writings of nonfiction

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Last updated on Apr 21, 2021

Nonfiction: 24 Genres and Types of Fact-Based Books

Many readers think of nonfiction as a genre in itself. But take a look through your local bookstore and you’ll see dozens of sections devoted to fact-based books, while fiction titles are sorted into just a few broadly defined genres like ‘Fantasy/Sci-Fi’ and ‘General Fiction’!

To give nonfiction books the recognition they deserve and help authors choose the right category for their work, here’s a list of the 24 most common genres of nonfiction along with their identifying features. 

Expository nonfiction

Expository nonfiction aims to inform the reader about its subject —  providing an explanation for it, be it a historical event, natural phenomenon, fashion trend, or anything else. 

1. History 

History books are not to be mistaken with textbooks. Rather than cherry-picking details to be memorized about a person, an event, or an era, these nonfiction titles are more like cross-sections in time. They provide readers with as much of the social and political contexts of events as possible with the use of rich primary and secondary sources, so as to better understand their causes and their legacies. 

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond Tapping into geological, agricultural, and biological evidence, Diamond challenges perception of genetic differences and contextualizes the history of human development using various external, environmental conditions.

Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 by Anna Reid The Eastern Front of WWII is not as well-discussed as the Western one, though it's just as important. To balance the viewpoints out a little, Anna Reid explores life in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) during one of the longest, costliest, and deadliest military blockades in history. 

2. Philosophy 

This is where the big questions get asked. While ‘philosophy’ conjures up the image of impenetrable books written by Nietzche and Confucius for the enjoyment of beard-stroking academics, that isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of this genre! Contemporary authors have taken care to make their writings more accessible without sacrificing depth of analysis.

Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy by Simon Blackburn An introduction to life’s grandest topics (ethics, freedom, self — all that jazz) as told through the prism of history’s greatest philosophers. Suitable for curious readers who don’t know their Aristotles from their Kants.

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor by Donald Robertson The author smuggles in a history of the great philosopher king by presenting it as a self-help guide. By showing his readers how Marcus Aurelius’s beliefs can apply to modern life, Robertson appeals to readers who wouldn’t otherwise pick up a copy of Meditations from the library.

A Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno See how philosophy has evolved in today’s international world through Paolo Virno's perspective. He advocates for the understanding of people as "multitudes" (courtesy of Dutch Enlightenment thinker, Spinoza). It's recommended that readers go into this book with some previous knowledge on classic philosophical paradigms. 

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3. Religion and Spirituality

Books about religion and spirituality can take many forms. Some are theory-based, some are written from personal experience, and some are structured like a self-help book, with the end goal of helping readers find their spiritual home. Oftentimes, each book focuses on a particular belief system — there are even Christian publishers who are solely dedicated to publishing books about their religion. 

📚 Examples 

Waking the Buddha by Clark Strand An interesting cross between a historical research and a personal spiritual exploration, this book details the rise and continued influence of the Soka Gakkai, an international Buddhist organization that works towards egalitarianism and social justice.

The Power of Now by Ekchert Tolle This self-help-style book brings readers closer to spiritual enlightenment by acknowledging how our mind focuses on the past and the future rather than the present. It's the first step on the path toward mindful connection with the joys of the moment. 

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Science books, or  “Science & Maths” books — as Amazon would categorize them — can get quite technical. Most of the time, they’re reporting on scientists’ academic research. And so, science books tend to be well-organized and follow academic conventions like referencing and indexing . But while they sound dry, the intriguing questions that they address can always be presented in ways that keep readers coming. In any case, readers can always choose to scan over the complex mathematical proofs, or authors can put all that into the appendix.  

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking See the concept of time through the logical and characteristically witty eyes of this world-renowned scientist. It doesn’t make for the breeziest read, but it will give readers a very in-depth understanding of this arbitrary but ever-present concept. 

Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith Neil deGrasse Tyson takes readers on a tour of the universe's transformations through the years, introducing concepts of moons’ orbits and expanding stars along they way. All of this is a sturdy stepping stone to the complex realm of cosmology. 

5. Popular Science 

Is this type of nonfiction just academic science books but repackaged for laypeople? Why yes indeed. Popular science books take complex research and processes and get rid of most of the jargon, so that your average Joe can pick them up and learn something new about our universe. They’re almost like Vox videos, but that you read instead of watch. 

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson Bill Bryson isn’t a scientist or an anthropologist, but he’s brought together knowledge from various disciplines to create this digestible, comprehensive exploration of the universe and the human race. 

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson Tyson’s expertise as a science communicator shines through with this armchair-expert version of astrophysics, which he claims can be read on noisy buses and trains without much headache. 

6. Politics and Social Sciences 

With the ongoing social and political tumult across the world, there has been a rise in both the reading and writing of this kind of book. Some political and social science books are based more on anecdotal evidence, others are on par with academic papers in terms of depth of research. Either way, they usually pick out a specific feature or structure in society to analyze with a critical eye. 

Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson Discover why some nations are stuck in poverty traps with these economists. Using empirical data, they compellingly demonstrate the importance of inclusive institutions in fostering growth. Their writing continues to inspire development theories and strategies worldwide.  

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge It started with a blog post which the author wrote to express her frustration toward the domination of white people in discussions about racism. It became a tour-de-force work on the experiences and realities of deep-rooted racial discrimination in society. 

A book of essays is a collection of themed pieces of writing written by an author, or multiple authors, who often has some sort of authority on or personal experience with the subject matter. While they sound incredibly serious, they don’t require as much research as the types of nonfiction we’ve mentioned above. They’re often quite introspective and personal, like op-ed pieces or magazine articles. In fact, many essay books are made up of articles that were previously published in newspapers or magazines.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin A collection of articles published in Harper’s Magazine , Partisan Review , and The New Leader , in which Baldwin discusses representations of Black people in the media, as well as his experiences as a Black man in Europe. 

The Good Immigrant , edited by Nikesh Shukla 21 writers of color come together to talk about their lives in the UK, and how they're sometimes made to question their sense of belonging despite being born and raised there. 

8. Self-Help 

Out of all the non-fiction genres out there, this is probably the most popular one. The name itself is explanatory: a self-help book provides you with some guidance and actions through which you can solve personal problems. Self-help books can be research-based, or they can be reflective — like an extended blog post. Note, though, that while the latter kind may read somewhat like a memoir in style, if you choose to write a self-help book , you must explicitly advise the reader. 

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell What makes a person successful? Gladwell argues that it’s hardly just luck — even prodigies aren’t guaranteed recognition. Pulling from various examples and sociological studies, he identifies several factors, beyond genetics, that anyone can optimize to boost their chances. 

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson Sometimes what you need is for someone to give it to you straight. That’s when conversational, hilarious, blog-style books like this become handy. Mark Manson’s self-help book is all about accepting what you’re given and not allowing expectations ruin your happiness. 

9. Business and Economics 

While this a broad category that may include volumes with a journalistic flavor, business books tend to be guides to entrepreneurship and management. It’s a medium for those who've had experience in the workplace or the market to share their tips and tricks (and also a good tool for authors to bag guest-speaking events). In this sense, this kind of book is like self-help, but specifically for entrepreneurs and business managers. 

Profit First by Mike Michalowicz Master the art of financial management through real-life case studies and a four-principle system with which can be applied to any business. It's straightfoward and has enough examples to demonstrate its success. 

The Big Short by Michael Lewis Lewis makes the mess of the financial crisis of 2008 that little bit easier to wrap your head around in this darkly humorous book. He follows the stories of ordinary people who fell victim to the American financial sector, revealing the precariousness of this ever-expanding industry. 

10. Health and Wellness

There's no shortage of health and wellness books out there — what do we care about if not a long and healthy life, right? These books cover many different topics, from diets to sleeping habits, from stress management to dealing with anxiety. Most are written by researchers and doctors, who have the technical knowhow to offer sound insight and advice. 

Lifespan by David Sinclair Drawing from his knowledge as a geneticist, Sinclair gives readers the scoop on the ever-popular topic of aging. He assures us that for a long, healthy, and happy life, we should enjoy our chocolate and wine (in moderation, of course).

This Is Your Brain on Food by Uma Naidoo Food provides more than just nutrients for sustenance and growth — what you eat also impacts your mood and mental health. Dr. Uma Naidoo is a psychiatrist, nutritionist, and a professional chef, so you can trust she knows what she’s talking about. 

11. Crafts and Hobbies 

Once upon a time, before Google became the omniscient engine that held the answer to all our questions, people relied on craft books to teach them how to pick up a new hobby. Origami, crochet, calligraphy, gardening — you name it, there’s a book about it. Nowadays, books like these appeal to the audience not solely because of the skills but also the author. Authors are usually someone with an online presence and authority when it comes to the craft, and their book's tone and interior design usually reflect a bit of their personality. 

By Hand by Nicole Miyuki Santo Beautifully designed with plenty of samples with which readers could practice their own calligraphy, Santo’s guide is a meditative exercise book. It’s also a great avenue for her followers on Instagram to come closer to her art by practicing it themselves.  

Alterknit Stitch by Andrea Rangel For knitters who have already nailed down the basics and want to experiment with new patterns, this is the book to get. It demonstrates ways to have fun with this cozy hobby by defying the conventions of knitting. 

12. Travel Guides

Again, the internet seems to have taken over from books when it comes to helping travelers and tourists discover new places. Still, travel guides are a lot more comprehensive, keeping everything you might need to know about budgeting, languages, places to visit (or avoid), and much more, in one place. Ebooks are the perfect format for these guides — they’re easy for travelers to refer to on the go, and they’re not as costly to update to include the latest information. 

The Lonely Planet series This collection has been growing since the 1970s, and it now holds plenty of books with various focuses. There are guides solely on helpful phrases in foreign languages, and then there are regional, country-level, and city guides, all made with contributions from locals. 

The Time Out series While also written by locals, these books focus only on cities (mainly in Europe and the US). As with the magazine of the same name, the content of the books is all about local haunts and hidden shops that tourists may not be aware of. 

13. Cookbooks

Cookbooks make up another type of nonfiction that’s evermore popular, and not just because we’re cooking more and more at home nowadays. They’re increasingly beautiful, and to write a cookbook is to have a vision in mind about what kind of mouth-watering photos (or illustrations!) it would offer alongside easy-to-follow instructions. They also tend to have cohesive themes, i.e. desserts for vegans, at-home experimental fine-dining, or worldly culinary adventures from your kitchen.

In Bibi’s Kitchen by Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen Grandmothers from eight different Eastern African countries show readers both hearth and heart through the familial stories associated with their food. Beyond the loving taste of traditional homecooked dishes, readers will also get to learn about life in the villages of Africa. 

Ottolenghi Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi Israeli-English chef Yotam Ottolenghi is the owner of several branches of restaurants, bakeries and food shops in London, but you can get a taste of his cuisine with this collection of 130 Middle Eastern recipes that can be made within 30 minutes. Who says simple cooking couldn't be adventurous?

Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For by Ella Risbridger A slightly different take on cookbooks, Midnight Chicken is a manifesto for an joyful life, built on homemade food. Her recipes are simple and homely, just like the illustrations of her book, so that anyone can make them even after a long and tiring day.

14. Parenting and Family 

Parenting is anything but easy, and since Supernanny is not always on air, a little help from experts and those who've had experience dealing with children is the next best thing. From understanding with the psychology of young minds to finding the best environments and ways to nurture them, parenting books with sound academic backing provide useful insights and advice to help readers become better guardians and caregivers. 

Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids by Laura Markham Based on the latest research on brain development and clinical tests, Markham emphasizes the importance of the emotional connection between parent and child in development. When parents understand their own emotions, they can raise their children with empathy, set healthy boundaries, and communicate with clarity. 

Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau Beyond the home, there's a complex world which parents don’t have control of. Annette Lareau sociologically examines the social and political contexts in which children would be exposed to (if they live in America) and how childrearing can be affected by it.

