The Best Nonfiction of the Past Two Decades (2024)

The winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize gives the American housing crisis a human face—and a rapidly beating pulse. Told through the intimate and propulsive lens of eight Milwaukeean families trying to keep a roof over their heads, this book reads like a novel while inspiring real-world action.

Books on the climate catastrophe are always urgent, often insightful—and rarely fun to read. This refreshing exception from the author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close uses lush lyricism, damning data, and wildly original storytelling to craft an environmentalist narrative that inspires action and commands attention. While this book does have an agenda (spoiler alert: it has to do with our eating habits) Foer never lectures. Instead, he lays both himself and the research bare on the page, asking us to work through the existential and material questions of our changing planet alongside him. An unforgettable—and genuinely unputdownable—reckoning with the dire state of the planet and the very nature of our species, this book should be required reading for anyone who lives on this planet in the present and wants to in the future.

This stunning memoir, now a classic, was finished posthumously by Kalanithi’s wife, Lucy. It’s the story of a young neurosurgeon who dies of metastatic lung cancer at the age of 37, leaving a baby daughter behind. He writes of grappling with his diagnosis and treatment, and the quality of time itself—along with his remorse that after spending most of his life in school, he had barely begun to live. The great gift of this book, whether you’re grieving in parallel or not, is that it’s a testament to engage with life—and it’s also a reminder that short lives can still yield lasting, impenetrable legacies

Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker journalist Katherine Boo spent more than three years in Mumbai’s now-notorious Annawadi slum to bring an overdue focus to the unbelievable lives of its inhabitants. With compassion, dignity, and grace, Boo captures the interconnected stories of college hopefuls and trash collectors, slumlords and survivors—people chasing different fates but bound to the same land: a half-acre occupied by 3,000, built out of the wreckage of a rapidly changing country.

Rarely has depression been explored with such candor and courage as in Kiese Laymon’s lyrical memoir cum epistle to his mother, a poverty-scarred addict who raised her overweight Black son, in fits and starts, against the backdrop of racially divided Mississippi during the '80s and '90s. It's a valentine to survivors everywhere.

The South has given America its Dollar Stores, the best of its cuisine and culture, and—while most people don’t give it credit for this— many of the leaders of the Black Power movement. Perry, a daughter of the South and a Princeton professor, shows us dimensions of the South and its centrality to American identity that have previously gone under-examined.

An expansion of the ongoing and Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Magazine initiative of the same name, The 1619 Project features fiction, poetry, and essays from the greatest thinkers of our time, from Jesmyn Ward to Michelle Alexander on American racism, past and present. While the work in this collection is dazzlingly diverse, each voice in this chorus asserts, unwaveringly, the centrality of slavery to our nation’s origins and present-day identity.

In this follow-up to The Residue Years, the inimitable truthteller lays bare the agony and ecstasies of growing up Black in Portland, Oregon—and takes it upon himself to “keep alive the record of where we lived and how we lived and what we lived and died for.”

In this utterly engrossing, game-changing work of narrative nonfiction, a New York Magazine contributor profiles a trio of everyday women, shining a light on their darkest desires and how men (and other women) often thwart those wants.

A New Yorker staff writer, Aviv has long covered psychiatric illness, public policy, and the consequences of poor mental health infrastructure in this country, such as rampant homelessness and violence. Her searing Strangers to Ourselves is a revelation of literary journalism and medical research, plaiting six personal stories, including her own. (As a child, she was hospitalized for anorexia, at that time the youngest patient ever diagnosed in the U.S.) “Ray” chronicles the downward spiral of a white male physician in Virginia and the impact on his wives and children.“Bapu” draws on original reporting about a wealthy schizophrenic woman in India who abandoned her husband and children to pursue a romantic relationship with the Hindu god Vishnu. “Naomi” is the heartbreaking tale of an impoverished, neglected African American in St. Paul, Minnesota, who tossed her infant twin sons into the Mississippi River. (One survived.) There are radical lessons to learn here, Aviv suggests, if we only open our eyes.

While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was “once necessary” that now “appears inessential”—as well as on banana bread, pedicures, and tulips. Referencing Wordsworth, Marcus Aurelius, and Mel Gibson, among many others, Smith ponders our confounding current moment and offers musings like this one: “I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.”

Psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb is both doctor and patient in this singular memoir about what people talk about when they take the couch. Gottlieb describes the moment she decided to seek therapy (the guy she was crazy about and thought she'd marry suddenly breaks it off) and interweaves that journey with those of her clients (names and identities altered for privacy). And one of the book's great attractions is that the reader gets to be voyeur, sitting in on sessions as some of her stickier patients insist on presenting versions of themselves that are clearly only a small part of the whole picture. But she's onto them. It's also apparent that Gottlieb, as a former television writer, knows a little something about plot: The windows we get into her psyche and those of her clients are unexpectedly thrilling, as well as illuminating.

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois coined the phrase "double consciousness" to explain the mental gymnastics people of color perform in order to reconcile how the world sees them and how they see themselves. If there's any writer up to the task of examining this existential crisis through a feminist lens, it's Tolentino, whose astute commentary on the media's often-skewed perception of femininity and womanhood light up the pages of The New Yorker.

In this achingly beautiful look at her relationship with her mother, Nguyen unpacks the toll of the Vietnam War, when, due to the chaos, her family was split apart. She, her father, and her sister eventually land in Grand Rapids, and her mother, in Boston, Nguyen only rediscovering her whereabouts at age 10. Just how the legacy of their loss divides them is told with wrenching emotion and exquisite, controlled prose. A soon-to-be classic with implications about immigration in any era.

Each entry in Madden’s memoir-in-essays is the literary equivalent of sucking on a Warhead: at once nostalgically sweet, stingingly sour, and unnervingly satisfying. Set mostly against the helter-skelter backdrop of Boca Raton—a place of both privilege and immense squalor—these vignettes acutely capture the grit of girlhood.

While men like Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, and Donald Trump have decried the notion of holding men accountable for heinous behavior as "a witch hunt," the feminist firebrand and author of Shrill (also a Hulu series) leans into that idea, identifying herself as part of the coven coming to excoriate the culture that allows male chauvinism to flourish.

When you hear the word sociopath, you probably imagine someone closer to Patrick Bateman than Patric Gagne: an ax-wielding serial killer, not a dedicated therapist, loving mother, and devoted wife. But, in this fast-paced and unforgettable memoir, Gagne reveals that the truth of sociopathy is far more fascinating than the fictional stereotypes. Even in kindergarten, Gagne realized that she “didn’t feel things the way other kids did.” Empathy, remorse, and fear eluded her. Violence felt good. But Gagne does not want to be at the whim of her hardwired impulses; she wants to live a life of her own design. With no standard treatment (or even diagnosis) for psychopathy, she resolves to build her own through academic research and personal experimentation. Laid over this psychological odyssey is a romantic one, but Gagne deftly skirts the cliché of "Love cures all." Her relationship with her husband requires just as much trial and error, adaptation, and compromise as her relationship with her own mind; both are worth the labor. Hilarious and riveting, Gagne’s story is a life raft not just for those living with her particular disorder but for all of us trying to figure out how to live with another person, or with any sort of unruly brain.

What are we supposed to think these days about Lolita, the politically incorrect novel that just won’t shrivel up and leave the culture no matter how wrong it seems? What about Picasso and Hemingway and Woody Allen and any number of artists and writers whose behavior was as reprehensible as their work was genius? As personal as it is unflinching, Dederer’s exploration of the confusing boundaries between life and art refuses all the easy answers.