Best Nonfiction Books of the Century So Far

Through personal essays, award-winning author and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores their life—from childhood to college years—in New Jersey and Virginia. Bullies kicking their teeth in when they were five to precious shopping trips with their grandmother, to their first sexual encounters, and more, all get shared in this groundbreaking YA memoir that made everyone’s Best-Of list the year it was released. Its existence as Black queer testimony that is as joyful as it is brutally honest is even more important today, as it has become one of the Most Challenged books in the U.S., according to the American Library Association.

The history of the world has been whitewashed repeatedly, often taught through the viewpoint of the “victors,” meaning white people. This is as true in the United States as it is anywhere, but it’s not so in Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz’s seminal book. This book is a difficult, dark read, full of powerful truths about so many of America’s so-called “heroes,” as it looks at the history of America from the point of view of its Indigenous people, including their own incredible heroes.

Nonviolent true crime books had a moment, thanks in large part to John Carreyrou’s excellent, prize-winning reporting on the incredibly bizarre, dangerous, and grifty AF Theranos. Nothing is more enticing than a “you can’t make this up” true story in the form of a page-turning nonfiction book written by a journalist. Even if you already know the story of Elizabeth Holmes, this book will have you racing to the end in disbelief. Not only was it a bestseller, but its popularity led to a podcast, a documentary, and a Hulu series starring Amanda Seyfried.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique fomented a public conversation about gender roles that many recognize as the start of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s. Scholars disagree on which feminist wave we find ourselves in today, but I would argue that Roxane Gay’s 2014 book Bad Feminist played a similar role as Friedan’s book did in the ’60s in launching it. Gay dives headfirst into the messy contradictions and ethical quandaries of modern feminism. Deftly weaving feminist theory into conversations about race, class, body image, social media, and pop culture, she contemplates everything from freedom of speech and white privilege to The Hunger Games and Scrabble. It’s a potent conversation starter that marked a turning point in how we think about feminism in the 21st century.

The weight of this book goes beyond its seemingly small 176 pages. In just that short space, Coates manages to fully flesh out the cosmic feeling of disembodiment Black Americans feel in this country since we become aware of our place in the world and it. He does this by paying homage to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, but this time, instead of writing to a nephew as Baldwin does, Coates writes to his son. He takes his experiences—as a journalist witnessing trauma, as an author traveling to Paris, and more—to try to reckon with America’s past and present treatment of Black people and the bodies we inhabit.

In his emotional memoir, Trevor Noah recounts his life growing up biracial in South Africa during Apartheid. Despite the heart-wrenching challenges he faced, Noah shares these stories with his signature eloquence and humor. The Audie Award-winning audiobook is incredible, especially as he narrates it himself, and the memoir also won many awards, including two NAACP Image Awards and the James Thurber Prize. Noah has made a profound pop cultural impact this century as a host of The Daily Show, and reading about his childhood leaves a lasting impression. Noah’s reflections on being raised by his single mother are especially moving, too.

First published in 2013, Braiding Sweetgrass became a New York Times bestseller in 2020, and it remains on the Paperback Nonfiction bestseller list to this day. It has sold over two million copies worldwide—not an easy feat for a book about ecology. Kimmerer combines her scientific knowledge as a botanist with Indigenous ways of knowing as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The result is a beautifully written and engaging text that invites the reader to develop a reciprocal relationship with the living world. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by guilt and cynicism, but Kimmerer offers a hopeful and generous view of our place in nature.

Piepzna-Samarasinha consistently writes some of the most thought-provoking books I’ve ever encountered. In essays varying in topic and tone, they explain the joys and difficulties of living a life of disability justice: disability activism that leads from the most affected, centering queer, trans, Black, Indigenous disabled/Mad/mentally ill people of colour. Disability justice sees ableism as intertwined with colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and all of the other ways that bodies are policed. I feel like I’ll have to read this many more times just to scratch the surface of how much is explored here; it is a paradigm-shifting read.