15. Children’s Nonfiction 

 Explaining the world to children, even on a limited scale, can be incredibly difficult, as it’s hard to keep their attention. Luckily, a bit of assistance from an illustrator can do wonders. As a result, many children’s nonfiction books are in the style of picture books and chapter books. Topics covered include short historical accounts and biographies, or stories that explain scientific phenomena and how they are studied. For a more detailed breakdown of children’s nonfiction, check out editor Melissa Stewart’s system of classification .

The Little Leaders series by Vashti Harrison Read about exceptional men and women of various ethnic backgrounds throughout history, and enjoy their adorable portraits in this series. There’s hardly a better way to help children embrace differences than through nonfiction books about diversity such as this.

There Are Bugs Everywhere by Britta Teckentrup Open young minds up to the natural world through this colorful elementary guide to the insect world. Answering questions about where insects live or how they find and store food with engaging drawings, it’s a great educational tool for parents and teachers. 

16. Educational Guides 

Many educational guides as the YA version of nonfiction books. These are targeted at final-year high-schoolers and young college students, with the aim providing them some guidance as they reach that strange age where independence is desperately craved but also a bit scary. Unlike popular YA fiction , this is still definitely a niche, yet, as rising study-with-me YouTubers would show you, there is potential for growth. Other than that, there are also learning guides for older audiences as well. 

The Uni-Verse by Jack Edwards Sharing his experience in preparing for and being at university, Edwards hopes to ensure readers that they, too, could emerge from univeristy happy and successful. From how to take lecture notes to how to get along with your roommates, this guide is full of helpful advice for anyone who’s feeling a bit overwhelmed. 

Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt Education doesn’t have to be limited to the classroom, as Tom Vanderbilt shows us in this call-to-action for life-long learning. As testament to the value of learning as an adult, he tells the stories behind his journey with five skills: playing chess, singing, surfing, drawing, and juggling. 

17. Textbooks 

We’ve all had our fair share of poring over these books: each comprehensively puts together information about a specific subject (and sometimes even the subject of teaching itself). The content of textbooks also include questions that stimulate learners, encouraging them to reflect on certain matters. As they are meant to accompany a curriculum, textbooks have to be written with a good overarching grasp of the subject and solid understanding of pedagogy. Given all this work, textbook writers deserve more appreciation than they get!

Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series by Oxford University Press This popular series offers a short and concise introduction to just about every topic out there. Breaking big concepts and lesson outcomes into bitesize definitions, they make great overviews or quick refreshers before an exam.

Letting Go of Literary Whiteness by Carlin Borsheim-Black and Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides This textbook is made not for students but for teachers. Based on experiences and examples from their own classrooms, the authors supply advice, and real-life scenarios in which they apply, on how to be anti-racist in schools. 

18. Language Books 

Language books can be general guides as to how to learn any language, or they can go into the nitty-gritty of a particular language. Some of them aren’t even about learning to use and communicate in a language; instead, they take a dive into the origins and inner workings of these complex systems. Regardless, because of the complexity of the subject, these nonfiction titles require expert knowledge from the part of the author. 

Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher Linguist Guy Deutscher (a perfect name for the profession) makes the case for the connection between language and culture in this volume, opening up a whole new perspective on language learning beyond the practicalities. 

How to Speak Any Language Fluently by Alex Rawlings This book does what it says on the tin: it gives you the tools to pick up any language you want. Rawling's advice is as fun as it is helpful, so everyone can learn their language of choice with extra enjoyment! 

Many of them are memoirs of comedians and talk show hosts, others are written by celebrated essayists and journalists. The celebrity profiles of authors in the genre explains humorous nonfiction's popularity. While form may vary, most of these titles are penned as social commentaries that candidly talk about issues that are often overlooked.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell A witty exploration of the legacies of presidential assassinations in America, which notes how they’ve been used for political and commercial purposes that ridiculously undermine their historical importance. It’s history and politics, but with a healthy dose of sharp humor. 

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh Bill Gates says it’s “funny as hell” , and that’s all the advertising it needs. Taking the unconventional form of meme-worthy comic strips accompanied by texts to provide context, Brosh’s memoir is a candid reflection on both hilarious and bleak moments she's been through. 

20. Arts Books

The arts section is a fun mix — to name a few, there are photography collections, art catalogues, books on theory and critique, and volumes that teach artistic endeavors. With nuggets of wisdom from industry experts and often great attention paid to design details these books really are like pieces of artwork themselves. 

The World of Art series by Thames & Hudson This collection offers a variety of art styles and their hallmark pieces from across time and space. You could pick any one of them and feast your eyes on not only the art itself, but the wonderful interior design — courtesy of Adam Hay .

Women Artists by Flavia Frigeri In a now seminal feminist art history text written in the 70s, Linda Nochlin raised a provocative question: “Why have there been no great women artists?” Well, this addition to the Art Essentials series answers the question by showcasing 50 women artists throughout history, proving that the problem lies not in the lack of female artists, but in the failure to give them the recognition they deserve. 

Narrative nonfiction 

While narrative nonfiction books are still factual, they're written in the style of a story. As such a book's chapters have a flow — a story structure , if you will — rather than being systematically organized by topic. 

21. Memoirs and autobiographies

Memoirs and autobiographies are books about the writer’s life. The former covers a shorter time period, focusing on a particularly noteworthy moment, such as experience in a certain industry, or an unconventional childhood. It’s thus often written by younger authors. The latter follows a longer timeline, going through a whole life, like a personal history. As such, while anyone, with or without a public presence, can write a memoir , autobiographies are always penned by well-known figures. Autobiographies are also often used by politicians and activists to share their journey and views.

Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung by Min Kym Prodigal violinist Min Kym was the youngest pupil at the Purcell School of Music, though her life wasn't a bed of roses. While struggling with the theft of a 17th-century Stradivarius in her possession (which made national headlines in the UK in 2010), she came to realize with incredible clarity that she had lost much more on the journey to meet the expectations of her teachers, her parents, and the world. And all of it was beautifully recorded in this memoir. 

A River in Darkness by Masaji Ishikawa Masaji Ishikawa's life in Japan is just like any ordinary person’s life, but to have gotten there, he’d undergone the challenges of escaping the totalitarian state of North Korea. His experience with this totalitarian state and his subsequent escape makes for a memoir readers can't put down. 

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela The man at the heart of one of the biggest, most publicised international movement against racial discrimination and for political freedom shares his journey from being an activist to his 27 years in prison in this autobiography. 

22. Biographies

Take note, biographies are different from auto biographies in a very crucial way, even though both are basically life stories. While autobiographies are written by authors about themselves , biographies are written by an author about somebody else . If the subject is alive, their consent should be acquired for ethical purposes (though this isn’t always done). A biography could also be penned long after its subject’s death, presented as a history book that’s focused solely on the life and circumstances of one person. Many of these have gone on to inspire award-winning movies and musicals.

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow Ron Chernow is truly the master of biographies, and any of his titles would be a great example of his brilliance as a writer and researcher. This Pulitzer Prize winner on America’s founding father is recommended for its nuanced portrait of a legendary figure. Chernow took four years to research and an additional two to complete the manuscript — it was no easy project!

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar Perhaps more famous for its movie adaptation starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, Sylvia Nasar’s biography provides a window into the turbulent life of schizophrenic mathematician and economist John Nash. While it challenged ethical practices by not consulting with Nash even though he was alive, the book was still very well-received. 

23. Travel Literature 

Some call them travelogues, others call them travel memoirs — either way, travel literature books straddle the line between informing on the many cultures of the world and self-reflection. Books that fall into this genre are usually quite poetic and insightful (unlike practical travel guides). They’re all about personal journeys that are meditative and eye-opening, and can be about a specific place or a series of places. 

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bike by Dervla Murphy In 1963, Dervla Murphy kept a daily diary of her trek “across frozen Europe and through Persia and Afghanistan, over the Himalayas to Pakistan and into India.” After the trip, she published the diary and invited readers to join her on this remarkable feat, whether from their couch or as they start their own journey.

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson Focusing on the place and not the journey, Bill Bryson documents his “farewell tour” of the UK as he prepared to return to America after almost two decades of living across the pond. Mixing cultural insights with a healthy dose of humor, he wraps his travel notes in social commentary to both satirize and praise the idiosyncrasies of the British. 

24. Journalism

Follow investigative journalists as they uncover ugly truths. Other than doing justice by in-depth and sometimes even dangerous investigations, this type of nonfiction also enthralls readers with the twists and turns of real events and details of actual underground operations, conspiracies, and court dramas, to name a few. 

All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein Journalists Woodward and Bernstein's reports in The Washington Post won them a Pulitzer Prize and led to President Nixon’s impeachment. In this book, they recollect the process behind their famous exposé on Watergate.

Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow On his trail to investigate Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults, Farrow discovered a systematic mechanism which favors offenders with big pockets and silences the voice of victims. His book is thus an exposé on the journalism industry itself.

Voilà! Those are 24 of the most popular types of nonfiction along with some typical exmaples. And keep in mind that as more and more titles get released, the genres will expand beyond this list. It goes to show how expansive this side of the publishing world can be. If you’re writing , publishing, or marketing a nonfiction book , hopefully this list has clarified the purpose, styles, and formats of each genre so that you can find the perfect fit for your own work.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Personal Essay

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

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

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

3. Travel Writing

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

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

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

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

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

4. Literary Journalism

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

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

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

5. Features

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

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

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

6. Cultural Criticism

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

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

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

7. Ekphrastic Essays

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

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

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

8. Lyric Essay

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

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

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

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

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

9. Hermit Crabs & Other Borrowed Forms

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

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

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

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

10. Flash Nonfiction

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

Flash nonfiction emphasizes compression and precision.

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

Explore Different Types of Nonfiction Genres at Writers.com

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

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

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

Salamat/THANK YOU!

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

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Home / Guides / Book Publishing / How to Write a Nonfiction Book in 2024: The Ultimate Guide for Authors

How to Write a Nonfiction Book in 2024: The Ultimate Guide for Authors

• Part 1: Your Book Idea
• Part 2: Outline the Book
• Part 3: Write the Book
• Part 4: Edit the Book
• Part 5: Format Your Nonfiction Book
• Part 6: Publish & Market Your Book

If you want to be a nonfiction author, I’ve got the perfect guide for you. 

I've assembled this ultimate guide will walk you through the entire process of creating your nonfiction book, from the initial idea to the final publication.

• How to ensure your idea will sell
• How to outline and write your nonfiction book
• How to polish your book to make it perfect
• How to publish and market your book for maximum success

Some of my links in this article may give me a small commission if you use them to purchase products. There’s NO extra cost to you, and it helps me continue to write handy articles like this one.

The first step is to come up with your idea, and validate it to make sure it is something that will sell.

Determine What Problem Your Nonfiction Book Solves

When it comes to nonfiction writing, it's common for beginning ideas to be a bit vague. It's easy to have a general concept in mind, but to truly make your book a success, you need to do market research to ensure there's an audience for your work. 

This research will help you narrow down your focus and identify the specific problem your book will solve.

In most cases, nonfiction books are written to solve a specific problem . Whether it's a how-to guide on a particular topic, or a self-help book addressing a certain issue, these types of books are meant to provide readers with valuable information that can help them in some way. 

Side note: there are some genres, such as history books, creative nonfiction, or memoirs, that don't quite fit into this mold. But even in these cases, it's still important to understand why people want to read it.

When doing market research, it's important to answer the five W's of your book: the who , what , where , when , and why . 

By answering these questions, you'll be able to identify your niche and craft a book that truly resonates with readers.

Validate Your Book Idea

Before you completely narrow down your story or topic, you need to know if it's a good idea or not. To do this, you need to run through four steps:

• Step 1: Learn if and how many people search for your book idea
• Step 2: Learn if the idea is profitable during the book topic validation process
• Step 3: Discover how hard the competition is for your book
• Step 4: Rinse and repeat

If you find your book topic is not profitable, you can still write it. But if that's the case, you will have to resort to different marketing tactics. You will need to focus on finding the right market somewhere other than Amazon, and getting them interested in reading your book.

Read more in our article on book idea validation .

Determine Your Audience

When it comes to market research for your book, the most important part is understanding your audience. Without a clear understanding of who you're writing for, it will be difficult to create a book that truly resonates with readers. Counterintuitively, you want to narrow down your audience as much as possible. 

