students today, including food insecurity and stress.

English 201 S06 and S11: Composition II with an emphasis in Environmental Writing

S06: MWF at 10–10:50 a.m. in Yeager Hall Addition 231

S11: MWF at 12–12:50 p.m. in Crothers Engineering Hall 217

Gwen Horsley

English 201 will help students develop skills to write effectively for other university courses, careers, and themselves. This course will provide opportunities to further develop research skills, to write vividly, and to share their own stories and ideas. Specifically, in this class, students will (1) focus on the relationships between world environments, land, animals and humankind; (2) read various essays by environmental, conservational, and regional authors; and (3) produce student writings. Students will improve their writing skills by reading essays and applying techniques they witness in others’ work and those learned in class. This class is also a course in logical and creative thought. Students will write about humankind’s place in the world and our influence on the land and animals, places that hold special meaning to them or have influenced their lives, and stories of their own families and their places and passions in the world. Students will practice writing in an informed and persuasive manner, in language that engages and enlivens readers by using vivid verbs and avoiding unnecessary passives, nominalizations, and expletive constructions.

Students will prepare writing assignments based on readings and discussions of essays included in Literature and the Environment and other sources. They will use The St. Martin’s Handbook to review grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and usage as needed.

Required Text: Literature and the Environment: A Reader On Nature and Culture. 2nd ed., edited by Lorraine Anderson, Scott Slovic, and John P. O’Grady.

LING 203.S01 English Grammar

TuTh 12:30-1:45 p.m.

Dr. Nathan Serfling

The South Dakota State University 2023-2024 Undergraduate Catalog describes LING 203 as consisting of “[i]nstruction in the theory and practice of traditional grammar including the study of parts of speech, parsing, and practical problems in usage.”

“Grammar” is a mercurial term, though. Typically, we think of it to mean “correct” sentence structure, and, indeed, that is one of its meanings. But Merriam-Webster reminds us “grammar” also refers to “the principles or rules of an art, science, or technique,” taking it beyond the confines of syntactic structures. Grammar also evolves in practice through application (and social, historical, economic changes, among others). Furthermore, grammar evolves as a concept as scholars and educators in the various fields of English studies debate the definition and nature of grammar, including how well its explicit instruction improves students’ writing. In this course, we will use the differing sensibilities, definitions, and fluctuations regarding grammar to guide our work. We will examine the parts of speech, address syntactic structures and functions, and parse and diagram sentences. We will also explore definitions of and debates about grammar. All of this will occur in units about the rules and structures of grammar; the application of grammar rhetorically and stylistically; and the debates surrounding various aspects of grammar, including, but not limited to, its instruction.

ENGL 210 Introduction to Literature

Jodi andrews.

Readings in fiction, drama and poetry to acquaint students with literature and aesthetic form. Prerequisites: ENGL 101. Notes: Course meets SGR #4 or IGR #3.

ENGL 222 British Literature II

TuTh 9:30-10:45 a.m.

This course serves as a chronological survey of the second half of British literature. Students will read a variety of texts from the Romantic period, the Victorian period, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, placing these texts within their historical and literary contexts and identifying the major characteristics of the literary periods and movements that produced them.

ENGL 240.ST1 Juvenile Literature

Randi l. anderson.

A survey of the history of literature written for children and adolescents, and a consideration of the various types of juvenile literature.

ENGL 240.ST1 Juvenile Literature: 5-12 Grade

In English 240 students will develop the skills to interpret and evaluate various genres of literature for juvenile readers. This particular section will focus on various works of literature at approximately the 5th-12th grade level.

Readings for this course include works such as Night, Brown Girl Dreaming, All American Boys, Esperanza Rising, Anne Frank’s Diary: A Graphic Adaptation, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, The Hobbit, Little Women, and Lord of the Flies . These readings will be paired with chapters from Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction to help develop understanding of various genres, themes, and concepts that are both related to juvenile literature, and also present in our readings.