Spy thriller meets investigative drama in this terrifying tale of #MeToo reportage. Farrow, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, documents his life-threatening experience investigating Harvey Weinstein as long-held secrets about the powerful producer boiled over into one of the definite stories—and social movements—of the 21st century. This heart-in-your-throat story, especially captivating on audio, reminds us of the risks journalists take in service of the truth. The women who came forward to bring down their abusers are the first heroes of #MeToo. Journalists like Farrow (and the New York Times’s Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey) stand beside them. 

Some may have been surprised that Crying in H Mart, a 2021 memoir by indie musician Michelle Zauner of the band Japanese Breakfast exploring her biracial identity and complicated relationship with her mother, became a runaway bestseller that lingered on bestseller lists for years. But at its core, it’s a powerful story with a universal message about loss, grief, healing, family, and food that spoke directly to the hearts of millions of readers. It begins with an essay Zauner first published in The New Yorker about remembering her mother, who died of pancreatic cancer, through cooking Korean food, and expands into an intricate story of coming of age and growing through grief. Zauner’s lyrical prose makes it a must-read modern classic.

If you were to ask me for a book that has shattered my understanding of the world and forever rearranged the lens through which I view everything, it would be this. After reading this book, I realized that as a non-disabled person, my world was so small, my views so narrow, and I truly didn’t even know what I didn’t know. I began to comprehend that my ignorance, and the ignorance of so many of us, is by design in a society built on colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. This book also opened my eyes to the brilliance, resilience, and innovation of the disabled community, and each new instance of accessibility expanded my mind.

We don’t really know what’s happening in the homes next door to us, let alone in homes thousands of miles away. Westover’s memoir is a courageous story of growing up off-grid with survivalist parents. Isolation, violence, and deprivation were the norm—until Westover was inspired by one of her brothers to turn her life around and seek out the formal education she’d been denied. This harrowing read melds tragedy and horror with triumph, serving as a crucial reminder of the purpose of education and the power of the human spirit. Educated proves the memoir a vibrant and enduring part of 21st-century nonfiction.

Evicted only seems to have gotten more relevant since its 2016 release. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book by sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond presents his research on true poverty in America by following eight families as they navigate the housing crisis in Milwaukee. It is as eye-opening as it is infuriating and important. It is a must-read for the 21st century.

It’s hard to overstate just how influential Alison Bechdel’s 2006 memoir was; it’s a defining work in graphic memoirs and in LGBTQ literature. This century has seen graphic novels and memoirs become recognized as a respected literary format worthy of study, and Fun Home helped lead the way. The New York Times named it one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, and it has won Stonewall, Lambda Literary, and Eisner Awards. Since its publication, it has been the target of many challenges and bans—a trend that continues with LGBTQ comics today. It also inspired a musical that won five Tony Awards, including for Best Musical.

In her award-winning book, Macdonald chronicles her relationship with a goshawk as her way to deal with the grief of losing her father. While the type of memoir was not new in itself, the award-winning success of H is for Hawk’s helped popularize the subgenre of memoirs of people writing about their relationships with specific animals. Now there are more books published every year, and even documentaries that follow this theme. In 2025, H is for Hawk was turned into a movie by the same name, starring Claire Foy.

In this memoir, Laymon, a prolific author and champion for writers, reflects on growing up in Jackson, Mississippi. I remember the first time I read this, at City Lights. In awe of the possibility of writing, of the Andrew Carnegie Medal winner’s repetition in the captivating opening—“I wanted to write a lie.”—I bought a copy. With vulnerability, crack-a-rib laughter, and breathtaking prose, the MacArthur Genius’s moving exploration of the body, Black literature, matriarchs, masculinity, and the U.S. South shines. A treasure.

