For Esquire Charles P. Pierce tagged fifteen of the best political nonfiction books ever, including:
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. ThompsonRead about the other entries on the list.
Before Being Hunter ate him alive. Some of the most honest, scabrous, and, dammit, beautiful writing ever on how we govern ourselves.
You can watch her most recent comedy special, Good Timing, currently streaming on Peacock. She can be heard hosting the long-running podcast, Dr. Gameshow, with comedian Manolo Moreno. She is also the co-author of two card games: Punderdome: A Card Game for Pun Lovers and Fruits.
The Spellman Files by Lisa LutzRead about the other titles on Firestone's list.
This book is about a dysfunctional family of private investigators, with 28-year-old Izzy at the helm. Izzy is a mess and so is her family, but the stories about them are charming. They’re such good private investigators, they are constantly tailing and wiretapping each other. It’s a cozy and quick read.
she is a produced playwright and author of the novels Stage Seven, My Year of Casual Acquaintances, and The Unexpected Guests. Stevens is a proud member of the Women's Fiction Writers Association and the Dramatists Guild of America and serves as a volunteer and acquisitions editor for AlzAuthors. She lives in Torrance, California, with her husband. In her spare time, she enjoys travel, hiking, hip-hop and fitness classes, yoga, Broadway musicals, wine tasting, leading a book club, and visiting her grandsons in NYC.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie GarmusRead about the other entries on Stevens's list.
This book contained everything I love in a novel: a sympathetic and unforgettable hero and a story that’s funny, original, and often surprising.
Elizabeth Zott is a beautiful woman and a gifted scientist, and I could feel her frustration as she tried to compete in the male-dominated professional world of the early 1960s. I cheered her on when she met her soulmate, fellow researcher Calvin, and abandoned her lonely existence.
When Elizabeth later ended up hosting a popular TV cooking show, where she taught her female fans how to break out of the stereotypical housewife rut to become modern women, I cheered even louder at her bold defiance of the status quo.
John Wiswell is a disabled author who lives where New York keeps all its trees. His fiction has been translated into 10 languages. He won the 2021 Nebula Award for Best Short Story for "Open House on Haunted Hill," and the 2022 Locus Award for Best Novelette for "That Story Isn't The Story." He has also been a finalist for the Hugo, World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards.
Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya DeaneRead about the other entries on the list.
Achilles is one of the great heroes of retellings, both ridiculously popular and ever inconsistent across iterations. Some myths cast himas invincible except for a weak spot on his heel, yet in the most famous work he appears in, Homer’s Iliad, he is so not-invincible that the gods make sure he gets the right armor and shield. He is a figure with a million angles. Most recently, audiences fell in love with Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, a tender gay romance that focused on Achilles and his fellow soldier Patroclus.
If you hunger for another LGBTQ+ take on Achilles, you need Wrath Goddess Sing in your life. It springs from the ancient story of Achilles passing as a woman in the court of King Skyros, and Deane explodes that idea to speculate that Achilles was a trans woman. She is hardly the only queer figure in the era of the Trojan War, but this Achilles has a unique path through the treacherous relationships of kings and warriors.
and teacher. His music has been performed widely in the UK and internationally by groups including the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra of Opera North and Westminster Cathedral Choir. His YouTube channel, Listening In, which he began in 2019 and for which he makes videos that explore the cross-section between pop culture and classical music, has garnered over 200,000 subscribers and ten million views. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and now teaches in London, where he lives with his husband.
Emily St. John Mandel, Station ElevenRead about the other novels on the list at CrimeReads.
Station Eleven doesn’t directly feature a parent-child relationship, but it has all the hallmarks of it. Kirsten, who is eight when theGeorgia Flu appears, saw actor and movie star Arthur Leander as a father figure. And Jeevan, who is with Kirsten on the night of the outbreak, looks after her as a parent would following the collapse of civilization.