In addition to exploring various genres of writing (poetry, non-fiction, fantasy, historical, non-fiction, graphic novels, etc.) this course will also allow students to engage in a discussion of larger themes present in these works such as censorship, race, rebellion and dissent, power and oppression, gender, knowledge, and the power of language and the written word. Students’ understanding of these works and concepts will be developed through readings, discussion posts, quizzes and exams.

ENGL 240.ST2 Juvenile Literature Elementary-5th Grade

April myrick.

A survey of the history of literature written for children and adolescents, and a consideration of the various genres of juvenile literature. Text selection will focus on the themes of imagination and breaking boundaries.

ENGL 242.S01 American Literature II

TuTh 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Dr. Paul Baggett

This course surveys a range of U.S. literatures from about 1865 to the present, writings that treat the end of slavery and the development of a segregated America, increasingly urbanized and industrialized U.S. landscapes, waves of immigration, and the fulfilled promise of “America” as imperial nation. The class will explore the diversity of identities represented during that time, and the problems/potentials writers imagined in response to the century’s changes—especially literature’s critical power in a time of nation-building. Required texts for the course are The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1865 to the Present and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.

WMST 247.S01: Introduction to Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

As an introduction to Women, Gender and Sexuality studies, this course considers the experiences of women and provides an overview of the history of feminist thought and activism, particularly within the United States. Students will also consider the concepts of gender and sexuality more broadly to encompass a diversity of gender identifications and sexualities and will explore the degree to which mainstream feminism has—and has not—accommodated this diversity. The course will focus in particular on the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, ethnicity, and disability. Topics and concepts covered will include: movements for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights; gender, sexuality and the body; intersectionality; rape culture; domestic and gender violence; reproductive rights; Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW); and more.

ENGL 283.S01 Introduction to Creative Writing

MWF 1-1:50 p.m.

Prof. Steven Wingate

Students will explore the various forms of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction and poetry) not one at a time in a survey format—as if there were decisive walls of separation between then—but as intensely related genres that share much of their creative DNA. Through close reading and work on personal texts, students will address the decisions that writers in any genre must face on voice, rhetorical position, relationship to audience, etc. Students will produce and revise portfolios of original creative work developed from prompts and research. This course fulfills the same SGR #2 requirements ENGL 201; note that the course will involve creative research projects. Successful completion of ENGL 101 (including by test or dual credit) is a prerequisite.

English 284: Introduction to Criticism

This course introduces students to selected traditions of literary and cultural theory and to some of the key issues that animate discussion among literary scholars today. These include questions about the production of cultural value, about ideology and hegemony, about the patriarchal and colonial bases of Western culture, and about the status of the cultural object, of the cultural critic, and of cultural theory itself.

To address these and other questions, we will survey the history of literary theory and criticism (a history spanning 2500 years) by focusing upon a number of key periods and -isms: Greek and Roman Classicism, The Middle Ages and Renaissance, The Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, Formalism, Historicism, Political Criticism (Marxism, Post-Colonialism, Feminism, et al.), and Psychological Criticism. We also will “test” various theories we discuss by examining how well they account for and help us to understand various works of poetry and fiction.

• 300-400 level

ENGL 330.S01 Shakespeare

TuTh 8-9:15 a.m.

Dr. Michael S. Nagy

This course will focus on William Shakespeare’s poetic and dramatic works and on the cultural and social contexts in which he wrote them. In this way, we will gain a greater appreciation of the fact that literature does not exist in a vacuum, for it both reflects and influences contemporary and subsequent cultures. Text: The Riverside Shakespeare: Complete Works. Ed. Evans, G. Blakemore and J. J. M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

ENGL 363 Science Fiction

MWF 11-11:50 a.m.

This course explores one of the most significant literary genres of the past century in fiction and in film. We will focus in particular on the relationship between science fiction works and technological and social developments, with considerable attention paid to the role of artificial intelligence in the human imagination. Why does science fiction seem to predict the future? What do readers and writers of the genre hope to find in it? Through readings and viewings of original work, as well as selected criticism in the field, we will address these and other questions. Our reading and viewing selections will include such artists as Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Stanley Kubrick and Phillip K. Dick. Students will also have ample opportunity to introduce the rest of the class to their own favorite science fiction works.

