Diclaimer: This list is not any sort of authoritative list of the best nonfiction reads of all time. This is simply a collection of ten diverse reads, which offer excellent reportage, compelling prose, and unique approaches to educating readers. On this list you’ll find some excellent antiracist reads, urgent #MeToo stories, fascinating books that explore… Continue reading The Nonfiction Edit
Author: jecrandall44
The Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour
Purchase a copy for yourself here! In her most recent essay collection, The Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour begins with her family’s riches to rags stories. Having immigrated to California after the 1979 revolution, her parents, who worked at the prestigious Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, left their comfortable life in Tehran for relative poverty in… Continue reading The Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour
Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Recollections of My Nonexistence begins as a meditation on place—specifically the small but elegant apartment that Solnit moved into in her early 20s, where she began the academic and artistic research that would come to define her work in the following decades. Solnit was a resident of a mostly… Continue reading Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Britt Bennett’s recent novel, The Vanishing Half, deals in multiplicative identities. The Vanishing Half is Bennett’s follow up to her debut novel, The Mothers (Read my review here), which similarly dwells on how explosive secrets can tear families and communities asunder. The novel begins with sixteen-year old twins, Desiree… Continue reading The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
A Burning by Megha Majumdar
Purchase a copy for yourself here! A Burning begins not only with a burning—a train car lit on fire in a terrorist attack that kills 100 patrons—but with a Facebook post. Jivan, a young Muslim woman living in the Kolabagan slum in Bangladesh, witnessed the terrorist attack and expresses her outrage on social media, posting… Continue reading A Burning by Megha Majumdar
The Memoir Edit
Disclaimer: This is not meant to be any sort of authoritative list of the ten best memoirs ever, but rather an edit of ten memoirs that I feel embody the best of the genre. I wanted to capture the diversity of the memoir space, and thus I’ve included lighthearted celebrity memoirs, deeply moving activist memoirs,… Continue reading The Memoir Edit
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Before she was the literary cool-girl icon that she is now, Sally Rooney burst onto the scene with her 2017 debut novel, Conversations with Friends. Rooney’s much-awaited second novel, Normal People (check out my review here), only cemented her position as the preeminent trendy millennial novelist. The highly successful… Continue reading Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
Purchase a copy here! Britt Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers begins, “All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around in our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.”… Continue reading The Mothers by Brit Bennett
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
Purchase a copy for yourself here! In an interview at the University of Central Florida, novelist Emily St. John Mandel said, “You can make an argument that the world’s become more bleak, but I feel like we always think we’re living at the end of the world”. Her most recent novel, The Glass Hotel, published… Continue reading The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Purchase a copy for yourself here! By all appearances, newly married college grads Roy and Celestial are living the dream as an upwardly mobile and passionately in love black couple in Atlanta. But their marriage is at once torn asunder, on a night when the couple is staying in a hotel in Louisiana on a… Continue reading An American Marriage by Tayari Jones