The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 (So Far)

Just how much do algorithms control our lives—and what can we do about it? In this eye-opening investigation, Chayka enumerates the insidious ways that algorithms have flattened our culture and circumscribed our lives, from our online echo chambers to the design of our coffee shops. But all is not lost: Chayka argues for a more conscientious consumption of culture, encouraging that we seek out trusted curators, challenging material, and spirited conversations. After reading Filterworld, you’ll be ready to start your own “algorithmic cleanse” and get back in touch with your humanity.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

“Billionaires shouldn’t exist”—or so goes the popular refrain. In this revolutionary volume, an ethicist expands that thought into a comprehensive plan to eradicate extreme wealth. Robeyns connects outrageous wealth to all manner of societal ills, from human-rights violations to the corporate ransacking of Earth’s natural resources. She also lays out a multi-pronged solution: We must legislate a wealth cap, she argues, coupled with measures like robust taxes and a universal basic income. Though we’re a long ways away from enacting Robeyns’s radical vision, Limitarianism is a thoughtful blueprint for the world so many of us want to live in—one where capitalism is curbed and greed is limited.

In this candid and soulful memoir of gender transition, Sante recounts her experience of transitioning later in life, at age sixty-six. She describes an electrifying experiment with FaceApp’s “gender-swapping feature,” where the sight of her face (digitally altered to look more feminine) produced “one shock of recognition after another.” In one dimension of the memoir, Sante traces her realization of her true self and her process of coming out; in another, she reconsiders her entire life through the prism of what she knows now. Sante’s account of meeting her true self is arresting, intimate, and a work in progress. As she writes, "Transitioning is not an event but a process, and it will occupy the rest of my life as I go on changing."

In This American Ex-Wife, a blistering memoir-meets-manifesto about the fraught gender politics of marriage and divorce, Lenz details how the end of her marriage became the beginning of her life. Raised in a religious household and married at a young age, Lenz walked away from an unsatisfying partnership to rebuild her life on her own terms, only to discover that happiness and autonomy lay on the other side. Weaving together a detailed history of marriage, sociological research, cultural commentary, and a frank dissection of her own personal experiences, Lenz paints a damning portrait of marriage in America: “an institution built on the fundamental inequality of women.” Yet the book is also a rousing and exuberant cry for a reckoning—one in which couples can love freely, leave freely, and build meaningful partnerships based on the full and equal humanity of men and women alike.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

Fifty years after Studs Terkel’s Working, a historian delivers a comprehensive sequel for the age of late-stage capitalism. Through a polyphonic oral history, Larson presents 101 conversations with American workers from all walks of life, including teachers, nurses, truck drivers, executives, dairy farmers, stay-at-home parents, wildland firefighters, funeral directors, and many more. In the wake of the pandemic and the Great Resignation, Larson’s subjects share their struggles to make ends meet, reckon with economic upheaval, and locate meaning and purpose in their work. Assembled in one thick volume, these often-fascinating anecdotes are a rich examination of modern-day economic anxiety and social change.

In her latest bravura memoir, Jamison chronicles a wrenching period of rupture and rebirth. When their daughter was thirteen months old, Jamison and her husband separated; what followed was a brutal struggle to balance parenthood, work, dating, sobriety, and creative fulfillment, all while the pandemic loomed. Told in overlapping, ever-widening circles of thought, Splinters details Jamison’s struggle to inhabit the roles we ask of women: mother, daughter, lover, friend. At the same time, the book is an intimate tribute to the author’s rapturous love for her daughter. Splinters thrives in this messy, imperfect complexity—in “the difference between the story of love and the texture of living it, the story of motherhood and the texture of living it.” Honest, gutsy, and unflinching, Jamison scours herself clean here, finding exquisite, hard-won joy in the aftermath.

Born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo Territory in New Mexico, Taffa situates her outstanding debut memoir in similar collisions of culture, land, and tradition. Here, she recalls the people and places that raised her—especially her parents, who pushed her to idealize the American dream and assimilate through education. Taffa layers in diligent research about her mixed-race, mixed-tribe heritage, highlighting little-known Native American history and the shattering injustices of colonial oppression. Together, the many strands of narrative coalesce to form a visceral story of family, survival, and belonging, flooding the field with cleansing light.

In 2019, Crosley suffered two keelhauling losses: First, her apartment was burglarized and her jewelry stolen; then, one month later, her friend and mentor Russell Perrault took his own life. For Crosley, the two losses became braided together. “I am waiting for the things I love to come back to me, to tell me they were only joking,” she writes. In this raw and poignant memoir, divided into five sections that correspond to the five stages of grief, she links her frantic desire to recover the stolen jewelry with her inability to bring back Perrault. Leavened by Crosley’s characteristic gimlet wit, this excavation of grief, loss, and friendship leaves a lasting twinge.

One of our foremost thinkers returns with an essential polemic on gender, an urgent front line of the culture wars. Butler argues that by turning gender into a “phantasmic scene,” conservative politicians have diverted political will from the most pressing problems of our time, like climate change, war, and capitalist exploitation. Butler explores how various movements around the world have weaponized gender to achieve their goals, with a particular focus on trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). Who’s Afraid of Gender? calls for gender expression to be recognized as a basic human right, and for radical solidarity across our differences. With masterful analysis of where we’ve been and an inspiring vision for where we must go next, this book resounds like an impassioned depth charge.

When Ian Fleming’s family approached Nicholas Shakespeare to write a biography of the late spy novelist, promising access to never-before-seen family materials, Shakespeare soon concluded that “under the jarring surface of his popular image,” he could “see a different person.” In this outstanding biography, the author uncovers countless sides of his complicated subject to construct “the complete man.” From Fleming’s youth spent at the vanguard of military and journalistic history to his later years as “a slave to a serial character,” Shakespeare constructs an exhaustive portrait of the author’s life and influences. Clocking in at just under nine hundred pages, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man leaves no stone unturned. It’s the definitive biography of an endlessly fascinating subject.