Read about the other entries on the list.Feel Free by Zadie Smith
For all Zadie Smith’s talents and successes as a novelist, some in the literary world think her real strength is non-fiction. They have a strong case: Feel Free, Smith’s second essay collection, is full of superb writing. She’s razor-sharp at times, but also unafraid to confess genuine love and admiration for the subject at hand. The book and exhibition reviews are deft, but the highlights come with weirder subjects: a meditation on joy, in relation to ecstasy and British rave culture, and an improbable but brilliant comparison between Justin Bieber and the philosopher Martin Buber.
may it rest in peace. Before the lure of books hooked her, she was curator of the history museum in Jonesborough, Tennessee’s oldest town.
Gloria Lamerino, protagonist in the Periodical Tables Mysteries by Camille Minichino, is a former Berkeley physics professor. Gloria left California for herRead about the other entries on MacRae's list.hometown, Revere, Massachusetts, and now works part-time as a science consultant for the Revere police department. Her former and current jobs are offbeat only because so many cozy mysteries feature crafters, cooks, café owners, and the like. Gloria is fifty-six, turning gray, and thinks of herself as amply proportioned. She has brains and hips. She uses her science background and everything she absorbed from the dynamics and traditions of her Italian family to help her solve murders in her own well-mannered way. There’s something else offbeat about her—she doesn’t live in a quaint or cute cottage and she hasn’t inherited an inn or B&B. She lives in an apartment above a friend’s funeral home. These are intelligent, well-written, tightly-paced mysteries with appealing, sympathetic characters and a real Boston feel. There are eight books in the series and several short stories.
Read about the other entries on the list.Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark
This alternative history horror novel imagines the KKK as literal demons. The release of the film Birth of a Nation in 1915 spread hatred across America and spawned hellish members of the Klan who planned to proliferate violence wherever they went. The only ones who can stop them are Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters. But the Klan has plans for Macon, Georgia, and Maryse and her demon-hunters will have to resist them with everything they’ve got.
Sue Hincenbergs is a former television producer who has worked on multiple award-winning programs. She lives in Toronto with her (very much alive) husband, her scruffy, middle-aged rescue dog, Kramer, and the rooms full of the stuff her three sons left behind when they moved out. The porch light is always on in case one comes by for a visit.
Too Old for This by Samantha DowningRead about the other entries on the list.
Seventy-five-year-old retired serial killer Lottie Jones is forced back into action when an investigative reporter comes for a visit and asks too many questions. Technological advances since she was last disposing of bodies require some navigation in a story that has a bit of bingo and a bit of blood with a dash of church drama and family dysfunction.
Julia Seales is a novelist and screenwriter. She earned an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA, and a BA in English from Vanderbilt University. She is a lifelong Anglophile with a passion for both murder mysteries and Jane Austen. Seales is originally from Kentucky, where she learned about manners (and bourbon).
Silent in the Grave by Deanna RaybournRead about the other titles on the list.
Lady Julia Grey’s husband Sir Edward drops dead in their London home, murdered – and thus begins the Lady Julia Grey mystery series. Set in the Victorian era against the backdrop of London society, this is a lush showcase of the city. And once you’ve read all of Julia Grey, you can move to Veronica Speedwell, the detective in Raybourn’s other fantastic, London-set mystery series.
No Small Thing by Orlaine McDonald is one of the best debut novels I’ve read in recent years. A family of women, mother, daughter and granddaughter, carry unresolved and unspoken trauma that’s passed down through the generations. This poisons their relationships and ability to fully function in society. Intense, visceral and beautifully written, McDonald’s novel captures their damaged souls. Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is the follow-up to her bestselling novel Detransition, Baby. Consisting of three short stories and a novella, this is adventurous, mind-expanding and provocative fiction that skilfully serves up different possibilities of gender and sexuality.Read about the other recommended books at The Guardian.
Fran Littlewood is the author of Amazing Grace Adams, which was an instant New York Times bestseller and a #ReadWithJenna book club pick. She has an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. Before her MA, she worked as a journalist, including a stint at the Times. She lives in London with her husband and their three daughters.
