random house best nonfiction books

The editors of The Modern Library were privileged to have the assistance of a distinguished Board made up of celebrated authors, historians, critics, and publishing luminaries. In 1998 and 1999, members of the Modern Library Board participated in the “100 Best” project, voting on the 100 Best Novels and 100 Best Non-fiction works, respectively.

100 Best Novels

1.     ULYSSES by James Joyce

Written as an homage to Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey , Ulysses follows its hero, Leopold Bloom, through the streets of Dublin. Overflowing with puns, references to classical literature, and stream-of-consciousness writing, this is a complex, multilayered novel about one day in the life of an ordinary man. Initially banned in the United States but overturned by a legal challenge by Random House’s Bennett Cerf, Ulysses was called “a memorable catastrophe” (Virginia Woolf), “a book to which we are all indebted” (T. S. Eliot), and “the most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness” (Edmund Wilson). Joyce himself said, “There is not one single serious line in [ Ulysses ].

2.     THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Set in the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby tells the story of the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, his decadent parties, and his love for the alluring Daisy Buchanan. Dismissed as “no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that” ( The Chicago Tribune ), The Great Gatsby is now considered a contender for “the Great American Novel.” Fitzgerald wanted to title the novel “Trimalchio in West Egg,” but both his wife and his editor preferred “The Great Gatsby.” Fitzgerald gave in, though he still thought that “the title is only fair, rather bad than good.”

3.     A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce

Published in 1916, James Joyce’s semiautobiographical tale of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is a coming-of-age story like no other. A bold, innovative experiment with both language and structure, the work has exerted a lasting influence on the contemporary novel; Alfred Kazin commented that “Joyce dissolved mechanism in literature as effectively as Einstein destroyed it in physics.” Reviewing the book in The New Republic, H. G. Wells wrote, “Like some of the best novels in the world it is the story of an education; it is by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing.”

4.     LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita tells the story of middle-aged Humbert Humbert’s love for twelve-year-old Dolores Haze. The concept is troubling, but the novel defies any kind of label, though it has been heralded as a hilarious satire, a bitter tragedy, and even an allegory for U.S.-European relations. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi summarized the book as “hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life . . . Nabokov, through his portrayal of Humbert, has exposed all solipsists who take over other people’s lives.”

5.     BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley

Though Brave New World is less famous than George Orwell’s 1984 , it arguably presents a world that more closely resembles our own: a world of easy sex, readily available and mood-altering pharmaceuticals, information overload, and mass production.  Juxtaposing Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopias, the critic Neil Postman commented: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. . . . Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

6.     THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner

Narrated by the Compson siblings—Benjy, a source of shame for his family due to his diminished mental capacity; brilliant and obsessive Quentin; and Jason, the cynic—as well as Dilsey, the powerful matriarch of their black servants, The Sound and the Fury  is a tragedy of haunted lives. As each of these characters reflect on the fourth sibling, beautiful and free-spirited Caddy, Faulkner paints an indelible portrait of a family in disarray. While The Sound and the Fury was dismissed by its author as a “splendid failure,” it is now considered a masterpiece and played a crucial role in Faulkner being awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

7.     CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller

This satirical novel follows U.S. Captain John Yossarian and his squadron of World War II fighters as they navigate the horrors and paradoxes of war. Based on American author Joseph Heller’s own wartime experiences, the novel explores the many facets of war and employs a unique narrative structure. Catch-22 is widely seen as one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century. The New York Times called it “a dazzling performance that will outrage nearly as many readers as it delights.”

8.     DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler

Set in the midst of Stalin’s 1936–1938 purges—when Stalin executed as many as 1.75 million peasants, government officials, and Communist party members— Darkness at Noon is the story of a man named Rubashov, who is arrested in the middle of the night by the state’s secret police. The Party he has long served tortures him and demands he confess to crimes they know he has not committed. Darkness at Noon sold over 400,000 copies when it was published and its portrait of Communism was a major factor in the Communist Party’s defeat in France.

9.     SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence

This intensely autobiographical novel recounts the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing to manhood in a British working-class family rife with conflict. The author’s vivid evocation of life in a Nottingham mining village in the years before the First World War and his depiction of the all-consuming nature of possessive love and sexual attraction make this one of Lawrence’s most powerful novels. The poet Philip Larkin said, “If Lawrence had been killed off after writing [ Sons and Lovers ], he’d still be England’s greatest novelist.”

10.  THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, this 1939 novel follows the Joad family as they leave the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and travel to California in search of work. A moving story about migration and abject poverty, The Grapes of Wrath is a candidate for the Great American Novel. Steinbeck himself claimed that he wanted the book “to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for [the Great Depression and its effects].”

11.  UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry

November 2, 1938: It is the Day of the Dead, and Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic bureaucrat, is stumbling around the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac in a last-ditch attempt to win his wife back. Set over the course of the day, Under the Volcano follows Firmin as he drinks wine, beer, mezcal, and tequila in a world that is as menacing and meaningless as it is exhilarating. Many publishers rejected this book but Lowry defended it as “a kind of symphony, or in another way as a kind of opera—or even a horse opera. It is hot music, a poem, a song, a tragedy, a comedy, a farce.”

12.  THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler

Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, Butler’s novel about the fortunes of the Pontifex family is a thinly veiled account of his own upbringing and a scathingly funny depiction of the hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life. George Bernard Shaw hailed the novel as “one of the summits of human achievement” and William Maxwell claimed that it was the one Victorian novel he would save if his house caught on fire.

13.  1984 by George Orwell

The most famous dystopian novel of all time, 1984 is the story of Winston Smith as he struggles to survive in the sinister world of Big Brother. This novel has so defined the twentieth century that many terms from it— Big Brother, doublethink, thought police —have seeped into popular culture. When it was first published in 1949, the novelist V. S. Pritchett commented: “I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down.”

14.  I, Claudius by Robert Graves

A classic of historical fiction, this book is the fictionalized autobiography of the Roman Emperor Claudius, born partially deaf and afflicted with a limp, and his rise to power. Along the way, you see the inner workings of the First Family of Rome and the vicious, murderous in-fighting and poisonings that Claudius—considered too stupid, lame, and ugly to fear—observes. The book ends with Claudius’s ascension to emperor; Graves continues the saga in Claudius the God (also worth reading, though not on this list).

15.  TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf

The Ramsays spend summers in their holiday home off the coast of Scotland, welcoming a motley assortment of guests into their warm family fold. But the First World War looms, and when it has passed, everything will be changed. Writer Arnold Bennett criticized the novel’s slight narrative: “A group of people plan to sail in a small boat to a lighthouse. In the end, some of them reach the lighthouse in a small boat. That is the externality of the plot.” But if the plot is superficially small, Woolf’s prose is infinitely expansive, capturing gorgeous, ephemeral moments of family joy and heartbreak.

16.  AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser

Published in 1925, An American Tragedy is the story of the naive Clyde Griffiths and his desperate search for success. Dreiser based the story on a 1906 murder trial, and the resulting novel paints a damning portrait of early twentieth-century society. Over nine hundred pages long, this isn’t a quick read, but if you enjoy long studies of sexual obsession and ambition gone horribly wrong, this is the book for you.

17.  THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers

Published in 1940, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter follows a handful of outsiders in a small Georgia town: a young girl, a doctor, a deaf-mute, the owner of a diner, and an antagonistic wanderer. The novel was an overnight sensation and made Carson McCullers extremely famous. When it was first reviewed in The New York Times , Rose Feld wrote: “No matter what the age of its author, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter would be a remarkable book. . . . When one reads that Carson McCullers is a girl of 22 it becomes more than that. . . . [McCullers] writes with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming.”

18.  SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut

An American classic, Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden that Vonnegut, then a POW, himself survived, Slaughterhouse-Five includes time travel, a voyage to an alien planet, a love affair with a movie star, and an assassination in its vast scope. Despite these fantastical elements, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives. Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, praised Slaughterhouse-Five as “beautifully done, fluid, smooth, and powerful.”

19.  INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man is one man’s story of how the world around him has decided that he is invisible, and therefore disposable. Moving from the unnamed hero’s high school days, to the campus of a Southern college and then to New York’s Harlem, the hero is sometimes befriended but more often deceived and betrayed by the duplicity of others. Winner of the 1953 National Book Award, and described by Saul Bellow as “a book of the very first order, a superb book,” Invisible Man is a bold classic whose take on race in America remains as searing today as when it was first published.

20.  NATIVE SON by Richard Wright

The story of Bigger Thomas, a poor, twentysomething African-American man living in Chicago, Native Son unflinchingly portrays the damage poverty and racism can inflict. Bigger Thomas is a difficult, even unsympathetic character, but his experiences force the reader to confront the real cost of societal injustice. Loosely based on a series of “brick bat” murders in 1939, Native Son was an immediate bestseller, selling 250,000 copies within three weeks of its publication.

21.  HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow

Eugene Henderson is an American millionaire living off his inherited wealth. Dissatisfied with his life, he leaves his comfortable world behind and travels to Africa. In a fictional village, his prayers for rain are answered, transforming him into a messiah figure. Saul Bellow also wrote The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift , but Henderson the Rain King was his personal favorite.

22.  APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O’Hara

In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville, PA, social circuit is filled with parties and dances, rivers of liquor, and music playing late into the night. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English, the envy of friends and strangers alike. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent—the book takes place over thirty-six hours—toward self-destruction.  A twentieth-century classic, Appointment in Samarra is the first and most widely read book by the writer Fran Leibowitz called “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

23.  U.S.A.(trilogy) by John Dos Passos

A collection of three novels— The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money —this work by Dos Passos combines the stories of different characters with current events, small biographies of famous men, and stream-of-consciousness moments to create a portrait of the United States itself. A massive 1,300-page saga, U. S.A. was hailed by The Washington Post as “the most ambitious attempt by any American writer of fiction to contain this vast, heterogeneous and elusive nation.”

24.  WINESBURG, OHIO by Sher wood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson's timeless cycle of loosely connected tales—in which a young reporter named George Willard probes the hopes, dreams, and fears of a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century—embraced a new frankness and realism that helped usher American literature into the modern age. “Here [is] a new order of short story,” said H. L. Mencken when Winesburg, Ohio was published in 1919. “It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own.”

25.  A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster

In E. M. Forster’s epic yet intimate 1924 novel, his last to be written and published in a long lifetime, a day trip to explore the enigmatic Marabar Caves explodes into accusations of sexual assault. Forster’s beautifully rendered characters illuminate the tensions of British-occupied India and make A Passage to India a work not only of historical impact but of deep humanity. Of Forster’s masterworks, including A Room with a View, Howards End , and the long-suppressed Maurice, A Passage to India may well be the richest and most ambitious. The Guardian recently described it as “a strangely timeless achievement . . . eerily prescient on the subject of empire.”

26.  THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James

Published in 1902 and set amid the splendor of fashionable London drawing rooms and gilded Venetian palazzos, The Wings of the Dove concerns a pair of lovers who conspire to obtain the fortune of Milly, a doomed American heiress. But the naïve young woman becomes both their victim and their redeemer in James's meticulously designed drama of treachery and self-betrayal.  Writing in 1959, James Thurber described the book as “a kind of femme fatale of literature . . . a masterpiece.”

27.  THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James

Henry James’s 1903 novel, written at the peak of “The Master’s” powers, follows the trip of Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of Chad, his widowed fiancée’s supposedly wayward son. Charged with bringing back the young man to the family business, Lewis soon encounters unexpected complications and a world of subtlety previously unknown to him. A finely drawn portrait of a man’s awakening to life, The Ambassadors is a timeless masterpiece of James’s late period and the book that James himself considered his best.

28.  TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald’s final completed novel, Tender Is the Night, follows the charming American couple Dick and Nicole Diver—loosely based on real-life 1920s socialites Gerald and Sara Murphy—as they cavort around the French Riviera. One summer, Dick and Nicole befriend a young American actress named Rosemary Hoyt, but their idyllic life is threatened when the truth behind Dick and Nicole's marriage is revealed. Fitzgerald claimed that this was his favorite of all his works, writing in a friend’s copy, “If you liked The Great Gatsby , for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith.”

29.  THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell

Written during the Great Depression, these three novels ( Young Lonigan; The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan; Judgment Day ) follow their eponymous hero as he roams through raw, energetic, 1930s-era Chicago, complete with the American Nazi Party headquarters, the White Sox, and the stockyards. The first volume, Young Lonigan , was considered so incendiary when it was first published that it was issued in a wrapper identifying it as a “clinical document” to be read only by social workers and psychologists.

30.  THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford

The Ashburnhams and the Dowells are wealthy, charming, and refined. They have been close friends for years. Their lives are apparently perfect. But in this short novel set just before World War I, nothing is what it seems. Told by an unreliable narrator, with a nonlinear plot, this portrait of Edwardian society is, says Jane Smiley, “a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel” that depicts “the world of Jane Austen a hundred years on, depopulated, lonely, and dark.”

31.  ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell

This short novel, set on an English farm, is an allegory about the Soviet Union and its transition from an idealistic workers’ revolution to a brutal dictatorship. The young pigs Snowball and Napoleon lead a revolution, ousting the farmer in favor of animal self-rule. Their new regime is based on one core principle: “All animals are equal.” Complete with a wise donkey, rebellious hens, and suspiciously urbane pigs, this book is considered one of the best satires of all time.

32.  THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James

The Golden Bowl is the story of the rich American Adam Verver, and his daughter, Maggie. The two fall in love—Adam with Maggie’s friend Charlotte, and Maggie with Prince Amerigo, an impoverished Italian prince—unaware that Charlotte and Prince Amerigo are former lovers. The story is one of passion, betrayal, and manipulation, told in James’s signature elaborate style. Gore Vidal wrote that The Golden Bowl “is a story radiant with the art of a master fulfilled; and dark with the profound knowledge of how force [in this case, money] is motor to all our lives.”

33.  SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser

Sister Carrie transformed the conventional “fallen woman” story into a bold and truly innovative piece of fiction when it appeared in 1900. Naïve young Caroline Meeber, a small-town girl seduced by the lure of the modern city, becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman and then of a saloon manager, who elopes with her to New York. Both its subject matter and Dreiser’s unsparing, nonjudgmental approach made Sister Carrie a controversial book in its time, and the work retains the power to shock readers today.

34.  A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh

The title is a reference to a line from T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” (“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”) in this satire about a disaffected country squire who travels to the Brazilian jungle in order to find a meaningful life. In 2010 Time magazine named A Handful of Dust to its list of “All-Time 100 Best Novels” and wrote: “If this is Waugh at his bleakest, it’s also Waugh at his deepest, most poisonously funny.”

35.  AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner

In this harrowing stream-of-consciousness novel, Faulkner tells the story of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members—including Addie herself from beyond the grave— As I Lay Dying is a complex chorus of familial love and angst. Faulkner said of the novel that he “set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force,” and this family saga, which he wrote in just six weeks, certainly fits the bill.

36.  ALL THE KING’S MEN by Robert Penn Warren

Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, All the King’s Men is the story of the populist politician Willie Stark, as narrated by the reporter Jack Burden. Burden watches as Willie Stark rises to power, changing as he does from a naïve idealist to a charismatic, powerful, and corrupt state governor. Most people assume that Willie Stark was based on real-life politician Huey Long, a controversial senator who was assassinated in 1935, but Warren always disavowed any resemblance between the two.

37.  THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder

Winner of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize, The Bridge of San Luis Rey takes a single event—a bridge collapsing on July 20, 1714—and expands it into a meditation on life and faith. A monk named Brother Juniper witnesses the collapse and, curious about why God would allow such a tragedy, decides to compile a book about the five people who died in an attempt to understand God’s purpose.  A novella that carries the emotional weight of a much longer book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey was a bestseller when it was published and has never been out of print.

38.  HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster

Howards End , a story about who would inhabit a charming old country house (and who, in a larger sense, would inherit England), was the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer. Centered around the conflict between the wealthy, materialistic Wilcox family and the cultured, idealistic Schlegel sisters—and informed by Forster’s famous dictum “Only connect”—it is full of tenderness. Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty is an homage to Howard’s End, with aspects of the plot and various characters drawn straight from Forster’s original.

39.  GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin

Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles one day in the life of a fourteen-year-old boy. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. “Mountai n, ” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.”

40.  THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene

Major Henry Scobie is an assistant police commissioner for a West African colony. Disillusioned but compassionate, he leads a quiet existence married to a woman he does not love. But when a new police inspector and a young widow arrive in town, the resulting love triangles and dilemmas will up-end his life. Generally considered Greene’s masterpiece, The Heart of the Matter was an immediate bestseller, selling 300,000 copies in the UK alone. In 1948, The New York Times raved: “From first page to last, this record of one man's breakdown on a heat-drugged fever-coast makes its point as a crystal-clear allegory—and as an engrossing novel.”

41.  LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding

A group of British schoolboys are marooned on an island with no grown-ups. At first, they enjoy their freedom. But the realization that there are no rules, and the ensuing struggle for order and dominance, transforms this book into a brutal story about human nature. Written while Golding was teaching at a boys’ grammar school, The Lord of the Flies was famously dismissed by an editor as an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy . . . Rubbish & dull. Pointless.” However, a younger editor at the same publishing house disagreed, and the book was published in 1954. Since then it has sold over 10 million copies.

42.  DELIVERANCE by James Dickey

Famously made into a 1972 film with Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, this story of a weekend canoe trip gone horribly, horribly wrong won critical acclaim when it was first published. The New York Times Book Review praised it as “a novel that will curl your toes . . . Dickey's canoe rides to the limits of dramatic tension,” The New Yorker called it “a brilliant and breathtaking adventure,” and The New Republic called it “a tour de force.” It is impossible to put down and terrifying to read.

43.  A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell

Inspired by the sixteenth-century painting by Nicolas Poussin, this series of novels chronicles one man’s life. Published from 1951 to 1975, these novels were critical darlings, with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. proclaiming them “an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars.” An excellent book for fans of Evelyn Waugh or Edward St. Aubyn’s “Patrick Melrose” novels.

44.  POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley

Point Counter Point follows a large cast of characters, many based on people Huxley actually knew, as they argue and sleep with one another. The title references musical counterpoint, a compositional technique that relies on melodic interaction to make independent voices or chords sound harmonic together—and, similarly, Huxley attempted to create a harmonic whole with independent characters, instead of a unifying plot. The storylines are linked but not always easy to follow; still, it is a humorous if dry satire of 1920s intellectual life.

45.  THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway

Perhaps the ultimate novel of the “Lost Generation,” The Sun Also Rises is the story of WWI veteran Jake Barnes, the beautiful and seductive Lady Brett Ashley, and the raucous café society of 1920s Paris. Written in Hemingway’s signature terse style, and populated by characters based on people Hemingway knew, the book came out to mixed reviews. Some critics found the characters unlikable, and older critics especially disliked Hemingway’s spare prose. Nevertheless, the book was a bestseller, making Hemingway famous, and it inspired a generation of readers and writers.

46.  THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad

One of Joseph Conrad's most accessible novels, The Secret Agent is the chilling story of a terrorist plot. Based loosely on the failed Greenwich bombing of 1894, this short novel follows  Adolf Verloc, who appears to be a successful businessman, happily married and living in London, but is in fact an anarchist spy for an unnamed country. The New York Times called The Secret Agent “the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside.”

47.  NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad

Originally published in 1904, Nostromo is considered Conrad's supreme achievement. Set in the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana, the novel reveals the effects of unbridled greed and imperialist interests on many different lives. Although each character's potential for good is ultimately corrupted, Nostromo underscores Conrad’s belief in fidelity, moral discipline, and the need for human communion. The author himself described the book as “an intense creative effort on what I suppose will remain my largest canvas.”

48.  THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence

The Rainbow is the epic story of three generations of the Brangwens, a Midlands family. A visionary novel, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world. Originally published in England in 1915, The Rainbow was the subject of an obscenity trial, as a result of which over a thousand copies were burned. Although it was available in the United States, it would be banned in England for many years.

49.  WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence

A sequel to The Rainbow, Women in Love is D. H. Lawrence’s magnificent exploration of human sexuality in the days surrounding World War I. The story of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, Women in Love illuminates their characters and their relationships with the men that they love. The character of Ursula was based on Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, and Gudrun was loosely based on the writer Katherine Mansfield.

50.  TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller

Often described as lewd, outrageous, and pornographic, Tropic of Cancer is the story of Henry Miller, a writer living in Paris. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, this novel was banned in the United States until an obscenity trial in 1961. The trial went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which overturned a lower court’s ruling in 1964, allowing the book to be published in the United States. Norman Mailer called Tropic of Cancer “one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century, a revolution in consciousness equal to The Sun Also Rises .”

51.  THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer

Based on Mailer’s own experiences during World War II, The Naked and the Dead is the story of a U.S. platoon in the Philippines. Mailer’s decision to use a range of characters instead of a single hero was inspired by Leo Tolstoy; Mailer used to read parts of Anna Karenina every morning, before he worked on his own writing. Perhaps as a result, he felt that The Naked and the Dead was “the greatest war novel since War and Peace .”

52.  PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth

A long monologue delivered by Alexander Portnoy to his psychologist, many U.S. libraries banned the book because of its unbelievably frank and incredibly detailed accounts of the female form, masturbation, and fellatio (among other things). The literary critic Irving Howe dismissed the book as “vulgar” and claimed that “the cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy’s Complaint is to read it twice.” But the novel was a literary sensation, selling millions of copies and making Philip Roth a household name overnight.

53.  PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire is a stylistic masterpiece in true Nabokovian fashion: a 999-line poem by reclusive genius John Shade with an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Dr. Boswell, Charles Kinbote, adding up to a satiric novel of literature and intrigue. Nabokov loved wordplay, and this novel shows his skills at their finest. While Time initially dismissed Pale Fire as “an exercise in agility – or perhaps bewilderment,” this did not prevent the magazine from naming it one of their top 100 English-language novels, and it remains one of Nabokov’s most popular works to date.

54.  LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner

Light in August , a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry. The book was originally called Dark House , but Faulkner changed it to Light in August , based on a comment that his wife made.

