Nonfiction

Memorial Days

Pulitzer-winning novelist (for March) Geraldine Brooks pens a memoir about grieving the sudden death of her husband, fellow Pulitzer winner Tony Horwitz, in 2019. Besieged by the demands of a partner’s death, Brooks put off grieving for three years. Memorial Days is about the time after, when she retreated to a remote island off the coast of Australia, her home country, to finally attend to the demands of grief.

The Loves of My Life

By Edmund White

Novelist, biographer, playwright, essayist and queer icon Edmund White (The Humble Lover, A Saint From Texas) has spent his long career writing about love and sex in a way that shatters taboos and elevates the value of pleasure. His dishy new memoir, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, explores these themes during different seasons of his life.

Kuleana

By Sara Kehaulani Goo

The Hawaiian word kuleana means responsibility and stewardship carried through the generations, and it’s the theme of Sara Kehaulani Goo’s Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai’i. A veteran journalist (Axios, NPR, the Washington Post), Goo was drawn to investigate her family’s ancestral land in Maui when their property tax rose by 500%, a sum that seemed intended to displace them. Kuleana’s understanding of her own cultural identity deepens as she unfurls her family’s story alongside that of Hawai’i’s.

No Straight Road Takes You There

By Rebecca Solnit

For two decades, author, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit (Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, The Faraway Nearby, among many) has been an incisive interpreter of the modern age, with a particular talent for laying bare current social and political crises while providing actionable advice to effect positive change. With No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, Solnit homes in on climate change, prison abolition and more to explore how to harness the lessons of the past to forge ahead with courage and intention.

Toni at Random

By Dana Williams

A great editor works so seamlessly in the range of the author’s voice as to be invisible to readers. It makes sense that when considering Toni Morrison—Nobel Prize winner, stone-cold genius and among the greatest writers of all time—readers might not be thinking about her impact as an editor, even though it was tremendous. Working at top publishing houses, Morrison edited authors like Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest and Lucille Clifton, and profoundly influenced American letters. Before her death, she requested that Howard University dean Dana A. Williams tell this story. Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship will grant her wish.

Positive Obsession

By Susana M. Morris

In her too-short life, Octavia E. Butler redefined science fiction with books like Kindred, Parable of the Sower and Bloodchild. Named for Butler’s 1995 essay, in which she writes starkly about her beginnings as a writer, Susana M. Morris’ Positive Obsession seems akin to Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ 2024 biography of Audre Lorde, Survival Is a Promise. By grounding Butler’s work in the sociological and historical contexts of her time—such as Black Power, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights—Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler promises to show how the author was driven to push boundaries, imagine new futures and expand the genre of science fiction.

Lorne

By Susan Morrison

For five decades, Lorne Michaels has pulled the strings behind the curtain of the late night show he created, Saturday Night Live. Famously private, yet storied and mythologized by countless SNL cast members and writers through the years, Michaels is revealed in full in Susan Morrison’s deeply reported story of his life and career.

Misbehaving at the Crossroads

By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois was longlisted for the National Book Award, and made our 2021 list of best fiction, for good reason: “Her masterful treatment of the characters and their relationships, paired with the thorough and engaging way the narrative is laid out, makes for a book that is easy to invest and get lost in,” our reviewer wrote. Jeffers’ first work of nonfiction will explore “the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life.”

Motherland

By Julia Ioffe

U.S. national security, foreign policy and politics reporter Julia Ioffe makes her literary debut with Motherland, a book that seeks to show how Russia’s history is inextricably linked to its women. Ioffe, whose family escaped the Soviet Union and migrated to New York City when she was 7, puts her formidable journalism skills to use as she braids family memoir with history, illuminating how the country’s treatment of women paved the way to the rise of today’s authoritarian government.

Mark Twain

By Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton may have launched him into mainstream fame with the success of Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical adaptation, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer (for George Washington) is not resting on his laurels. Mark Twain is sure to illuminate the eponymous author’s life and times with delightfully excessive research and a brisk narrative pace. Fans of Twain and Chernow best set aside their TBR piles to indulge in this 1,200-page whopper from one of the eminent historians of our time.

Everything Is Tuberculosis

By John Green

Apart from his literary accomplishments (The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down), John Green is a notable philanthropist, having created a string of nonprofit charity projects and a foundation alongside his brother, Hank. Green is an advocate for health care equality and, most notably, has been using his platform to address policies and regulations regarding tuberculosis, a preventable and curable disease that is nonetheless a leading cause of death in Africa, especially among children. Everything Is Tuberculosis asks readers to join the fight to save them.

Pure Innocent Fun

By Ira Madison III

Pop culture maven, TV writer and podcaster Ira Madison III serves his cultural critiques with a side of spit take-inducing humor. His debut essay collection is like a brunch date with your sharpest, most hilarious friend—the one who never holds back their opinions. Here, Madison riffs on everything from the bewildering appeal of Tom Cruise to his identification with Daria to boy bands of yesteryear (err . . . the early aughts). Pure Innocent Fun promises to be a worthy romp.

Black in Blues

By Imani Perry

Imani Perry showed her ability to weave historical research with sharp, sparkling analysis in 2022’s National Book Award-winning South to America. In Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, she explores how the color blue has been intertwined with Black life: in the dyeing of indigo, the religious traditions of various African cultures, the literature of Zora Neale Hurston, the revolutionary politics of Black freedom fighters and much more.

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