One of the best ways to narrow down your audience is by creating a customer avatar. This is a single person that represents your ideal reader. 

The more specific you can make this person, the better. 

It's important to think about things like their gender, age, background, education level, family situation, and even how much money they make. 

The more specific you can get, the more you'll understand about the kinds of problems they're facing, and how your book can help them.

Having a customer avatar in mind can help you make important decisions about your book, such as what types of information to include, what tone to use, and even what types of marketing to do. 

It also helps to think of your customer avatar when you are writing as well so you are writing with a specific person in mind and that will help you to keep your writing more focused. 

Outlining is the next part, and is particularly important for nonfiction books.

You want to make sure you are covering all the subjects thoroughly in your nonfiction book outline, and nothing is lost in translation. Here are some ideas to help.

Brainstorm Ideas

Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience and the problem your book will solve, it's time to start brainstorming ideas. If you already know what your book is about, this is the time to think about how to structure your book and what to include in it. 

If you're still not sure what your book is about, this is the time to explore different possibilities.

When brainstorming ideas, it's important not to hold back. Write down everything that comes to mind, even if it doesn't seem like a good fit at first. 

To help generate ideas, try brainstorming with a group of people, whether it's friends, family or other nonfiction writers. They may have insights you haven’t considered and the exchange of thoughts can be very productive. Also, you could explore other books in your niche and look for inspiration, or research the latest trends and best practices in your niche.

Ultimately, don't be afraid to experiment and try out different things. Brainstorming is a creative process and the more ideas you have to work with, the better your final book will be.

After brainstorming ideas, it's time to dive into research. Research is the best way to truly understand what your book should talk about.

If you find that no one has written about your topic before, it might be a sign that the topic may not be as helpful as you think. So, it's important to be open to the possibility of changing the topic or pivoting in a different direction.

The research process should involve looking through a variety of sources such as books written by others, online articles, podcasts and YouTube videos, interviews, and anything else that may be relevant to your topic. This will give you a good idea of what to cover, but also what gaps in knowledge still exist.

As you research, make sure to gather all unique pieces of data into your notes. Organize the information by topic or subtopic, and make sure to include the source of each piece of information. This will be useful later when you're writing your book and need to cite your sources or refer back to specific information.

Research is a crucial step in the book-writing process, and the more time you spend doing it, the more valuable your book will be. 

It will help you to understand your topic more deeply and help you to better serve your readers. Remember, research is not just to back your claims but to improve the credibility of your book.

Use Nonfiction Story Structures

I often talk about story structure when it comes to fiction, but nonfiction books can benefit from using story structures as well. There are many different types of nonfiction story structures you can use, but here are a few examples to get you started.

• Manipulating Time: With this structure, your story starts in the middle, and shows how you got there in flashback-type sequences. This is great if you're using your own story or something from one of your clients. It allows you to show how your protagonist got to where they are, using the principles you outlined in the book.
• Hook, Story, Offer: This is a great framework from Russell Brunson that I like to use. It consists of three different steps: Hook, which is the thing that gets your readers interested; Story, which is the thing that connects your readers with the emotional truths you're trying to convey; and Offer, where you present the solution to the problem you outlined in your story.
• Circular Structure: Similar to manipulating time, this structure starts at the end, and shows how you got there.
• Parallel Structure: With this structure, you might have two or more stories that you are weaving together. They might seem separate at first, but you tie them together by the end. This is a great way of interweaving your personal story with the principles in your nonfiction book.

Using nonfiction story structures can be a great way to engage your readers and make your book more compelling. By using one of these structures, you can help your readers understand and connect with the information you're presenting in a more meaningful way.

Put it All Together

Once you have your structure in place and your notes organized, it's time to weave it all together into something coherent. 

This can be a challenging step, as you'll need to take all the information you've gathered and figure out how to present it in a logical and easy-to-understand way. 

It's important to be selective with the information you include, as you'll likely have more than you can include in your book. This means that some things may need to be left out, as hard as that may be.

Once you have that all fleshed out and ready to go, it’s time to move on to the next step…

Writing a book is the single most important step on this list, and often the hardest. So I’ve assembled a few tips to get you started.

Determine the Best Writing Software

Choose the best book writing software for individual project, consider software like Atticus, Scrivener, Ulysses and Microsoft word or Google Docs.

Atticus is the best book writing software for overall capability, including tracking software and formatting. It costs $147 as a one-time fee and works on multiple platforms. 

Plus, it is optimized for nonfiction, with certain features that make the nonfiction process SOOOOO much easier, including:

• Endnote and Footnotes (the only budget-friendly tool to do the latter)
• H2 – H6 Headers
• Callout boxes
• Hanging indents

It is my #1 recommendation for authors who want to write and format books of any kind!

Scrivener is the next best option for organization and customization, but it has a steep learning curve and costs $49 (one-time) for Mac or Windows. $19.99 for iOS devices and reduced pricing of $41.65 is available for “students & academics”.

Use Kindlepreneur’s unique discount code (KINDLEPRENEUR) to get 20% OFF your purchase.

• Download Scrivener 3 for Mac
• Download Scrivener 1 for Windows , which is on par with Scrivener 2 for Mac (update coming in 2021)
• Download Scrivener 1 for iOS , which is also on par with Scrivener 2 on Mac (a handy tool for on-the-go writing with an iPad or iPhone )

Ulysses is a customizable and sleek book writing software that syncs automatically and has a drag-and-drop functionality, but only works on Apple products and costs $5.99/month or $49.99/year, but with a free 2-week trial. 

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is industry standard for word processing, but not ideal for novel writing, often used because of its ubiquity, but it is cumbersome for writing a book, and costs $139.99 as a one-time purchase or $6.99/month for a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Write the Book Fast

When it comes to nonfiction and fiction alike, I firmly believe that getting the book out as fast as possible is the best way to go. Writing fast allows you to get the first draft on the table and start the editing process. 

Important: The goal at this stage is not to create a perfect product, but simply to get the words down so you can work with them later.

One of the main advantages of writing quickly is that it helps to overcome writer's block and other forms of procrastination. When you're not focusing on making everything perfect, it's easier to simply get words down on the page. 

It's also useful to remember that the first draft is not meant to be perfect, it's meant to be a starting point, it's where you will put down the ideas that you want to explore further, and decide which direction you want to take.

Some quick tips to write fast include

• Set good goals
• Work in manageable chunks
• Develop writing habits
• Right at the same time everyday
• Use a timer
• Try dictation

I have a whole list of other ways to write faster in this article.

Use Storytelling

Storytelling is often seen as something that is only relevant to fiction writing, but it's equally important in nonfiction. Stories allow you to draw readers in and make them emotionally connected with your subject matter.

There are many ways to incorporate stories into your nonfiction book. You can mine stories from your own life, the lives of your clients, history, or even current events. 

The key is to find stories that are relevant to the topic of your book and that will help to illustrate the points you're trying to make.

Keep the Writing Simple

For nonfiction, it's important to keep the language simple and easy to understand. Unless you are speaking to a highly educated audience, this will almost always be the case. 

This is because nonfiction books often have the goal of conveying information to a wide audience, which means that the language must be accessible to a general reader.

Using simple and easy-to-understand language not only makes your book more accessible to a wider audience, but it also makes it more likely that your readers will retain the information you're trying to convey. 

Avoid using jargon and technical terms that might not be familiar to your general audience. Instead, explain them in simple terms or provide definitions. 

The more complex your topic, the more you want to be able to explain that topic in simple terms.

Editing the book is when you take that rough product and polish it. It’s an important step that should be done with care.

Self-edit the Book

Let's be honest, self-editing is not everyone's favorite part of the writing process. However, it is an important step that should not be overlooked. Before you send your work to beta readers or an editor, it's a good idea to have at least one self-edit. 

This will give you an opportunity to catch any errors and make sure your ideas flow well, your arguments are tight and the book feels coherent.

The key is to approach self-editing with an open mind and a critical eye. Take the time to read through your work carefully and consider whether each sentence and paragraph adds value to the book. Look for ways to tighten up the writing, eliminate redundancy and make sure that the book is clear and easy to understand. 

Fact Check Everything

In today's age of misinformation, fact checking is more important than ever. It's crucial that the information in your nonfiction book is accurate and reliable, otherwise it risks losing credibility with your readers. 

The good news is that if you did your research well, and documented everything, this step will be greatly simplified. You should have sources and citations to back up every claim you make in your book. 

By double-checking these sources and making sure that the information is still accurate, you'll ensure that your book is reliable and trustworthy.

Send to Editors

After you've given your manuscript a thorough self-edit, it's time to send it to an editor . An editor is one of your most important resources when it comes to producing a polished and professional book. 

They can provide valuable feedback and make suggestions that will help to improve the overall quality of your manuscript.

It's important to keep in mind that editing can be one of the more expensive parts of the book writing process. However, investing in an editor's expertise is well worth the effort. 

An editor can help you to turn your manuscript into a polished and professional book that will stand out among the competition.

Send to Beta Readers

Once you have a decent product, it's time to send it out to beta readers. Beta readers are a valuable resource that can help you to identify problems you might not have thought of. 

Beta readers can also help you to understand if the stories you used in your manuscript worked and if any of them were confusing. They will give you an idea of how the general audience might receive your work. They can point out if certain parts of the manuscript are too complex or if certain sections don't flow well.

This feedback is essential to help you to make necessary adjustments before your book is ready for publication.

The penultimate step is to format your nonfiction book so it looks good. I've got one specific tool to help with this…

The best way to format your nonfiction book is using Atticus, the best formatting tool for nonfiction, given that it has multiple nonfiction-specific features that other formatting tools don't have.

Plus, it's way cheaper and easier to use than any of the other formatting tools out there.

For example, here are some of the nonfiction-specific features that you might want to use:

Subheadings

While most formatting tools have only one size of heading, Atticus has the ability to create multiple levels of headings, meaning you can have main headings, then subheadings underneath those headings, etc. Here's what that looks like:

Additionally, you can customize the size and style of each heading type, which actually means that fiction authors can make use of the headings as well.

By selecting a specific style font, you could create the illusion of a hand-written note or a text that you could use insert into your text. So headings are not just for nonfiction authors!

Here's the what the heading formatting looks like in Atticus:

Footnotes/Endnotes

Until Atticus came along, there wasn't any affordable and easy to use program that provided footnotes in books. But Atticus can!

With Atticus, you can easily add footnotes that will appear at the bottom of each page in your print edition (note: ebook editions, by necessity, default to endnotes).

In addition to footnotes, Atticus also lets you select endnotes, and let's you specify whether you want your endnotes to appear at the end of the book, or the end of each chapter.

Hanging Indents

Hanging indents are an essential piece of formatting for authors who have a lot of references. A hanging indent is used when you need to list your sources and create a bibliography.

In other words, this is an essential piece of the puzzle for any nonfiction author who needs to list their sources.

Callout Boxes

Last but not least, Atticus has Callout Boxes!

These are honestly some of my favorites.

Atticus lets you add a callout box to any selection of text, and it will show up with that callout box in ebook or in print.

You can completely customize the look of your callout boxes, as seen here:

And then, once you've got something like that, you can preview it in Atticus' device previewer, where it might look a little something like this:

Part 6: Publish & Market Your Book

Writing the book is just part of the process. With any book, but especially with nonfiction books, publishing and marketing is crucial.

Research Your Title and Subtitle

When it comes to writing a nonfiction book, finding the right title and subtitle is crucial. This is because a well-crafted title and subtitle can help to attract readers and increase the visibility of your book.

One effective way to determine your title and subtitle is by doing keyword research.

Keyword research can be done by extensively crawling through Amazon's listings. This can help you to understand what people are searching for, and what kind of titles and subtitles are most effective. 

Pro Tip: The key is to figure out what people are searching for, and use this information to choose a title and subtitle that will resonate with your target audience.

Unfortunately, manual searches can be tedious when done manually. However, there's a tool out there called Publisher Rocket that will automate this process and make it faster and easier. 