55.  ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac

A loosely fictionalized version of Kerouac’s road trips with Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty, in the novel), this novel’s tone captures the wild rhythm of life on the road. Jack Kerouac described On the Road as “a journey through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man. It was really a story about 2 Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him.” When Kerouac delivered his 120-foot-long scroll of a manuscript to his publisher, Robert Giroux, he supposedly unfurled the scroll and “tossed it right across the office like a piece of celebration confetti.”

56.  THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett

When Sam Spade is hired by the sultry, gorgeous Miss Wonderly to track down her little sister, he does not realize that he’s been brought into the search for an incredibly valuable figurine of a falcon. But as events unfold (and the body count rises), it becomes clear that Spade can trust no one—least of all his beautiful client. The Maltese Falcon is the detective novel that introduced the archetype of the world-weary, cynical private detective to a wide audience, and the 1941 movie based on the novel (starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor) is considered the first major film noir. 

57.  PARADE’S END by Ford Madox Ford

Set before, during, and slightly after World War I, Parade’s End is the story of Christopher Tietjens, whose decency is consistently taken advantage of by his beautiful and devious wife Sylvia. When Tietjens meets Valentine Wannop, a suffragette with an independent spirit, the stage is set for a love triangle that touches on class, money, and a changing world.

58.  THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton

Newland Archer saw little to envy in the marriages of his friends, yet he prided himself that in May Welland he had found the perfect woman—tender and impressionable, with equal purity of mind and manners. Enter Countess Olenska, a woman of quick wit sharpened by experience, determined to find freedom in divorce. Against his judgment, Newland is drawn to the socially ostracized Ellen Olenska. He knows that he can expect stability and comfort in a marriage with sweet-tempered May. But what new worlds could he discover with Ellen? Written with elegance and wry precision, this is a Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece and a tragic love story.

59.  ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm

Written in 1911, just before World War I, the various absurdities of plot and all of the characters are best seen as a satire of Downton Abbey –era society, class, and wealth. A beautiful young woman goes to Oxford and meets the handsome, rich, and snobbish Duke of Dorset. He proposes, and Zuleika, believing that she can only love someone who doesn’t love her, refuses him. More men fall in love with Zuleika, and chaos is unleashed in suitably ridiculous, Oscar Wilde­–ish fashion. The Guardian called Zuleika Dobson “the finest, and darkest kind of satire: as intoxicating as champagne, as addictive as morphine.”

60.  THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy

Binx Bolling is a young Korean War veteran, adrift in his own life. He goes to movies and has a series of meaningless flings with his secretaries. But in this laconic novel, this premise expands to become a meditation on emotion and self-examination. Walker Percy won the National Book Award for The Moviegoer , beating the following nominees, among others: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger, and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

61.  DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather

Based on the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the first archbishop of the (newly created) diocese of New Mexico, Death Comes for the Archbishop portrays the clash between Old World, New World, and Native American culture. Cather’s love for American land shines through the beautiful prose as the reader moves from scene to scene, following hero Jean Marie Latour as he wrestles with corruption and the requirements of his mission.

62.  FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones

Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941: Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets “the treatment” that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he’s risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife.  In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldier’s life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence, and passions of men and women in the most important American novel to come out of World War II, a masterpiece that captures as no other the honor and savagery of men.

63.  THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE by John Cheever

Winner of the 1958 National Book Award, The Wapshot Chronicle is the story of Moses and Coverly Wapshot, two brothers growing up in the fictional New England town of St. Botolphs, Massachusetts. Both brothers wrestle with the lessons and expectations of their father, and both struggle to create their own identity away from St. Botolphs. A story of eccentric, warm characters in an archetypal Massachusetts fishing community, The Wapshot Chronicle established John Cheever as a novelist (he had previously focused on short stories) and a humorist.

64.  THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is Holden Caulfield, a sixteen-year-old who leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. As we spend time in his head, we see him experience the pain and pleasure of adolescence, and the particular ache of finding one’s place in the world. Holden Caulfield made his first appearance in the short story “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” which was published in The New Yorker in 1946. Among the book’s many fans is Bill Gates, who proclaimed it his favorite read.

65.  A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess

In A Clockwork Orange , Anthony Burgess depicts a dystopian future where gangs of teenage criminals rule the streets; among them a fifteen-year-old “droog” named Alex. Narrated in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends’ social pathology, Alex’s story is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. Burgess has offered several explanations for the meaning of the novel’s mysterious title—from East London Cockney slang to a pun on the Malay word “orang,” meaning “man,” to an oxymoronic juxtaposition of the mechanical and the organic.

66.  OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham

Originally published in 1915, this story of infatuation begins with Philip Carey, a sensitive boy raised by a religious aunt and uncle. Philip yearns for adventure, and at eighteen leaves home to pursue a career as an artist in Paris. When he returns to London to study medicine, he meets the androgynous but alluring Mildred and begins a love affair that will change the course of his life. “Here is a novel of the utmost importance,” wrote Theodore Dreiser on the book's publication. “One feels as though one were sitting before a splendid Shiraz of priceless texture and intricate weave, admiring, feeling, responding sensually to its colors and tones.”

67.  HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad

Originally published in 1902, and written several years after Conrad’s grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel tells the story of Marlow, a seaman who undertakes his own journey into the African jungle to find the tormented white trader Kurtz. Rich in irony and spellbinding prose, Heart of Darkness is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity. The basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness remains one of the most searing and relevant books of the twentieth century.

68.  MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis

When Carol Milford marries Will Kennicott, she moves to his small hometown of Gopher Prairie but is quickly dismayed by the backwardness of her new surroundings. She endeavors to reform the town and the people around her in this satire about the rapid modernization of early twentieth-century America. Lewis Mumford observed: “Young people had grown up in this environment, suffocated, stultified, helpless, but unable to find any reason for their spiritual discomfort. Mr. Lewis released them.”

69.  THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton never wrote a more compelling or tragic heroine than the beautiful Lily Bart, whose attempts to navigate turn-of-the-twentieth-century society founder on her lack of the only commodity that matters: money. As Lily is brought low by circumstance, Wharton brings to life the alluring, dangerous, and stifling world of Old New York.  Published in 1905, The House of Mirth is the first of Edith Wharton’s major novels— Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country , and The Age of Innocence and it remains a memorably vibrant, and still wrenchingly heartbreaking, masterpiece.

70.  THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durrell

Set in Alexandria, Egypt, these interlinked novels explore the city over the 1930s and 1940s.  Justine was published in 1957, Balthazar and Mountolive in 1958, and Clea in 1960. The novels follow the same characters, but from different perspectives and different times—a tactic that Durell claimed was inspired by Einstein’s theory of relativity (which gives you some idea of his ambitions for this tetralogy).

71.  A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes

Set in the nineteenth century, this novel revolves around six children who are seized by pirates on a voyage from Jamaica to England. What begins as an adventure becomes a darker story about the childrens’ naïve lack of morality. In a 1969 interview with The New Yorker , Hughes claimed he was inspired by an old lady’s description of being captured by surprisingly considerate pirates as a child. Hughes commented, “This was a new idea—that pirates were sentimental about children. I began to wonder what would happen if a group of pirates were suddenly landed with a group of children. In the ensuing conflict, which side would go under?”

72.  A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul

Mohun Biswas is born with an extra finger and inadvertently causes his own father’s death. Affable but unlucky, Mr. Biswas grows up, gets a job, and inadvertently proposes to a woman (whose family accepts on her behalf). What he really wants, though, is a home of his own. The novel’s premise is simple, but the language is rich, textured, and humorous. Naipaul, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, confessed: “Of all my books A House for Mr. Biswas is the one closest to me. It is the most personal, created out of what I saw and felt as a child. It also contains, I believe, some of my funniest writing.”

73.  THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West

A panoramic account of the desperate ambitions, and equally desperate miseries, of an array of Los Angeles denizens at the height of the Hollywood studio era, this 1939 novel is as unsparing as it is compulsively readable. With a cast of characters including an avaricious, only marginally talented starlet, an innocuous-seeming retiree under whose dull surface violence lurks, and the painter whose vision of a “Burning of Los Angeles” canvas imagines the apocalypse of the American Dream, The Day of the Locust is a grisly masterpiece—a “nightmare of lust and violence, of distortions and cruel comedy,” as The New York Times described it.

74.  A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway

Frederic Henry is an American paramedic in the Italian Army during World War I. He meets Catherine Barkley, a nurse, and they fall in love. Loosely based on Hemingway’s relationship with Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, A Farewell to Arms was censored for its expletives and frank descriptions of Frederic and Catherine’s romance. Fun fact: When Ernest Hemingway sent a draft of A Farewell to Arms to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald wrote back with ten pages of suggestions and possible edits. Hemingway’s response? “Kiss my ass.”

75.  SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh

A send-up of tabloid journalism in the 1930s, Waugh drew inspiration for Scoop from his time working as a special correspondent for the Daily Mail . In the novel, the two biggest newspapers, The Daily Beast and The Daily Brute , report on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. As the newspapers (and their megalomaniacal owners) vie for supremacy, they create news as needed and report the war as they see fit. Even The Atlantic admitted, “There is perhaps no more uproarious burlesque of the workings of the press.” This is a wickedly funny novel that feels all too relevant in the age of Internet journalism.

76.  THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” the title character boasts, “and she is mine for life.” The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie tells the story of a glamorous, unconventional schoolteacher and her favorite students, who worship but ultimately betray her.  Upon its 1961 publication, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which is frank in its exploration of sexuality, was deemed “not read-aloudable” by the audiobook industry, a code for “too X-rated.”

77.  FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce

When James Joyce finished writing Ulysses —his long, complicated masterpiece about one day in the life of Dublin—he decided to write Finnegans Wake : a long, complicated novel about one night in the life of Dublin. A nonlinear dream narrative, the first sentence of Finnegans Wake reads: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” The book defies summary, though many critics and scholars have tried. Still, Joyce maintained that Finnegans Wake made sense—he told his biographer that he could “justify every line of this book.”

78.  KIM by Rudyar d Kipli ng

Kim is the tale of an Irish orphan raised as an Indian vagabond on the rough streets of colonial Lahore: a world of high adventure, mystic quests, and secret games of espionage played out between the Russians and the British in the mountain passages of Asia. Kim is torn between his allegiance to the ascetic lama, who becomes his beloved mentor, and the temptations of those who want to recruit him as a spy in the “great game” of imperial conflict. In a series of thrilling escapades, he crisscrosses India on missions both spiritual and military before the two forces in his life converge in a dramatic climax in the high Himalayas.

79.  A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster

Published in 1908 to both critical and popular acclaim, A Room with a View is a whimsical comedy of manners that owes more to Jane Austen than perhaps any other of Forster’s works. The central character is a muddled young girl named Lucy Honeychurch, who runs away from the man who stirs her emotions, remaining engaged to a rich snob. Forster considered it his “nicest” novel, and today it remains probably his most well liked. Its moral is utterly simple: Throw away your etiquette book and listen to your heart.

80.  BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh

In post–World War I England, a young middle-class man is infatuated with an aristocratic family and their glittering but decaying way of life, particularly the family’s flamboyant younger son and beautiful older daughter.  There are many autobiographical facts in Waugh’s life that are tantalizingly close to elements of Brideshead , but the novel opens with this author’s note: “I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.”

81.  THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow

“I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.” So begins The Adventures of Augie March, a modern picaresque (a genre of literature that follows a loveable rogue through a series of misadventures) that won the 1954 National Book Award is considered a contender for the Great American Novel Apparently the novel was very easy to write—Saul claimed that “the book just came to me. All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.”

82.  ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1971, Wallace Stegner’s American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical—that endures as Wallace Stegner's master

83. A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul

First published in 1979, A Bend in the River is a profound and richly observed novel of postcolonial Africa. Salim, a young Indian man, moves to a town on a bend in the river of a recently independent nation. As Salim strives to establish his business, he comes to be closely involved with the fluid and dangerous politics of the newly created state, the remnants of the old regime clashing inevitably with the new.

84. THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen

Portia is sixteen, recently orphaned, and living in London with her brother and Anna, his fashionable but unfriendly wife. Then she meets Eddie, a young man and a friend of Anna’s; the novel follows Portia as she discovers the delights of first love and the sorrow of heartbreak. Bowen is often compared to Jane Austen—she skewers drawing-room society with similarly exquisite writing and explores the intricacies of the human heart with the same sharp-eyed wisdom. John Banville, winner of the Booker Prize, has stated: “Had Elizabeth Bowen been a man she would be recognized as one of the finest novelists of the twentieth century.”

85. LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim is the story of Jim, a sailor who abandons a sinking ship and its passengers to near-certain death; but, as with any Conrad novel, this novel only loosely captures this startling masterpiece. Conrad, who also wrote The Heart of Darkness , Nostromo, and The Secret Agent (all of which appear on the Top 100), is regarded as one of the greatest writers to write in English, despite it being his third language. His stories portray the weight of outside forces—globalism, racism, colonialism—as they compress and constrain individuals, in prose that is like liquid gold.

86. RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow

Ragtime opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow’s imagined family and other fictional characters. The New Yorker called Ragtime “an extraordinarily deft, lyrical, rich novel that catches the spirit of this country.”

87. THE OLD WIVES’ TALE by Arnold Bennett

First published in 1908, The Old Wives’ Tale tells the story of the Baines sisters—shy, retiring Constance and defiant, romantic Sophia—over the course of nearly half a century. Bennett traces the sisters’ lives from childhood during the mid-Victorian era, through their married lives, to the modern industrial age, when they are reunited as old women. The setting moves from the Five Towns of Staffordshire to exotic and cosmopolitan Paris, while the action moves from the subdued domestic routine of the Baines household to the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.

88. THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London

Buck, a dog stolen from his home and sold to become a sled dog during the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, is the central character of this classic adventure novel. Faced with new challenges and an unforgiving environment, Buck is forced to learn the harsh rules of the wild. A novel of survival, loyalty, and the realities of nature, The Call of the Wild is “a story well and truly told” (E. L. Doctorow).  Jack London lived in the Klondike for almost a year, gaining inspiration for the story that would become one of his most popular.

89. LOVING by Henry Green

Set in an Irish country house during World War II, Loving is a literary version of Gosford Park. The Tennants are an aristocratic family, and Eldon, their loyal butler, manages the household staff. But the seemingly calm appearance of the Tennants and their staff masks the relationships, insecurities, and rivalries roiling beneath the surface; meanwhile, the country is at war, bombarded and bracing for a German invasion. In 2013, the Los Angeles Review of Books declared: “No English novel of the 1940s has better stood the test of time.”

90. MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn that his every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; and, most remarkably, his telepathic powers link him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children.” Midnight’s Children won the 1981 Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers” in 1993, when it was voted the most beloved novel to have ever won the Booker.

91. TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell

Set in Georgia during the Great Depression, Tobacco Road follows the Lesters, a family of poor white sharecroppers. Caldwell’s blunt, grotestque portrayal of the Lesters infuriated Southern readers, but the novel has sold over 10 million copies since it was published in 1932. The New York Times critic Dwight Garner wrote of the novel: “You can’t stop turning the pages, because you want to see how much further your jaw can drop. . . . The pulpiest—and arguably the most unforgettable—Southern novel you’ll ever read.”

92. IRONWEED by William Kennedy

Francis Phelan is a former basketball player, now grave digger, living in Albany. An alcoholic who accidentally killed his son many years ago, Phelan now wanders around town, occasionally encountering the ghosts of his son and other people he killed. Ironweed won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984, despite being rejected by thirteen publishing houses.

93. THE MAGUS by John Fowles

The Magus is a genre-bending story about a young Englishman drawn into the manipulative psychological games of a wealthy recluse. The novel was widely praised when it was published in 1966; in perhaps the most effusive review of all time, The New York Times called The Magus “a pyrotechnical extravaganza, a wild, hilarious charade, a dynamo of suspense and horror, a profoundly serious probing into the nature of moral consciousness, a dizzying, electrifying chase through the labyrinth of the soul, an allegorical romance, a sophisticated account of modern love, a ghost story that will send shivers racing down the spine.”

94. WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys

In this “beautiful and subversive” novel ( The Paris Review ), Rhys gives a backstory to Bertha Mason, first wife of Edward Rochester and the “insuperable impediment” to marriage between Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. In Rhys’s telling, Bertha is a lively and inquisitive Creole heiress, growing up in the unstable and racially charged environment of the West Indies. Her marriage to an unnamed Englishman, and her forced move to chilly England, heightens her unhappiness. If you have read Jane Eyre , you know how the story ends—but Rhys’s interpretation will transform your understanding of the classic, too.

95. UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch

Under the Net catalogues the comic trials and tribulations of Jack Donaghue, an unsuccessful writer and shameless mooch, as he attempts to become a successful writer. Iris Murdoch was a philosopher at St. Anne’s College, Oxford whose work on free will and choice shaped twentieth-century moral philosophy. Her novels, however, are intellectually stimulating and easy to read, in part because of Murdoch’s belief that the ideal reader was  “someone who likes a jolly good yarn and enjoys thinking about the book as well, about the moral issues.”

96. SOPHIE’S CHOICE by William Styron

Three stories are told in Styron’s National Book Award–winning novel: a young Southerner journeys to New York, eager to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between Nathan, a brilliant Jew, and Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman who survived internment at Auschwitz; and of an awful wound in Sophie’s past that impels both her and Nathan toward destruction. The Washington Post called it “Styron’s most impressive performance. . . . It belongs on that small shelf reserved for American masterpieces.”

97. THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles

Kit and Port Moresby are an American couple touring North Africa with another man, Turner. As they travel deeper into the Sahara desert, tensions rise and a love triangle emerges: the landscape informs the emotional lives of the characters, who are by turns suffocated by their surroundings and moved by its beauty. Writing in The New York Times , Tennessee Williams called The Sheltering Sky “enthralling . . . powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire.”

98. THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain

Roughly one hundred pages long, this dark tale of lust and murder was banned in 1934 for its then-shocking depictions of sex and violence. The Postman Always Rings Twice even managed to shock fellow noir writer Raymond Chandler, who called Cain “a Proust in greasy overalls” and The Postman “the offal of literature.” Cain, who also wrote Mildred Pierce and Double Indemnity, has since been recognized as one of the great noir writers, with The New York Times noting that “Cain can get down to the primary impulses of greed and sex in fewer words than any writer we know of.”

99. THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy

The Ginger Man is the story of Sebastian Dangerfield, an American student studying in post-WWII Dublin (but mostly getting drunk and sleeping around). Now considered a modern classic, The Ginger Man has sold over 10 million copies worldwide. Jay McInerney claimed that the book “has undoubtedly launched thousands of benders, but it has also inspired scores of writers with its vivid and visceral narrative voice and the sheer poetry of its prose.”

100. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington

Today The Magnificent Ambersons is best known through the 1942 Orson Welles movie, but it won the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918. A chronicle of the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty, The Magnificent Ambersons follows George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the family’s magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers, and manufacturers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class.

100 Best Nonfiction

1.  THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS by Henry Adams

Written by the historian, novelist, world traveler, caustic observer, and informal presidential advisor, The Education of Henry Adams was privately printed in 1907 and posthumously published in 1918 to great acclaim. It was a popular bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. If you read nothing else, check out pages 17 to the top of page 19 (in the Modern Library edition) for a study in concision, empathy, and cutting criticism in his narrative portrait of his grandmother, “The Madam,” wife of John Quincy Adams and daughter-in-law of the “stern” and “efficient” Abigail Adams.

2. THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by William James

The Varieties of Religious Experience was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in June 1902. James discusses conversion, repentance, mysticism, and fears of punishment in the hereafter—as well as the religious experiences of such diverse thinkers as Voltaire, Whitman, Emerson, Luther, Tolstoy, and others. The result is a book that encourages readers to ask new questions rather than feel that the old ones have been answered.

3. UP FROM SLAVERY by Booker T. Washington

Published to great acclaim in 1901, this memoir helped make Washington the most prominent black spokesman of his time. Washington vividly recounts his birth into slavery, his yearning for education, and his vision of an educational center for black students. A shrewd politician and a tireless promoter of the importance of education, Washington was devoted to advancing the cause of racial equality. On reading this classic autobiography, Langston Hughes noted, “[Washington’s] story of himself, as half-seen by himself, is one of America’s most revealing books.”

4.  A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN by Virginia Woolf

Based on a series of lectures Woolf delivered at Cambridge in 1928, A Room of One’s Own argues that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of great books that could have been written by women—if they had been given the time, means, education, and space that have always been granted to men. A brilliant, early feminist text, Woolf argues for a woman’s right to create, rather than be relegated to the role of domestic angel or idealized beauty.

5.  SILENT SPRING by Rachel Carson

First published in The New Yorker in 1962, Silent Spring documented the many environmental problems caused by pesticides, from alarming mutations to cancer in human beings. As a result of Carson’s compelling argument, as well as public outcry, the U.S. government banned the use of DDT (a synthetic pesticide), and the EPA was formed. Sir David Attenborough (narrator of Planet Earth and other documentaries) believes that Silent Spring and The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin are the two books that have most changed the scientific world.

6. SELECTED ESSAYS, 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot

Witty, learned, and filled with quips like “It is a question of some nicety to decide how much must be read of any particular poet,” this collection of literary criticism from T. S. Eliot, the author of “The Wasteland” and  other poems, provides insight into Eliot’s literary theory with essays on Seneca, Shakespeare, Dante, William Blake, and Charles Dickens. This is an insightful—if slightly academic—take on Western literary tradition by one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century.

7.  THE DOUBLE HELIX by James D. Watson

The autobiographical account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, The Double Helix is unusual because of its memoir-like and colorful approach. Harvard University Press declined to publish it for that very reason, while other readers criticized Watson for dismissing Rosalind Franklin (whose data Watson used).  Nonetheless, The New York Times said that “anyone seeking to understand modern biology and genomics could do much worse than start with the discovery of the structure of DNA, on which almost everything else is based.”

8.  SPEAK, MEMORY by Vladimir Nabokov

Written by the author of Lolita and Pale Fire , this memoir traces Nabokov’s life from his childhood up until his emigration to the United States. Nabokov describes his aristocratic background, his lifelong love of butterflies, his education in Cambridge, a young love affair, and meeting his wife, Vera, in his signature rhapsodic style. John Updike, author of The Witches of Eastwick and the Rabbit series, wrote that “Nabokov has never written English better than in these reminiscences. . . Nabokov makes of his past a brilliant icon—bejewelled, perspectiveless, untouchable.”

9. THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE by H. L. Mencken

Published in 1919, this book defends American English as a language in its own right, instead of a perversion of British English. Mencken also celebrated the fact that American English was, despite the massive sprawl of the United States, a single dialect: “There may be slight differences in pronunciation and intonation—a Southern softness, a Yankee drawl, a Western burr—but in the words they use and the way they use them all Americans, even the least tutored, follow the same line. . . . A Boston street-car conductor could go to work in Chicago or San Francisco without running the slightest risk of misunderstanding his new fares.”

10.  THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY by John Maynard Keynes

Keynes departed from classical economics by suggesting that a free market required government structure to operate efficiently. In doing so, The General Theory made economics and economists socially relevant and introduced the idea that economics and politics were intertwined. Keynes argued against the “long run” view of economics, quipping that “this  long run  is a misleading guide to current affairs.  In the long run  we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.” In 1971, President Nixon stated: “We are all Keynesians now.”

11.  THE LIVES OF A CELL by Lewis Thomas

What does the mitochondria do?  How are men similar to giant clams? How does language affect science? Weaving together music, biology, and medicine, this collection of essays tackles these questions in an introduction to science that is also a pleasure to read. When it was first published in 1974, Joyce Carol Oates praised Thomas for his “effortless, beautifully toned style” and described Thomas’s  essays themselves as “undogmatic, graceful, gently persuasive . . . insist[ing] upon the interrelatedness of all life.” The book would go on to receive two National Book Awards.

12.  THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY by Frederick Jackson Turner

In this hugely influential essay, Turner introduced the idea that the frontier—from the first Puritan settlers to the pioneers—shaped American democracy. Turner suggested that Americans had essentially “evolved” from a more European mindset to a distinctly American one, and argued that this evolution was a product of the American population moving west.  The frontier mindset was distrustful of centralized authorities and hierarchies, more violent, and less artistic—and that, Turner thought, explained a great deal about the United States.

13.  BLACK BOY by Richard Wright

Originally titled American Hunger , this book is an autobiographical account of life in the Jim Crow South. Renowned for its radical portrayal of the realities of African American life under the oppression of Jim Crow, Black Boy was an instant success, a landmark achievement that earned Wright an audience unlike any other African American writer of the time commanded. Wright's powerful, pressing work foretold his eventual ascendance to being one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century, and paved the way for authors like James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry after him

14.  ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL by E. M. Forster

A series of lectures on the essential parts of the novel, delivered in 1927 by the author of Howards End, A Room with a View, A Passage to India, Where Angels Fear to Tread , and others. Forster distinguishes between “flat” vs. “round” characters, discusses the importance of rhythm, and explains the difference between plot and story: “ ‘The King died, and then the Queen died’ is a story; ‘the King died and then the Queen died of grief’ is a plot.”

15.  THE CIVIL WAR by Shelby Foote

Shelby Foote’s tremendous, sweeping narrative of a war that lasted four long, bitter years begins with Jefferson Davis’s resignation from the United States Senate and Abraham Lincoln’s departure from Springfield for the national capital. These two leaders are only the first of scores of exciting personalities that in effect make The Civil War a multiple biography set against the crisis of an age. When the novelist Walker Percy read the final book, he wrote to Foote: “It’s a noble work. I’m still staggered by the size of the achievement. . . . It is The Iliad .”

16.  THE GUNS OF AUGUST by Barbara Tuchman

In this Pulitzer Prize–winning account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII and spectacularly peopled by the war’s key players, Tuchman’s magnum opus is a classic for the ages. The Chicago Tribune called it “more dramatic than fiction . . . a magnificent narrative—beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained.”

17.  THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND by Isaiah Berlin

When Isaiah Berlin died in 1997, one of his obituaries declared him “the world’s greatest talker, the century’s most inspired reader, [and] one of the finest minds of our time.” The Proper Study of Mankind brings together essays on everything from Machiavelli’s morality, Tolstoy’s theory of history, the meaning of liberty, and his own conversations with the great poet Anna Akhmatova. The New York Review of Books praised Berlin as the “everyman's guide to everything exciting in the history of ideas.”

18.  THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN by Reinhold Niebuhr

A collection of theological lectures delivered by Niebuhr in 1939, The Nature and Destiny of Man tackles the Christian concept of human nature, the powerlessness of man, and Christianity’s impact on human history. Delivered just before the outbreak of World War II, these lectures were so influential that Cold War containment policies and aspects of realpolitik can be traced back to them.  Highly recommended for fans of ontology.

19.  NOTES OF A NATIVE SON by James Baldwin

Written by the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country , and The Fire Next Time , this series of essays confronts the issue of race in both the United States and Europe.  Reviewing the collection for the New York Times , the poet Langston Hughes wrote: “Few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin. . . . I much prefer Notes of a Native Son to his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain .”

20.  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein

A faux-memoir told in the voice of Stein’s partner, Alice B. Toklas, the wryly titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is an account of life in the avant-garde and love on the Left Bank. The Autobiography became a runaway success for its portrayal of life as, and among, artists, invoking a cast of characters like Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, which cemented its legacy as a classic account of an American in Paris. Hemingway called it a “damned pitiful book,” but many cherish it today as a testament of love to Alice, Gertrude’s enduring muse.

21.  THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE by William Strunk and E. B. White

William Strunk Jr. was a professor at Cornell University when he self-published a simple guide to American grammar in 1919. Decades later, Strunk’s former student E. B. White worked with Strunk to revise the text; the resulting book was published in 1959 and it swiftly became a revered guide to grammar and usage. Dorothy Parker quipped: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

22.  AN AMERICAN DILEMMA by Gunnar Myrdal

Published in 1944 and nearly 1,500 pages long, An American Dilemma is a thorough study of race and democracy in America. Funded by the Carnegie Corporation and written by a Swedish American (in an attempt to find an unbiased author), the book details the many ways in which racism impedes African-American success and social mobility. Myrdal came to the happy conclusion that democracy would triumph over racism—and, while that day of ultimate triumph is still TBA, Myrdal’s book was cited in the landmark case of Brown v Board of Education.

23.  PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell

A three-volume examination of formal logic, this text is most popularly known for proving that 1+1=2 and was hailed by the poet T.S. Eliot as “perhaps a greater contribution to our language than [it is] to mathematics.” Principia Mathematica created a new kind of mathematical notation—one that all mathematicians could use—as well as fostering connections between mathematics and philosophy. A fundamental text, but not a fun read.  

24.  THE MISMEASURE OF MAN by Stephen Jay Gould

Published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man argues that the notion of an IQ—that intelligence can be accurately measured—is not only wrong, but often classist and racist. This book, part theory, part history of science, explores how the definition of intelligence has been shaped by unconscious bias and sloppy conflations of correlation and causation—effectively calling out scientists for limp reasoning and forcing their facts to fit their hypotheses. Gould reserved special scorn for The Bell Curve , a bestseller which argued that poverty was the result of inherited lower intelligence. Recommended reading for those opposed to eugenics.

25.  THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP by Meyer Howard Abrams

A work of scholarly analysis, The Mirror and the Lamp explores the difference between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature. The “mirror” is a metaphor for the eighteenth-century approach, which held that literature should reflect the real world. The “lamp” is a metaphor for the approach of the Romantics, who believed that the soul of the author should illuminate their work. If you’ve ever wanted to know how John Locke’s notion of mind-dependent secondary qualities influenced Wordsworth, this is the book for you.

26.  THE ART OF THE SOLUBLE by Peter B. Medawar

Dubbed “the wittiest of all science writers” (Richard Dawkins) and “perhaps the greatest science writer of his generation” ( New Scientist ), Sir Peter Medawar won a Nobel Prize in 1960 for his work on skin grafts. The Art of the Soluble is a meditation on the joys of science that also compares scientists who prioritize data over hypotheses to “cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.” Equal parts snark and brilliant observation.

27.  THE ANTS by Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson

Winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, this scientific textbook details everything you ever wanted to know (and then some) about ants. The Ants received rave reviews from nonscientists, with The Chicago Tribune calling it “a monumental achievement,” and The New York Times Book Review noting that “science is rarely good literature. The Ants is an exalting exception.” At 746 pages, it’s a long read but—if you like ants—a riveting one.

28.  A THEORY OF JUSTICE by John Rawls

Regarded as the twentieth century’s most important work of political philosophy, A Theory of Justice explores how a modern civil society can be just and fair to as many of its citizens as possible. A Theory of Justice was widely reviewed and discussed when it was published in 1971, with many critics comparing it to the work of Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Writing in Civilization, Will Blythe praised “the simple carpentry of its arguments, its egalitarian leanings, and its preoccupation with fairness” and claimed that “ A Theory of Justice is as American a book as, say, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .”

29.  ART AND ILLUSION by Ernest H. Gombrich

“Works of art are not mirrors,” Gombrich wrote, “but they share with mirrors that elusive magic of transformation which is hard to put into words.” Nevertheless, Gombrich tried to do just that in this exploration of how and why art changes over time. Blending the history of art with a scientific theory of perception, Gombrich writes crisply and clearly about a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to) Ancient Greek society, Renaissance art, and how artists develop style. A useful book if you’ve ever wondered why babies in Medieval paintings look nothing like babies in Renaissance paintings.  

30.  THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS by E. P. Thompson

Published in 1963, Thompson’s book focuses on the working class of the Industrial Revolution: the weavers, artisans, and croppers whose collective class identity, he argues, was formed during this time. Thompson’s conclusions were highly controversial, since hypothesizing about the hopes and dreams of an entire socioeconomic class is tricky business. But by choosing to focus on the story of a class, rather than an individual with power and clout, Thompson changed how history is studied. An excellent book for readers interested in mass political identity.

31.  THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK by W.E.B. Du Bois

When first published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk redefined the history of the black experience in America and introduced the now famous “problem of the color line.” Today it ranks as one of the most influential and resonant works in the history of American thought. It was so contentious when first published that the Nashville Banner warned its readers that “This book is dangerous for the Negro to read, for it will only incite discontent and fill his imagination with things that do not exist, or things that should not bear upon his mind.”

32.  PRINCIPIA ETHICA by G. E. Moore

Regarded among philosophers as a revolutionary guide to ethics and logic, this knotty text defines right acts as those acts that produce the most good, and also states that “good” is indefinable. Filled with sentences like, “Philosophers are constantly endeavoring to prove that ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ will answer questions, to which neither answer is correct, owing to the fact that what they have before their minds is not one question, but several, to some of which the true answer is ‘No,’ to others ‘Yes.’” 

33.  PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION by John Dewey

A collection of eighteen essays by one of the most influential minds in twentieth-century education reform. Dewey wrote extensively about the importance of educating children in order to advance civilization, and feared that American philosophy was hampered by its reliance on borrowed ideas and borrowed institutions. Though copies are now hard to find, you might agree with the review in the January 1934 edition of The International Journal of Ethics, which declared this book “an imaginative delight.”

34.  ON GROWTH AND FORM by D'Arcy Thompson

Written in 1917, this heavy tome—over 1,100 pages—introduced many readers to the field of mathematic biology. Examining everything from soap bubbles to molluscs to humans, Thompson explores how living things grow and, more amazingly, why they take a particular shape when they do. Scientists, architects, and anthropologists alike have all praised the book for its intellectual daring, though the science writer Phillip Ball noted that “like Newton’s Principia , D’Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form is a book more often cited than read.”  

35.  IDEAS AND OPINIO NS by Alber t Einstein

A collection of the essays, letters, speeches, and interviews of Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions provides a quick glimpse into the mind of one of the most brilliant men of all time. Discussing everything from classic literature to Marie Curie to explanations of general relativity, this book brings a reader into close contact with Einstein’s genius, his wide-ranging interests, and even his sense of humor.

36.  THE AGE OF JACKSON by Arthur Schlesinger by Jr.

Winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History, The Age of Jackson was praised by The New York Times as “a remarkable piece of analytical history, full of vitality, rich in insights and new facts, and casting a broad shaft of illumination over one of the most interesting periods of our national life.” (It has since been criticized for failing to discuss slavery and the plight of Native Americans.) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. would later serve as a Special Assistant to President John F. Kennedy and would win another Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Days , his book about JFK’s presidency.

37.  THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes

A character-driven narrative about the history of the atomic bomb, from the nineteenth century to Nagasaki, this nonfiction classic reads like a compelling novel (it opens with Leo Szilard, the scientist who patented the nuclear reactor, being grumpy about the rain in London). Isaac Asimov described The Making of the Atomic Bomb as “the best, the richest, and the deepest description of the development of physics in the first half of this century that I have yet read, and it is certainly the most enjoyable.” Could you wish for a better recommendation?

38.  BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON by Rebecca West

Born in 1892, Rebecca West was a British journalist, early feminist, and writer. The famously witty George Bernard Shaw claimed that “Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely” and President Truman called her “the world’s best reporter.” Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is West’s combined history and travelogue of modern-day Yugoslavia, based on a six-week journey she made in 1937. West dedicated the book “To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved.” (The Nazis invaded Yugoslavia shortly after she left.) Larry McMurtry, the author of Lonesome Dove , wrote “there are only a few great travel books. Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one.”

39.  AUTOBIOGRAPHIES by W. B. Yeats

Autobiographies brings together six volumes of Yeats’s personal memoirs, each one detailing a different period of his life. From his Reveries over Childhood and Youth to his 1923 Nobel Prize lecture, the Autobiographies lay bare the inner thoughts of this famous Anglo-Irish poet. The Autobiographies do roam from subject to subject, but readers who are fond of Yeats’s poetry may be interested in gaining an in-depth understanding of the man.

40.  SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA by Joseph Needham

Joseph Needham was a well-known historian and biochemist when he began working on this series of books in 1954. Over the course of fifty years and seven volumes (the most recent volume was published in 2004), Joseph Needham and his research team sought to understand the long history of Chinese science, mathematics, astronomy, nautical technology, mechanical engineering, windmills, aeronautics, civil engineering, metallurgy, botany, physiological alchemy, and printing. More textbook than beach read.

41.  GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves

A classic of World War I literature that is a memoir of childhood and a farewell to the pre-WWI way of life. Graves’s honest account of trench warfare, which faithfully records the heroism and brutality of military life, was extremely unpopular with the reading public. One contemporaneous reader wrote to Graves: “You are a discredit to the Service, disloyal to your comrades and typical of that miserable breed which tries to gain notoriety by belittling others.”  

42.  HOMAGE TO CATALONIA by George Orwell

A personal account of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), written by the author of 1984 and Animal Farm . Orwell was thirty-three when he traveled to Spain to fight against the nationalist and fascist forces led by General Franco. Homage to Catalonia depicts the evils of both sides of the war, the filth and the grime, the idealism and the intrigue. According to the historian Raymond Carr: “The Spanish Civil war produced a spate of bad literature. Homage to Catalonia is one of the few exceptions and the reason is simple. Orwell was determined to set down the truth as he saw it.”

43.  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN by Mark Twain

Dictated during the last years of his life, The Autobiography of Mark Twain is more like a transcription of a standup routine than a traditional memoir. Filled with scathing, winding anecdotes—many of which Twain did not want published until he had been dead for a century— The Autobiography is Mark Twain in exactly, precisely his own words, from his concerns about money to his dislike of Theodore Roosevelt and everything in between.

44.  CHILDREN OF CRISIS by Robert Coles

A Pulitzer Prize–winning series of interviews with American children, Children of Crisis focuses on how children of different ages, races, and social classes confront change and construct personal identities. In his attempt to “evoke, apprehend, and come to terms with the psychological realities of particular men, women, and children,” Robert Coles lived with the migrant workers, urban poor, and sharecroppers whose children he interviewed, and his study destroyed long-held stereotypes about these men and women. 

45.  A STUDY OF HISTORY by Arnold J. Toynbee

Toynbee traces the rise and fall of nineteen different civilizations in this twelve-volume, 7,000- page work of history. Arguing that civilizations arise out of society-wide responses to challenges, Toynbee attempted to create a universal theory of civilizations, identifying and labeling different phases. The first volume was published in 1934, and the last in 1961; this monumental effort was hailed by Clifton Fadiman as the book “most assured of being read a hundred years from now.”  (We’ll let you, the reader, be the judge of that.)

46.  THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY by John Kenneth Galbraith

The Affluent Society tackles how the post-WWII American economy was making the rich richer, yet keeping the poor just as poor.  Galbraith was a committed capitalist who also argued for a government willing to invest in roads, schools, and hospitals as well as businesses. Ultimately, Galbraith was interested in finding tailored solutions to l

47. PRESENT AT THE CREATION by Dean Acheson

A Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir by a former secretary of state and architect of government foreign policy during World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, and the Korean War. Foreign Policy revisited the memoir in 2017, writing that “Acheson stood like a ringmaster at the center of a complex diplomatic and political circus. . . . This is a must-read book not only for historians, but also for anyone interested in national policy, diplomacy, or military strategy. It is essential, especially today, to understand how America came to play the central role in the world, and the consequences of failure.”

48. THE GREAT BRIDGE by David McCullough

The Great Bridge reveals the saga behind the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge: one of the oldest suspension bridges in the world and a beautiful feat of engineering.   The Los Angeles Times praised The Great Bridge as “a book so compelling and complete as to be a literary monument.” Newsday wrote that The Great Bridge is “a stupendous narrative about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, with a cast of thousands (give or take 100), whose major characters come alive on the page as authentically, as creatively, as would their fictional counterparts if one had the imagination to dream up such a yarn.”

49. PATRIOTIC GORE by Edmund Wilson

A survey of American Civil War literature, with thumbnail portraits of various novelists, poets, and diarists. Wilson read many forgotten memoirs and novels in an attempt to find the best Civil War literature—he wanted Northerners to read Southern literature, and vice versa. Wilson also included unknown writers, including women and some African Americans, in his survey.  The result is a wide-ranging look at how the United States chronicled the Civil War.

50. SAMUEL JOHNSON by Walter Jackson Bate

The son of a bookseller, Samuel Johnson is considered one of the greatest minds in English history. He was a well-known critic, political commentator, and the author of Rasselas, and later A Dictionary of the English Language (which reigned supreme until the Oxford English Dictionary was published a hundred years later). Published in 1977, Bate’s biography of Samuel Johnson won an astonishing array of prizes: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A marvelous book about a genius who literally defined the English language.

51. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is the “brilliant, painful, important” ( New York Times ) story of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated and controversial figures. Malcolm talks frankly about his conversion to Islam, his fight against racism, his belief that “American society makes it next to impossible for humans to meet in America and not be conscious of their color difference.” Eloquent, brutally honest, and humorous, this book is as relevant now as it was when it was first published in 1964.

52. THE RIGHT STUFF by Tom Wolfe

Published in 1979, The Right Stuff contrasts the first astronauts (also known as the “Mercury Seven”) with the Edwards AFB test pilots. A portrait of the space age and a pulse-pounding look at daring pilots and courageous astronauts, The Right Stuff was called “an exhilarating flight into fear, love, beauty and fiery death” ( People ), “superb” ( The New York Times ), “breathtaking” ( Los Angeles Times ) , and “the best book I have read in the last ten years” ( Chicago Tribune ). The 1983 film The Right Stuff, starring Sam Shepard, Ed Harris, and Dennis Quaid was based on this book.

53. EMINENT VICTORIANS by Lytton Strachey

Eminent Victorians debunks old myths of high Victorianism by revealing the chauvinism, hypocrisy, and not-so-stiff upper lips that characterized many of its heroes from the self-seeking ambitions of Cardinal Manning to the neuroticisms of Florence Nightingale. The famous mathematician Bertrand Russell read the book while he was imprisoned in Brixton for his antiwar campaigning, and wrote that: “I often laughed out loud in my cell while I was reading the book. The warder came to my cell to remind me that prison was a place of punishment.”

54. WORKING by Studs Terkel

Bestselling oral histories are rare, but when Working was published in 1974, it struck a chord with readers. A series of interviews with different workers, from parking attendants and gravediggers to prostitutes and brokers, Terkel explored what work means to the individual, and how our self-worth is often tied to what we do, and how we feel about what we do. There is little to no plot, but Terkel’s portraits of men and women are deeply moving.

55. DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron

A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron’s true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression in 1985. The author of Sophie’s Choice , Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression’s psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery. A short and incredibly powerful memoir of despair and inner strength.

56. THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION by Lionel Trilling

Published at the beginning of the Cold War, Trilling’s thoughts on Huckleberry Finn , the Kinsey Report, and F. Scott Fitzgerald challenged many commonly held beliefs of postwar America and had an immense impact on Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, and others. Upon publication of The Liberal Imagination , Trilling became the United States’ most recognizable intellectual—a fact he hated. He wrote in a journal, “I have one of the great reputations in the academic world. This thought makes me retch.”

57. THE SECOND WORLD WAR by Winston Churchill

The Second World War is Winston Churchill’s six-volume memoir from the end of World War I to the end of World War II. Though this is a personal account, British law prevented many wartime files—as well as many top secret missions—from being openly discussed. As such, The Second World War is patchy in places, and far from objective in others; nevertheless, it is a chronicle of a crucial period, written by one of the key men of that era.

58. OUT OF AFRICA by Isak Dinesen

“In Africa,” Isak Dinesen would later comment, “I learned how to tell tales.” First published in 1937, this memoir is a reminiscence on the years the author spent living on a coffee plantation in Kenya. It is a nostalgic picture of African colonial life and the characters that populated it. Written after her return to her native Denmark, the descriptions of the Africa she knew are an evocative portrait of the country she had once called home.

59. JEFFERSON AND HIS TIME by Dumas Malone

This massive six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson was published over the course of thirty-four years: the first volume was published in 1948, and the sixth in 1982. Praised as a “masterly achievement of scholarship” by The New York Times Book Review , the book has fallen out of favor, due to its extreme length. Nevertheless, Malone’s dedication to his subject is remarkable: he lost his eyesight in 1977, but continued work on the biography for another five years. At over 3,000 pages, this is a daunting read but likely an exciting one for anyone who felt that Jon Meacham’s The Art of Power was too easy.

60. IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN by William Carlos Williams

Published in 1925, In the American Grain was Williams’s attempt to “get inside the heads of some of the American founders or ‘heroes,’ if you will, by examining their original records.” Beginning with the Vikings and including Ponce de Lyon, Cotton Mather, Aaron Burr, and Abraham Lincoln, this unorthodox approach to U.S. history involves Williams writing as his heroes, in order to understand what being American means. Short but complicated, this is a thought-provoking take on U.S. history.