Hannah Pittard, We Are Too Many: A Memoir (Kind of)Read about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.
Described as “A Memoir (kind of),” this genius, genre-defying book blurs fact with fiction to brilliantly explosive and quietly devastating effect. A reconstruction of the breakdown of theauthor’s marriage, following her husband’s affair with her best friend, Pittard fills in the blanks creatively—detailing calls and meetings between the two, as she imagines they might have happened.
But it’s the Fleabag-esque relationship between the author and her sister, that’s a breakout star of the book for me. In caustic exchanges, which pulse with unconditional love, the sisters riff on everything from a lacklustre suicide attempt to their grandpa’s porn stash, usually both validating and invalidating one another in a single pitch-perfect encounter. Raw, irreverent and funny as hell, this is a slim volume that punches powerfully.
Dwyer Murphy is the author of An Honest Living and The Stolen Coast, both of which were New York Times Editors’ Choice selections. He is the editor in chief of Literary Hub‘s CrimeReads vertical.
Stephen L. Carter, The Emperor of Ocean ParkRead about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.
Carter’s 1993 novel tells the story of the Garland family through the eyes of Talcott Garland, a Yale Law professor reckoning with scandal and regret in thewake of his father’s death. The paterfamilias was Judge Oliver Garland, a DC power player once snubbed on the cusp of an appointment to the Supreme Court. Upon the Judge’s death, his son finds himself caught up in a sprawling conspiracy of former spies and politicos, and the action soon shifts to the family’s summer haunts on Martha’s Vineyard. Carter paints a lively scene on the island and off, moving through rarefied circles of African-American power and community. And Carter is a dedicated stylist, too, with a voice that presumes a level of sophistication in its readers you rarely find in thrillers today. It makes for a highly enjoyable and deeply satisfying novel that resonates all the more on a second reading.
(2009), and In the Colorless Round, a prose collaboration with artist Rikki Ducornet (2006). She co-wrote Field Glass, a speculative novel, with Joanna Ruocco (2017). Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, Verse, Bomb, and parts elsewhere. She lives in Denver and Providence and teaches at University of Denver.
Innocents and Others by Dana SpiottaRead about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.
Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others centers a pair of female filmmakers, Meadow and Carrie, whose long-standing friendship must endure the pressure-cookerof corporatized filmmaking as they grow into their very different film careers. Peppered with film history and the anxiety of influence—Orson Welles looms large—the book uses formal experimentation in the flavor of cinematic montage to mimic the technological immersion of modern filmmaking, and the fragmented modes of composition and communication it demands. Spiotta challenges any simple, singular category of woman-as-artist and maker, highlighting nuanced differences in aesthetic, ideology, and methodology for the two friends, and a difference in their feminisms, and strategies for navigating the male-dominated industry.
for excellence in book reviewing, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman has written for the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She has been a writer-in-residence for Columbia College Chicago and has taught at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Seaman created the anthology In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness, her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists.
Glory Edim, Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved MeRead about the other entries on the list.
Many of us say that books have saved us by providing perspective, companionship, and sanctuary, but the predicaments Edim needed help navigating were exceptionally difficult. The firstborn child of immigrants from Nigeria, Edim was five when her brother, Maurice, was born; she was eight when their parents divorced and her mother, a former teacher who taught a very young Edim to read, began working long shifts as a nurse, leaving Edim to care for her brother. The siblings reveled in the weekends spent with their father until he abruptly disappeared. Worse yet washer mother’s doomed second marriage which left Edim responsible for Maurice and a new baby brother. Not even college brought relief when her long-traumatized mother needed care.