This heartbreaking yet hopeful graphic memoir by Jarrett J. Krosoczka follows his experiences raised by his single mother and his grandparents and explores difficult themes like absent fathers and substance abuse in families. Often, these topics get associated with feelings of shame, so I appreciated how Krosoczka shines a spotlight on them and helps readers in similar situations feel seen and understood. The muted colors and beauty of his art add to the memoir’s depth. This book won many awards, including an Odyssey Award, a Harvey Award Book of the Year, and a finalist selection for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

Books that bring forth previously untold stories about marginalized people’s impacts on history are a genre unto themselves these days, due in no small part to this celebration of the Black women mathematicians who quietly propelled NASA’s biggest 20th-century successes. A master of “show, don’t tell,” Shetterly captures the truth that the personal is always political, telescoping between the individual experiences of the “human computers” and the backdrop of organizational and social systems that wanted to benefit from their skills without acknowledging their humanity. The rare book that is nearly as groundbreaking as the story is relays.

When you have a foreword from Maya Angelou, you know you got the writing right. And what a subject to command. James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award-winner Jessica B. Harris tells the culinary story of African Americans from the Atlantic Slave Trade to the present day. This important book highlights the contributions, stemming from homesickness and necessity, of African Americans to the national culinary identity. Harris’s research and prose inspired a powerful, often intimate Netflix series that is a must-watch companion to this must-read.

Invoking Leslie Feinberg’s queer feminist classic Stone Butch Blues, Lamya H’s Hijab Butch Blues is an astounding memoir-in-essays that offers nuanced reflections on gender, sexuality, spirituality, and belonging into the 21st century. Lamya narrates their journey of self-exploration while coming of age in South Asia and moving to the U.S. as a queer hijabi Muslim young adult. In each essay, they use a close reading of the Quran to embrace queerness within Islamic tradition and consider famous stories and prophets in a new light. It’s a remarkable work about belief, queer identity, displacement, and self-love that will speak to many generations to come.

You’d be hard-pressed to find an anti-racist reading list in 2020 that didn’t rightfully highlight Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism. All its critical acclaim was deeply merited as Kendall’s sharp, incisive essays critique the lack of intersectionality in the white feminist movement. Her interrogation of our systematic failures from health care to education were on point in 2020 and remain so. The only way forward is an anti-racist, intersectional feminist movement working to reform the systems designed to only work for (or against) a select group. Get the audiobook narrated by Mikki Kendall and also a print or ebook copy. Take notes.

This is a book in two parts: a memoir of a mixed-race nonbinary scientist as well as a collection of essays about marine biology. I’m not usually a reader of science writing, but I was so intrigued by Imbler’s descriptions that I would have been happy to read just those sections. By braiding these facts with personal stories, though, it’s more than the sum of its parts; Imbler uses sea creatures to refract their life in extended metaphors. These essays explore queer people as shapeshifters, as swarms, as immortal. I never wanted this collection to end, and I’m forever looking for books that can pull off this format as well as Imbler does.

Before Jennette McCurdy released her debut memoir, she was known as the quirky tomboy who played Sam on iCarly. Her breakout book transformed how we talk about her. No longer just a former child star, McCurdy has become the writer she always dreamed of being. This vulnerable, relatable, and thought-provoking book reaches readers far beyond her Nickelodeon fan base. This is a difficult but relatable exploration of what it feels like growing up with an abusive, narcissistic parent. As the provocative title suggests, McCurdy also questions why we feel compelled to love parents unconditionally when some parents’ love can feel so conditional.

Known for her roles on Orange Is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, Diane Guerrero stepped into a new spotlight when she went public with her life story of having fallen through the cracks of a terrible system. She was 14 when her parents were deported to Colombia, and no one came to check on her. After President Obama named her a Presidential Ambassador for Citizenship and Naturalization, she published her honest, heartbreaking, and defiant memoir. A memoir that has only become more necessary as ICE continues to terrorize our neighbors and communities.

In a memoir that defies genre by including everything from a choose-your-own-adventure style section to fairytale motif classifications in footnotes, Machado tells the story of her experience with domestic abuse in a queer relationship. The genius of her work lies in how she uses tropes—like the haunted house, for instance—to evoke how emotional manipulation can trick the mind, how people in abusive situations can come to feel trapped, and how trauma can make the past difficult to escape. Machado addresses the silence that surrounds abuse in queer relationships and dares to break through it.

