New Nonfiction
Prince Shakur
When They Tell You to Be Good
Tin House
This debut memoir made many best-of-fall lists and won the Hurston/Wright Crossover Award. Shakur’s memoir charts his political coming of age, compelling readers to take a closer look at the political world of young, Black, queer, and radical millennials today.
Rebecca Mead
Home/Land
Vintage
The author of My Life in Middlemarch returns with the story of her reverse migration: from New York City back to London, her birth city. Both fleeing the political situation in the US and hoping to show her son a wider world, Mead returned to London in 2018. Home/Land is a mix of memoir and reportage that draws on literature and art, recent and ancient history, and her encounters with individuals, environments, and landscapes.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
A Man of Two Faces
Grove Atlantic
Well known for his novels The Sympathizer and The Refugees, Pulitzer Prize–winner Viet Thanh Nguyen here shares his own story while addressing larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America.
Lorraine Byrne Bodley
Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer
Yale University Press
In this new biography, Lorraine Byrne Bodley draws from extensive archival research in Vienna and the Czech Republic to present a fuller account of the short life of one of the most beloved composers of the nineteenth century.
C. J. Hauser
The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays
Anchor
C. J. Hauser called off her wedding, headed to Texas to study the whooping crane, and realized how close they came to living someone else’s life. Hauser dissects pop-culture touchstones, attends a robot convention, and contemplates grief at John Belushi’s gravesite in this memoir that maps the difference between the stories we’re asked to hold versus those we choose to carry. Time and The Guardian named it a best book of the year.
Jenn Shapland
Thin Skin
Pantheon
Another much-anticipated book, Jenn Shapland’s collection of essays weaves together historical research, interviews, and her everyday life in New Mexico. Shapland’s first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Lambda Literary Award.