61. CADILLAC DESERT by Marc Reisner

Subtitled “The American West and Its Disappearing Water,” this 1986 book explores the history of the American West through a single lens: the human demand for water. The most precious natural resource of all, water determines how cities grow, and which ones die—a fact that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Reclamation Bureau were keenly aware of. Ultimately, their efforts to control the flow of water continue to have serious long-term effects on water quality. Tales of corruption, price rigging, and “water wars” abound in this eye-opening book.

62. THE HOUSE OF MORGAN by Ron Chernow

Written by the author of Alexander Hamilton , the National Book Award–winning The House of Morgan is the story of J. P. Morgan’s empire, from its beginnings as his father’s company to the crash of 1987. Along the way J. P. Morgan bailed out the United States government; his son helped finance World War I; and subsequent generations helped finance World War II and pioneered the hostile takeover. More than a story of a company, this is a guide to the key people and events of the twentieth century.

63. THE SWEET SCIENCE by A. J. Liebling

Named “The Greatest Sports Book of All Time” by Sports Illustrated , this collection of essays is a taut, beautiful homage to the sport of boxing. Written between 1951 and 1955, Liebling’s pieces covered some of the greatest fights of the twentieth century: Louis-Savold, Cerdan-Marciano, Ray Robinson-Turpin, Robinson-Maxim, and Marciano-Walcott, to name a few.  Liebling created moving portraits of the boxers and their trainers, and paid attention to boxing lore and history. The result is a tribute to the golden days of American boxing.

64. THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES by Karl Popper

A work of political philosophy that explores, among other things, the dangers of fascism, The Open Society raised eyebrows because Popper criticized Plato, Hegel, and Marx. However, Popper defended his argument by saying that his “motive was not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men.” Upon its publication in 1945, Bertrand Russell praised the book as “a vigorous and profound defense of democracy, timely, very interesting, and very well written.”

65. THE ART OF MEMORY by Frances A. Yates

The Art of Memory is a history of human memory before the printed page made storing and referencing information simple. What mnemonic systems and tricks did other civilizations use to remember information that we can jot down with a pen? The answers are surprising. For example, a Roman lawyer pictured a man lying in bed holding a cup in his right hand and the testicles of a ram in his left to remember details of a poisoning case. Other systems used puns, or a memory structure (ie, Sherlock Holmes’s “memory palace”) to store vast amounts of information. A groundbreaking look at what the human mind is capable of, sans paper.

66. RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM by R. H. Tawney

This historical work argued that the rise of Protestantism made industrial organization possible in Europe. Indeed, two tenets that we now consider essential to modern capitalism—hard work and the importance of individuals—are foundational aspects of the Protestant faith. However, Tawney was no fan of capitalism, declaring that: “The revolt of ordinary men against Capitalism has had its source . . . in the straightforward hatred of a system which stunts personality and corrupts human relations by permitting the use of man by man as an instrument of pecuniary gain.”

67. A PREFACE TO MORALS by Walter Lippmann

Written in 1929, and addressed to the nonreligious, A Preface to Morals argues that humanist values—as espoused by thinkers like Plato, Confucius, and Buddha—are eternal, while religious values rely on outdated understandings of government, law, and social custom. Lippmann is renowned as a leading thinker of the twentieth century; he won two Pulitzer Prizes, helped found The New Republic, created modern journalism as we understand it, coined the term “stereotype,” influenced President Woodrow Wilson, and feuded with President Lyndon B. Johnson.

68. THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE by Jonathan D. Spence

A history of the Chinese revolution told through the letters and testimonials of different Chinese authors and essayists. Foreign Affairs praised Spence for bringing “the past 100 years of the Chinese revolution to life with a novelist’s flair and an historian’s grounding in fact” and called the book “intellectual history of the first order.” Spence also includes women writers as well, bringing their often overlooked voices to the fore.

69. THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas S. Kuhn

Before Kuhn, it was believed that science advanced by gathering data, with each new data point contributing to the upward trajectory of human knowledge. But Kuhn argued that scientific progress was actually dependent on short, explosive periods where scientists discarded old models, or “paradigms,” in favor of new ones.  These revolutions, in turn, were dependent on social change. The idea that science could depend on irrational social forces was widely scoffed at by scientists. But Kuhn’s ideas have seeped into the mainstream, as evidenced by the fact that terms like “the Copernican Revolution” are accepted labels for periods of time.

70. THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW by C. Vann Woodward

Based on a series of lectures that Woodward delivered at the University of Virginia, The Strange Career of Jim Crow discusses the history of segregation. Woodward argues that Jim Crow was not an inevitable result of slavery, the Civil War, or even the Reconstruction era; the fact that Jim Crow laws were enacted in the 1890s, a quarter of a century after the Civil War ended, was part of Woodward’s proof. This slim volume (150 pages) was hugely influential when it was published in 1955, with Martin Luther King, Jr. dubbing it “the historical bible of the Civil Rights movement.”

71. THE RISE OF THE WEST by William H. McNeill

Winner of the 1964 National Book Award, The Rise of the West examines how different civilizations rose, fell, and interacted with one another, and argues that these interactions contributed to the ultimate fate of said civilizations. Though this conclusion is taken for granted now, it was a new and startling conclusion when The Rise of the West was first published.  Reviewing the book in The New York Times , Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote: “This is not only the most learned and the most intelligent, it is also the most stimulating and fascinating book that has ever set out to recount and explain the whole history of mankind.”

72. THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS by Elaine Pagels

In 1945 an Egyptian peasant unearthed what proved to be the Gnostic Gospels, thirteen papyrus volumes that expounded a radically different view of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ from that of the New Testament. Early Christians dared to ask many questions that orthodox Christians later suppressed—and their explorations led to profoundly different visions of Jesus and his message. This exploration of the mysteries and beliefs of the first Christians won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and is still considered a landmark study of the long-buried roots of Christianity.

73. JAMES JOYCE by Richard Ellmann

Dubbed “the greatest literary biography of the century” by Anthony Burgess, this book “translates James Joyce’s books back into his life” ( The New York Times ). Affectionate, clear-eyed, and thorough, Ellmann reveals that understanding Joyce’s fiction is the key to understanding the man himself, and vice versa. An excellent book for people who have struggled with Joyce’s fiction, or who want to learn more about the genius compelled to write such groundbreaking (and frankly, pretty challenging) novels.

74. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE by Cecil Woodham-Smith

Published in 1951, Florence Nightingale is an authoritative biography that restored Florence Nightingale’s reputation (Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians , also on the Modern Library list, had not treated Nightingale well). An Oxford-trained historian, Smith put her career on hold while raising her children, though she wrote potboilers on the side. As a result, Florence Nightingale is both well researched and very readable, and it transformed Smith into a respected historian and a bestselling author practically overnight.

75. THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell

The survivors of World War I produced great literature: All Quiet on the Western Front, Parade’s End, A Farewell to Arms, Goodbye to All That, Testament of Youth, Storm of Steel, and Under Fire, to name a few. The Great War and Modern Memory explores how and why World War I (called “the Great Fuck-Up” by the infantrymen who fought it) produced great art. Winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, this is a rare example of culturally relevant literary criticism.

76. THE CITY IN HISTORY by Lewis Mumford

What is a city? Why has humanity—across time and different cultures—sought to create cities? Written by an autodidact who never earned a college degree yet became one of the twentieth century’s most renowned scholars, The City in History argues that language and communication, but not technology, are crucial to a successful city. The City in History, which won the National Book Award, is “one of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century” ( Christian Science Monitor ).

77. BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM by James M. McPherson

This Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the Civil War era delves into the war and argues that Abraham Lincoln’s political acuity, and not the North’s larger population, was the deciding factor. Battle Cry of Freedom received rave reviews when it was published, with The New York Times writing: “[ Battle Cry of Freedom ] is the best one-volume treatment of its subject I have ever come across. It may actually be the best ever published. It is comprehensive yet succinct, scholarly without being pedantic, eloquent but unrhetorical. It is compellingly readable. I was swept away, feeling as if I had never heard the saga before.”

78. WHY WE CAN’T WAIT by Martin Luther King Jr.

The published version of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” this book is one of the most important documents in United States history. Why We Can’t Wait is a personal account of the civil rights movement, an explanation of the decision to use nonviolent resistance, and a moving reminder of the sacredness of equality. Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. wrote, “No child should graduate from high school without having read this book. In telling the story of the third American Revolution, it is as integral to American history as the Declaration of Independence.”

79. THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT by Edmund Morris

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt tells the story of Roosevelt’s irresistible rise to the presidency: a story so prodigal in its variety, so surprising in its turns of fate, that previous biographers have treated it as a series of haphazard episodes. This book, the only full study of Roosevelt’s pre-presidential years, brings all of his characteristics together into an educational and genuinely entertaining story.

80. STUDIES IN ICONOLOGY by Erwin Panofsky

Panofsky pioneered a multidisciplinary approach to art that stressed the importance of understanding art within its particular historical context. Studies in Iconology focused on Renaissance art, and Panofsky was able to unearth new symbols and elements that revealed hidden layers of meaning. Panofksy was, essentially, the real-life version of Robert Langdon, the “symbologist” of The Da Vinci Code .

81. THE FACE OF BATTLE by John Keegan

The Face of Battle bluntly confronts the psychological toll of warfare on individual soldiers. Examining three famous conflicts—Agincourt in 1415, Waterloo in 1815, and the Somme in 1916—Keegan described what happens in the fever of war, from the physically disgusting aspects of combat to the shameful execution of prisoners. Keegan was described as “the best military historian of our generation” by Tom Clancy, and The Face of Battle is considered his best book.

82. THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND by George Dangerfield

Published in 1935, this book suggests that the British Liberal Party’s decline was caused by four separate rebellions before World War I. This thesis ran counter to the common belief that the Liberal Party died after World War I. The Guardian wrote: “This is no staid parliamentary history, it is a sweeping cultural interpretation of what Dangerfield sees as the death of Victorian rationalism and sobriety.” Great for people who want to read about British politics.

83. VERMEER by Lawrence Gowing

Written by a painter and a self-taught art historian, this biography of Johannes Vermeer was praised for its nuanced and loving approach to Vermeer’s body of work. Vermeer was not an especially successful painter in his lifetime; after he died, he was forgotten until the nineteenth century. Gowing’s approach blurred the line between an artist and the art he creates, and the result is a book that uses Vermeer’s paintings ( Girl with a Pearl Earring among them) as a way into his character and elusive personality.

84. A BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan

This story of U.S. Army Lt Col Paul Vann and his consistent opposition to the Vietnam War won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Vann was an early proponent of the war, but his time on the ground—where he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery during the Battle of Ap Bac—convinced him that the corruption of the South Vietnamese government and the United States’ refusal to change tactics would doom the war. The New York Times Book Review wrote that “if there is one book that captures the Vietnam war in the sheer Homeric scale of its passion and folly, this book is it.”

85. WEST WITH THE NIGHT by Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham was the first person to fly nonstop from England to North America, and her memoir West with the Night chronicles her adventures and her drive to succeed. Her writing is so excellent that Ernest Hemingway raved about it to his editor, Maxwell Perkins: “Did you read Beryl Markham’s book, West with the Night ? . . . She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. . . . It really is a bloody wonderful book.”

86. THIS BOY’S LIFE by Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff’s memoir catalogues his travels with his mother as a teenager. Roaming the United States, the two grow closer as they try to stay one step ahead of Tobias’s abusive and sadistic stepfather. One critic marveled, “So absolutely clear and hypnotic is Tobias Wolff’s painful memoir of growing up in the 1950s that a reader wants to take it apart and find some simple way to describe why it works so beautifully. . . . Superb.” (Disclaimer: the Modern Library does not recommend disassembling books. We do recommend reading them, though.)

87. A MATHEMATICIAN’S APOLOGY by G. H. Hardy

A Mathematician’s Apology is about the beauty of “pure mathematics” (math with no practical application). A Cambridge scientist who focused on prime number theory, Hardy believed that “a mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.” Funnily enough, Hardy’s devotion to pure mathematics had a very real-world application when number theory was used to break the German’s Enigma code in World War II.

88. SIX EASY PIECES by Richard P. Feynman

A collection of brilliant and accessible lectures by a Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist.  Feynman was famous for his teaching ability, which earned him a reputation as “the Great Explainer.” While working at Cal Tech, though, Feynman became discouraged with how many bright students were dropping out of the physics program—so Feynman redesigned the curriculum and presented it himself to a test group of undergraduates. A great choice for readers who enjoyed Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics or Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry .

89. PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK by Annie Dillard

This Pulitzer Prize–winning book is a meditation on life in Tinker Creek, Virginia, and an homage to Thoreau’s Walden . The nameless narrator roams the Blue Ridge Mountains, observing the wildlife around her and writing in a reverent, spiritual tone. William Deresiewicz commented: “Her field notes on the physical world are recorded as researches toward the fundamental metaphysical conundra… What, in other words—with crayfish and copperheads and giant biting bugs, with creeks and stars and human beings with their sense of beauty—does God have in mind?”

90. THE GOLDEN BOUGH by James George Frazer

In The Golden Bough , Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer posited that all religions are based in a belief in magic. Frazer compared different cultures’ religions before coming to the conclusion that all societies transitioned from a belief in magic to a belief in a divine being to a belief in science. Although Frazer’s theory has fallen out of favor with contemporary anthropologists, writers as diverse as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Graves, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway were influenced by Frazer’s then-shocking arguments.

91. SHADOW AND ACT by Ralph Ellison

Published thirteen years after Invisible Man, these essays were being praised as “Ralph Ellison’s real autobiography—in the form of essays and interviews—as distinguished from the symbolic version given in his splendid novel” ( The New York Review of Books ). The New York Times commented, “In the course of these pages, the portrait of a strong, reserved and honest man emerges . . . by reaching so far into himself [Ellison] reaches right through to the other side and fetches forth truths he could have got in no other way.”

92. THE POWER BROKER by Robert A. Caro

The Power Broker is the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Robert Moses, the man who used his political connections and business acumen to shape New York City. Caro’s detailed take on this abrasive visionary is over 1,300 pages and is considered one of the most extraordinary biographies of all time. Even Jane Jacobs—who famously opposed Moses’s attempt to build a highway through the West Village in her book The Life and Death of American Cities —praised The Power Broker as “sheer good reading” and “an immense public service.”

93. THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION by Richard Hofstadter

Written as a series of mini-biographies, this 1948 book argued that all U.S. politicians were united—to varying degrees—by a common belief in self-help, competition, and free enterprise. Still, Hofstadter was critical about many of these leaders: His portrait of Thomas Jefferson reveals a brilliant if inconsistent thinker, and his take on Abraham Lincoln suggests a man motivated primarily by ambition. Hofstadter would win the Pulitzer Prize twice, once in 1956 and again in 1964.

94. THE CONTOURS OF AMERICAN HISTORY by William Appleman Williams

Williams identified the United States as an imperial power long before such an argument was popular, and linked the U.S. history of expansionism to British political history—a controversial and important argument in 1961.  For all its literary significance, the book is dense: one reviewer complained that Williams had “produced a volume so packed with erudite and obscure references and sesquipedalian words that it defeated one reader completely” ( Kirkus Reviews).

95. THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE by Herbert Croly

The co-founder of the New Republic, Herbert Croly was one of the most famous and respected public intellectuals of early twentieth-century America. The Promise of American Life is an argument for a nation that, through education, unionization, and social welfare, provides all of its citizens with an equal shot at the American Dream. Theodore Roosevelt reviewed the book for a weekly magazine and proclaimed it “the most profound and illuminating study of our National conditions.”

96. IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote

In 1959, Truman Capote read a 300-word article in The New York Times about the savage murder of an entire family. Intrigued, he traveled to Holcomb, Kansas, to investigate with his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee. As Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he writes with both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood grew out of Capote’s 8,000 pages of notes and interviews, and is the second-biggest-selling true crime book in publishing history.

97. THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER by Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm uses the Jeffrey MacDonald case—in which a doctor was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two daughters and which was turned into Joe McGinniss’s true crime bestseller Fatal Vision —as a launching-off point for exploring the journalist-subject relationship, which Malcolm argues is one of mutual manipulation.

98. THE TAMING OF CHANCE by Ian Hacking

Statistics saturate our conversations, our news, and our governments—but how, and why, did these numbers attain such outsize influence? Hacking argues that our belief in statistics reflects our attitudes toward randomness: Do we believe that randomness exists? Or do we believe that chance is merely ignorance of undiscovered laws of the universe? Although this book may not be for everyone, it did earn rave reviews from the American Historical Review and the Journal of the American Statistical Association (“very pleasant reading”). A book that has shaped how we talk about probability and our attitudes toward science.

99. OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS by Anne Lamott

Subtitled “A Journal of My Son’s First Year,” Anne Lamott’s hilarious account of being a single mother at age thirty-five was heralded as a “smart, funny, and comforting” ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ) story written by “a gifted novelist and journalist” ( The Washington Post ). Lamott, a former alcoholic, writes about the sleep deprivation, the moments of bliss, and the confusion that accompanies parenthood. The Chicago Tribune praised Lamott as “a wonderfully lithe writer. . . . Anyone who has ever had a hard time facing a perfectly ordinary day will identify.”

100. MELBOURNE by Lord David Cecil

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, was a prime minister of England best known as the political guide and close friend of the young Queen Victoria (there were rumors that she would marry him, despite their forty-year age difference). A politician who was bored by politics, Lord Melbourne nevertheless created a stable coalition of moderates. Lord Cecil’s two-volume biography (The Young Melbourne and Lord M) was heralded as “brilliant, beautiful, and utterly absorbing” by The New York Times Book Review and Cecil was dubbed “A historian of the heart” by L. P. Hartley.

Top 100 Talking Points

On July 21, 1998, the Radcliffe Publishing Course compiled and released its own list of the century’s top 100 novels, at the request of the Modern Library editorial board .

Which books would you omit and which would you add to our list? What is your top ten, or top one hundred?

Any list of “best novels” is open to debate. What do you think should be the criteria for judging the best novels of the century? What makes a book one of the best?

A majority of the writers on the list are Americans. In what ways does this reflect a twentieth-century literary balance of power? How does the racial composition of the list reflect these issues?

If books of all languages had been considered, which other great novels might have made the list? What might the linguistic composition of the list look like? Predict a top ten list of books of all languages. And predict a top ten list of the best books of all time.

How do you think the novel will have changed a hundred years from now? Do you think novels will be read on paper then, or will all books be electronic? Will this fundamentally change the experience of reading a novel?

Novelists go in and out of fashion and many of these books were what today would be called quite unsuccessful. Are literary and commercial success incompatible?

Is it possible to compare books as different as Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, and Brave New World? Are there any features that unite these three books? More widely, are there any literary features that unite the best books as a whole? How would you compare one of the books on the list to your favorite book that did not make the list?

There are eight women novelists represented on the list. Which other women novelists might have been included? Would there be more women novelists on a list compiled from books published in the nineteenth century? From a list of books published in the last fifty years?

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The 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years

Slate’s books team selects the definitive works of reporting, memoir, and argument of the past quarter-century..

“As a writer, I prefer to get bossed around by my notebook and the facts therein,” David Carr wrote in his reported memoir The Night of the Gun , one of Slate’s 50 best nonfiction books of the past 25 years. Carr was mulling over the difference between fiction and nonfiction, the novelist’s art and the reporter’s craft. “They may not lead to a perfect, seamless arc, but they lead to a story that coheres in another way, because it is mostly true.”

In the work of canon-building , nonfiction tends to get short shrift . While memoir has gained a foothold in the literary conversation, narrative and reported nonfiction tend to be ignored. It can be easy to dismiss these forms as the worthwhile but fundamentally unliterary assemblage of facts into paragraphs. Yet what reader hasn’t had her mind expanded, her heart plucked, her conscience stirred by a nonfiction book? The responsibility the writers of such books take on, to arrange the facts of the world into a form that makes sense of its tumult, can produce in the reader a kind of clarity of thought that no other genre can match.

Slate’s list of the definitive nonfiction books written in English in the past quarter-century includes beautifully written memoirs but also books of reportage, collections of essays, travelogues, works of cultural criticism, passionate arguments, even a compendium of household tips. What they all share is a commitment to “mostly truth” and the belief that digging deep to find a real story—whether it’s located in your memory, on dusty archive shelves, in Russian literature, in a slum in Mumbai—is a task worth undertaking.

Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication.

Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology  by Lawrence Weschler (Pantheon, 1995)

“What kind of place  is  this exactly?” Lawrence Weschler asks the proprietor of the oddball Los Angeles storefront museum he stumbles into one day, where the exhibits are surprising, whimsical, and in fact often (but not always!) entirely made up. In Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Weschler spins the story of the Museum of Jurassic Technology’s unlikely creation into an entirely winning meditation on human ingenuity and creativity, a thought experiment about how the mind responds to being  amazed . The result is   a deceptively simple book that—like the 16 th -century “wonder cabinets” that, Weschler explains, served as the very first museums—opens to reveal astonishments untold.

Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder

By Lawrence Weschler

Into the Wild  by Jon Krakauer (Villard, 1996)

In April 1992, Christopher McCandless, a young man in search of wild, untrammeled experience, hiked into the Alaskan wilderness. Four months later, his body was found by a moose hunter. Krakauer sets out to unravel the mystery of how this adventure ended in tragedy, and the tiny mistakes that cost McCandless his life, by reading McCandless’ journals, talking to his friends, and traveling to the abandoned bus where McCandless spent his last months. Through his reporting of McCandless’ passionate and foolhardy journey into transcendence—and writing about his own, similar youthful experiences—Krakauer explores our modern relationship to the wilderness and the deep desire many young people feel to seek out unthinkable danger.

Into the Wild

By Jon Krakauer

Madeleine’s World: A Biography of a Three-Year-Old  by Brian Hall (Houghton Mifflin, 1997)

Hall’s quixotic premise—to write a detailed biography of his own daughter, Madeleine, from infancy through toddlerhood to small-kidness—works only because Hall is such a curious observer and imaginative interpreter of his subject. That subject is, of course, Madeleine but also childhood , the period of almost incomprehensible development between zero and 3, the simultaneous flowerings of action, reason, and self-awareness. Even nonparents will be fascinated by  Madeleine’s World  for the ways it delves deep into the thought patterns and imaginative leaps readers half-remember from their own childhoods; for parents, the book—in its insistence that to  pay attention  is to love—can be almost unbearably moving.