This tool can help you to analyze your competition, uncover the best keywords, and optimize your title and subtitle for maximum visibility.

Publish Your Nonfiction Book

After all the hard work of researching, writing, editing and fact-checking, it's finally time to publish your book. It can be a daunting process, but with the right guidance, it can be done seamlessly. 

If you're planning to publish your book on Amazon, I have an article that can be extremely helpful. 

It provides an in-depth guide on how to publish your book on Amazon, detailing the different options and services available, and how to use them.

Market Your Book to Your Audience

When you publish your book, make sure you  format your book correctly , nail your  back cover blurb , have a  stellar book cover  (traditional publishers will usually pay for this), and properly organize the  front matter and back matter . Hopefully, you know that you have to start marketing your book long before it hits shelves and the online marketplace. Here are some articles you can read to learn more about book marketing:

• Book Marketing 101
• Kindle Keywords for Self-Publishers
• Ultimate List of the Best Book Review Blogs
• How to Use Surveys to Sell More Books
• Best Email Services for Authors
• How to Sell Your Books in an Indie Bookstore

Jason Hamilton

Related posts, cyber monday deals for writers 2023, launching a book: the ultimate step by step guide, how to publish a book on amazon: the full step-by-step guide, sell more books on amazon, amazon kindle rankings e-book.

Learn how to rank your Kindle book #1 on Amazon with our collection of time-tested tips and tricks.

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• Entertainment

The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2021

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

I n an era when time spent trying new things and meeting new people was still a rare privilege, the best books served to please our wandering minds. These works, from well-known writers as well as exciting new voices, dissect a range of subjects from the history of Black performance in America to the value of the 19th-century Russian short story to the intimate pain caused by losing a parent . They are sweeping histories and bold essay collections, powerful memoirs and brilliant literary criticism. Their diversity is a virtue in and of itself, a means of exploring and satisfying our curiosities. Here, the top 10 nonfiction books of 2021.

10. The Kissing Bug , Daisy Hernández

When Daisy Hernández was a child, her aunt traveled from Colombia to the U.S. in search of a cure for the mysterious disease that caused her stomach to become so distended that people thought she was pregnant. Growing up, Hernández believed her aunt had become sick from eating an apple; it wasn’t until decades later that she learned more about Chagas disease . As Hernández describes in her deftly reported book, Chagas—transmitted by “kissing bugs” that carry the parasite that causes it—is an infectious disease that sickens hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S., many of whom are poor immigrants from Latin America. She traces the history of Chagas and the lives most impacted by it, offering a nuanced and empathetic look into the intersections of poverty, racism and the U.S. health care system.

Buy Now: The Kissing Bug on Bookshop | Amazon

9. Finding the Mother Tree , Suzanne Simard

In her first book, pioneering forest ecologist Suzanne Simard blends her personal history with that of the trees she has researched for decades. Finding the Mother Tree is as comprehensive as it is deeply personal, especially as Simard explores her curiosity about trees and what it has been like to work as a woman in a field dominated by men. Her passion for the subject at the book’s center is palpable on every page, coalescing into an urgent call to embrace our connection with the earth and do whatever we can to protect it.

Buy Now: Finding the Mother Tree on Bookshop | Amazon

8. The Copenhagen Trilogy , Tove Ditlevsen

Originally published as three separate books in Danish between 1967 and 1971, The Copenhagen Trilogy, now presented in a single translated volume, is a heartbreaking portrait of an artist. In precise and brutally self-aware terms, Tove Ditlevsen reflects on her life, from her turbulent youth during Hitler’s rise to power to her discovery of poetry and later to the dissolution of her multiple marriages. Though the story was written decades ago, the complexities of womanhood that Ditlevsen captures are timeless.

Buy Now: The Copenhagen Trilogy on Bookshop | Amazon

7. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain , George Saunders

George Saunders is deeply familiar with the 19th-century Russian short story—he’s been teaching a class on the subject to M.F.A. students for two decades. Here, he opens up his syllabus, analyzing seven iconic works by authors including Chekhov and Tolstoy to highlight the importance of fiction in our lives. In a world bursting with distractions, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain demands the reader’s attention. Saunders begins by breaking down a story line by line—in less thoughtful hands, this exercise would be draining, but Saunders infuses so much heart into the practice that instead it is simply fun.

Buy Now: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain on Bookshop | Amazon

Read more about the best entertainment of the year: TV shows | Movies | Songs | Albums | Podcasts | Fiction books | YA and children’s books | Movie performances | Video games | Theater

6. Empire of Pain , Patrick Radden Keefe

From the author of the 2019 best seller Say Nothing , which dove into Northern Ireland during the Troubles, Empire of Pain is a stirring investigation into three generations of the Sackler family . Patrick Radden Keefe explores the Sacklers and the source of their infamous fortune, earned by producing and marketing a painkiller that became the driving force behind the opioid crisis. It’s a sweeping account of a family’s outsize impact on the world­—and a dogged work of reporting that showcases the horrific implications of greed.

Buy Now: Empire of Pain on Bookshop | Amazon

Most Popular from TIME

5. aftershocks , nadia owusu.

Born in Tanzania and raised all over the world, from England to Italy to Ethiopia, Nadia Owusu never felt she belonged anywhere. In her aching memoir, she embarks on a tour de force examination of her childhood, marked first by her mother’s abandoning her when she was a toddler and later by the death of her beloved father. Through assessing the people and places that shaped her, Owusu picks up the pieces of her life to make sense of it all. In lyrical and lush prose, she crafts an intimate and piercing exploration of identity, family and home.

Buy Now: Aftershocks on Bookshop | Amazon

4. How the Word Is Passed , Clint Smith

Amid a discussion of what students should be learning about history , Clint Smith, a poet and journalist, takes readers across the U.S.­—from the Monticello plantation in Virginia to a maximum-security prison in Louisiana—to underline the legacy of slavery and how it has shaped the country. The result, longlisted for the National Book Award, is an insightful dissection of the relationship between memory, history and America’s ongoing reckoning with its past.

Buy Now: How the Word Is Passed on Bookshop | Amazon

3. Invisible Child , Andrea Elliott

For almost a decade, reporter Andrea Elliott observed the coming-of-age of a girl named Dasani, who has lived in and out of the New York City shelter system for most of her life. Dasani’s existence is full of contradictions—her Brooklyn shelter is just blocks away from some of the borough’s most expensive real estate—and Elliott is relentless in her efforts to capture them all. In exact and searing detail, she places Dasani’s story alongside the larger issues of inequality, homelessness and racism in the city and more broadly the U.S.

Buy Now: Invisible Child on Bookshop | Amazon

2. Crying in H Mart , Michelle Zauner

When Michelle Zauner, founder of the indie-rock band Japanese Breakfast, was 25 years old, her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. That illness and her mother’s eventual death shattered Zauner’s sense of self—and forced her to re-evaluate her relationship with her Korean culture. In her memoir, Zauner searches for answers about the influences that shaped so much of her life, often ruminating on the food her mother made for her. The memories associated with these dishes—jatjuk, gimbap, galbi—push the narrative along, and it’s food that becomes such a heartbreaking marker of her mother’s decline, particularly when chemotherapy makes it too difficult for her to eat. Remarkably honest and written in animated terms, Crying in H Mart is a potent and devastating portrait of a mother and daughter and the life that they shared.

Buy Now: Crying in H Mart on Bookshop | Amazon

1. A Little Devil in America , Hanif Abdurraqib

A finalist for the National Book Award, Hanif Abdurraqib ’ s work of cultural criticism is an astonishing accounting of Black performance. In essays full of snappy prose, Abdurraqib analyzes everything from the rise of Whitney Houston to a schoolyard fistfight. The author, also a poet, seamlessly blends pop culture references with U.S. history and stories from his own upbringing. The connections that he makes between these stories—both small and large, intimate and collective—point to the enduring influence of Black art. He covers broad ground with ease and wit, an impressive balance for a book that is as bold as it is essential.

Buy Now: A Little Devil in America on Bookshop | Amazon

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What Is Nonfiction: Definition and Examples

Sarah Oakley

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What is nonfiction, is nonfiction a genre, what is a nonfiction book example, how prowritingaid can help you write nonfiction.

Nonfiction writing has become one of the most popular genres of books published today. Most nonfiction books are about modern day problems, science, or details of actual events and lives.

If you’re looking for informative writing made up of factual details rather than fiction, nonfiction is a great option. It serves to develop your knowledge about different topics, and it helps you learn about real events.

In this article, we’ll explain what nonfiction is, what to expect from the nonfiction genre, and some examples of nonfiction books.

If you’re considering writing a book, and you can’t decide between fiction or nonfiction , it helps to know exactly what nonfiction is first.

Similarly, if you want to indulge in some self-development, and you decide to read some books, you’ll need to know what to look for in a nonfiction book to ensure you’re reading factual content.

Nonfiction Definition

To define the word nonfiction, we can break it down into two parts. “Non” is a prefix that means the absence of something. “Fiction” means writing that features ideas and elements purely from the author’s imagination.

Therefore, when you put those two definitions together, it suggests nonfiction is the absence of writing that comes from someone’s imagination. To put it in a better way, nonfiction is about facts and evidence rather than imaginary events and characters who don’t exist. 

Nonfiction Meaning

As nonfiction writing sounds like the opposite of fiction writing, you might think nonfiction is all true and objective, but that’s not the case. While nonfiction writing contains factual elements, such as real people, concepts, and events, it’s not always objectively true accounts.

A lot of nonfiction writing is opinionated or biased discussions about the subject of the writing.

For example, you might be a football expert, and you want to write a book about the top goal scorers of 2022. Your piece could be objective and discuss exactly who scored the most goals in 2022, or you could add some opinions and discuss who scored the best goals or who performed the best on the pitch.

Opinions make nonfiction books more unique to the author, as it sounds more authentic and human because we all have our own thoughts and feelings about things.

Adding opinions can also make nonfiction books more interesting for readers, as you can be more controversial or use exaggeration to increase reader engagement. Many readers like to pick up books that challenge their thoughts about certain topics.

Be confident about grammar

Check every email, essay, or story for grammar mistakes. Fix them before you press send.

Nonfiction is a genre, but it’s more of an umbrella term for several reference and factual genres. When you’re in the nonfiction section of a bookstore or library, you’ll find the books in categories based on the overall theme or topic of the book.

There are several categories of nonfiction:

Biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs

Travel writing and travel guides

Academic journals

Philosophical and modern social science

Journalism and news media

Self-help books

How-to guides

Humorous books

Reference books

Historical, academic, reference, philosophical, and social science books often focus on factual representations of information about specific subjects, events, and key ideas. The tone of these books is often more formal, though there are some informal examples available.

Biography , memoir, travel writing, humor, and self-help books are creative nonfiction. This means they’re based on true events and stories, but the writer uses a lot more creative freedom to tell stories and pass on information about what they have learned from life.

Readers often criticize journalism and news media for not being objectively truthful when telling people about events. However, almost all journalism is biased or opinionated in one way or another. Therefore, it’s good to read from multiple different sources for your news updates.

If you want to read nonfiction to get an idea of what it’s like, we’ve got several examples of great nonfiction books for you to check out.

Historical : The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Biography : This Much is True by Miriam Margolyes

Travel Writing : Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon

Philosophical : The Alignment Problem: How Can Machines Learn Human Values? By Brian Christian

Self-Help : Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? By Dr. Julie Smith

Humor : What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe

If you want to write nonfiction, you can use ProWritingAid to ensure you avoid publishing a manuscript full of grammatical errors. Whether you’re looking for a second pair of eyes catching quick fixes as you write, or a full analysis of your manuscript once it’s written, ProWritingAid has you covered.

You can use the Realtime checker to see suggested improvements to your writing as you’re working. If you use the in-tool learning features as well, you’ll see fewer suggestions as you write because it’ll essentially train you to become a better writer.

If you’re more of a full-blown analysis editor, try using the Readability report to see suggestions highlighting where you can improve your writing to ensure more readers can understand what you’re saying. Readability is important if you want to reach more readers who have different levels of reading comprehension.