Stevenson’s memoir chronicles his work as a lawyer helping clients on death row and founding his nonprofit, The Equal Justice Initiative. It details the murder conviction and exoneration of Walter McMillian, a Black man from Alabama. McMillian was targeted for having an affair with a white woman. Many of Stevenson’s clients spent months or years in prison before conviction. Just Mercy received many honors, was praised by Bishop Desmond Tutu, and is often on college reading lists. It was adapted into a movie starring Michael B. Jordan in 2019. This hugely influential book exposes the United States’ systemic racism and the brutality of the death penalty.

Indigenous history has long been overlooked and conveniently sanitized in this country. David Grann reminds us of this unfortunate legacy in his account of one of the most shocking crimes in U.S. history: the early 20th-century murders of several wealthy Osage people and the law-enforcement officials who tried to investigate. Grann crafts a page-turner as he lays out the events of this chilling conspiracy, from the motivations behind the killings to their investigation by a nascent FBI. Grann is a master at crafting nonfiction that reads with the urgency of true crime and mystery, a skill that’s fully flexed in this record of an underreported crime.

Anthony Bourdain’s impact on culinary entertainment, exposing the masses to global cuisine and the dining scene, is profound. His bestselling memoir kicked off his stunning career and, with his uniquely wry, no-nonsense voice, guided eaters from the dining room to the harried restaurant kitchen and its punk staff. Bourdain’s perspective and insights would evolve and sharpen over the course of his life, but Kitchen Confidential remains the groundbreaking book that changed the way we consume food and connect cuisine to history, politics, and culture.

Emily Doe was the name the world knew as one survivor fought for justice after being sexually assaulted by Brock Turner at Stanford University. She remained anonymous for years until she published her powerful memoir in 2019 to reclaim her identity. Not only is the award-winning memoir deeply important in our rape culture, but it also introduced to the world Chanel Miller’s incredible voice and talent as a writer. I am forever glad that she followed it up by writing children’s novels—Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All and The Moon Without Stars—which have solidified her as an automatic buy author.

This genre-bending memoir is a work of art, unnatural as it feels to say about a book on such a dark subject: the titular Liliana’s tragic death in 1990s Mexico. In the past, we get to know Liliana through testimony from friends and family and her own journal entries. In the present, the author travels from her home in Texas to Mexico in search of her sister’s case file and a better understanding of the systemic failures that allowed, and still allow, gender-based violence to go largely unchecked in Mexico. The grief jumps off the page, as does Rivera Garza’s love for her beautiful, enigmatic sister.

Named a best book of 2019 by (*studies the lengthy list*) everyone, this lyrical debut garnered the instant fandom of many. You know those writers you would read anything by? I would read anything by Madden. Essays, grocery lists, marginalia. Through heart-cupping grace and humor, this memoir from the author of Whidbey brims with secrets while examining desire, family, forgiveness, loss, and coming of age in Boca Raton. Marvel at the craft in every sentence. They mesmerize, squirm in your brain, and rearrange your matter. From “Why You Like It”: “I wanted love the size of a fist. Something I could hold, something hot and knuckled and alive.”

Congressman John Lewis was more than a long-serving member of the U.S. Congress before his death. He was a Freedom Rider. He spoke at the Million Man March before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was as much a part of the Civil Rights Movement as King, Malcom X, and others. When he decided to tell his story, he did it in graphic memoir form, and the trilogy this book starts off is some of the clearest, most compelling storytelling of the Civil Rights Movement that you’ll ever find.

Psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb’s bestselling memoir follows the sessions of her therapy clients, as well as her experiences in therapy with her own therapist. This book was published in 2019, at a time when people weren’t as open about mental health and therapy as they are today. Gottlieb writes with such compassion, sincerity, and honesty about mental health challenges people face, including herself, and I think this really helped destigmatize conversations about mental health.

A two-time winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, this beloved writer’s much-anticipated nonfiction debut delivers. On the page, you can expect the excellence you behold in Ward’s poignant novels: gripping structure, propulsive storytelling, unforgettable imagery, and spectacular language. While meditating on community, family, grief, history, and DeLisle, Mississippi, Ward—a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the author of On Witness and Respair—celebrates the lives of five young, Black men, all dear to her: “[T]elling this story is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that.”