Madeleine’s World

By Brian Hall

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997)

This deeply researched, profoundly empathetic story of cultural miscommunication in medicine focuses on the case of Lia Lee, the doted-on youngest daughter in a family of Hmong refugees in rural Northern California. Lia had an unusual and severe form of epilepsy. Doctors at the American hospital where her family sought treatment prescribed an elaborate drug regimen to control her seizures. Her family, on the other hand, believed the doctors’ recommendations made the child sicker and failed to address what they saw as the cause of her illness: spirits that had kidnapped her soul and needed to be placated with animal sacrifices. Fadiman shows great respect for the Hmongs and their culture, devoting alternate chapters to their beliefs and history, without ever pretending that their folk cures did Lia any good. It’s Fadiman’s commitment to sympathetically depicting both sides without ceding all judgment entirely that makes this case study so impressive. Both sides were united in their devotion to the little girl’s welfare, and Fadiman ultimately argues that if the physicians had been more willing to better understand the Hmong people and engage with Lia’s parents and their beliefs, they might have saved Lia from her sad fate.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

By Anne Fadiman

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown, 1997)

Although he’s now best known for his 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, Wallace made his reputation, particularly among younger readers in the late ’90s, as an essayist and a very particular sort of journalist. His editors at Harper’s sent him to a state fair and on a holiday cruise, pastimes whose reputations for carefree, middle American fun seemed hopelessly alien to Wallace himself, a hyperactive observational machine desperate to shed his own self-consciousness but incapable of doing so. The results, included in this collection of essays, were hilarious and revelatory; who knew it was even possible to write that way, to acknowledge how difficult it is for a certain kind of media-soaked mind to stop making associations and references, to forget itself? In these pieces, Wallace makes himself—and his doomed attempts to fit in and have a kind of fun he doesn’t really believe in—the butt of the joke, and a very funny joke it is (although less so in light of his suicide in 2008). This collection also includes some top-notch writing on tennis, and Wallace’s still-relevant essay on television and fiction, “E Unibus Pluram,” but the cruise ship and state fair pieces still shine the brightest.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

By David Foster Wallace

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer (North Point Press, 1998)

Surely the funniest book ever written about writer’s block, this “study” of D.H. Lawrence, a favorite author of Dyer’s, is more travelogue and memoir than the “sober, academic” work the author originally set out to pen. Pinging from Paris to Rome to Greece to Taos, New Mexico, Dyer makes literary pilgrimages that result in no epiphanies. One place is too hot to get anything done; another is too beautiful. One is too cacophonous; another is too tranquil. He comically works on a novel to avoid his Lawrence book when he’s not working on the Lawrence book to avoid his novel. (“At first I’d had an overwhelming urge to write both books but these two desires had worn each other down to the point where I had no urge to write either.”) His ennui is operatic and ridiculous. And yet, through the cracks between Dyer’s torpor and his dissatisfaction, a tribute to Lawrence—that great proponent of passionate living—finally emerges. Lawrence knew well the paradox at the center of a writer’s life, which is that life is the subject of writing and yet writing is not living; the two cancel each other out. The only sensible response to this absurd dilemma is laughter, and Dyer’s readers will enjoy plenty of that.

Out of Sheer Rage

By Geoff Dyer

The Tennis Partner: A Doctor’s Story of Friendship and Loss  by Abraham Verghese (HarperCollins, 1998)

Abraham Verghese was a doctor at a teaching hospital in El Paso, Texas, when he met medical student David Smith, a burned-out ex–tennis pro from Australia.  The Tennis Partner  is, in part, the story of the friendship that grew between the two men as they interact at work and on the tennis court, with Verghese encouraging Smith to rekindle his love of the game and Smith counseling Verghese through the difficult end of his marriage. If it were only a closely observed, intimate portrait of a close and meaningful friendship, the book would already be an enormous success. But Smith, an addict in recovery, falls back into drug use, and the final third of the book is both a suspenseful portrait of a doctor trying to save a life and a moving meditation on the limits of what friends can do when facing the monster of addiction. Carrying us through it all is Verghese’s voice: empathetic, rueful, honest to a fault, and always kind.

The Tennis Partner

By Abraham Verghese

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

Media reports during the genocidal 1994 massacres in Rwanda were spotty and confusing. Gourevitch, a journalist, was determined to understand how a country united by a single language and religion could become so divided that one part of its population would suddenly turn on the other, killing a million of their fellow citizens, including their own neighbors. He traveled in the African nation for nine months, visiting sites of slaughter, interviewing war criminals in prison camps, gathering the stories of those who escaped by the skin of their teeth. But We Wish to Inform You is more than a masterpiece of war reportage. Gourevitch digs down to the roots of the genocide, locating them in the leftover resentments fostered by colonialism and a civil war. Above all, he blames the schemes of the ruling Hutu elite, who deliberately engineered the massacre by using radio, Rwanda’s primary means of mass communication, to foment murderous hatred among Hutus toward the Tutsi minority. This plan went unhampered by international intervention, even after Western leaders became aware of the atrocities being perpetrated. Although beautifully written, this book is not easy to read, but the insights Gourevitch arrives at are more essential than ever.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

By Philip Gourevitch

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House  by Cheryl Mendelson (Scribner, 1999)

Beautifully written and nearly deranged in its comprehensiveness,  Home Comforts  holds what seems an entire culture’s collected wisdom on fabric selection, lighting design, clothes folding, waste disposal, dishwashing, food storage, table setting, closet organization, and piano tuning. Mendelson’s irreplaceable guide to stain removal spans four pages, from  adhesive tape to crayon to mustard all the way to  urine . But this isn’t just a handbook; above all,  Home Comforts  is animated by Mendelson’s respect and affection for the duties and pleasures of housekeeping. Every one of its 884 pages is an absolute joy to read, and no book is more deeply comforting to neat freaks—or inspirational to slobs.

Home Comforts

By Cheryl Mendelson

The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong (Knopf, 2000)

After 9/11, Armstrong, a former nun turned popular historian of religion, seemed like some kind of prophet: She had published her history of fundamentalism, The Battle for God, the preceding year. Readers turned to her in droves, trying to understand what felt like a sudden, unanticipated, overwhelming menace. As a result, Armstrong’s take on fundamentalism has shaped our understanding of the phenomenon more than perhaps any other thinker’s. Fortunately, hers is an insightful analysis, identifying the similarities among fundamentalists of all three major monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Most importantly, she recognizes that all forms of fundamentalism are reactions to the dislocation and confusion of modernity even as fundamentalists embrace modern tools like mass and social media. Lucid, wide-ranging, and persuasive, The Battle for God provides a framework for understanding more than the three religions it focuses on. It only becomes more relevant with every year.

The Battle for God

By Karen Armstrong

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (Simon & Schuster, 2000)

If you were a semifeckless, amply flawed but eminently clever twentysomething Gen Xer at the turn of the 21 st century, and you were writing a memoir about how your parents died within five months of each other when you were a senior in college, leaving you to care for your 8-year-old brother, you faced a choice. You could present your story with purported sincerity (as pretty much anyone in their late 20s would do today). Or, if you were painfully aware that so much of what fronts as sincere is in fact ungenuine or calculating sentimentality and otherwise bogus, you could come up with a new style. It would need to be a style that insisted on scrutinizing and mocking and apologizing for itself, that veered vertiginously between the playful and the stark. Eggers, of course, chose the latter, producing a book that was hugely influential—that still is hugely influential, to judge by, among other things, the prevalence of a certain exclamation mark–bedazzled school of journalism. Eggers himself was inspired by David Foster Wallace, but unlike Wallace, Eggers was able to hack his way out of the thickets of self-consciousness, or maybe it was even further into them, and arrive at a rock, a kernel of reality, which was his love for, and commitment to, his brother Toph. He left a pretty good path behind him, too.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

By Dave Eggers

Borrowed Finery : A Memoir by Paula Fox (Henry Holt, 2001)

It’s true that Fox’s memoir of the first 20 or so years of her life was published during a boom in autobiographies about awful childhoods, and Fox’s Jazz Age–style bohemian parents were …  difficult. They abandoned her to assorted relatives, friends, and strangers for years at a time, bouncing her from an elderly minister’s house in upstate New York to a Floridian resort, a Los Angeles apartment, a Cuban sugar plantation, and a fancy Montréal boarding school. Her charming, mercurial father drank too much and broke promises, while her mother simply rejected her. But Fox clearly has no interest in crafting a tale of woe. Instead,  Borrowed Finery  is a kind of transcription of memory in its strange spottiness. It comes in pieces, a recording of those incidents, big and small, that are for whatever reason lit up as if by spotlights when we cast our minds back over the great, dark stretches of the past. This memoir is less a narrative than a collage of mysteriously potent moments: a favorite teacher’s kitchen, a dead puppy, a new dress. Best of all is Fox’s prose style—unostentatiously simple, lucid, distilled down to quintessential detail—as close to perfection as the English language gets.

Borrowed Finery

By Paula Fox

American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center  by William Langewiesche (North Point Press, 2002)

“The buildings were not buildings anymore, and the place where they fell had become a blank slate,” William Langewiesche writes of ground zero, the site of the World Trade Center towers’ destruction on Sept. 11. “Among the ruins now, an unscripted experiment in American life had gotten underway.” Langewiesche had nine months of unfettered access to every meeting, decision, and subterranean hellhole at ground zero, which resulted in this astonishingly detailed and deeply emotional look at the labor of thousands of city employees, engineers, and construction workers as they cleaned up the burning, toxic, dangerous wreckage of Lower Manhattan. American Ground is an inspiring portrait of American ingenuity when faced with an impossible task and a gripping exploration of the American psyche in the aftermath of a great shift in the world order.

American Ground

By William Langewiesche

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx  by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Scribner, 2003)

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent 10 years reporting on a group of young men and women in the west Bronx as they paired off, grew up, escaped, returned, and tried to raise children of their own. Written with a moment-to-moment emotional intensity that drops the reader into the hearts of Jessica, Coco, Lourdes, Mercedes, and Foxy,  Random Family  crackles with immediacy. Brilliantly observant of the social codes and structures that rule the communities it portrays, the book reads like a Jane Austen novel, its heroines constricted by circumstance as well as their own personalities. The most moving moments of this work of deep reportage come when its women find brief moments of peace in good relationships, in family, in jobs they enjoy; but always trouble waits around the corner, to “break open like a burst of billiard balls.”

Random Family

By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation  by Jeff Chang (St. Martin’s Press, 2005)

A sweeping cultural history of the dominant American art form of the past 50 years,  Can’t Stop Won’t Stop  traces hip-hop back to its birth in the South Bronx and then back even further, to the Jamaican toasters whose style inspired New York’s first rappers. Chang fills his book with the names and stories of the kind of small-time heroes whose creativity and inspiration get overlooked in so many cultural narratives: the party promoters whose DIY bashes in dingy apartments drew crowds and DJs, the dance crews who drove the community’s passion for this new music, the graffiti artists who brought street style downtown. But he also highlights the stars, from Kool Herc to Rakim to Ice Cube, who innovated and popularized the form for an audience beyond those DIY parties. And in his propulsive, idiosyncratic style, Chang situates the revolution in the political and social context of 20 th -century New York (and America): deeply racist, economically cruel, and ready to explode.

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

By Jeff Chang

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic   by Alison Bechdel ( Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

In this moving memoir-as-investigation of her own father’s hidden life, Alison Bechdel combines the skills of an experienced cartoonist—expressive drawing, concise storytelling, mordant humor—with the ingenuity and curiosity of a reporter. Starting with her own journals, Bechdel uncovers dark treasures of her childhood and adolescence as the daughter of a closeted funeral home director in small town Pennsylvania; her clever narrative structure returns to crucial moments again and again, polishing them and holding them up to the light to reveal new facets of meaning. Young Alison and her dandyish father were inversions of each other: “While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him,” she writes, “he was attempting to express something feminine through me.” This understated yet beautiful book, an attempt to puzzle out his life and death, thrillingly animates and embodies their relationship.

By Alison Bechdel

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007)

We are a culture intoxicated by apocalypse and ruin, forever telling one another stories about what we’d do to survive should civilization as we know it collapse. But what if humanity itself went poof and left behind the entire apparatus of our existence without a single soul remaining to start over? That is the irresistible premise of Weisman’s book, a thought experiment substantiated by deep research into what it takes to keep the built world functioning and what has happened in the few places (Chernobyl, the Korean Demilitarized Zone) where there has been no one around to prop it up. Weisman, a science journalist, projects a week-by-week progression of flooding subway tunnels, farms reclaimed by grassland, toppling skyscrapers, domestic animals reverting to their feral state, and, less romantically, nuclear reactors melting down, chemical plants exploding into poisonous bonfires, and a vast mass of discarded plastics drifting around the world’s oceans for ages to come. The planet would eventually recover, he assures his readers—if “assure” is even the right word: The air would clear, the waters sweeten, and the animals, birds, and insects would take up residence in our old haunts. It’s a scenario both beautiful and terrifying, the original definition of the sublime, and executed with a methodical bravado that’s breathtaking.

The World Without Us

By Alan Weisman

The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own.  by David Carr (Simon & Schuster, 2008)

In 2008, David Carr had been a respected New York Timesman for years, the paper’s media reporter and a beloved mentor of countless young journalists. But two decades before that, Carr was a junkie—a crack addict who washed out of journalism jobs, who was rung up by the Minneapolis cops nine times, and whose twin daughters were born 2½ months premature to a mother who’d smoked crack the night before their delivery. For  The Night of the Gun , Carr applied his reporter’s eye to his own story, digging into those lost years and uncovering painful and frightening truths about the man he was while in the throes of addiction. Released into a post–James Frey, post–JT LeRoy era when skeptics found memoir increasingly unreliable, Carr’s live-wire combination of autobiography and journalism explores not only the secrets of his own life but also the ways in which the stories we all tell ourselves evolve into the versions we can live with.  The Night of the Gun  makes plain how hard, and how necessary, it is to face the past with diligence and humility.

The Night of the Gun

By David Carr

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (Pantheon, 2009)

Holmes is our greatest living biographer. Whether he’s recounting Percy Shelley’s rebelliousness, Samuel Coleridge’s descent into opium addiction (Holmes specializes in the Romantic poets), or his own penchant for walking along the paths and roads his subjects once tread, everything he writes is a positive delight to read—charming, unostentatiously erudite, moving. In this unusual work, he considers several British scientists and explorers as the 18 th century gave way to the 19 th . Far from soberly rational, these thinkers were as galvanized by the exhilarating spirit of their times as the poets Holmes usually writes about. William Herschel, who identified the first new planet in centuries; Humphry Davy, who invented electrochemistry and experimented with nitrous oxide; Mungo Park, who searched for Timbuktu; and others were as much adventurers of the imagination as any artist, Holmes insists. Coleridge (the subject of a two-volume Holmes biography and a friend of Davy’s) declared science to be driven by “the passion of Hope” and a vision of transforming the world for the better. Holmes urges his readers to understand that at one time poetry and science stood with linked arms upon the peak of discovery and looked at each other with “a wild surmise” like Cortez and his men in Keats’ sonnet . Here is a book capable of flooding a reader with the same sense of astonishment.

The Age of Wonder

By Richard Holmes

Columbine by Dave Cullen (Twelve, 2009)

The 1999 slaying of 13 people at Columbine High School in Colorado was, as Cullen notes in this definitive account of the tragedy, “the first major hostage standoff of the cellphone age.” As Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, heavily armed, still roamed the hallways of the building, the media, desperate for any information, began to spin a tale of the Trenchcoat Mafia and disaffected goths lashing out at the jocks who’d bullied them. Students hiding from the shooters saw these reports on classroom TVs and echoed them back via their mobile phones. A mythos grew up around the school shooting, the deadliest up to that point, almost entirely fictional, and much of it difficult to dispel. Harris, Cullen concludes, was merely an angry psychopath, and Klebold, his suicidal apostle, but in the aftermath, everyone from onetime adolescent misfits to evangelicals with martyr complexes twisted this bald reality into a story that confirmed their views of the world. Cullen, who was on the scene himself within 15 hours of the crime, spent 10 years teasing out the legends from the truth. The result is an extraordinary work of reportage, a revelation, not just of the shootings themselves but of the myriad misbegotten attempts to find meaning in them.

By Dave Cullen

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon  by David Grann (Doubleday, 2009)

Percy Fawcett was the last of the great white explorers, a dashing Brit who, in the first decades of the 20 th  century, became obsessed with a fabled ancient civilization deep within the Amazon jungle. For years, Fawcett hunted for his “lost city of Z,” even as he was betrayed by collaborators, weakened by hunger, and attacked by poisonous ants and carnivorous fish. Z finally cost Fawcett his life, along with that of his son, when they both disappeared on a 1925 search. Grann—“nearly 40 years old, with a blossoming waistline”—resolves to tell Fawcett’s story and soon finds himself stuck in the jungle himself, captured, absurdly, by the same lust for discovery that killed his subject. A signal work of narrative nonfiction that both celebrates and satirizes the time-honored tale of the adventurer attacking the wilderness with “little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose.”

The Lost City of Z

By David Grann

Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981)  and  Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011)  by Stephen Sondheim (Knopf, 2010–11)

Plenty of writers have collected their life’s work into two volumes and assessed it, but no one has done so with as much wit, ruthless honesty, and good humor as Stephen Sondheim, which makes sense, because few writers’ work matches Sondheim’s in those exact qualities. Crucially, these collected lyrics aren’t an exercise in self-gratification; Sondheim is insightful and unsparing about his own mistakes, even the ones that only he is smart enough to see. Take, for example, his notes on the perfectly lovely  Company  song “The Little Things You Do Together”: He bemoans the song’s glibness, calls its tight rhyme schemes “as tiresome as they are elaborate,” and mourns a quatrain he replaced with one he now sees as worse. The result is a pocket history of the past half-century of musical theater, a crash course in the collaborative creative process, and a bottomless craft lecture for anyone who aspires to make something beautiful.

Finishing the Hat

By Stephen Sondheim

Look, I Made a Hat

The immortal life of henrietta lacks  by rebecca skloot (crown, 2010).

In 1951, a 30-year-old black woman was diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The cells biopsied from Henrietta Lacks’ tumor, dubbed HeLa cells, soon became the basis for decades of crucial medical research: The polio vaccine, IVF techniques, and advancements in gene mapping all owe their success to the HeLa cells taken from Lacks’ body. Skloot’s impeccably reported book tells a remarkable story of scientific development but also makes an impassioned argument about the way medicine has always used black and poor bodies. In the process of reporting the book, Skloot befriended Lacks’ descendants. Rather than harming the author’s “objectivity,” these friendships transform what was already a very good science book into a deeply humane and crucial interrogation of how technological progress churns along, indifferent to the lives fueling its course.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu (Knopf, 2010)

It seems obvious today that the internet would trend toward the consolidation of power in the hands of a few major players, but nearly 10 years ago, Wu raised hackles when he argued that all information industries move from openness to concentration unless outside forces intervene. In this book, he follows the histories of telephony, radio, movies, and television, observing that early periods of innovation and access for small, nimble players (such as local telephone companies) always yielded to centralized control. Hollywood tycoons in particular sought to bring every aspect of moviemaking, from the talent to the theaters, under their sway, and only government action succeeded in breaking their stranglehold. The fantasy that the internet’s distributed structure (it has no “master switch”) would keep it forever free of monopolies was a point of faith among the medium’s early adopters, and the intervening years have only underlined how prophetic Wu was in identifying their mistake. He did get some things wrong—social media was a fledgling force at the time, and Google then seemed an admirably open gateway to content compared with Apple—but the stories of those other industries remain a potent warning about the fate of any crucial communications medium in a society that fails to protect itself.

The Master Switch

The new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by michelle alexander (the new press, 2010).

Alexander was an academic specializing in civil rights when, in the early 2000s, she walked past a protest sign condemning the War on Drugs as the “new Jim Crow.” Her first impulse was to shrug off this claim as conspiracy theory and to go back to what most of her middle-class black friends and colleagues considered their top priority: protecting affirmative action. But over the years, Alexander’s work as a lawyer for the ACLU ultimately led her to agree with the sign’s author. Far from being “just another institution infected with racial bias,” she argues, the criminal justice system, and particularly its drug laws, has replicated the effect of Jim Crow laws, reinforcing a racial caste system in which large numbers of poor black men have been barred from anything better than the most menial employment and from equal participation in civic life. Riveting to read, The New Jim Crow became a surprise bestseller, and it transformed forever the way thinkers and activists view the phenomenon of mass incarceration.

The New Jim Crow

By Michelle Alexander

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

What Batuman, a staff writer for the New Yorker , loves most about Russian literature, and about Russianness itself, are what she calls its “mystifications,” specifically, “the feeling of only half understanding.” In this delectable collection of essays, she describes her travels to such perplexing locales as Tolstoy’s former estate, Uzbekistan, a monastery on an Adriatic island, and graduate school. Hers is a lifelong quest for the grandiose, the melancholic, and—crucially—the absurd. Batuman seems to attract Borgesian peculiarity like a magnet. She journeys to Samarkand to study a language of dubious authenticity, in which one of the few remaining written texts takes the form of love letters between the colors red and green. When Aeroflot loses her luggage, the clerk asks her, “Are you familiar with our Russian phrase, resignation of the soul?” She gets talked into judging a boys’ “leg contest” at a Hungarian summer camp. And while most academic conferences are pretty dull, she attends one in which an old lady turned to another guest and demanded, “I would like to know if it is TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME.” When it comes to eccentricity, Batuman holds up her end—her Ph.D. dissertation compared novels to double-entry bookkeeping, and she talked her way into a Tolstoy conference by proposing a paper arguing that the novelist was murdered. While The Possessed is unlikely to enhance readers’ understanding of Dostoevsky, by the end they’ll be having so much fun they won’t care.