From the start, Edim read hungrily, searchingly, steeping herself in “survival stories.” She found comfort in Little Women, as have so many book-loving girls and future writers, and inspiration in Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, a novel about a ten-year-old Black girl in Mississippi during the Great Depression. Edim loved both books because, like her, their young female characters “were struggling, they had burdens and responsibilities beyond their years, and they still found a way to be emotionally fulfilled. They found a way out of the danger that surrounded them.” The more demanding her life became, the more urgently and astutely Edim read, finding her way to the wisdom and artistry of Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, and Toni Morrison. Ultimately her ardor for and abiding faith in literature, especially writing by Black women poets and writers, inspired her to found Well-Read Black Girl, an innovative, impactful, and award-winning nonprofit literary organization.
for almost five years. She now lives in Cambridge with her partner.
explore the different ways setting a book at sea can impact characters and plot, from the inherent dangers of sailing, to being stranded, to what happens when the boat sinks and relationships are tested. The protagonists often have an offer they can’t refuse, a desire to taste a life so different from their own, and this leads to fatal consequences.One title on the list:
The Last Passenger by Will DeanRead about the other entries on the list.
Dean describes stepping onto a boat as “an act of faith”. This sentiment feels more common when considering something like flying—plenty of people are afraid ofthat, even those that fly often. There’s an implicit fear difficult to shake, and you truly feel dependent on the pilots and crew. Really, there should be a similar sentiment just as the main character describes when on a ship. If something goes wrong, you cannot outswim the ocean. The captain is everything. Which is why, when Caroline wakes up aboard the Atlantica and finds herself entirely alone, it is a worst nightmare come true. Her boyfriend is gone, her phone has no reception, and the crew have vanished. There are only a small number of other passengers who seem equally as confused about what’s going on. This book strips back life on board a vessel and shows the amount of work that goes into simply staying alive, which becomes ever more important in the game of survival that develops.
Read about the other entries on the list.Falling by T. J. Newman
This is also a story of a member of the airline being put in an impossible situation. After a passenger plane to New York takes off, the pilot gets (secret) word that his family has been kidnapped. The kidnappers have one demand: either crash the plane or his family will die. Unsure who he can trust, Captain Bill Hoffman must make an unimaginable decision. Newman’s thrillers are terrifying, bolstered by the fact that she once worked as a flight attendant, so she knows the ins and outs of air travel.
Her first collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Arterian's writing has appeared in BOMB, The Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A poetry editor for Noemi Press, Arterian writes "The Annotated Nightstand" column at Lit Hub. She lives in Los Angeles.
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní GhríofaRead about the other entries on Arterian's list at Electric Lit.
This memoir is an extended meditation on Ní Ghríofa’s relationship with a keen poem from the late 1700s written in Irish alongside her modern experiences of love and motherhood. The keen is by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill in response to the heinousmurder of her beloved husband, whom she realizes is dead when his horse walks to their home with his “heart’s blood smeared from cheek to saddle.” The horse carries her to her husband’s corpse. “In anguish and in grief,” writes Ní Ghríofa, “she fell upon him, keening and drinking mouthfuls of his blood.” Ní Chonaill’s husband was shot at the order of a magistrate, illustrative of the oppression of the Catholic majority in Ireland. Though Ní Chonaill’s voice burns through the centuries, we know little else of her life beyond her entrancing descriptions of love and abject grief. In A Ghost in the Throat, Ní Ghríofa’s life whizzes around us as she raises four small children, her ratty copy of Ní Chonaill’s keen in her hands during late-night breastfeeds. Through the book, Ní Ghríofa never stops probing—the archive, the poem’s lines.
Grace Flahive was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. She studied English literature at McGill University in Montreal before moving to London, UK, in 2014, where she’s lived ever since.
Emily St. John Mandel, The Lola QuartetRead about the other entries on the list.
I’m grateful to be following in the tradition of Canadian authors writing about Florida (though this book packs more crime story punch than my own!)Published in 2012, two years before Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s The Lola Quartet is the type of book you devour in one sitting. Following a group of four friends one decade after high school, it’s both at crime thriller with literary flair and a masterful character study, exploring four very different but intertwined lives and the ways that small decisions can create ripple effects across decades. In this book, Florida’s nature is a haunting, hunting thing—heat that suffocates, greenery that hides danger, and snakes that lie in wait in the water.