The “minor feelings” poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong is referring to are the contradictions she felt as a Korean American growing up surrounded by the myth of the American Dream. By examining her feelings of shame and sadness, she’s able to examine the unwritten racial rules of America. Readers follow along as she explores Asian American consciousness through cultural criticism, art, her own friendships, and more, in this Pulitzer Prize finalist.

You can draw a direct line from Ehrenreich’s embedded reporting in Nickeled and Dimed to the kind of narrative journalism being done in today’s nonfiction landscape. Leaving home and taking on scores of low-wage, “low skill” jobs, Ehrenreich sought to discover where and how people in America are getting by. Her takeaways in 2001 served as a portal to what would come today—without reform, those working some of the hardest and most necessary jobs would not feel like their feet are beneath them or that their money would keep them housed, clothed, and sheltered. It remains essential reading and a title frequently cited as inspiration to others.

This National Book Award-winning nonfiction debut from an author celebrated for his sharp, prescient fiction confronts the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad delivers what is aptly described as a reckoning with being a member of Western civilization, a liberal, and silently complicit. The title of this book began as and continues to be a call to pay attention, right now, to the history we’re making, and a critique of our tendency to stand still and silent in the present and look back with remorse on the chaos and destruction we silently bore witness to or even endorsed.

Satrapi’s book has more than earned its place on several “Best of the Century” lists, including historical fiction. So if the comic about growing up in Iran under the Islamic Revolution is fiction, why is it also on nonfiction? Because this immersive, powerful read has ignited debate for decades over its proper classification—based entirely on lived experience but infused with imagined dialogue, where does the book best sit? Does such distinction matter at all? Wherever you land, it’s an essential part of this century’s canon.

This 2012 book argued that introversion has been undervalued by Western society for over a century, while also advocating for cultural changes in American schools, government, and workplaces via what Cain called “the quiet revolution.” She was praised for her thorough and varied research, which weaved together information from psychology and other scientific sources with personal anecdotes and the stories of influential introverts throughout history. Not only was this a bestselling book, it also brought the concepts of introversion and extroversion into our modern lexicon.

Representation of transgender people in media underwent a major change in the 2010s, as evidenced by Janet Mock’s bestselling 2014 memoir. It follows Janet Mock from her childhood understanding of her journey through transitioning and coming out publicly. Redefining Realness is part of a tradition of Black women writers, and includes repeated references to Their Eyes Were Watching God. More than ten years later, it’s still one of only a few traditionally published memoirs by trans people of color, but its influence is not limited to LGBTQ literature; it has found a broad audience, and it helped pave the way for many other women writers of color.

When people ask about my favorite books, they do not expect a cookbook, and yet this one is in my top ten. This book not only fundamentally changed the idea of what a cookbook, or a book about cooking, could be, it improved my own cooking and relationship to food exponentially. And when your cooking is improved, your quality of life is improved. There is no amount of online videos that have given me the knowledge, tools, and understanding about cooking and food that this book has. It won the 2018 James Beard General Cookbook of the Year, among other awards, and spawned a four-part miniseries on Netflix that was nothing short of inspiring.

Say Nothing is Patrick Radden Keefe at his very best, a masterclass in narrative nonfiction that opens with a notorious Northern Ireland killing and goes deep into a wider history of the period known as The Troubles. The story was brought to screen in 2024 in a series that’s every bit as compelling and evocative as Radden Keefe’s text, confronting the violence of this tumultuous history and how relentless persecution can lead to radicalization. It’s the sort of compelling read that will make you forget you’re reading nonfiction. That is the PRK way. 

The testimonies in this collection of stories of self-discovery, activism, resistance, and survival from queer elders of color aren’t just a necessary record of lived experience and hard-won progress; they’re a love letter to queer history and a reminder that it’s a gift to have queer elders among us. There’s so much history contained in these pages, and some stories will break your heart. But if joy is an act of resistance, this beautiful book is a rallying cry, one that feels even more urgent and precious now than when it came out last year.