The Possessed

By Elif Batuman

Travels in Siberia   by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

A kind of capstone to a career spent visiting seemingly empty landscapes and finding the warm hearts that beat inside them,  Travels in Siberia  exhibits all of Ian Frazier’s remarkable travel-writing talents. He is deeply curious about everything and everyone he meets. He is patient and observant. He is a well-read, brilliant contextualizer. He effortlessly brings the past to the present and makes connections between person and place, history and destiny. And he’s funny as hell, one of the funniest writers alive. ’Til the day that you die you will remember with squirming laughter Frazier’s descriptions of the nightmarish mosquitoes of Western Siberia, which “came at us as if shot from a fire hose”: “There are the majority, of course, who just bite you anywhere. Those are your general practitioner mosquitoes, or GPs. Then you have your specialists—your eye, ear, nose, and throat mosquitoes.”

Travels in Siberia

By Ian Frazier

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

At once intimate and sweeping, Wilkerson’s history offers a landmark account of one of the epochal changes in American society: The movement, over six decades, of approximately 6 million black citizens from the South to the Midwest, West, and Northeast. Many of these transplants behaved, as Wilkerson notes, more like refugees than anything else, fleeing Jim Crow laws to form enclaves united by their ties to the towns they’d left behind. (Detaching from the South, one of her sources told her, was like “getting unstuck from a magnet.”) Wilkerson pulls in the book’s focus by following the lives of three individuals: a sharecropper’s wife, a labor organizer, and a doctor who would go on to count Ray Charles among his patients. Although each migrated at a different time for different reasons, their stories share the common thread of flight from Southern society’s pervasive, cruel, and dehumanizing racism. What these hopeful travelers found once they left was often exploitative, but the slight advantages they discovered under those other suns became the springboards for that most American of dreams: a better life.

The Warmth of Other Suns

By Isabel Wilkerson

Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America  by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Little, Brown, 2011)

Dreamy, meandering, and ravishing, Rhodes-Pitts’ ode to Harlem summons up the ghosts of the “Mecca of Black America.” As a Texas-born pilgrim to this vexed promised land, she found herself drawn not to the obvious inspirational sites, such as Langston Hughes’ house, but to the remnants of Harlemites past who have been overlooked or half-forgotten: a literary scrapbooker named Alexander Gumby, a photographer specializing in portraits of the dead, the operator of a wax museum. A neighborhood is defined by its eccentrics, and Rhodes-Pitts seeks them out, chatting with old ladies, searching for the author of inspirational messages chalked on the sidewalks, subjecting herself to the lectures of one of the last members of a nearly extinct black nationalist movement. She matches up archival photos of vacant lots and storefronts with the new, gentrifying constructions erupting in their place. Harlem Is Nowhere is a work less of history than of mood, a delicate phantasm, evocative of the aspirations and losses of a remarkable place and all the people who have made it their sanctuary and their home.

Harlem Is Nowhere 

By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick (Pantheon, 2011)

To say Gleick’s history of information and communication is wide-ranging is a bit of an understatement. According to Gleick, we are all “creatures of the information,” from the words that make up most of our interactions with one another to the code embedded in our DNA. This book constellates around Claude Shannon, a Bell Labs mathematician and cryptographer who founded information theory with a 1948 paper considering how to measure what it takes to transmit a message from a sender to a recipient—even if that recipient is just a subatomic particle on the other side of the universe wondering which way to spin. Human beings are some of the universe’s most energetic signal transmitters, and when Gleick isn’t explaining information’s relevance to Brownian motion and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem , he’s deep in the more engaging stories of African talking drums, Ada Lovelace’s nascent computer programs , and how the telegram changed the world. Information is not the same thing as knowledge, however, and it is knowledge that this book imparts in great, glorious fistfuls, as it loops through time and space, shedding brilliant light on first one corner of experience, then another. Its breadth and grasp are dazzling.

The Information

By James Gleick

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity  by Katherine Boo (Random House, 2012)

The product of more than three years of in-depth reporting in a slum near Mumbai airport called Annawadi, Katherine Boo’s masterpiece is a Kafka story for our times, the tale of determined strivers so hemmed in by circumstance, official disregard, and rampant corruption that even those who succeed are punished for their accomplishments. In its portrait of the garbage-sorter Abdul, who winds up in court after a false accusation from a neighbor,  Behind the Beautiful Forevers  depicts a young man who loses everything he’s earned and comes out on the other side declaring that “something had happened to his heart.” His painful moral decision-making reflects a book in which Boo is always careful to portray the ways her subjects exert agency within their own lives, even at the cost of their health and safety. A propulsive, dramatic, heartbreaking book.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

By Katherine Boo

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon (Scribner, 2012)

Having interviewed more than 300 people over the course of 10 years, Solomon explores the experience of parenting a child fundamentally different from oneself. The children of these parents are, as Solomon recounts, “deaf or dwarfs; they have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia or multiple severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people conceived in rape or who commit crimes; they are transgender.” Far From the Tree is mammoth, but its oceanic scope is essential to convey the infinite variety in humanity’s ability to cope with the differences among us. As the collator of all this material, Solomon makes his own emotional and intellectual growth one of the book’s themes, as he describes how his subjects helped him shed the blinders he once wore. At the heart of this extraordinary project is the mystery of what makes a group of people a family. Blood, it turns out, is not always enough, but neither are many other commonalities in identity. Building true kinship starts as a choice and then often comes to seem inevitable, an act of will in the face of daunting odds that ends up feeling like a miracle.

Far From the Tree

By Andrew Solomon

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane (Viking, 2012)

Macfarlane cares passionately about two things: landscape and language. This vividly sensuous account of several walking tours, plus a respectable bout of sailing, describes his experiences with ancient routes, most created by peoples whose names have been lost to time, but whose imprint on Earth lives on thanks to the countless feet that have followed them. He argues that similar age-old paths crisscross the sea, remembered by sailors even if they leave no visual trace. Macfarlane’s desire to more fully experience the places he visits—mostly in Britain but also in Spain and Tibet—is so keen he takes off his shoes to feel the rock, grass, heather, and (in one painful incident) gorse under his feet. His travels aren’t without human interest, either; they always seem to include meetings with fascinating poets and artists, like a man who plans to suspend a life-size figure made of human bones and calf skin inside a boulder whose location only a handful of people will ever know. Like all of Macfarlane’s work, this book is a charm against the streamlined, the global, the generically virtual. It is a paean to the irreducible reality of stone and leaf and wave.

The Old Ways

By Robert Macfarlane

People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)

The secret of a great true crime book is not how the author writes about the crime, but how skillfully he articulates the effect it has on the survivors and the secrets it betrays about the society that let it happen. Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the story of the murder of Lucie Blackman, a 21-year-old former flight attendant who disappeared while working as a hostess in the city’s Roppongi district. Her body was found in a cave seven months later. Parry offers a devastating portrait of the inadequacies of Japan’s criminal justice system, as it struggled to comprehend that a serial killer was responsible. Eventually, the son of a Korean-Japanese businessman was convicted, absurdly, of abducting and dismembering Blackman but not of killing her. Blackman’s warring divorced parents play major roles in Parry’s account, from the father who kept the search for Lucie going to the embittered mother, who could not resist the opportunity to strike back at her ex. The killer himself is an impenetrable cipher, but Parry portrays the people whose lives he devastated in all their complexity: heroic, flawed, stricken, and ultimately sympathetic.

People Who Eat Darkness

By Richard Lloyd Parry

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright (Knopf, 2013)

This book might just be the perfect exposé: a consummate journalist writing about an outrageously malfeasant subject and raising urgent themes. Wright fell down this particular rabbit hole after writing for the New Yorker about the Church of Scientology’s wooing of celebrities, and he came in for some tweaking over the extremely measured tone he employs while recounting the shenanigans of the religion’s founder, science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, and the even-worse behavior of his successor, David Miscavige. But Wright’s refusal to rant and rave—even when presented with countless examples of church skullduggery, mendacity, and brutality, not to mention the sheer, flagrant kookiness—turns out to be his secret weapon. Making every effort to be fair, allowing for the bad press and outright repression that often greets new religions, Wright assembles a wall of proof, brick by damning, implacable brick. It doesn’t hurt that Scientology’s story is both utterly bizarre—including a prison camp in Southern California, a seagoing headquarters designed to evade the IRS and other authorities, and campaigns to induce mental illness in church critics—and a case study in American self-help hucksterism.

Going Clear

By Lawrence Wright

Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker (Harper, 2013)

At least four and possibly as many as 14 murders have been attributed to a still-unknown individual who dumped his victims’ remains along a desolate beachside highway on Long Island. For most true-crime writers, the lack of an identified killer would make this book a nonstarter, but Kolker, who has covered the investigation for New York magazine for several years, turns that liability into a strength. As Kolker tells the story of how more than a dozen young women drifted to the margins of society and became vulnerable to one or more predators, he does justice to the painful complexity of these women’s family lives, their talents and dreams, their battles with substance abuse and sexual violence, and their fraught relationships with their mothers, as well as the friends and relatives who fought to keep their memories alive and the search for their killer going. The unifying features of all their stories are class, poverty, and the economic temptations of sex work. Another is that the authorities did not take their disappearances seriously until four of them were found buried in the same place. Kolker, who has an uncanny ability to play fly on the wall, catches members of the police and the media dismissing the victims; it was only the possibility of a serial killer that made them count. Kolker refuses to let their murderer define them.

By Robert Kolker

The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking by Olivia Laing ( Picador, 2013)

Not all great American writers have been big drinkers, but there are enough souses among them for Laing, a British woman intoxicated by the wide-open promises of our national literature, to engineer a road trip around their boozy misadventures. Although not an alcoholic herself, Laing grew up in a family warped by her mother’s partner’s drinking, and that story weaves through her account of her travels to the places where six men—John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Carver, and John Berryman—wrote, got hammered, and dried out. Laing’s readings of their work are extraordinarily sharp and sensitive, and her description of the places she visited and what happened to her there may be even better. (A bald eagle in flight looks like “a coat thrown into the air, ragged and enormous.”) But the true subject of this gorgeously sorrowful book is the drive toward self-destruction, and what it means to live close to a person who can’t resist its siren call.

The Trip to Echo Spring

By Olivia Laing

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)

This choral account of American life over the past 35 years is told from the points of view of famous individuals (Newt Gingrich, Elizabeth Warren, Colin Powell, Alice Waters) and unknowns (a black labor organizer, a would-be entrepreneur high on self-help nostrums, an Ohio woman who lost her retirement savings to a Ponzi scheme, and in one bravura chapter, the city of Tampa as it underwent a cascade of mortgage foreclosures following the 2008 recession). Packer strives to transmit each subject’s narrative without editorializing or moralizing, an approach that feels radical a mere six years after the book’s publication, since today the imperative to opine never seems to let up. As a result, The Unwinding is almost disorienting, like coming inside after a day spent walking into a stiff wind. But once you get used to it, Packer’s approach opens up the space to contemplate how these different people experience and respond to their sense that America is coming apart. The few exceptions practically glow with significance, from the tightknit family of poor Floridians who struggled with one setback after another but always had one another’s backs to the owner of a handful of empty motels, who chose to fight the automated foreclosure system with the help of her community and clan. “Usha Patel was not a native-born American,” Packer writes in a typically astute (if atypically subjective) sentence, “which is to say, she wasn’t alone.”

The Unwinding

By George Packer

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala (Knopf, 2013)

Deraniyagala, an economist at the University of London and Columbia University, was vacationing with her family in Sri Lanka in 2004, when she looked out the window and saw the ocean rise up and rush toward the balcony of their holiday rental. By the end of the day, Deraniyagala had lost her parents, her husband, and their two young sons to the Boxing Day Tsunami. It is the kind of devastation that might seem beyond words, and yet Deraniyagala finds them; she is, it turns out, a very gifted writer. Most of Wave describes the aftermath of the tragedy. It is an account of grief that refuses to turn away from ugliness or wallow in sentiment, and yet it is acutely beautiful because of Deraniyagala’s devotion to the truth. There are weeks of sleeping, then drinking, then a demented campaign to eject the couple that moved into her parents’ old house. Finally, two years after the tsunami, Deraniyagala returned to the London home she once shared with her husband and sons, a place where a dirty old baby bowl repurposed as a garden toy becomes a precious talisman of the lost. Slowly, her pain clears enough for her to fill in portraits of those boys, that man, vivid enough to pierce the reader with a sliver of her own mourning. Deraniyagala’s story alone would have made this book unusual, but it is her artistry that makes it indelible.

By Sonali Deraniyagala

Citizen: An American Lyric  by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press, 2014)

Part poetry collection, part memoir, part book-length critical essay,  Citizen  takes risks other books wouldn’t dare, and it reads like no other title on this list. A dazzling meditation on invisibility, blackness, and America,  Citizen  grapples with the double-take moments in daily life: “Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that?” And it asks other, more pointed questions: What was rising up in Serena Williams’ throat her entire career? What did the water in New Orleans want? Whose arm is that, flailing from the sea behind J.M.W. Turner’s slave ship? Midway through this wrenching and mordantly funny book, written entirely to an unnamed “you,” Rankine addresses the  first  person, the point of view of the traditional memoir. The first person, she writes, is “a symbol for something”: “The pronoun barely holding the person together.”

By Claudia Rankine

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History  by Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt, 2014)

The Sixth Extinction  is a moving elegy to the species lost over the centuries to catastrophes both natural and man-made. But it’s also a warning about what awaits the animals of Earth in the Anthropocene, the climate-changed and human-shaped era in which we now find ourselves. The result is a chilling, fascinating history of mass extinction, those once-every-hundred-million-years-or-so events in which the Earth’s population of species crashes. “During mass extinction events,” Kolbert writes, “the usual rules of survival are suspended.” Once-dominant species are wiped out in the geologic snap of a finger. No book has made the reality of how humans are endangering the future not only of their planet but of their species more clear to readers than this beautifully written, perfectly reported, passionately argued model of explanatory science journalism.

The Sixth Extinction

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)

Talk about low concept: Stuff Matters is about, among other things, concrete, glass, porcelain, paper, graphite, stainless steel, and plastic. This is the man-made stuff all around us and so mundane we barely give it a second thought. Miodownik, a materials scientist with the soul of a poet, sings of the magic hidden within these ordinary substances. Stuff Matters describes how our stuff (bricks, coffee mugs) gets made and what it may someday be able to do for us (invisibility cloaks, bionic human limbs, exploding billiard balls, an elevator to outer space, concrete that can be rolled up like fabric or purify air). He also celebrates the remarkable properties of everyday stuff we take for granted, like paper, the stuff of love letters and old photographs, and glass—a substance once so rare that a lump of desert sand that had been struck and melted by lightning was one of the most valuable “gems” in King Tut’s tomb at the time of his burial. To read Stuff Matters is to see the humble objects around us afresh and to grasp the wonders they represent for the first time.

Stuff Matters

By Mark Miodownik

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life  by William Finnegan (Penguin Press, 2015)

You may think you don’t care about a life spent chasing waves all over the world, but William Finnegan’s memoir so precisely distills the “brief, sharp glimpse of eternity” the surfer gets from riding a board through a crystal-blue tube on a perfect run that a hundred pages into  Barbarian Days  you, too, will have stepped through the looking glass. It’s clear from Finnegan’s rueful retelling of his younger days all that he endured due to the life he chose: He experiences terror and pain on the waves; he punishes his body with scrapes, a broken nose, torn ankle cartilage, sun-caused cataracts; relationships with friends and family pale next to the life of a “latter-day barbarian” who rejects the values of duty. But years of hunting surf also create unlikely friendships, from the Hawaiian kids of Finnegan’s Oahu childhood to the “goofyfoot dancer” who helps Finnegan find waves in the cold waters off Long Island, a quick subway ride from the longtime New Yorker journalist’s apartment.  Barbarian Days  is a masterpiece of sports writing, focusing its lens on the smallest unit of both athletic and artistic achievement: the single human body, attempting to do something difficult and beautiful.

Barbarian Days

By William Finnegan

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones ( Bloomsbury Press, 2015)

The opioid epidemic snuck up on a lot of urban middle-class Americans, but not Quinones, who quit his job at the Los Angeles Times to write Dreamland, the first and still the best book-length examination of the crisis. He approached the story from two widely disparate perspectives: from the small towns and cities where doctors’ belief in Big Pharma’s lies about the nonaddictive properties of new drugs like OxyContin led to overprescription and pill mills, and from the obscure Mexican state of Nayarit, where local clans mounted a fully vertically integrated heroin trade, controlling every aspect from growing the poppies to delivering dope to customers’ doors. He reports fully and deeply on both. Quinones’ depiction of the contrast between the strangely healthy and robust communities in Nayarit and the economically and socially disintegrating American towns where the dealers preferred to operate (avoiding clashes with the established drug dealers in metropolitan centers) is both surprising and enlightening.

By Sam Quinones

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Grove Press, 2015)

Everyone mourns in her own way, and for Macdonald, after her beloved father’s death, that way was by taming a goshawk, a process described in this scratched, muddy, glorious memoir. A practiced falconer, Macdonald understands how ill-advised her project is; the species is famously hard to train, stubborn in its wildness. But she falls in love with the bird, “a reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.” Macdonald’s writing is similarly gilded and faintly antiquarian as she pursues the medieval task of training the hawk, named Mabel, to fly to her leather-gloved hand on command. Mabel can’t be cuddled and won’t look up at her with liquid, adoring eyes—this isn’t that kind of sappy, an-animal-saved-me memoir. But the reader gradually realizes that Mabel, with all her difficulty and alien, nonmammalian ways, is exactly what Macdonald needs. The writer is reconciling herself not to loss but to life, a thing as beautiful and terrible, as merciless and vital, as the goshawk.

H Is for Hawk

By Helen Macdonald

Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon, 2015)

Born just after the end of World War II to a Chicago pediatrician and his “socialite” wife, Margo Jefferson grew up in “Negroland,” the name she gives to the black American elite—a class defined by profession, affluence, pedigree, and to her dismay, skin color and comportment. The appeal of her memoir lies in Jefferson’s beautifully articulated ambivalence about most everything—including memoir itself, a form that, she observes, offers the perpetual temptation to “bask in your own innocence” and “revere your grief.” Jefferson refuses to do either, or to discard the problematic word in her title. “I still find ‘Negro’ a word of wonder, glorious and terrible,” she writes. “A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations.” Jefferson’s social class fostered her exquisite sense of taste (she became a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic for the New York Times), but its members, as she would grow to understand during the upheaval of the 1960s, also “settled for a desiccated white facsimile, and abandoned a vital black culture.” Jefferson’s memoir of growing up in this milieu, with its strenuous gentility and complex relationship to the American racial caste system, is both loving and darkly ironic, as rich and seasoned as the life it recounts.

By Margo Jefferson

The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

One of her generation’s greatest memoirists ( Fierce Attachments )   and essayists, Gornick devotes this book to puzzling out how she became an “odd woman,” a single and childless urbanite, intoxicated by the street life of Manhattan. A red diaper baby, she fantasized during her Bronx childhood about leading the revolution and finding true love, but as she looks back, she decides that she, like her mother and several of her literary heroines, “was born to find the wrong man,” to seek “the unholy dissatisfaction that will keep life permanently at bay.” In exchange, she got New York, which (almost) never fails to satisfy her with its parade of characters and “the variety and inventiveness of survival technique.” In supple, searching prose, Gornick meditates on the riches of friendship—particularly her bond with Leonard, a gay man who shares her saturnine take on just about everything—and the life of the mind, as well as the self-knowledge that comes with age. For a woman who claims to have “a penchant for the negative,” she has produced a remarkably inspiring book.

The Odd Woman and the City

By Vivian Gornick

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS  by David France (Knopf, 2016)

For decades, the story of the fight against AIDS seemed one of nothing but frustration, shame, and a body count in the hundreds of thousands. Except that it wasn’t: Even at the height of the epidemic, scientists worked feverishly to understand the virus and its effects—and just as importantly, activists battled to increase those scientists’ funding, to focus and target their research, and to erase the stigma of those who suffered from it. In his monumental history of that battle, from the first cases in the 1970s to the mid-’90s advent of the “triple cocktail” that made AIDS a manageable condition for many economically advantaged Americans, David France notes that many of those activists’ work was extensively documented, because the activists themselves feared they’d never live to see the results of their work. Many of them didn’t. France tells their stories with clear-eyed compassion, leaning not only on his dogged research skills but also on his history as both activist and reporter for the New York Native. This is the crucial book for understanding how one of the great social transformations of our era was not the result of the arc of history bending naturally toward justice but the arc of history bending thanks to the tireless, agonizing work of those who put their lives on the line.

How to Survive a Plague

By David France

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren (Knopf, 2016)

Jahren’s memoir is a paean to her life in science, specifically the kind of science that involves getting your hands dirty and reaching for a specimen vial. She is a professor of geobiology specializing in the life cycle of plants, and while this involves a certain amount of travel and mucking about, she feels most at home in her lab, “a place where I move. I stand, walk, sit, fetch, carry, climb, and crawl. My lab is a place where it’s just as well that I can’t sleep, because there are so many things to do in the world besides that.” As inspiring as it is to read someone writing so well about a line of work whose pleasures often go unsung, the greatest treat in Lab Girl is Jahren’s account of her friendship with Bill, her scientific partner of more than 20 years. A deep and entirely platonic bond between the kind of people who celebrate receiving their advanced degrees by blowing glass tubes full of carbon dioxide into the wee hours is really not the sort of thing you often get to read about. This friendship, as fiercely committed and abiding as any blood tie, is built on junk food, scavenged equipment, wisecracks, and a shared hunger for both knowledge and the task of getting it. When the normally taciturn Bill confesses to feeling alone after his father’s death, Jahren thinks, “no matter what our future held, my first task would always be to kick a hole in the world and make a space for him where he could safely be his eccentric self.” She doesn’t know how to tell him this, so she shows him, and us, instead.

By Hope Jahren

One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America  by Gene Weingarten (Blue Rider Press, 2019)

Weingarten, a longtime, Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post writer, begins his book with a gimmick: He and his editor choose a random day—Sunday, Dec. 28, 1986—and Weingarten sets out to report every single interesting thing that happened. The result is funny, heart-wrenching, chilling, and absurd, as Weingarten chronicles a serial killer, a heart transplant, a tragic fire, an  unlikely romance , a political miscalculation, a Grateful Dead concert—all of them expert portraits of American life in miniature. The book is a stunt, a dare, but it’s also proof of the belief that animates all the books on this list: There are stories everywhere. The nonfiction writer’s job is to look long and hard enough to find them, and to tell them with enough empathy and care to bring them to life.