Another great report you can use for nonfiction writing is the Transitions report. Transitions are the words that show cause and effect within your writing. If you want your reader to follow your points and arguments, you need to include plenty of transitions to improve the flow of your writing.

Now that you know what nonfiction means and how ProWritingAid can help you produce a great nonfiction book, try nonfiction writing , and see how fun it is to share your knowledge and opinions with the world. Just don’t forget to check your work is factual and relevant.

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How To Write A Nonfiction Book: 21 Steps for Beginners

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The proven path from blank page to 10,000 copies sold.

The steps on how to write a nonfiction book are easy to follow, but can be difficult to execute if you don't have a clear plan.

Many first time authors experience information overload when it comes to writing a nonfiction book. Where do I start? How do I build authority? What chapters do I need to include? Do I know enough about this topic?

If you're mind is racing with questions about how to get started with your book, then you’ve landed in the right place!

Writing a book can be a grueling, lengthy process. But with a strategic system in place, you could become a nonfiction book author within three to four months.

However, you need an extremely high level of motivation and dedication, as well as a clear, proven system to follow.

In this article, we’ll cover all there is to know about the nonfiction book writing process.

Need A Nonfiction Book Outline?

How to write a nonfiction book

Writing a nonfiction book is one of the most challenging paths you will ever take. But it can also be one of the most rewarding accomplishments of your life.

Before we get started with the steps to write a nonfiction book, let's review some foundational questions that many aspiring authors have.

What is a nonfiction book?

A nonfiction book is based on facts, such as real events, people, and places. It is a broad category, and includes topics such as biography, memoir, business, health, religion, self-help, science, cooking, and more.

A nonfiction book differs from a fiction book in the sense that it is real, not imaginary.

The purpose of nonfiction books is commonly to educate or inform the reader, whereas the purpose of fiction books is typically to entertain.

Perennial nonfiction books are titles such as How to Win Friends and Influence People from Dale Carnegie, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, and Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl .

What is the author’s purpose in a work of nonfiction?

In a nonfiction book, the author’s main purpose or reason for writing on the topic is to inform or educate readers about a certain topic.

While there are some nonfiction books that also entertain readers, the most common author's purpose in a work of nonfiction is to raise awareness about a certain topic, event, or concept.

How many words are in a nonfiction book?

Because nonfiction is such a broad category, it really depends on the type of nonfiction you are writing, but generally a nonfiction book should be about 40,000 words.

To determine how many words in a novel , narrow down your topic and do some research to see what the average word count is.

Use this Word & Page Count Calculator to calculate how many words you should aim for, based on your genre and audience.

How long does it take to write a nonfiction book?

It can take anywhere from three months to several years to write a nonfiction book, depending on the author's speed, research process, book length, and other variables.

On average, it can take a self-published author typically six months to one year to write their nonfiction book. However, that means the author is setting time aside daily to work on their book, staying focused, and motivated.

Other nonfiction authors, especially those with heavy research an in–depth analysis can take much longer. How long it takes to write a nonfiction book really just depends on several factors.

Benefits of writing a nonfiction book

Making a decision to write a book could change your life. Just think about all the ways you could leverage your expertise!

If you’re interested in how to write a book , it’s important to understand all the things writing the book can do for you, so that you can stay motivated throughout the process.

Some rewarding results that can come after you write a nonfiction book are:

• Exponentially accelerate the growth of your business
• Generate a stream of passive income for years to come
• Build authority in your field of expertise
• Increase exposure in the media
• Become a motivational speaker
• …and so much more (this is just the beginning)!

Imagine for a moment …walking into your local bookstore and seeing your book placed at the front of the store in the new releases section. Or browsing on Amazon KDP , the world’s largest online bookstore, and seeing your nonfiction book listed as a bestseller alongside well-known authors.

It can happen in as little as three months if you are fully committed and ready to start today.

How to Write a Nonfiction Book in 21 Steps

You're clear on the type of nonfiction book you want to write, and you're ready to get started.

Before you start writing, it's time to lay the groundwork and get clear on the entire process. This will help you manage your book writing expectations, and prepare for the nonfiction book writing journey that lies ahead.

With those foundational questions out of the way, let’s move on to 21-step checklist so you can start learning exactly how to write a nonfiction book.

#1— Develop the mindset to learn how to write a nonfiction book

The first step in how to become an author is to develop a rock solid author mindset. Without a writer’s mindset, you are going to struggle to get anywhere with your book. Writing has more to do with your attitude towards the craft than the skill required to get you there.

If writing words down and tying sentences together to craft a story is the skill, your mindset is the foundation that keeps this motivation moving forward.

Identifying yourself as a writer from the start (even if you haven't published yet) will form the mindset needed to continue working on your book .

To succeed, you must toughen up so that nothing gets in your way of writing.

This is also known as imposter syndrome : A psychological pattern where a person doubts their accomplishments and has an ongoing internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.

Here’s how to prevent imposter syndrome as an aspiring author:

• Define what it means to be an author or writer. Is this someone who wakes up at 5am and writes 1000 words a day?
• Tell yourself you’re a writer. Just do it. It feels strange at first but you will begin to believe your own self-talk.
• Talk about your book idea . That’s right – start telling people you are writing a book. Many writers working on a book will keep it a secret until published. Even then, they might not about it.
• Take action to build author confidence. Imposter syndrome paralyzes you. Focus on increasing your author confidence and getting rid of doubt. This can be done by committing to writing every day. Just 500 words is enough. Build that writing habits early and you’ll be walking and talking like a true author.

#2 – Create a Book Writing Plan

Excuses will kill your chances of becoming a published author. There are no good reasons for not writing a book, only good excuses you convince yourself are real.

You are trying to protect yourself from embarrassment, only to create a new kind of shame: the shame of not finishing the book you have been talking about for years.

Some of the most common excuses that hold writers back are: There is no time to write in my life right now. I can't get past my distractions. I can never be as good as my favorite famous author. My book has to perfect.

Excuses are easy to dish out. But identifying them for what they are (excuses), is the first step towards taking action and changing your limiting mindset.

Excuses, while they may seem valid, are walls of fear. Banish your excuses right now and commit to writing your book.

Here's how to overcome the excuses that prevent you from writing:

• Make the time to write. Set up a thirty-minute time block every day. Commit to writing during this time.
• Turn off your distractions. Get rid of the WiFi for an hour. Close the door. It is just you and the story.
• Be aware of comparisons to other writers. They worked hard to get where they are, and you will get there, too.
• Give yourself permission to write badly. It won’t be perfect, but a book that is half-finished can’t be published.

#3 – Identify your WHY

Start with this question: “Why am I doing this?”

Know your why . This is critical to moving ahead with your book idea. We usually have an intrinsic and extrinsic reason for wanting to learn how to write a nonfiction book.

Intrinsic Why: What is your #1 reason for wanting to write this book? Is it a bucket list goal you must achieve? Is it to help people overcome a root issue in their lives? Do you want to create a movement and generate social impact?

Extrinsic Why: Do you want to create a business from your book? Have passive income coming in for many years later? Become a full-time author and work from home? Grow your network? Build an online presence?

Getting super clear on why you want to write a bestselling book is the momentum to propel you forward and deliver your story. Enlisting the help of a book writing coach (like we offer here at SelfPublishing!) can also help you stay close to your why. This person will be your sounding board, motivation, and voice of reason during the writing process – providing much-needed support from someone who's published multiple books before.

#4 – Research nonfiction book topics

Whether you have a clear idea of what you want to write about or if you are still exploring possible topic ideas, it's important to do a bit of market research.

Researching the current news and case studies related to your potential topic are powerful ways to add credibility to your nonfiction book, and will help you develop your own ideas.

This adds greater depth to your nonfiction book, builds better trust with readers, and delivers content that exceeds customer expectations.

If you need help narrowing down your book idea, try experimenting with some writing prompts based on the genre you're interested in!

Here's how to write a nonfiction book that's well-researched:

• Use case studies. Pull case studies and make reference to the research. If there are not any case studies related to your topic, explore the idea of creating your own case study.
• Read books related to your topic. Mention good books or articles to support your material.
• Research facts from reliable sources. Post proven facts and figures from reliable sources such as scholarly journals, academic papers, white papers, newspapers, and more.

#5 – Select a nonfiction book topic

What are you writing about? It starts with having a deep interest and passion for the area you are focused on.

Common topics to write a nonfiction book on are:

• Business and Money
• Health, dieting and exercise
• Religion and Spirituality
• Home repair
• Innovation and entrepreneurship

You probably already know this so it should be easy. Make a note of the area you are writing your book on. And then…

#6 — Drill down into your book idea

Everyone starts at the same place. It begins with an idea for the book.

What is the core idea for your book? If your nonfiction book topic is on health and dieting, your idea might be a book on “How to lose 7 pounds in your first month.”

Your book is going to be centered around this core idea.

You could have several ideas for the overall book but, to avoid writing a large, general book that nobody will read, make it more specific.

#7 — Schedule writing time

What gets scheduled, gets done. That’s right, you should schedule in your writing time just like any other appointment on your calendar.

Your writing routine will have a large role to play when it comes to writing and finishing your book.

Scheduling time for writing, and sticking to it, will help you knock out your writing goals with ease.

Stephen King sits down to write every morning from eight-thirty. It was his way of programming his brain to get ready for the day’s work. He writes an average of ten pages a day.

W.H. Auden would rise at six a.m. and would work hard from seven to eleven-thirty, when his mind was sharpest.

When do you feel the most productive? If you can, make time for writing at the same time every day to set the tone for your writing productivity.

Commit to a time of day and a length of time during which to write. Set a goal for yourself and try to hit the target every day by sticking with your routine.

#8 — Establish a writing space

You need a place to write, and you must establish that space where you can write everyday, distraction-free for several hours a day.

Your writing environment plays a critical role in your life as an author. If you write in a place that’s full of noise, uncomfortable to be in, or affects your emotional state to the point you don’t want to do anything, you might consider your environment needs some work.

Here is how to create a writing space that inspires you to write:

Display your favorite author photos

Find at least twenty photos of authors you want to emulate. Print these out if you can and place them around your room. An alternative idea is to use the photos as screensavers or a desktop screen. You can change the photo every day if you like. There is nothing like writing and having your favorite author looking back at you as if to say, “Come on, you’ve got this!”

Hang up a yearly calendar

Your nonfiction book will get written faster if you have goals for each day and week. The best way to manage this is by scheduling your time on a calendar. Schedule every hour that you commit to your author business.

As Bob Goff said, “The battle for happiness begins on the pages of our calendars.”

Buy a big wall calendar. Have enough space on each day that you can write down your goals for that day. When you have a goal for that day or week, write it down or use a sticky note.

Create a clutter-free environment

If there is any one factor that will slow you down or kill your motivation, it is a room full of clutter.

If your room looks like a tornado swept through, it can have a serious impact on your emotional state. What you see around you also occupies space in your mind. Unfinished business is unconsciously recorded in your mind and this leads to clutter (both physical and mental).

Although you can’t always be in complete control of your physical space, you can get rid of any clutter you have control over. Go for a simple workplace that makes you feel relaxed.

Choose a writing surface and chair

Consider a standing desk, which is becoming popular for many reasons. Sitting down for long periods of time becomes uncomfortable and unhealthy. You can balance your online time between sitting and standing.

For sitting, you want a chair that is comfortable, but not too comfortable. Invest in a chair that requires you to sit up straight. If there is a comfortable back attached, as with most chairs, you have a tendency to get sleepy. This can trigger other habits as well, such as craving television.

Seek out the place where you can be at your most productive and feel confident and comfortable.

#9 — Choose a nonfiction book writing software

This is one of the most important writing tools you will choose. Your writing software needs to be efficient, easy to use and stress-free. Anything that requires a lot of formatting or a steep learning curve could end up costing you time and patience.

There are literally dozens of choices for book writing software , so it's really just a matter of finding what works best for you.