ENGL 383.S01 Creative Writing I

MWF 2-2:50 p.m.

Amber Jensen

Creative Writing I encourages students to strengthen poetry, creative nonfiction, and/or fiction writing skills through sustained focus on creative projects throughout the course (for example, collections of shorter works focused on a particular form/style/theme, longer prose pieces, hybrid works, etc.). Students will engage in small- and large-group writing workshops as well as individual conferences with the instructor throughout the course to develop a portfolio of creative work. The class allows students to explore multiple genres through the processes of writing and revising their own creative texts and through writing workshop, emphasizing the application of craft concepts across genre, but also allows students to choose one genre of emphasis, which they will explore through analysis of self-select texts, which they will use to deepen their understanding of the genre and to contextualize their own creative work.

ENGL 475.S01 Creative Nonfiction

Mondays 3-5:50 p.m.

In this course, students will explore the expansive and exciting genre of creative nonfiction, including a variety of forms such as personal essay, braided essay, flash nonfiction, hermit crab essays, profiles and more. Through rhetorical reading, discussion, and workshop, students will engage published works, their own writing process, and peer work as they expand their understanding of the possibilities presented in this genre and the craft elements that can be used to shape readers’ experience of a text. Students will compile a portfolio of polished work that demonstrates their engagement with course concepts and the writing process.

ENGL 485.S01 Writing Center Tutoring

MW 8:30-9:45 a.m.

Since their beginnings in the 1920s and 30s, writing centers have come to serve numerous functions: as hubs for writing across the curriculum initiatives, sites to develop and deliver workshops, and resource centers for faculty as well as students, among other functions. But the primary function of writing centers has necessarily and rightfully remained the tutoring of student writers. This course will immerse you in that function in two parts. During the first four weeks, you will explore writing center praxis—that is, the dialogic interplay of theory and practice related to writing center work. This part of the course will orient you to writing center history, key theoretical tenets and practical aspects of writing center tutoring. Once we have developed and practiced this foundation, you will begin work in the writing center as a tutor, responsible for assisting a wide variety of student clients with numerous writing tasks. Through this work, you will learn to actively engage with student clients in the revision of a text, respond to different student needs and abilities, work with a variety of writing tasks and rhetorical situations and develop a richer sense of writing as a complex and negotiated social process.

ENGL 492.S01 The Vietnam War in Literature and Film

Tuesdays 3-5:50 p.m.

Dr. Jason McEntee

In 1975, the United States officially included its involvement in the Vietnam War, thus marking 2025 as the 50th anniversary of the conclusion (in name only) of one of the most chaotic, confusing, and complex periods in American history. In this course, we will consider how literature and film attempt to chronicle the Vietnam War and, perhaps more important, its aftermath. I have designed this course for those looking to extend their understanding of literature and film to include the ideas of art, experience, commercial products, and cultural documents. Learning how to interpret literature and movies remains the highest priority of the course, including, for movies, the study of such things as genre, mise-en-scene (camera movement, lighting, etc.), editing, sound and so forth.

We will read Dispatches , A Rumor of War , The Things They Carried , A Piece of My Heart , and Bloods , among others. Some of the movies that we will screen are: Apocalypse Now (the original version), Full Metal Jacket , Platoon , Coming Home , Born on the Fourth of July , Dead Presidents , and Hearts and Minds . Because we must do so, we will also look at some of the more fascinatingly outrageous yet culturally significant fantasies about the war, such as The Green Berets and Rambo: First Blood, Part II .

ENGL 492.S02 Classical Mythology

TuTh 3:30-4:45 p.m.