By Gene Weingarten

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The 100 best nonfiction books of all time: the full list

After two years of careful reading, moving backwards through time, Robert McCrum has concluded his selection of the 100 greatest nonfiction books. Take a quick look at five centuries of great writing

• Robert McCrum reflects on his 100 greatest nonfiction books list
• The 100 best novels written in English: the full list
• What did Robert miss? Leave your thoughts in the comments

1. The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014) An engrossing account of the looming catastrophe caused by ecology’s “neighbours from hell” – mankind.

2. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005) This steely and devastating examination of the author’s grief following the sudden death of her husband changed the nature of writing about bereavement.

3. No Logo by Naomi Klein (1999) Naomi Klein’s timely anti-branding bible combined a fresh approach to corporate hegemony with potent reportage from the dark side of capitalism.

4. Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (1998) These passionate, audacious poems addressed to Hughes’s late wife, Sylvia Plath, contribute to the couple’s mythology and are a landmark in English poetry.

5. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (1995) This remarkably candid memoir revealed not only a literary talent, but a force that would change the face of US politics for ever.

6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988) The theoretical physicist’s mega-selling account of the origins of the universe is a masterpiece of scientific inquiry that has influenced the minds of a generation.

7. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1979) Tom Wolfe raised reportage to dazzling new levels in his quest to discover what makes a man fly to the moon.

8. Orientalism by Edward Said (1978) This polemical masterpiece challenging western attitudes to the east is as topical today as it was on publication.

9. Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977) A compelling sense of urgency and a unique voice make Herr’s Vietnam memoir the definitive account of war in our time.

10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976) An intoxicating renewal of evolutionary theory that coined the idea of the meme and paved the way for Professor Dawkins’s later, more polemical works.

11. North by Seamus Heaney (1975) This raw, tender, unguarded collection transcends politics, reflecting Heaney’s desire to move “like a double agent among the big concepts”.

12. Awakenings by Oliver Sacks (1973) Sacks’s moving account of how, as a doctor in the late 1960s, he revived patients who had been neurologically “frozen” by sleeping sickness reverberates to this day.

13. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970) The Australian feminist’s famous polemic remains a masterpiece of passionate free expression in which she challenges a woman’s role in society.

14. Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom by Nik Cohn (1969) This passionate account of how rock’n’roll changed the world was written with the wild energy of its subject matter.

15. The Double Helix by James D Watson (1968) An astonishingly personal and accessible account of how Cambridge scientists Watson and Francis Crick unlocked the secrets of DNA and transformed our understanding of life.

16. Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag (1966) The American novelist’s early essays provide the quintessential commentary on the 1960s.

17. Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965) The groundbreaking collection, revolving around the poet’s fascination with her own death, established Plath as one of the last century’s most original and gifted poets.

18. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963) The book that ignited second-wave feminism captured the frustration of a generation of middle-class American housewives by daring to ask: “Is this all?”

19. The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963) This influential, painstakingly compiled masterpiece reads as an anatomy of pre-industrial Britain – and a description of the lost experience of the common man.

20. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962) This classic of American advocacy sparked a nationwide outcry against the use of pesticides, inspired legislation that would endeavour to control pollution, and launched the modern environmental movement in the US.

21. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn (1962) The American physicist and philosopher of science coined the phrase “paradigm shift” in a book that is seen as a milestone in scientific theory.

22. A Grief Observed by CS Lewis (1961) This powerful study of loss asks: “Where is God?” and explores the feeling of solitude and sense of betrayal that even non-believers will recognise.

23. The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White (1959) Dorothy Parker and Stephen King have both urged aspiring writers towards this crisp guide to the English language where brevity is key.

24. The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958) An optimistic bestseller, in which JFK’s favoured economist promotes investment in both the public and private sectors.

25. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life by Richard Hoggart (1957) This influential cultural study of postwar Britain offers pertinent truths on mass communication and the interaction between ordinary people and the elites.

26. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955) Baldwin’s landmark collection of essays explores, in telling language, what it means to be a black man in modern America.

27. The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art by Kenneth Clark (1956) Clark’s survey of the nude from the Greeks to Picasso foreshadows the critic’s towering claims for humanity in his later seminal work, Civilisation.

28. The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin (1953) The great historian of ideas starts with an animal parable and ends, via a dissection of Tolstoy’s work, in an existential system of thought.

29. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1952/53) A bleakly hilarious, enigmatic watershed that changed the language of theatre and still sparks debate six decades on. An absurdist masterpiece.

30. A Book of Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David (1950) This landmark recipe book, a horrified reaction to postwar rationing, introduced cooks to the food of southern Europe and readers to the art of food writing.

31. The Great Tradition by FR Leavis (1948) The controversial critic’s statement on English literature is an entertaining, often shocking, dissection of the novel, whose effects are still felt to this day.

32. The Last Days of Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper (1947) The historian’s vivid, terrifying account of the Führer’s demise, based on his postwar work for British intelligence, remains unsurpassed.

33. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946) The groundbreaking manual urged parents to trust themselves, but was also accused of being the source of postwar “permissiveness”.

34. Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946) Hersey’s extraordinary, gripping book tells the personal stories of six people who endured the 1945 atom bomb attack.

35. The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper (1945) The Austrian-born philosopher’s postwar rallying cry for western liberal democracy was hugely influential in the 1960s.

36. Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth by Richard Wright (1945) This influential memoir of a rebellious southern boyhood vividly evokes the struggle for African American identity in the decades before civil rights.

37. How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher (1942) The American culinary icon was one of the first writers to use food as a cultural metaphor, describing the sensual pleasures of the table with elegance and passion.

38. Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly (1938) Connolly’s dissection of the art of writing and the perils of the literary life transformed the contemporary English scene.

39. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1937) Orwell’s unflinchingly honest account of three northern towns during the Great Depression was a milestone in the writer’s political development.

40. The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937) Much admired by Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Byron’s dazzling, timeless account of a journey to Afghanistan is perhaps the greatest travel book of the 20th century.

41. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936) The original self-help manual on American life – with its influence stretching from the Great Depression to Donald Trump – has a lot to answer for.

42. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933) Brittain’s study of her experience of the first world war as a nurse and then victim of loss remains a powerful anti-war and feminist statement.

43. My Early Life: A Roving Commission by Winston Churchill (1930) Churchill delights with candid tales of childhood and boy’s own adventures in the Boer war that made him a tabloid hero.

44. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929) Graves’s account of his experiences in the trenches of the first world war is a subversive tour de force.

45. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929) Woolf’s essay on women’s struggle for independence and creative opportunity is a landmark of feminist thought.

46. The Waste Land by TS Eliot (1922) Eliot’s long poem, written in extremis, came to embody the spirit of the years following the first world war.

47. Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed (1919) The American socialist’s romantic account of the Russian revolution is a masterpiece of reportage.

48. The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes (1919) The great economist’s account of what went wrong at the Versailles conference after the first world war was polemical, passionate and prescient.

49. The American Language by HL Mencken (1919) This declaration of linguistic independence by the renowned US journalist and commentator marked a crucial new chapter in American prose

50. Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918) Strachey’s partisan, often inaccurate but brilliant demolitions of four great 19th-century Britons illustrates life in the Victorian period from different perspectives.

51. The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois (1903) The great social activist’s collection of essays on the African American experience became a founding text of the civil rights movement.

52. De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905) There is a thrilling majesty to Oscar Wilde’s tormented tour de force written as he prepared for release from Reading jail.

53. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902) This revolutionary work written by Henry James’s less famous brother brought a democratising impulse to the realm of religious belief.

54. Brief Lives by John Aubrey, edited by Andrew Clark (1898) Truly ahead of his time, the 17th-century historian and gossip John Aubrey is rightly credited as the man who invented biography.

55. Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S Grant (1885) The civil war general turned president was a reluctant author, but set the gold standard for presidential memoirs, outlining his journey from boyhood onwards.

56. Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (1883) This memoir of Samuel Clemens’s time as a steamboat pilot provides insight into his best-known characters, as well as the writer he would become.

57. Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson (1879) The Scottish writer’s hike in the French mountains with a donkey is a pioneering classic in outdoor literature – and as influential as his fiction.

58. Nonsense Songs by Edward Lear (1871) The Victorians loved wordplay, and few could rival this compendium of verbal delirium by Britain’s “laureate of nonsense”.

59. Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold (1869) Arnold caught the public mood with this high-minded but entertaining critique of Victorian society posing questions about the art of civilised living that still perplex us.

60. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859) Darwin’s revolutionary, humane and highly readable introduction to his theory of evolution is arguably the most important book of the Victorian era.

61. On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859) This fine, lucid writer captured the mood of the time with this spirited assertion of the English individual’s rights.

62. The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole (1857) A gloriously entertaining autobiography by the widely revered Victorian sometimes described as “the black Florence Nightingale”.

63. The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell (1857) Possibly Gaskell’s finest work – a bold portrait of a brilliant woman worn down by her father’s eccentricities and the death of her siblings.

64. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854) This account of one man’s rejection of American society has influenced generations of free thinkers.

65. Thesaurus by Dr Peter Mark Roget (1852) Born of a Victorian desire for order and harmony among nations, this guide to the English language is as unique as it is indispensable.

66. London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew (1851) The influence of the Victorian journalist’s detailed, dispassionate descriptions of London lower-class life is clear, right up to the present day.

67. Household Education by Harriet Martineau (1848) This protest at the lack of women’s education was as pioneering as its author was in Victorian literary circles.

68. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845) This vivid memoir was influential in the abolition of slavery, and its author would become one of the most influential African Americans of the 19th century.

69. Essays by RW Emerson (1841) New England’s inventor of “transcendentalism” is still revered for his high-minded thoughts on individuality, freedom and nature expressed in 12 essays.

70. Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope (1832) Rich in detail and Old World snobbery, Trollope’s classic travelogue identifies aspects of America’s national character still visible today.

71. An American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster (1828) Though a lexicographical landmark to stand alongside Dr Johnson’s achievement, the original sold only 2,500 copies and left its author in debt.

72. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey (1822) An addiction memoir, by the celebrated and supremely talented contemporary of Coleridge and Wordsworth, outlining his life hooked on the the drug.

73. Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb (1807) A troubled brother-and-sister team produced one of the 19th century’s bestselling volumes and simplified the complexity of Shakespeare’s plays for younger audiences.

74. Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa by Mungo Park (1799) The Scottish explorer’s account of his heroic one-man search for the river Niger was a contemporary bestseller and a huge influence on Conrad, Melville and Hemingway.

75. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin (1793) The US founding father’s life, drawn from four different manuscripts, combines the affairs of revolutionary America with his private struggles.

76. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) This radical text attacked the dominant male thinkers of the age and laid the foundations of feminism.

77. The Life of Samuel Johnson LLD by James Boswell (1791) This huge work is one of the greatest of all English biographies and a testament to one of the great literary friendships.

78. Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (1790) Motivated by the revolution across the Channel, this passionate defence of the aristocratic system is a landmark in conservative thinking.

79. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano (1789) The most famous slave memoir of the 18th century is a powerful and terrifying read, and established Equiano as a founding figure in black literary tradition.

80. The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne by Gilbert White (1789) This curate’s beautiful and lucid observations on the wildlife of a Hampshire village inspired generations of naturalists.

81. The Federalist Papers by ‘Publius’ (1788) These wise essays clarified the aims of the American republic and rank alongside the Declaration of Independence as a cornerstone of US democracy.

82. The Diary of Fanny Burney (1778) Burney’s acutely observed memoirs open a window on the literary and courtly circles of late 18th-century England.

83. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776-1788) Perhaps the greatest and certainly one of the most influential history books in the English language, in which Gibbon unfolds the narrative from the height of the Roman empire to the fall of Byzantium.

84. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1776) Blending history, philosophy, psychology and sociology, the Scottish intellectual single-handedly invented modern political economy.

85. Common Sense by Tom Paine (1776) This little book helped ignite revolutionary America against the British under George III.

86. A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson (1755) Dr Johnson’s decade-long endeavour framed the English language for the coming centuries with clarity, intelligence and extraordinary wit.

87. A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume (1739) This is widely seen as the philosopher’s most important work, but its first publication was a disaster.

88. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift (1729) The satirist’s jaw-dropping solution to the plight of the Irish poor is among the most powerful tracts in the English language.

89. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe (1727) Readable, reliable, full of surprise and charm, Defoe’s Tour is an outstanding literary travel guide.

90. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke (1689) Eloquent and influential, the Enlightenment philosopher’s most celebrated work embodies the English spirit and retains an enduring relevance.

91. The Book of Common Prayer by Thomas Cranmer (1662) Cranmer’s book of vernacular English prayer is possibly the most widely read book in the English literary tradition.

92. The Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys (1660) A portrait of an extraordinary Englishman, whose scintillating firsthand accounts of Restoration England are recorded alongside his rampant sexual exploits.

93. Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk by Sir Thomas Browne (1658) Browne earned his reputation as a “writer’s writer” with this dazzling short essay on burial customs.

94. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651) Hobbes’s essay on the social contract is both a founding text of western thought and a masterpiece of wit and imagination.

95. Areopagitica by John Milton (1644) Today, Milton is remembered as a great poet. But this fiery attack on censorship and call for a free press reveals a brilliant English radical.

96. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions by John Donne (1624) The poet’s intense meditation on the meaning of life and death is a dazzling work that contains some of his most memorable writing.

97. The First Folio by William Shakespeare (1623) The first edition of his plays established the playwright for all time in a trove of 36 plays with an assembled cast of immortal characters.

98. The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621) Burton’s garrulous, repetitive masterpiece is a compendious study of melancholia, a sublime literary doorstop that explores humanity in all its aspects.

99. The History of the World by Walter Raleigh (1614) Raleigh’s most important prose work, close to 1m words in total, used ancient history as a sly commentary on present-day issues.

100. King James Bible: The Authorised Version (1611) It is impossible to imagine the English-speaking world celebrated in this series without the King James Bible, which is as universal and influential as Shakespeare.

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The Best (and Most Anticipated) Nonfiction Books of 2024, So Far

Here’s what memoirs, histories, and essay collections we’re indulging in this spring.

Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

Truth-swallowing can too often taste of forced medicine. Where the most successful nonfiction triumphs is in its ability to instruct, encourage, and demand without spoon-feeding. Getting to read and reward this year’s best nonfiction, then, is as much a treat as a lesson. I can’t pretend to be as intelligent, empathetic, self-knowledgeable, or even as well-read as many of the authors on this list. But appreciating the results of their labors is a more-than-sufficient consolation.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka

There’s a lot to ponder in the latest project from New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka, who elegantly argues that algorithms have eroded—if not erased—the essential development of personal taste. As Chayka puts forth in Filterworld , the age of flawed-but-fulfilling human cultural curation has given way to the sanitization of Spotify’s so-called “Discover” playlists, or of Netflix’s Emily in Paris, or of subway tile and shiplap . There’s perhaps an old-school sanctimony to this criticism that some readers might chafe against. But there’s also a very real and alarming truth to Chayka’s insights, assembled alongside interviews and examples that span decades, mediums, and genres under the giant umbrella we call “culture.” Filterworld is the kind of book worth wrestling with, critiquing, and absorbing deeply—the antithesis of mindless consumption.

American Girls: One Woman's Journey Into the Islamic State and Her Sister's Fight to Bring Her Home by Jessica Roy

In 2019, former ELLE digital director Jessica Roy published a story about the Sally sisters , two American women who grew up in the same Jehovah’s Witness family and married a pair of brothers—but only one of those sisters ended up in Syria, her husband fighting on behalf of ISIS. American Girls , Roy’s nonfiction debut, expands upon that story of sibling love, sibling rivalry, abuse and extremism, adding reams of reporting to create a riveting tale that treats its subjects with true empathy while never flinching from the reality of their choices.

Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood by Paula Delgado-Kling

In this small but gutting work of memoir-meets-biography, Colombian journalist Paula Delgado-King chronicles two lives that intersect in violence: hers, and that of Leonor, a Colombian child solider who was beckoned into the guerilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) only to endure years of death and abuse. Over the course of 19 years, Delgago-King followed Leonor through her recruitment into FARC; her sexual slavery to a man decades her senior; her eventual escape; and her rehabilitation. The author’s resulting account is visceral, a clear-eyed account of the utterly human impact wrought by war.

Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton

A meticulous work of research and commitment, Antonia Hylton’s Madness takes readers deep inside the nearly century-old history of Maryland’s Crownsville State Hospital, one of the only segregated mental asylums with records—and a campus—that remain to this day. Featuring interviews with both former Crownsville staff and family members of those who lived there, Madness is a radically complex work of historical study, etching the intersections of race, mental health, criminal justice, public health, memory, and the essential quest for human dignity.

Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections by Emily Nagoski

Out January 30.

Emily Nagoski’s bestselling Come As You Are opened up a generations-wide conversation about women and their relationship with sex: why some love it, why some hate it, and why it can feel so impossible to find help or answers in either camp. In Come Together , Nagoski returns to the subject with a renewed focus on pleasure—and why it is ultimately so much more pivotal for long-term sexual relationships than spontaneity or frequency. This is not only an accessible, gentle-hearted guide to a still-taboo topic; it’s a fascinating exploration of how our most intimate connections can not just endure but thrive.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer

A remarkable volume—its 500-page length itself underscoring the author’s commitment to the complexity of the problem—Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here tracks the history of the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border through the intimate accounts of those who’ve lived it. In painstaking detail, Blitzer compiles the history of the U.S.’s involvement in Central America, and illustrates how foreign and immigration policies have irrevocably altered human lives—as well as tying them to one another. “Immigrants have a way of changing two places at once: their new homes and their old ones,” Blitzer writes. “Rather than cleaving apart the worlds of the U.S., El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the Americans were irrevocably binding them together.”

How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir by Shayla Lawson

Out February 6.

“I used to say taking a trip was just a coping mechanism,” writes Shayla Lawson in their travel-memoir-in-essays How to Live Free in a Dangerous World . “I know better now; it’s my way of mapping the Earth, so I know there’s something to come back to.” In stream-of-consciousness prose, the This Is Major author guides the reader through an enthralling journey across Zimbabwe, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Bermuda, and beyond, using each location as the touchstone for their essays exploring how (and why) race, gender, grief, sexuality, beauty, and autonomy impact their experience of a land and its people. There’s a real courage and generosity to Lawson’s work; readers will find much here to embolden their own self-exploration.

Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See by Bianca Bosker

There’s no end to the arguments for “why art matters,” but in our era of ephemeral imagery and mass-produced decor, there is enormous wisdom to be gleaned from Get the Picture , Bianca Bosker’s insider account of art-world infatuation. In this new work of nonfiction, readers have the pleasure of following the Cork Dork author as she embeds herself amongst the gallerists, collectors, painters, critics, and performers who fill today’s contemporary scene. There, they teach her (and us) what makes art art— and why that question’s worth asking in an increasingly fractured world.

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

A profoundly unusual, experimental, yet engrossing work of not-quite-memoir, Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries is exactly what its title promises: The book comprises a decade of the author’s personal diaries, the sentences copied and pasted into alphabetical order. Each chapter begins with a new letter, all the accumulated sentences starting with “A”, then “B,” and so forth. The resulting effect is all but certain to repel some readers who crave a more linear storyline, but for those who can understand her ambition beyond the form, settling into the rhythm of Heti’s poetic observations gives way to a rich narrative reward.

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon

Out February 20.

“Even now, I can taste my own history,” writes Chantha Nguon in her gorgeous Slow Noodles . “One occupying force tried to erase it all.” In this deeply personal memoir, Nguon guides us through her life as a Cambodian refugee from the Khmer Rouge; her escapes to Vietnam and Thailand; the loss of all those she loved and held dear; and the foods that kept her heritage—and her story—ultimately intact. Interwoven with recipes and lists of ingredients, Nguon’s heart-rending writing reinforces the joy and agony of her core thesis: “The past never goes away.”

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison

The first time I stumbled upon a Leslie Jamison essay on (the platform formerly known as) Twitter, I was transfixed; I stayed in bed late into the morning as I clicked through her work, swallowing paragraphs like Skittles. But, of course, Jamison’s work is so much more satisfying than candy, and her new memoir, Splinters , is Jamison operating at the height of her talents. A tale of Jamison’s early motherhood and the end of her marriage, the book is unshrinking, nuanced, radiant, and so wondrously honest—a referendum on the splintered identities that complicate and comprise the artist, the wife, the mother, the woman.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider by Michiko Kakutani

The former chief book critic of the New York Times , Michiko Kakutani is not only an invaluable literary denizen, but also a brilliant observer of how politics and culture disrupt the mechanics of power and influence. In The Great Wave , she turns our attention toward global instability as epitomized by figures such as Donald Trump and watershed moments such as the creation of AI. In the midst of these numerous case studies, she argues for how our deeply interconnected world might better weather the competing crises that threaten to submerge us, should we not choose to better understand them.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg

From the author of the now-ubiquitous The Power of Habit arrives Supercommunicators , a head-first study of the tools that make conversations actually work . Charles Duhigg makes the case that every chat is really about one of three inquiries (“What’s this about?” “How do we feel?” or “Who are we?”) and knowing one from another is the key to real connection. Executives and professional-speaker types are sure to glom on to this sort of work, but my hope is that other, less business-oriented motives might be satisfied by the logic this volume imbues.

Whiskey Tender by Deborah Jackson Taffa

Out February 27.

“Tell me your favorite childhood memory, and I’ll tell you who you are,” or so writes Deborah Jackson Taffa in Whiskey Tender , her memoir of assimilation and separation as a mixed-tribe Native woman raised in the shadow of a specific portrait of the American Dream. As a descendant of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, Taffa illustrates her childhood in New Mexico while threading through the histories of her parents and grandparents, themselves forever altered by Indian boarding schools, government relocation, prison systems, and the “erasure of [our] own people.” Taffa’s is a story of immense and reverent heart, told with precise and pure skill.

Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley

With its chapters organized by their position in the infamous five stages of grief, Sloane Crosley’s Grief is For People is at times bracingly funny, then abruptly sober. The effect is less like whiplash than recognition; anyone who has lost or grieved understands the way these emotions crash into each other without warning. Crosley makes excellent use of this reality in Grief is For People , as she weaves between two wrenching losses in her own life: the death of her dear friend Russell Perreault, and the robbery of her apartment. Crosley’s resulting story—short but powerful—is as difficult and precious and singular as grief itself.