LA Times Book Prize. Her new novel is Ecstasy.
Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance by Irvine Welsh (1996)Read about the other entries on the list.
Rave culture, revenge, and pharmaceutical love stories
Welsh’s triptych of stories isn’t just about popping pills in neon-drenched clubs—it’s about what happens to your soul when the high fades. In classic Welsh fashion, the stories are raw, aggressive, and shot through with political venom. From a twisted revenge plot to a love story between damaged outsiders, Ecstasy captures the late-90s dance scene as both a cultural revolution and a minefield. The writing is visceral, the dialogue cracked with street poetry, and the characters burn bright before inevitably burning out.
The Swimmers (one of the best ten SF books of 2021, The Sunday Times) and in the Walton & Waltraud uncanny mystery series The Golden Key (2020) and On the Nature of Magic (2023). Her short fiction has been collected in Lost Objects and Out of the Window, Into the Dark, nominated to two British Fantasy Awards and one British Science Fiction Association Award, and selected for Year’s Bests. She lives in Cambridge (UK).
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie WillisRead about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.
One of the reasons jokes work is said to be that they offer us sidelong ways into things that, if contemplated seriously, would drive us mad…or to tears. I put Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog very firmly into this category—it’s one of the funniest novels one could ever read, yet the air of melancholy, of climate grief, that stands behind its best scenes gets me every time. We begin in the ashes of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a bombing raid in November 1940, with a group of time-travellers sent back to find various McGuffins that their patron, the impossible Lady Schrapnell, needs to fulfil her unnecessary plan to rebuild the cathedral as it was before the Blitz. But what sets the novel’s plot in motion is a sharp dig at the perpetual state of academia—the projects that can only get underway because of external support (for Schrapnell read Sackler), and the way in which use-value is prioritized above everything else when money is concerned. The main body of the novel, a reworking of Jerome K. Jerome’s perfect comedy, Three Men in a Boat, takes place with this disastrous future always lapping at its edges: a bittersweet reading experience.
of adventure & transformative cultural change. She’s written fantasy, science fiction, space opera based on the life of Alexander the Great (Unconquerable Sun), Young Adult fantasy, the seven volume (complete!) Crown of Stars epic fantasy series set in a landscape reminiscent of early medieval Europe, and the Afro-Celtic post-Roman alternate-history fantasy with lawyer dinosaurs, Cold Magic, as well as two novellas set in the Magic: The Gathering multiverse. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Norton, and Locus Awards.
The Green Bone Saga by Fonda LeeRead about the other entries on Elliott's list.
What if a crime family in an East Asian inspired fantasy island city had access to magical martial arts powers and were engaged in a long-standing turf war with a rival crime syndicate? Lee’s Jade City and its two sequels ask and answer this question. Lee brilliantly sets her story in an equivalent of the second half of our 20th century (although it is not our world). This allows her to follow the characters across decades of societal, cultural, diaspora, political, and technological change both in terms of their personal lives and in terms of how subsequent generations adapt to and make decisions about the family business they’ve been born into. Great stuff.
where she spends her time writing thrillers, over-analyzing episodes of The Bachelor, and hoping someone will romanticize her for reading on the subway. She is the author of the young adult novels People to Follow and The Debutantes. Her newly released adult debut is So Happy Together.
You by Caroline KepnesRead about the other entries on the list.
One of my all-time favorite series, You is like the mother of modern-day stalker stories. The first book, like the first season of the Netflix show it inspired, follows the infamously relatable Joe Goldberg as he falls in love with aspiring writer Guinevere Beck…and will stop at nothing, including murder, to keep her by his side.
House of Bone and Rain by Gabino IglesiasRead about the other entries on the list.