Drs. Michael S. Nagy and Graham Wrightson

Modern society’s fascination with mythology manifests itself in the continued success of novels, films and television programs about mythological or quasi-mythological characters such as Hercules, the Fisher King, and Gandalf the Grey, all of whom are celebrated for their perseverance or their daring deeds in the face of adversity. This preoccupation with mythological figures necessarily extends back to the cultures which first propagated these myths in early folk tales and poems about such figures as Oðin, King Arthur, Rhiannon, Gilgamesh, and Odysseus, to name just a few. English 492, a reading-intensive course cross-listed with History 492, primarily aims to expose students to the rich tradition of mythological literature written in languages as varied as French, Gaelic, Welsh, Old Icelandic, Greek, and Sumerian; to explore the historical, social, political, religious, and literary contexts in which these works flourished (if indeed they did); and to grapple with the deceptively simple question of what makes these myths continue to resonate with modern audiences. Likely topics and themes of this course will include: Theories of myth; Mythological Beginnings: Creation myths and the fall of man; Male and Female Gods in Myth; Foundation myths; Nature Myths; The Heroic Personality; the mythological portrayal of (evil/disruptive) women in myth; and Monsters in myth.

Likely Texts:

• Dalley, Stephanie, trans. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
• Faulkes, Anthony, trans. Edda. Everyman, 1995
• Gregory, Lady Augusta. Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster. Forgotten Books, 2007
• Jones, Gwyn, Thomas Jones, and Mair Jones. The Mabinogion. Everyman Paperback Classics, 1993
• Larrington, Carolyne, trans. The Poetic Edda . Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
• Matarasso, Pauline M., trans. The Quest of the Holy Grail. Penguin Classics, 1969
• Apollodorus, Hesiod’s Theogony
• Hesiod’s Works and Days
• Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homeric Hymns
• Virgil’s Aeneid
• Iliad, Odyssey
• Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica
• Ovid’s Heroides
• Greek tragedies: Orestaia, Oedipus trilogy, Trojan Women, Medea, Hippoolytus, Frogs, Seneca's Thyestes, Dyskolos, Amphitryon
• Clash of the Titans, Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, Troy (and recent miniseries), Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

ENGL 492.ST1 Science Writing

Erica summerfield.

This course aims to teach the fundamentals of effective scientific writing and presentation. The course examines opportunities for covering science, the skills required to produce clear and understandable text about technical subjects, and important ethical and practical constraints that govern the reporting of scientific information. Students will learn to present technical and scientific issues to various audiences. Particular emphasis will be placed on conveying the significance of research, outlining the aims, and discussing the results for scientific papers and grant proposals. Students will learn to write effectively, concisely, and clearly while preparing a media post, fact sheet, and scientific manuscript or grant.

Graduate Courses

Engl 575.s01 creative nonfiction.

In this course, students will explore the expansive and exciting genre of creative nonfiction, including a variety of forms such as personal essay, braided essay, flash nonfiction, hermit crab essays, profiles, and more. Through rhetorical reading, discussion, and workshop, students will engage published works, their own writing process, and peer work as they expand their understanding of the possibilities presented in this genre and the craft elements that can be used to shape readers’ experience of a text. Students will compile a portfolio of polished work that demonstrates their engagement with course concepts and the writing process.

ENGL 592.S01: The Vietnam War in Literature and Film

Engl 704.s01 introduction to graduate studies.

Thursdays 3-5:50 p.m.

Introduction to Graduate Studies is required of all first-year graduate students. The primary purpose of this course is to introduce students to modern and contemporary literary theory and its applications. Students will write short response papers and will engage at least one theoretical approach in their own fifteen- to twenty-page scholarly research project. In addition, this course will further introduce students to the M.A. program in English at South Dakota State University and provide insight into issues related to the profession of English studies.

ENGL 792.ST1 Grant Writing

This online course will familiarize students with the language, rhetorical situation, and components of writing grant proposals. Students will explore various funding sources, learn to read an RFP, and develop an understanding of different professional contexts and the rhetorical and structural elements that suit those distinct contexts. Students will write a sample proposal throughout the course and offer feedback to their peers, who may be writing in different contexts, which will enhance their understanding of the varied applications of course content. Through their work in the course, students will gain confidence in their ability to find, apply for, and receive grant funding to support their communities and organizations.