American Negra by Natasha S. Alford

In American Negra , theGrio and CNN journalist Natasha S. Alford turns toward her own story, tracing the contours of her childhood in Syracuse, New York, as she came to understand the ways her Afro-Latino background built her—and set her apart. As the memoir follows Alford’s coming-of-age from Syracuse to Harvard University, then abroad and, later, across the U.S., the author highlights how she learned to embrace the cornerstones of intersectionality, in spite of her country’s many efforts to encourage the opposite.

The House of Hidden Meanings by RuPaul

Out March 5.

A raw and assured account by one of the most famous queer icons of our era, RuPaul’s memoir, The House of Hidden Meanings , promises readers arms-wide-open access to the drag queen before Drag Race . Detailing his childhood in California, his come-up in the drag scene, his own intimate love story, and his quest for living proudly in the face of unceasing condemnation, The House of Hidden Meanings is easily one of the most intriguing celebrity projects of the year.

Here After by Amy Lin

Here After reads like poetry: Its tiny, mere-sentences-long chapters only serve to strengthen its elegiac, ferocious impact. I was sobbing within minutes of opening this book. But I implore readers not to avoid the heavy subject matter; they will find in Amy Lin’s memoir such a profound and complex gift: the truth of her devotion to her husband, Kurtis, and the reality of her pain when he died suddenly, with neither platitudes nor hyperbole. This book is a little wonder—a clear, utterly courageous act of love.

Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe

Red Paint author and poet Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe returns this spring with a rhythmic memoir-in-essays called Thunder Song , following the beats of her upbringing as a queer Coast Salish woman entrenched in communities—the punk and music scenes, in particular—that did not always reflect or respect her. Blending beautiful family history with her own personal memories, LaPointe’s writing is a ballad against amnesia, and a call to action for healing, for decolonization, for hope.

Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse" by Emily Raboteau

Out March 12.

In Emily Raboteau’s Lessons For Survival , the author (and novelist, essayist, professor, and street photographer) tells us her framework for the book is modeled loosely after one of her mother’s quilts: “pieced together out of love by a parent who wants her children to inherit a world where life is sustainable.” The essays that follow are meditations and reports on motherhood in the midst of compounding crises, whether climate change or war or racism or mental health. Through stories and photographs drawn from her own life and her studies abroad, Raboteau grounds the audience in the beauty—and resilience—of nature.

What to Read in 2024

Shelf Life: Jen Psaki

Robinne Lee on 'The Idea of You'

Kelsey McKinney Has a Juicy New Book on the Way

Shelf Life: Whoopi Goldberg

Inside the Ritual of Painting Ballet Slippers

Shelf Life: Rachel Khong

A Guide to Emily Henry’s Romance Novel Universe

Why Kathleen Hanna Said ‘Girls to the Front’

Emily Henry on the Wisdom of Modern Romance Novels

Shelf Life: Amy Tan

Shelf Life: Leila Mottley

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

Margalit fox. random house, $32 (336p) isbn 978-0-593-24385-5.

Reviewed on: 05/06/2024

Genre: Nonfiction

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Featured Nonfiction Reviews

20 Best Beach Reads for Summer Travel: Explore New Non-Fiction, Memoirs, Romance and More

We've sorted through the thrillers, fantasy novels, true crime books and more to find the best options to read this summer.

Soaking up the sun while reading a book you can't put down is something to look forward to this summer. Outside of deciding which insulated tumbler to take with you for hydration in the heat and finding a comfy spot on the beach or in a hammock, the most challenging part about settling in for a riveting read is choosing the novel itself.

E-readers and overnight online deliveries have put a library of unlimited books at our fingertips. From non-fiction to science fiction genres and  celebrity memoirs to book-to-screen adaptations , there are all kinds of incredible pages to peruse this spring. One of Amazon's most anticipated releases and biggest bestsellers for May is Erik Larson's latest book about the election of Abraham Lincoln and his presidency as the Civil War started.

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

President Lincoln was only in office for five months before the Civil War began. See what unfolded in those days in Erik Larson's latest non-fiction historical thriller.

Your summer library doesn't end there, because we've rounded up plenty of other newly released book picks, from steamy romance novels to chart-topping non-fiction books to edge-of-your-seat thrillers to magical worlds filled with sorcery and everything in between. Whether you read to enter a new world or to learn more about the world you live in, we've found a book you'll want on your reading list.

The Best Summer Reads of 2024

Long island (eilis lacey series).

An Oprah's Book Club pick, Long Island tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a women whose life is changed when her husband's baby from a secret affair winds up on her doorstep.

The Ministry of Time: A Novel by Kaliane Bradley

The Ministry of Time is spy thriller with a mix of time travel and romance. When a civil servant begins working a new time travel project, she must decide if falling in love is worth the consequences of changing history.

The Familiar: A Novel by Leigh Bardugo

This immersive romance novel taking place during the Spanish Inquisition tells the story of Luzia, a magic user enlisted to help the king.

The Women: A Novel by Kristin Hannah

Kristin Hannah, author of The Nightingale , has a new book that's made its way onto four of the top bestseller lists. The Women tells the story of Frances, a field nurse who enters the Vietnam War to return home only to find rising political tensions. 

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

A Reese's Book Club Pick, First Lie Wins  is a thriller that centers around Evie Porter, who is actually someone else and was given her identity by the mysterious Mr. Smith. Evie wants a new life, but one slip-up will change her future forever.

Rebel Rising: A Memoir by Rebel Wilson

Taking readers through the ups and downs of her career, Wilson's memoir ultimately teaches self-love with laughter along the way.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

While digging a foundation for a new development in the 1970s, the residents of Pottstown are shocked to find a skeleton. James McBride's novel  The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store intertwines the lives of the townspeople and their community during these times.

Our Fight: A Memoir by Ronda Rousey

As the UFC's first female champion, Ronda Rousey has made a name for herself in the world of mixed martial arts. Sharing her journey from the pursuit of perfection to the pursuit of happiness, this relatable story is about facing your fears.  

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up by Abigail Shrier

Currently No. 1 on Amazon's Most Sold Non-Fiction Books for the week, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up by Abigail Shrier explores the rising mental health crisis happening specifically in the Gen Z population. Interviewing experts in the field, Shrier explores some of the serious side effects of popular therapeutic approaches.

The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir by RuPaul

Save 30% when you shop RuPaul's new memoir on Amazon right now. Because reading is what? Fundamental! 

The Hunter: A Novel by Tana French

This much-anticipated book by Tana French tells the story of Cal Hooper, who develops a quiet life in Ireland with Lena and her unruly son Trey after retiring early from the Chicago P.D. When Trey's absent father shows up, the couple will do whatever they must to protect the boy.

Mostly What God Does: Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere

Today  show host Savannah Guthrie explores how her belief in God can help her grapple with the challenging times happening in our world in her new book  Mostly What God Does: Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere .

The Teacher: A Psychological Thriller by Freida McFadden

In this story, a scandal rocks Caseham High School when the news of an inappropriate student-teacher relationship comes to light. However, nothing is what it seems in Freida McFadden's newest thriller.

Expiration Dates: A Novel by Rebecca Serle

New York Times best-selling author Rebecca Serle released a heart-wrenching story that made Amazon's best books of March. 

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia Williams

New York Times best-selling author Tia Williams' latest book is a No. 1 pick on Amazon. In  A Love Song for Ricki Wilde, misfit Ricki Wilde moves to Harlem to open a flower shop where a mysterious stranger sets her world ablaze. 

Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton

Award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton explains the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital — a segregated asylum in Maryland — in her book  Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum , which was one of Amazon Editor's Best Book Picks. The hospital discussed in the book was shuttered in 2004 but the building still stands today.

The Fury by Alex Michaelides

Lana is a former movie star who invites her closest friends on a vacation to her private Greek island. But things suddenly take a turn when one of them is murdered in Alex Michaelides' new thriller The Fury .

Horse: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks

Horse , which was released in mid-January, is already an award-winning novel that focuses on race, art and history.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

Telling stories from those at the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Wandering Stars spans three generations of a family detailing their struggles and hopes for the future.

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Latest news.

Best nonfiction books of 2023 so far, as chosen by Amazon Editors

There are so many reasons to curl up with a good book, and our top nonfiction books hit every single one. Perhaps you’re looking for fascinating facts to share with everyone you know ( Generations), a gripping narrative history not taught in schools ( You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live) , a swashbuckling adventure far from home ( The Wager), or concrete advice on how to live a healthier, happier life as you age ( Outlive).

Of course, these are just a few of our favorite nonfiction books—our top 20 list can be found here . Also check out our top 20 books across all genres —led by Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful .

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About the Editor

Lindsay powers, latest articles by editor, best nonfiction books of may 2024, as chosen by the amazon editors.

‘Demon of Unrest’ author Erik Larson: Book by Book

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The Spinoff

Books May 10, 2024

Two senior publishers axed at penguin random house amid major restructure.

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New Zealand’s largest book publisher has undergone drastic changes this week, leaving its future role in local publishing uncertain.

Two of the most recognisable local publishers in New Zealand are among those restructured out of Penguin Random House, staff were told this week. Head of publishing Claire Murdoch will leave the company in the coming months, as will non-fiction publisher Rachel Eadie. The Spinoff understands a further eight roles have been cut at the publishing house, one of New Zealand’s four big commercial publishers alongside Hachette, Harper Collins, and Allen & Unwin.

A statement from New Zealand director Becky Innes confirmed the “structural changes” to The Spinoff, saying they were done following a “comprehensive review” and in order to “ensure we are appropriately aligned with market conditions”.

“There have been significant shifts in our cost structure, along with tough economic conditions and evolving consumer behaviour, so we felt it was necessary to adapt our business for future success,” she said, citing a focus on “leverag[ing] the benefits” of working across both New Zealand and Australia. Innes would not confirm or disclose the number of roles impacted.

In August 2023, authors around the country were shocked to hear of three senior staff members being made redundant at Penguin Random House, including longstanding and highly regarded fiction editor Harriet Allan. At that time, Claire Murdoch added the oversight of the fiction list to her responsibilities.

Now, with another, larger set of cuts, the future direction of the New Zealand office is less clear. Penguin Random House is a global publishing giant, from which the New Zealand division operates. It is the largest book publisher in the country, publishing across all genres and formats. Despite that, the number of staff employed locally is believed to be fewer than 50, across all departments such as commissioning, editing, design, distribution, marketing and publicity.

Next week, the country’s top book awards of the year will be handed out at the Ockhams, where Penguin Random House titles (particularly those commissioned and overseen by Eadie and Murdoch) will be in contention. Fungi of Aotearoa: A Curious Forager’s Field Guide by Liv Sisson is up for the award for best illustrated non-fiction, while two of the four general non-fiction finalists are PRH books (Laughing at the Dark: A Memoir by Barbara Else, and There’s a Cure for This: A Memoir by Emma Espiner).

The pair of publishers were well known to authors around the country, and the faces of Penguin Random House at festivals and other industry events.

In confirming that Eadie and Murdoch would be leaving the company, Innes announced that Grace Thomas would be “our new publisher for all adult books”. Who is Grace Thomas? An online search for “Grace Thomas Penguin Random House” provides literally no answers except a “zoominfo” bio stating her job title as “senior commissioning editor and audio producer”, which perhaps hints at the strategy behind the restructure. When asked for more information about Thomas, Innes cited Thomas’s 10 years’ experience in publishing and said: “Grace is interested in the digital landscape of the local publishing industry, and since 2021 has worked to establish, sustain and produce the PRHNZ audiobook list.” She has largely been working with non-fiction authors like Scotty Morrison and Charlotte Grimshaw in her time at the publishing house.

When asked if Penguin Random House would maintain its output of local titles, Innes simply stated that “there will be some adjustments to our programme” but that they would “continue to publish fiction, non-fiction and children’s books, in print, audio and ebook format”.

The Spinoff Review of Books is proudly brought to you by Unity Books , recently named 2020 International Book Store of the Year, London Book Fair, and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books Wellington or Unity Books Auckland online stores today. 

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Books to read if you love Doctor Who

Whether you’re a seasoned TARDIS traveller or an occasional time-hopper, here are the books to read if you want to see all of time and space.

The Doctor is back – with a new face, a new companion, and brand-new adventures. The hit show returns to BBC1 on Saturday 11th May for the first series of a new era, with Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson taking over the reins of the TARDIS as the Fifteenth Doctor and companion Ruby Sunday, respectively.

Doctor Who has been entertaining the world for over 60 years, its continual renewal (or, more accurately, regeneration) bringing adventure and wonder to viewers of all ages.

And the adventures aren’t confined to our TV screens. The Doctor’s universe is vast, complicated and exciting – and there are plenty of novels about our favourite Time Lord to get lost in. Or, if you’re more of a fact and trivia fan, you can dive into a range of non-fiction books exploring the Whoniverse. There are also a fair few classic science-fiction books that have inspired the show's storylines, which will have you feeling like a time-travelling pro.

So, when you feel like swapping your sonic screwdriver and psychic paper for the pages of an absorbing book, here are our top reads for any fan of Doctor Who :

Must-read Doctor Who books

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14 Canadian short story collections to read for Short Story Month

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May is Short Story Month. Celebrate by checking out one of these great Canadian short story collections.

Cocktail  by Lisa Alward

Cocktail   is a short story collection that explores some of life's watershed moments and the tiny horrors of domestic life. Beginning in the 1960s and moving forward through the decades,  Cocktail  tells intimate and immersive stories about the power of desire — and the cost of pursuing it.

Cocktail  was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize and shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award . 

The CBC Poetry Prize is open for Canadian writers from April 1 to June 1

Lisa Alward's short fiction has appeared in  The Journey Prize Stories 2017,   Best Canadian Stories 2017  and  Best Canadian Stories 2016 . She is the winner of the New Quarterly's 2016 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award as well as the 2015 Fiddlehead Short Fiction Prize. She lives in Fredericton. She was on  the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize longlist  for  Orlando 1974  which is included in  Cocktail . 

Death by a Thousand Cuts  by Shashi Bhat

Death by a Thousand Cuts   traces the funny, honest and difficult parts of womanhood. From a writer whose ex published a book about their breakup to the confession wrought by a Reddit post, these stories probe rage, loneliness, bodily autonomy and these women's relationships with themselves just as much as those around them. 

• Shashi Bhat writes about the South Asian female experience in her collection of short stories

Shashi Bhat's previous novels include  The Family Took Shape , a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and  The Most Precious Substance on Earth ,  which was also a finalist for the  Governor General's Literary Award for fiction  in 2022. Her short stories won the Writers' Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Bhat lives in New Westminster, B.C.

The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society  by Christine Estima

The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society  is a collection of connected stories that traces the immigrant experience of an Arab family through multiple generations. From brave Syrian refugees to trailblazing Lebanese freedom fighters, Azuree knows she comes from a long line of daring Arab women. These stories follow her as she explores ideas of love, faith, despair and the effects of war — and what those family histories mean for her as an Arab woman in the 21st century. 

• Christine Estima's vibrant story collection highlights the heart and history of the Arab diaspora in Montreal

Christine Estima is a writer, playwright and journalist living in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications and she was longlisted for the 2015  CBC Nonfiction Prize .  The Syrian Ladies Benevolant Society  is her first book. 

Her Body Among Animals  by Paola Ferrante

Her Body Among Animals  is a genre-bending collection of short stories that merges sci-fi, horror, fairy tales and pop culture to examine the challenges and boundaries society places on women's bodies. 

Her Body Among Animals   is shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award . 

• 5 Canadian authors shortlisted for $10K Danuta Gleed Literary Award for best debut short story collection

Paola Ferrante is a poet and fiction writer from Toronto. Her books include the poetry collection  What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack  and the poetry chapbook  The Dark Unwind.  She was longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize and won Room's 2018 prize for fiction.

Soft Serve  by Allison Graves

Soft Serve   is an edgy short story collection all about unconventional attachments between people and the reasons they endure. Through random encounters on highways, dating apps and fast food chains, the characters in these stories connect as they wander through the spaces — real and virtual — of our modern lives. 

• How a cappuccino sparked Allison Graves' writing career

Allison Graves is a Newfoundland-based writer and musician. Her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Riddle Fence Magazine and Room Magazine. Her fiction has been longlisted for prizes in Prism, The Fiddlehead and The Newfoundland Quarterly.  Soft Serve  is her debut fiction collection. 

Tales for Late Night Bonfires  by G.A. Grisenthwaite

In  Tales for Late Night Bonfires , writer G.A. Grisenthwaite blends the Indigenous tradition of oral storytelling with his own unique literary style. From tales about an impossible moose hunt to tales about the "Real Santa," Grisenthwaite crafts witty stories — each more uncanny than the last.

• G.A. Grisenthwaite's novel  Home Waltz  is a coming-of-age story about friendship, identity and acceptance

Grisenthwaite is Nłeʔkepmx, a member of the Lytton First Nation who currently lives in Kingsville, Ont. He made the  2021 CBC Short Story Prize longlist  and his 2020 debut novel  Home Waltz  was shortlisted for the  Governor General's Literary Award for fiction .

Stray Dogs  by Rawi Hage

The characters in Stray Dogs are restless travellers, moving between nation states and states of mind, seeking connection and trying to escape the past. Set in Montreal, Beirut, Tokyo and more, these stories highlight the often random ways our fragile modern identities are constructed, destroyed and reborn. 

Stray Dogs  was on the 2022 shortlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize . 

Rawi Hage's short story collection  Stray Dogs  captures snapshots of the lives of people on the move

Rawi Hage is a Montreal-based writer. His books include  De Niro's Game ,  which won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2008;  Cockroach ,  which received the Hugh MacLennan Prize for fiction, was defended by Samantha Bee on  Canada Reads  in 2014, and was shortlisted for the  Scotiabank Giller Prize  and the Governor General's Literary Award;  Carnival ,  which was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize; and  Beirut Hellfire Society ,  which was on the shortlist for  the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize  and  the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction . 

The Islands  by Dionne Irving

Set across the United States, Jamaica and Europe from the 1950s to present day,  The Islands  details the migration stories of Jamaican women and their descendants. Each short story explores colonialism and its impact as women experience the on-going tensions between identity and the place they long to call home.

The Islands  was  shortlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize .

Dionne Irving's  The Islands  follows the migration stories of Jamaican women

Dionne Irving is a writer and creative writing teacher from Toronto. She released her first novel,  Quint,  in 2021 and her work has been featured in journals and magazines like LitHub, Missouri Review and New Delta Review.  The Islands  is her debut short story collection. 

Animal Person  by Alexander MacLeod

The stories in Alexander MacLeod's latest collection,  Animal Person , explore the struggle for meaning and connection in an age where many of us feel cut off from so much, including ourselves. From two sisters having a petty argument to a family on the brink of a new life, these stories pick at the complexity of our shared human experience.

• Alexander MacLeod's short story collection Animal Person explores love, compromise and the idea of self

MacLeod is a short story writer and academic from Cape Breton and raised in Windsor, Ont. MacLeod's debut short story collection  Light Lifting  was shortlisted for the 2010  Scotiabank Giller Prize , the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Commonwealth Prize. It also won the Atlantic Book Award. In 2019, he won an O. Henry Award for his short story  Lagomorph.  He currently lives in Dartmouth, N.S.

Shut Up You're Pretty by Téa Mutonji

Shut Up You're Pretty  is a short fiction collection that tells stories of a young woman coming of age in the 21st century in Scarborough, Ont. The disarming, punchy and observant stories follow her as she watches someone decide to shave her head in an abortion clinic waiting room, bonds with her mother over fish and contemplates her Congolese traditions at a wedding. 

Shut Up You're Pretty  was on  the 2019 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize shortlist  and won the 2020 Edmund White Award for debut fiction. It was championed by Kudakwashe Rutendo on Canada Reads 2024 .

• Why Téa Mutonji wanted her first short story collection to challenge what diverse literature is supposed to be

Téa Mutonji was named  a writer to watch in 2019  by  CBC Books . Born in Congo-Kinshasa, Mutonji is also the editor of the anthology  Feel Ways: A Scarborough Anthology.  She currently lives in Toronto.

Half-Wild and Other Stories of Encounter  by Emily Paskevics

The short stories in  Half-Wild and Other Stories of Encounter  use the wilderness a a backdrop to focus on the connection between humans and the natural world and the intergenerational relationships within families. From a father searching for his wife and child wondering if they're better off without him, to an old woman standing on a frozen lake contemplating her death — this collection asks what it means to be a human in nature.

Emily Paskevics is a writer and editor currently based in Montreal. She is the author of the chapbook  The Night That Was Animal.  Her poetry, essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications and she was  longlisted for the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize . In 2022, Paskevics was named one of six emerging writers shortlisted for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Awards in the short fiction category . 

Peacocks of Instagram  by Deepa Rajagopalan

The collection of stories in  Peacocks of Instagram   paint a tapestry of the Indian diaspora. Tales of revenge, love, desire and family explore the intense ramifications of privilege, or lack thereof. Coffee shop and hotel housekeeping employees, engineers and children show us all of themselves, flaws and all.

Deepa Rajagopalan was the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived across India, the United States and Canada. Her previous writing has appeared in publications such as the  Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology , the New Quarterly, Room and Arc. Rajagopalan now lives and works in Ontario.

Chrysalis Anuja Varghese

Chrysalis  is a short story collection that centres South Asian women, showing how they reclaim their power in a world that constantly undermines them. Exploring sexuality, family and cultural norms, this collection deals with desire and  transformation. 

Chrysalis  won the  2023 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction  and the 2023 Dayne Ogilvie Prize .

• Anuja Varghese looks at death, life & the shackles of identity in this original short story

Anuja Varghese is a Hamilton, Ont.-based writer and editor. Her stories have been recognized in the Prism International Short Fiction Contest and the Alice Munro Festival Short Story Competition and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  Chrysalis  is her first book. 

Avalanche  by Jessica Westhead

The short stories in  Avalanche  all take a critical look at the ideas of whiteness, identity and relationships. The characters encounter — and perpetuate — everyday racism in many of its insidious forms and reckon with the implications of that.

• Why Jessica Westhead wanted to explore the everyday fears of motherhood in her fiction

Jessica Westhead is the author of the novel  Pulpy & Midge  and the short story collection  And Also Sharks . Her novel  Worry   was   on the  Canada Reads  2020 longlist .  

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