This book really takes the idea that violence begets violence to heart. Taking place in Puerto Rico, five teenage boys have been friends since childhood and have literally weathered the constant threat of death. But this time, death has come too close: the mother of one of five friends, Maria, has been gunned down, just as a hurricane is about to hit the island. Bimbo, the dead woman’s son, demands revenge, and his four friends are all going to help him. But the murderer may be connected to a powerful cartel on the island. Can Bimbo finish his quest, or will he and his friends die trying? Or will the hurricane sweep them away first?
among other journals. She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She is the organizer of “100 Notable Small Press Books,” a curated list of the year’s recommended books from independent publishers.
Sara Nović, True BizRead about the other books on the list at Lit Hub.
I came to True Biz because it has everything I love in a high school novel: a cloistered school environment, in this case the residential River Valley Schoolfor the Deaf; aching students straining to grow up, with fitful rebellions and first loves; and a nearby adult, the personally and professionally beleaguered headmistress, whose story is braided through the students’ and the school’s. I stayed for the intimately drawn world of Deaf culture. Nović takes us inside the unique strains and joys of deaf characters, one coming to ASL for the first time as a teen, another contending with a hearing sibling. The plot is a page-turner, to be sure. But one of the unexpected beauties of this novel is how Nović renders oral speaking, signing, and sign language itself, including chapter headings. Nović makes a home for Deafness on the page that is as powerful as the story itself.
Peter Swanson's novels include The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award, and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger; Her Every Fear, an NPR book of the year; Before She Knew Him, and Eight Perfect Murders.
A Suspension of Mercy (1965) by Patricia HighsmithRead about the other books on the list at CrimeReads.
Speaking of Highsmith, there’s no shortage of ugly marriages in her body of work, some of which culminate in murder. In this rather odd and clever story, the main protagonist Sydney Bartleby is an aspiring crime writer, who acts out scenes from his books and screenplays, including one in which he pretends to carry his wife’s body out of his English country cottage in a rolled carpet. When his wife actually does go missing, he naturally becomes the prime suspect.
V. E. Schwab was born in California, raised in Tennessee, and currently splits her time between Denver, Colorado and Edinburgh, Scotland. She got her undergraduate degree in book design at Washington University in St. Louis, and her masters in depictions of monstrosity in medieval art at the University of Edinburgh.
Woman, Eating by Claire KohdaRead about the other novels on the list.
Genre collides with the literary landscape in Kohda’s Woman, Eating, a cerebral and surreal work following Lydia, a young, struggling artist and gallery intern who longs to consume the food from her youth, while only being able to digest blood. What follows is at once eccentric and compelling, an examination of race, misogyny, body image and one not-entirely-human woman’s relationship with her own hunger—what she craves, compared with what she needs.
Yes, Daddy was named one of the best queer books of 2021 by Entertainment Weekly, NBC News, The Advocate, Lambda Literary, Bustle, Goodreads and more. Yes, Daddy was also optioned for television by Amazon Studios.
Raven Leilani, LusterRead about the other books on the list at Lit Hub.
There are few things sadder than a sparsely attended birthday party. And when that birthday party happens to be for a child, it is particularly heartbreaking. Raven Leilani’s brilliant debut novel Luster features one such scene—a roller rink celebration with a mere two guests and a disco ball disaster which I will notspoil here, other than to say it perfectly encapsulates the feeling of a very bad birthday.
Adding to the particularly impactful nature of this scene, is the fact that it perfectly encapsulates the complicated dynamic between the four main characters of the book. Luster follows the thorny misadventures of Edie, a disaffected publishing employee who enters a somewhat kinky affair with Eric, a digital archivist living in New Jersey.
Surprisingly, Eric’s wife doesn’t banish Edie from their home upon finding out about her husband’s dalliances. In fact, she invites Edie deeper into their family’s life. Soon, Edie becomes a significant role model to Akila, Eric’s adopted daughter, and it becomes clear that Edie may be the only Black person in Akila’s life, adding an intense complication to an already complex dynamic.
Luster brims with dark humor, poignant human insight, and sentences that shine with stylistic verve.
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