Here are 3 writing software for new authors to consider:

• Microsoft Word. Before any other writing tools came along, Microsoft Word was the only option available. Today, even though there are many other word processors out there, millions of people continue to use it for their writing needs. And it’s easy to see why. It’s trusted, reliable, and gets the job done well .
• Google Docs . It's a stripped-down version of Word that you can only use online. Some perks are that it comes with the built-in ability to share content, files, and documents with your team. You can easily communicate via comments for collaboration. If you write your book in Google Docs, you can share the link with anyone and they can edit , or make any changes right in the document itself. And all changes are trackable!
• Scrivener . A lot of writers absolutely love this program, with its advanced features and distraction-free writing experience. Scrivener was designed for writers; it’s super easy to lay out scenes, move content around, and outline your story, article, or manuscript. If you’re serious about learning how to write a nonfiction book, then putting in the time to learn this writing tool will definitely be worth it.

There are many forms of writing software that all have advantages to using them, but once you find what works for you, stick with it.

#10 — Create your mind map

A mind map is a brain dump of all your ideas. Using your theme and core idea as a basic starting point, your mind map will help you to visually organize everything into a structure for the book.

I highly recommend using pen and paper for this. You will enjoy the creative flow of this process with a physical version of the map rather than mind mapping software. But, if you prefer using an app to create your mindmap , you can try MindMeister .

Here is how to create your mind map:

• Start with your central idea. Write this idea in the center of the map.
• Add branches connecting key ideas that flow out from the core idea.
• Add keywords that tie these key ideas together.
• Using color coded markers or sticky notes, and identify the chapters within your mindmap.
• Take your chapter headings and…

#11 — How to write a nonfiction book outline

Now that your book topic is decided on, and you have mind mapped your ideas, it’s time to start determining how to outline a nonfiction book.

There are several ways to create a book outline , and it really boils down to author preference and style.

Here's how to write a nonfiction book outline:

• Use this Book Outline Generator for a helpful template to follow for your own outline.
• Map out your book's topics with a mindmap or bubble map, then organize similar concepts together into chapters.
• Answer the 5 Ws: Who, What, When, Where, Why.
• Use book writing software outline tools, like Scrivener's corkboard method.

What is a nonfiction book outline?

A book outline is a roadmap or blueprint for your story. It tells you where you need to go and when in chronological order.

Take the common themes of your chapters and, if applicable, divide your chapters into sections. This is your smooth transition from tangled mind map to organized outline.

Note that not every book needs sections; you might have chapters only. But if your chapters can be grouped into 3-6 different themes within the book, create a section for those common-themed chapters and group them together into a section.

The outline needs to be easy to follow and generally no more than a couple pages long.

The goal here is to take your mind map and consolidate your ideas into a structure that makes logical sense . This will be an incredible roadmap to follow when you are writing the book.

No outline = writing chaos.

There are two types of book outlines I will introduce here:

Option 1: Simple Nonfiction Book Outline

A simple book outline is just like it sounds; keep it basic and brief. Start with the title, then add in your major sections in the order that makes sense for your topic.

Don’t get too hung up on the perfect title at this stage of the process ; you just want to come up with a good-for-now placeholder.

Use our Nonfiction Book Title Generator for ideas.

Option 2: Chapter-by-Chapter Nonfiction Book Outline

Your chapter-by-chapter book outline is a pumped-up version of the simple book outline.

To get started, first create a complete chapter list. With each chapter listed as a heading, you’ll later add material or move chapters around as the draft takes shape.

Create a working title for each chapter. List them in a logical order. After that, you’ll fill in the key points of each chapter.

Create a mind map for each chapter to outline a nonfiction book

Now that you have a list of your chapters, take each one and, similar to what you did with your main mind map for the book, apply this same technique to each chapter.

You want to mind map 3-7 ideas to cover in each chapter. These points will become the subtopics of each chapter that functions to make up chapter structure in your nonfiction book.

It is important to not get hung up on the small details of the chapter content at this stage. Simply make a list of your potential chapters. The outline will most likely change as you write the book. You can tweak the details as you go.

#12 — Determine your point of view

The language can be less formal if you are learning how to write a self-help book or another similar nonfiction book. This is because you are teaching a topic based on your own perspective and not necessarily on something based in scientific research.

Discovering your voice and writing style is as easy as being yourself, but it’s also a tough challenge.

Books that have a more conversational tone to them are just as credible as books with more profound language. You just have to keep your intended audience in mind when deciding what kind of tone you want to have in your book.

The easiest way to do this is to simply write as you would talk, as if you were explaining your topic to someone in front of you – maybe a friend.

Your reader will love this because it will feel like you are sitting with them, having a cup of coffee, hanging out and chatting about your favorite topic.

#13 — Write your first chapter

As soon as you have your nonfiction book outline ready, you want to build momentum right away. The best way to start this is to dive right into your first chapter.

You can start anywhere you like. You don’t have to start writing your nonfiction book in chronological order.

Take a chapter and, if you haven’t yet done so, spend a few minutes to brainstorm the main speaking points. These points are to be your chapter subheadings.

You already have the best software for writing, you’re all set in your writing environment, now you can start writing.

But wait…feeling stuck already?

That’s okay. You might want to start off with some free flow writing. Take a blank page and just start writing down your thoughts. Don’t think about what you are writing or if it makes any sense. This technique is designed to open up your mind to the flow of writing, or stream of consciousness

Write for 10-15 minutes until you are warmed up.

Next, dive into your chapter content.

#14 — Write a nonfiction book first draft

The major step in how to write a nonfiction book is – well, to actually write the first draft!

In this step, you are going to write the first draft of your book. All of it. Notice we did not say you were going to write and edit . No, you are only writing.

Do not edit while you write, and if you can fight temptation, do not read what you’ve written until the first draft is complete.

This seems like a long stretch, to write a 30-40,000-word book without reading it over, but…it’s important to tap into your creative mind and stay there during the writing phase.

It is difficult to access both your writing brain and editing brain at the same time. By sticking with the process of “write first, edit later,” you will finish your first draft faster and feel confident moving into the self-editing phase.

To learn how to write a nonfiction book, use this format:

• Mind map your chapter —10 minutes
• Outline/chapter subheadings—10 minutes
• Research [keep it light]—20 Minutes
• Write content—90 minutes

After you're done with your rough draft (first draft) you'll move on to the second draft/rewrite of your book when you will improve the organization, add more details, and create a polished draft before sending the manuscript to the editor.

#15 — Destroy writer’s block

At some point along the writer’s journey, you are going to get stuck. It is inevitable.

It is what we call the “messy middle” and, regardless you are writing fiction or nonfiction, it happens to everyone. You were feeling super-pumped to get this book written but halfway through, it begins to feel like an insurmountable mountain that you’ll never conquer.

Writer’s block is what happens when you hit a wall and struggle to move forward.

Here is what you can do when you find yourself being pulled down that dark hole.

Talk back to the voices trying to overpower your mind. Your internal critic is empowered when you believe what you are listening to is true.

Bring in the writer who has brought you this far – the one who took the initiative to learn how to write a nonfiction book. Be the writer that embraces fear and laughs at perfectionistic tendencies. Be that person that writes something even if it doesn’t sound good. Let yourself make mistakes and give yourself permission to fail.

Use positive affirmations are therapy for removing internal criticism.

Defeat the self-doubt by not owning it. Your fears exist in your mind. The book you are writing is great, and it will be finished.

Now, go finish it…

#16 — Reach out to nonfiction book editors

Before you start your second rewrite, consider reaching out to an editor and lining someone up to professionally edit your book. Then, when you have completed your self-editing process, you can send your book to the editor as quickly as possible.

Just as producing a manuscript involves a varied skill set—writing, formatting, cover design, etc.— so does editing it.

Do not skimp on quality when it come to editing – set aside money in your budget when determining the costs to publish your book .

Getting a quality edit should be the #1 expenditure for your book. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re a fantastic writer—we all make small mistakes that are difficult to catch, even after reading through the book several times.

You can find good editors on sites such as Upwork or through recommendations from other authors.

#17— Self-edit your first draft

You completed the major step in how to write a nonfiction book: Your rough draft is finished . Now it is time to go through your content page per page, line per line, and clean it up.

This is where is gets messy. This is the self-editing stage and is the most critical part of the book writing process.

You can print out the entire manuscript and read through it in a weekend. Arm yourself with a red pen and several highlighters. You’ll be marking up sentences and writing on the page.

Start with a verbal read through.

Yes, actually read your draft out loud to yourself; you'll be surprised how reading it verbally allows you to spot certain mistakes or areas for improvement.

A verbal read through will show you:

• Any awkward phrasing you’ve used
• What doesn’t make sense
• Typos (the more mistakes you find, the less an editor will accidentally overlook)

Questions to ask as you self-edit your nonfiction book:

• What part of the book is unclear or vague?
• Can the “outsider” understand the point to this section without being told?
• Is my language clear and concrete?
• Can I add more detail or take detail out?
• Can the reader feel my passion for writing and for the topic I am exploring?
• What is the best part of this section and how can I make the other parts as good as the best section?
• Do I have good transitions between chapters?

For printed out material take lots of notes and correct each page as you go. Or break it down by paragraphs and make sure the content flows and transitions well.

Take 2-3 weeks for the self editing stage. The goal isn’t to make it perfect, but to have a presentable manuscript for the editor.

If you let perfection slip in, you could be self-editing and rewriting six months from now. You want to get your best book published, but not have it take three years to get there.

And, when the self edit is finished…

#18 — Create a nonfiction title

The title and subtitle is critical to getting noticed in any physical or online bookstore, such as Amazon.

Related: Nonfiction Book Title Generator

Set aside a few hours to work on crafting your perfect title and subtitle. Keep in mind that needs to engage your potential readers to buy the book.

The title is by far one of the critical elements of the books’ success .

Here are the main points to consider when creating a nonfiction book title:

• Habit Stacking
• Example#1: Break the Cycle of Self-Defeat, Destroy Negative Emotions and Reclaim Your Personal Power
• Example#2: How to Save More Money, Slash Your Spending, and Master Your Spending

Write down as many title ideas as you can. Then, mix and match, moving keywords around until you come up with a title that “sticks.”

Next, test your title by reaching out for feedback – this can be from anyone in your author network. Don’t have an author community to reach out to?

Consider attending some of the best writers conferences to start networking with other writers and authors!

You can also test your title on sites like PickFu .

#19 — Send your nonfiction book to the editor

In a previous step, you hired your editor. Now you are going to send your book to the editor. This process should take about 2-3 weeks. Most editors will do two revisions.

When you receive your first revision, take a few days to go through the edits with track changes turned on. Carefully consider the suggestions your editor is making.

If you don’t agree with some of the suggested edits, delete them! Your editors don’t know your nonfiction book as well as you do.

So, while expert feedback is essential to creating a polished, professional-quality book, have some faith in yourself and your writing.

Now that the editing is done, you are preparing for the final stage…

#20 — Hire a proofreader

Even with the best of editors, there are often minor errors—typos, punctuation—that get missed. This is why you should consider hiring a proofreader—not your editor—to read through the book and catch any last errors.

You don’t want these mistakes to be picked up by readers and then posted as negative reviews.

You can find proofreaders to hire in your local area, or online, such as Scribendi Proofreaders or ProofreadingServices.com.

Some great proofreading apps to use are Grammarly and Hemingway Editor App .

When you are satisfied that the book is 100% error free and stands up to the best standard of quality, it is time to…

#21 — Hire a formatter

Congratulations…you’re almost there! Hiring your book formatter is one of the final stages before publishing.

Nothing can ruin a good book like bad formatting. A well-formatted book enhances your reader's experience and keeps those pages being turned.

Be sure that you have clear chapter headings and that, wherever possible, the chapter is broken up into subheadings.

You can hire good formatters at places like Archangelink , Ebook Launch , and Formatted Books .

Here are the key pages to include in your nonfiction book:

Front Matter Content

• Copyright page
• Free gift page with a link to the opt-in page (optional)
• Table of contents
• Foreword (optional)

Back Matter Content

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Defining Nonfiction Writing

Andersen Ross / Getty Images

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

Etymology : From the Latin, "not" + "shaping, feigning"

Pronunciation : non-FIX-shun

Nonfiction is a blanket term for  prose accounts of real people, places, objects, or events. This can serve as an umbrella encompassing everything from Creative Nonfiction and Literary Nonfiction to  Advanced Composition ,  Expository Writing , and Journalism .