This National Book Award winner corrects the often simplistic and reductive view of the South that much of the country holds. When Perry, an Alabama native, returns home, she’s able to reconsider her home region with a new perspective. She writes of the artists and immigrants she encounters, as well as her ancestors and personal experiences, to create a picture of the South unlike any other. She shows that understanding the rituals, landscape, and stories of the region are necessary to understand America.

It’s hard to think about a time before Mary Roach published insightful, funny, and propulsive science writing on topics that many may have never considered book-worthy, but there was one. Stiff introduced readers to a taboo topic—human cadavers—with both respect and curiosity in 2003, and her books helped carve a path for the growth of popular science for the average non-scientist reader. This is a book that exhibits how powerful voice can be in nonfiction writing, and it not only continues to be widely read and enjoyed, but it has also helped define what it means to be a “Swiss Army Knife” of a book—easy to recommend to just about anyone.

What started with a special issue of The New York Times Magazine has expanded into a reframing that has shaken up all pre-existing narratives of American history. It has even been adapted into school-friendly education material by The Pulitzer Center and a series on Hulu. At its core, it is about how the arrival of people trafficked from Africa to the colony of Virginia in 1619 started 250 years of what would be an unbelievably barbaric enslavement system, and beyond that, how that system continues to function in the modern day. This collection of essays, poems, and fiction by more than 20 writers puts this entire history into context.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of cancer is big in every sense. Expansive in scope and a doorstopper in length, it is the rare work of serious nonfiction that sacrifices neither art nor science in service of its subject. Mukherjee’s profoundly human approach—he pays as much attention to the people whose lives have been changed by cancer as he does to scientific development and discoveries—combines with masterfully crafted prose to create an elevated, edifying reading experience that crackles with aliveness. You might think you don’t want to read a 700-page book about cancer, but I promise, you don’t want to miss this masterpiece. 

One of the most widely read—and widely-challenged—works of memoir is Walls’s story of growing up in the midst of chaos. Published at the beginning of the rise in memoir, its themes of resilience and wonder, as well as its exploration of what it means to be a family—and what it is to grow up and leave behind the past to build a different future—resonate with readers of all backgrounds and socioeconomic classes as much today as they did when it hit shelves. Walls’s storytelling is vivid, and as her editor said for the book’s 20th anniversary, this is a story about watching how a person becomes.

Medical treatment of the Black community in this country has historically been pretty abysmal, with negligence, malpractice, and discrimination causing immeasurable harm. Nowhere is that made more plain than in the case of Henrietta Lacks, the subject of Rebecca Skloot’s remarkable 2018 release. Modern medicine owes a lot to this poor Southern tobacco farmer whose cells were allegedly harvested for research without her consent, and it’s a crime that more people don’t know her name. But Skloot’s eye-opening account of Lack’s case did a lot to change that. It is a must-read exploration of the ethics of consent and the legacy of medical racism in the U.S.

Has the stunt memoir run its course? Hard to say. One thing that’s not hard to say, though, is that Jacobs has been a forerunner in this style of nonfiction, choosing one Herculean task to take on in earnest and to document start to finish. In The Know-It-All, he takes on the seemingly impossible work of reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from start to finish. It’s an amusing project, and Jacobs keeps readers watching his journey as the people closest to him in his life, by turns cheer him on and tell him he’s lost his mind. Readers who love a funny and compelling main character—Jacobs—will walk away wondering what knowledge even is at all.

This book is a lovely homage to libraries, but that’s not all Susan Orlean delivers. The Library Book also has a true crime element, re-opening the unsolved mystery of the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library fire. Normally, an arson case like this one should have made front-page news, and it would have been—then Chernobyl happened. Orlean walks us through the facts of the case, weaving in personal anecdotes, library history, and stories about the custodians of these important institutions. It’s a modern classic that feels especially urgent in this era of censorship and book banning. Let’s keep the library love alive.