Types of nonfiction include articles , autobiographies , biographies , essays , memoirs , nature writing , profiles , reports , sports writing , and travel writing .

Observations

• "I see no reason why the word [ artist ] should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry while the rest of us are lumped together under that despicable term 'Nonfiction'— as if we were some sort of remainder. I do not feel like a Non-something; I feel quite specific. I wish I could think of a name in place of 'Nonfiction.' In the hope of finding an antonym , I looked up 'Fiction' in Webster and found it defined as opposed to 'Fact, Truth, and Reality.' I thought for a while of adopting FTR, standing for Fact, Truth, and Reality, as my new term." (Barbara Tuchman, "The Historian as Artist," 1966)
• "It's always seemed odd to me that nonfiction is defined, not by what it is , but by what it is not . It is not fiction. But then again, it is also not poetry, or technical writing or libretto. It's like defining classical music as nonjazz ." (Philip Gerard, Creative Nonfiction . Story Press, 1996)
• "Many writers and editors add 'creative' to 'nonfiction' to mollify this sense of being strange and other, and to remind readers that creative nonfiction writers are more than recorders or appliers of reason and objectivity. Certainly, many readers and writers of creative nonfiction recognize that the genre can share many elements of fiction." (Jocelyn Bartkevicius, "The Landscape of Creative Nonfiction," 1999)
• "If nonfiction is where you do your best writing or your best teaching of writing, don't be buffaloed into the idea that it's an inferior species. The only important distinction is between good writing and bad writing." (William Zinsser, On Writing Well , 2006)
• The Common Core State Standards (US) and Nonfiction "One central concern is that the Core reduces how much literature English teachers can teach. Because of its emphasis on analysis of information and reasoning, the Core requires that 50 percent of all reading assignments in elementary schools consist of nonfiction texts . That requirement has sparked outrage that masterpieces by Shakespeare or Steinbeck are being dropped for informational texts like 'Recommended Levels of Insulation' by the Environmental Protection Agency." ("The Common Core Backlash." The Week , June 6, 2014)
• An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction
• Creative Nonfiction
• What Is Literary Journalism?
• A Look at the Roles Characters Play in Literature
• Tips on Great Writing: Setting the Scene
• Genres in Literature
• Stream of Consciousness Writing
• Point of View in Grammar and Composition
• John McPhee: His Life and Work
• Great Summer Creative Writing Programs for High School Students
• Are Literature and Fiction the Same?
• Examples of Images in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction
• Third-Person Point of View
• What Is a Synopsis and How Do You Write One?

The Best Books of the Year (So Far)

The nonfiction and novels we can’t stop thinking about.

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By The New York Times Books Staff

• May 24, 2024

Fiction | Nonfiction

We’re almost halfway through 2024 and we at The Book Review have already written about hundreds of books. Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the following.

We suspect that some (though certainly not all) will be top of mind when we publish our end-of-year, best-of lists. For more thoughts on what to read next, head to our book recommendation page .

James , by Percival Everett

In this reworking of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River, is the narrator, and he recounts the classic tale in a language that is his own, with surprising details that reveal a far more resourceful, cunning and powerful character than we knew.

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Good Material , by Dolly Alderton

Alderton’s novel, about a 35-year-old struggling to make sense of a breakup, delivers the most delightful aspects of romantic comedy — snappy dialogue, realistic relationship dynamics, funny meet-cutes and misunderstandings — and leaves behind clichéd gender roles and the traditional marriage plot.

Martyr! , by Kaveh Akbar

A young Iranian American aspiring poet and recovering addict grieves his parents’ deaths while fantasizing about his own in Akbar’s remarkable first novel, which, haunted by death, also teems with life — in the inventive beauty of its sentences, the vividness of its characters and the surprising twists of its plot.

The Hunter , by Tana French

For Tana French fans, every one of the thriller writer’s twisty, ingenious books is an event. This one, a sequel to “The Searcher,” once again sees the retired Chicago cop Cal Hooper, a perennial outsider in the Irish west-country hamlet of Ardnakelty, caught up in the crimes — seen and unseen — that eat at the seemingly picturesque village.

Wandering Stars , by Tommy Orange

This follow-up to Orange’s debut, “There There,” is part prequel and part sequel; it trails the young survivor of a 19th-century massacre of Native Americans, chronicling not just his harsh fate but those of his descendants. In its second half, the novel enters 21st-century Oakland, following the family in the aftermath of a shooting.

Headshot , by Rita Bullwinkel

Set at a women’s boxing tournament in Reno, Nev., this novel centers on eight contestants, and the fights — physical and emotional — they bring to the ring. As our critic wrote: This story’s impact “lasts a long time, like a sharp fist to your shoulder.”

Beautyland , by Marie-Helene Bertino

In 1970s Philadelphia, an alien girl sent to Earth before she’s born communicates with her fellow life-forms via fax as she helps gather intel about whether our planet is habitable. This funny-sad novel follows the girl and her single mother as they find the means to persevere.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder , by Salman Rushdie

In his candid, plain-spoken and gripping new memoir, Rushdie recalls the attempted assassination he survived in 2022 during a presentation about keeping the world’s writers safe from harm. His attacker had piranhic energy. He also had a knife. Rushdie lost an eye, but he has slowly recovered thanks to the attentive care of doctors and the wife he celebrates here.

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

This urgent and propulsive account of Latin American politics and immigration makes a persuasive case for a direct line from U.S. foreign policy in Central America to the current migrant crisis.

The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook , by Hampton Sides

By the time he made his third Pacific voyage, the British explorer James Cook had maybe begun to lose it a little. The scientific aims of his first two trips had shifted into something darker. According to our reviewer, the historian Hampton Sides “isn’t just interested in retelling an adventure tale. He also wants to present it from a 21st-century point of view. ‘The Wide Wide Sea’ fits neatly into a growing genre that includes David Grann’s ‘ The Wager ’ and Candice Millard’s ‘ River of the Gods ,’ in which famous expeditions, once told as swashbuckling stories of adventure, are recast within the tragic history of colonialism .”

The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon , by Adam Shatz

This absorbing biography of the Black psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon highlights a side of him that’s often eclipsed by his image as a zealous partisan — that of the caring doctor, who ran a secret clinic for Algerian rebels.

Fi: A Memoir , by Alexandra Fuller

In her fifth memoir, Fuller describes the sudden death of her 21-year-old son. Devastating as this elegant and honest account may be — it’s certainly not for the faint of heart — it also leaves the reader with a sense of having known a lovely and lively young man.

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John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

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Jenny Erpenbeck’s “ Kairos ,” a novel about a torrid love affair in the final years of East Germany, won the International Booker Prize , the renowned award for fiction translated into English.

Kevin Kwan, the author of “Crazy Rich Asians,” left Singapore’s opulent, status-obsessed, upper crust when he was 11. He’s still writing about it .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Nonfiction Books » Best Nonfiction Books of 2024

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Last updated: May 08, 2024

If you want to find our latest nonfiction book recommendations for 2024, please bookmark this page. Throughout the year, we'll be adding best of 2024 lists not only in general nonfiction, but also in more specific genres (such as history). Our lists include the latest books—picked out in round-ups by our editors—but also the results of 2024 book prizes as they're announced. Prizes are one of the best ways to find good books, as the books are picked out by a panel of judges who read dozens of books. Judges must also agree on which are the 'best' nonfiction books. Our editor round-ups, on the other hand, try to give a flavour of the range of new nonfiction books that are out there—focusing on the sheer variety. In general, they'll be covering a lot more than the five books displayed in the lists below:

Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024 , recommended by Sophie Roell

The shortest history of economics by andrew leigh, maurice and maralyn: a whale, a shipwreck, a love story by sophie elmhirst, vagabond princess: the great adventures of gulbadan by ruby lal, how the world made the west: a 4,000-year history by josephine quinn, third millennium thinking: creating sense in a world of nonsense saul perlmutter, robert maccoun and john campbell.

From the origins of sex to the effects of social media, from the invention of the wheel to the race against climate change, Five Books editor Sophie Roell gives an overview of the new nonfiction books appearing in January, February and March of 2024.

The Best Travel Writing of 2024 , recommended by Shafik Meghji

A stranger in your own city: travels in the middle east's long war by ghaith abdul-ahad, the britannias: an archipelago’s tale by alice albinia, the gathering place: a winter pilgrimage through changing times by mary colwell, the granite kingdom: a cornish journey, wounded tigris: a river journey through the cradle of civilisation by leon mccarron, high caucasus: a mountain quest in russia’s haunted hinterland by tom parfitt.

Every spring, the judges of the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards draw up a shortlist for the title of the 'travel book of the year.' The 2024 shortlist highlights six fascinating recent travelogues that wrestle with political and environmental issues, and explore the contrast between the outsider and the insider gaze.

Every spring, the judges of the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards draw up a shortlist for the title of the ‘travel book of the year.’ The 2024 shortlist highlights six fascinating recent travelogues that wrestle with political and environmental issues, and explore the contrast between the outsider and the insider gaze.

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize , recommended by Susan Brigden

The revolutionary temper: paris, 1748–1789 by robert darnton, france on trial: the case of marshal pétain by julian jackson, monet: the restless vision by jackie wullschläger, revolutionary spring: europe aflame and the fight for a new world, 1848-1849 by christopher clark, courting india: england, mughal india and the origins of empire by nandini das.

If you're looking for nonfiction with a literary sensibility and a historical bent, the books highlighted by the annual Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize are a great place to start. British historian Susan Brigden , author of Thomas Wyatt: The Heart's Forest and one of the prize's judges, talks us through the 2024 shortlist — from war and revolution to the splendours of Mughal India and Monet's garden at Giverny.

If you’re looking for nonfiction with a literary sensibility and a historical bent, the books highlighted by the annual Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize are a great place to start. British historian Susan Brigden, author of Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest and one of the prize’s judges, talks us through the 2024 shortlist — from war and revolution to the splendours of Mughal India and Monet’s garden at Giverny.

The Best Memoirs: The 2024 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist , recommended by May-lee Chai

I would meet you anywhere: a memoir by susan kiyo ito, secret harvests: a hidden story of separation and the resilience of a family farm by david mas masumoto, rotten evidence: reading and writing in an egyptian prison by ahmed naji, translated by katharine halls, how to say babylon: a memoir by safiya sinclair, story of a poem: a memoir by matthew zapruder.

It's been a "phenomenal" year for autobiographical writing, says May-lee Chai —the award-winning author and chair of the judges for this year's National Book Critics Circle prize for autobiography. Here she offers us a tour of the five memoirs that made their 2024 shortlist.

It’s been a “phenomenal” year for autobiographical writing, says May-lee Chai—the award-winning author and chair of the judges for this year’s National Book Critics Circle prize for autobiography. Here she offers us a tour of the five memoirs that made their 2024 shortlist.

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

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The Best 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

Yael van der Wouden on The Safekeep

How to Read the 'Bridgerton' Books in Order

Shelf Life: R.O. Kwon

Remembering Bendel’s Legendary Morning Lineup

My Anxiety Had Something to Teach Me

The Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reads of 2024

Shelf Life: Miranda July

Kaliane Bradley on The Ministry of Time

Read an Excerpt from 'The Midnight Feast'

Shelf Life: Claire Messud

Honor Levy Says ‘Goodnight Meme’

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 (So Far)

To make sense of an ever-changing world, dip into these titles.

To make sense of an ever-changing world, we recommend skipping Dr. Google and going straight to the experts. Do you want to expand your knowledge about hot-button issues like wealth inequality, algorithmic overload , and conservative culture wars? There’s a book for that. Or maybe you’re more of a memoir type, looking to glean information through other people’s lived experiences. Whether you’re interested in identity, grief , or marriage , there’s a book for that, too.

Whatever your persuasion as a reader and a learner may be, we’ve rounded up our favorite titles of the year for expanding your mind and heart. Here are the best nonfiction books of 2024 (so far), presented in publication order. Watch this space for updates—we’ll continue adding to our list as the year progresses.