This 2010 release has widely been regarded as one of the most important books of the century. It is so influential that it has inspired the creation of the Marshall Project and the $100 million Art for Justice Fund. In it, litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander exposes the lie that slavery and the Jim Crow era have ended. They have simply changed form. Their current iteration is the American caste system —and its co-conspirators, racism, the war on drugs, and the prison industrial complex.

While The Shock Doctrine was written in 2007 after Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, Klein’s searing indictment of capitalism is just as relevant today as it was when she originally wrote the book. She coined the phrase “disaster capitalism,” which describes how corporate and political actors use disasters to implement unpopular measures that provide significant financial gain to them. Examples include privatizing education in New Orleans and the exploitation and displacement in Puerto Rico that happened after Hurricane Maria. The book provided a critical framework for understanding capital interests exploiting crises for financial and political gain.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson wrote a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction about a sweeping yet marginalized chapter of U.S. history in her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns. The Great Migration lasted generations and impacted the entire nation. Wilkerson’s journalistic skills and exquisite storytelling continues to help readers comprehend the movement’s great scope and deep impacts through the life stories of three African Americans who left the Jim Crow South for the North and West. This ranks high on the list of compelling histories.

Joan Didion was a celebrated and iconic writer for decades. But this memoir, written at age 70,  might be her biggest legacy. In the book, she describes the year after her beloved husband died, while her adult daughter was going through a series of severe health problems. Didion explores her own identity shift and the irrational ways her mind worked while adjusting to this radical change in her life. It’s a common adage to write from the scar, not the wound. But in this personal, raw piece of writing, she ignores this advice and immerses the reader in her fresh, unprocessed grief.

There have been many stories about sports, but Abdurraqib’s memoir about growing up in the time of LeBron James’s rise to stardom in Columbus, Ohio, is less about sports and more about what sports mean to people. The tale of a basketball star fans out into a memoir of sorts, about coming-of-age and accepting that you’re getting old, about surviving in the kind of neighborhood other people in the city avoid, about loving a city deeply, leaving it, and returning to it. It packs all this in without feeling dense, revealing why Abdurraqib is undoubtedly one of the best authors of the century.

You might not know Daniel Kahneman’s name, but you definitely know the work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Economics. In a series of groundbreaking studies, Kahneman and his longtime research partner Amos Tversky—both were behavioral psychologists—discovered that human decision-making is shaped by cognitive biases and mental shortcuts that often make the process far from rational. Here, he relays findings that reshaped economics and psychology and have impacted nearly every field of human industry. This challenging read will change the ways you see the world and understand your own mind.

Samantha Irby is, without question, one of today’s funniest writers. She’s now known for her screenwriting on the Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That, and the Hulu adaptation of Lindy West’s memoir Shrill. But her books are where the real magic happens. While We Are Never Meeting in Real Life wasn’t her first book, it was the one that woke all of us up to just how hilarious she truly is. From her application to The Bachelor to Helen Keller, the hateful rescue kitten, to Irby’s general disdain for anyone who expects her to leave her house, it’s a joy to ride shotgun on Irby’s journey. Her writing is irreverent, self-deprecating, and make-you-laugh-so-hard-you-might-pass-out hilarious. Read/watch anything Irby writes, but start here.

What does it mean to have a voice? What might the ways we use or silence our own voices reveal about us? In 54 vignettes that blend essay, poetry, philosophy, and meditation, Williams uses one of the great mysteries of her life—upon inheriting her mother’s journals, she discovered that all of them were blank—to invite readers into the mysteries of our own. Warmth, wonder, tenderness, grief, and rage all have a place in this potent and memorable book. It just might change your life.

A Barnes & Noble Book of the Year, this nonfiction debut dazzles. Inspired by her South Indian father and Filipina mother’s affection for nature, the award-winning poet ruminates on identity, joy, motherhood, place, the wild, and other wondrous things. I can’t imagine these essays without Nakamura’s elaborate art, which beautifully complements the prose. Nezhukumatathil, who felt “the outdoors . . . was the easiest place of all to exist because I never had to explain myself or my family to anyone,” hadn’t seen brown people in nature or anyone that resembled her portrayed “outside in books,” and now this “love letter” exists—a wish come true.