Filterworld, by Kyle Chayka

Just how much do algorithms control our lives—and what can we do about it? In this eye-opening investigation, Chayka enumerates the insidious ways that algorithms have flattened our culture and circumscribed our lives, from our online echo chambers to the design of our coffee shops. But all is not lost: Chayka argues for a more conscientious consumption of culture, encouraging that we seek out trusted curators, challenging material, and spirited conversations. After reading Filterworld , you’ll be ready to start your own “algorithmic cleanse” and get back in touch with your humanity.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Limitarianism, by Ingrid Robeyns

“Billionaires shouldn’t exist”—or so goes the popular refrain. In this revolutionary volume, an ethicist expands that thought into a comprehensive plan to eradicate extreme wealth. Robeyns connects outrageous wealth to all manner of societal ills, from human-rights violations to the corporate ransacking of Earth’s natural resources. She also lays out a multi-pronged solution: We must legislate a wealth cap, she argues, coupled with measures like robust taxes and a universal basic income. Though we’re a long ways away from enacting Robeyns’s radical vision, Limitarianism is a thoughtful blueprint for the world so many of us want to live in—one where capitalism is curbed and greed is limited.

I Heard Her Call My Name, by Lucy Sante

In this candid and soulful memoir of gender transition, Sante recounts her experience of transitioning later in life, at age sixty-six. She describes an electrifying experiment with FaceApp’s “gender-swapping feature,” where the sight of her face (digitally altered to look more feminine) produced “one shock of recognition after another.” In one dimension of the memoir, Sante traces her realization of her true self and her process of coming out; in another, she reconsiders her entire life through the prism of what she knows now. Sante’s account of meeting her true self is arresting, intimate, and a work in progress. As she writes, "Transitioning is not an event but a process, and it will occupy the rest of my life as I go on changing."

This American Ex-Wife, by Lyz Lenz

In This American Ex-Wife , a blistering memoir-meets-manifesto about the fraught gender politics of marriage and divorce, Lenz details how the end of her marriage became the beginning of her life. Raised in a religious household and married at a young age, Lenz walked away from an unsatisfying partnership to rebuild her life on her own terms, only to discover that happiness and autonomy lay on the other side. Weaving together a detailed history of marriage, sociological research, cultural commentary, and a frank dissection of her own personal experiences, Lenz paints a damning portrait of marriage in America: “an institution built on the fundamental inequality of women.” Yet the book is also a rousing and exuberant cry for a reckoning—one in which couples can love freely, leave freely, and build meaningful partnerships based on the full and equal humanity of men and women alike.

Working in the 21st Century, by Mark Larson

Fifty years after Studs Terkel’s Working , a historian delivers a comprehensive sequel for the age of late-stage capitalism. Through a polyphonic oral history, Larson presents 101 conversations with American workers from all walks of life, including teachers, nurses, truck drivers, executives, dairy farmers, stay-at-home parents, wildland firefighters, funeral directors, and many more. In the wake of the pandemic and the Great Resignation, Larson’s subjects share their struggles to make ends meet, reckon with economic upheaval, and locate meaning and purpose in their work. Assembled in one thick volume, these often-fascinating anecdotes are a rich examination of modern-day economic anxiety and social change.

Splinters, by Leslie Jamison

In her latest bravura memoir, Jamison chronicles a wrenching period of rupture and rebirth. When their daughter was thirteen months old, Jamison and her husband separated; what followed was a brutal struggle to balance parenthood, work, dating, sobriety, and creative fulfillment, all while the pandemic loomed. Told in overlapping, ever-widening circles of thought, Splinters details Jamison’s struggle to inhabit the roles we ask of women: mother, daughter, lover, friend. At the same time, the book is an intimate tribute to the author’s rapturous love for her daughter. Splinters thrives in this messy, imperfect complexity—in “the difference between the story of love and the texture of living it, the story of motherhood and the texture of living it.” Honest, gutsy, and unflinching, Jamison scours herself clean here, finding exquisite, hard-won joy in the aftermath.

Harper Whiskey Tender, by Deborah Jackson Taffa

Born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo Territory in New Mexico, Taffa situates her outstanding debut memoir in similar collisions of culture, land, and tradition. Here, she recalls the people and places that raised her—especially her parents, who pushed her to idealize the American dream and assimilate through education. Taffa layers in diligent research about her mixed-race, mixed-tribe heritage, highlighting little-known Native American history and the shattering injustices of colonial oppression. Together, the many strands of narrative coalesce to form a visceral story of family, survival, and belonging, flooding the field with cleansing light.

Grief Is for People, by Sloane Crosley

In 2019, Crosley suffered two keelhauling losses: First, her apartment was burglarized and her jewelry stolen; then, one month later, her friend and mentor Russell Perrault took his own life. For Crosley, the two losses became braided together. “I am waiting for the things I love to come back to me, to tell me they were only joking,” she writes. In this raw and poignant memoir, divided into five sections that correspond to the five stages of grief, she links her frantic desire to recover the stolen jewelry with her inability to bring back Perrault. Leavened by Crosley’s characteristic gimlet wit, this excavation of grief, loss, and friendship leaves a lasting twinge.

Who’s Afraid of Gender?, by Judith Butler

One of our foremost thinkers returns with an essential polemic on gender, an urgent front line of the culture wars. Butler argues that by turning gender into a “phantasmic scene,” conservative politicians have diverted political will from the most pressing problems of our time, like climate change, war, and capitalist exploitation. Butler explores how various movements around the world have weaponized gender to achieve their goals, with a particular focus on trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). Who’s Afraid of Gender? calls for gender expression to be recognized as a basic human right, and for radical solidarity across our differences. With masterful analysis of where we’ve been and an inspiring vision for where we must go next, this book resounds like an impassioned depth charge.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare

When Ian Fleming’s family approached Nicholas Shakespeare to write a biography of the late spy novelist, promising access to never-before-seen family materials, Shakespeare soon concluded that “under the jarring surface of his popular image,” he could “see a different person.” In this outstanding biography, the author uncovers countless sides of his complicated subject to construct “the complete man.” From Fleming’s youth spent at the vanguard of military and journalistic history to his later years as “a slave to a serial character,” Shakespeare constructs an exhaustive portrait of the author’s life and influences. Clocking in at just under nine hundred pages, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man leaves no stone unturned. It’s the definitive biography of an endlessly fascinating subject.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates returns to nonfiction and explores the power of stories in upcoming ‘The Message’

This cover image released by One World shows “The Message” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (One World via AP)

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NEW YORK (AP) — For his first all-new book of nonfiction in nearly a decade, Ta-Nehisi Coates traveled the world.

One World announced Thursday that Coates’ “The Message” will be published Oct. 1. “The Message” is set everywhere from the American South to the Middle East and Palestine and focuses on a single question: In a time of growing strife and injustice, why do stories matter?

“In ‘The Message,’ Coates explores this question by reporting from three powerfully resonant sites — Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine — that have been profoundly shaped and riven by contested accounts of meaning and reality,” the One World announcement reads in part. “Weaving together on-the-ground reportage, personal narrative, and insightful dives into literature and history, he tries to clarify what’s real beneath layers of propaganda, wishful thinking, and enforced silence — and why we are so often misled, with sometimes catastrophic consequences.”

Additional details about “The Message” were not immediately available. In a statement released through One World, a Penguin Random House imprint, Coates said he was thrilled “to be back publishing nonfiction in this particular political moment.”

Coates’ last new work of nonfiction, “Between the World and Me,” was a meditation on racism and police violence that won the National Book Award in 2015 and was likened by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison to the works of James Baldwin. His books also include the 2017 essay collection “We Were Eight Years in Power,” drawn in part from his Atlantic magazine reporting during the Obama administration, and the 2019 novel “The Water Dancer,” an Oprah Winfrey book selection.

Watch CBS News

The Book Report: Washington Post critic Ron Charles (June 2)

By Ron Charles

Updated on: June 2, 2024 / 8:39 AM EDT / CBS News

By Washington Post book critic Ron Charles

Here are four hot new books to check out this summer.

You may know Claire Messud from such terrific books as "The Emperor's Children" or "The Woman Upstairs." Her new novel, "This Strange Eventful History" (W.W. Norton), uses the outlines of her own family to tell a story of three generations buffeted around the globe from World War II into the 21st century.

Determined to be a writer herself someday, the narrator watches as her father struggles for many unhappy decades to match the example of his father.

This gorgeously written book examines the way family secrets are protected and family myths are polished. 

Read an excerpt: "This Strange Eventful History" by Claire Messud

"This Strange Eventful History" by Claire Messud (W.W. Norton), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon , Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

clairemessud.com

I see a very fun novel in your future: "The Ministry of Time" by Kaliane Bradley (Simon & Schuster). This delightful mix of historical fact and science fiction is about a secret British agency that plucks doomed people from the past.

The narrator is a young woman serving as a guide to present-day life. Her first assignment is with the very proper Commander Graham Gore, who died on Franklin's Arctic expedition in the mid-19th century.

Imagine if "The Time Traveler's Wife" had an affair with "A Gentleman in Moscow." You'll love it.

Read an excerpt: "The Ministry of Time" by Kaliane Bradley

"The Ministry of Time" by Kaliane Bradley (Simon & Schuster), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon , Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

Speaking of bringing people back from the past: Fifteen years ago, Michael Crichton died before he could finish his story about a volcano in Hawaii. 

Well, life finds a way! Now in the splashiest partnership of this summer – or perhaps any summer – Crichton's manuscript has been completed by James Patterson.

The result of this bestseller mash-up is "Eruption" (Little, Brown & Co.), an explosively corny thriller about a volcano that's about to send millions of tons of lava across Hawaii and possibly threaten all life on Earth. Put on your oven mitts: This is a hot one.

Read an excerpt:  "Eruption" by Michael Crichton and James Patterson

"Eruption"  by Michael Crichton and James Patterson (Little, Brown & Co.), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats, available June 3 via  Amazon ,  Barnes & Noble  and  Bookshop.org

michaelcrichton.com

jamespatterson.com

In early 1986, the Challenger Space Shuttle blasted off into a clear blue sky. Seventy-three seconds later, the ship exploded, killing all seven crew members.

The outlines of that tragedy are well known, but Adam Higginbotham finds fresh new lessons in his exhaustively researched new book, "Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space" (Simon & Schuster). He explores the culture of overconfidence that led NASA to ignore warnings and push ahead as though space flight were routine. It wasn't then, and (as this sobering book reminds us) it still isn't. 

Read an excerpt: "Challenger" by Adam Higginbotham

"Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space" by Adam Higginbotham (Simon & Schuster), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon , Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

adamhigginbotham.com

For more suggestions on what to read, contact your librarian or local bookseller. 

That's it for the Book Report. I'm Ron Charles. Until next time, read on!

      For more info: 

• Ron Charles, The Washington Post
• Subscribe to the free  Washington Post Book World Newsletter
• Ron Charles' Totally Hip Video Book Review
• Bookshop.org  (for ordering from independent booksellers)

       For more reading recommendations, check out these previous Book Report features from Ron Charles: 

• The Book Report (April 28)
• The Book Report (March 17)
• The Book Report (February 18)
• Ron Charles' favorite novels of 2023
• The Book Report (October 22)
• The Book Report (September 17)
• The Book Report (August 6)
• The Book Report (June 4)
• The Book Report (April 30)
• The Book Report (March 19)
• The Book Report (February 12, 2023)
• The Book Report: Ron Charles' favorite novels of 2022
• The Book Report (November 13)
• The Book Report (Sept. 18)
• The Book Report (July 10)
• The Book Report (April 17)
• The Book Report (March 13)
• The Book Report (February 6, 2022)
• The Book Report (November 28)
• The Book Report (September 26)
• The Book Report (August 1)
• The Book Report (June 6)
• The Book Report (May 9)
• The Book Report (March 28)
• The Book Report (February 28)
• The Book Report (January 31, 2021)

      Produced by Robin Sanders and Roman Feeser.

• Books and Beyond

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