Electric Lit’s Best Nonfiction of 2024

The last decade has seen exponential growth in the popularity and prominence of nonfiction writing, and 2024 has been no exception. Where the writer often previously turned their gaze inward, and applied an understanding of the self to the world, the last year has seen a seismic shift. Writers are facing the world head-on, and tuning inward only once they’ve gleaned what they need. Our most celebrated authors have written plainly, pleadingly, their work startlingly clear-eyed and honest, yet there’s an air of having gone deeper, of having peeled back a layer and exposed the raw nerve of a nation in turmoil. Our books are making the truthful connections that we often turn away from, reminding us that we are what we do, and therefore, that this is who we are. The books on this list are a revelation, and we hope you love them as we have loved them. 

The books included on this list were chosen by a vote from the EL community. Here are Electric Lit’s Top 5 nonfiction books of 2024, followed by the best nonfiction books of the year.

The Top 5 Nonfiction Books of the Year:

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

In his national bestseller The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates journeys to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine as he grapples with each places’ history as a site of conflict. Across three intertwining essays, Coates dissects the ways our destructive mythmaking reshapes our realities with sobering clarity.

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

What happens when you take ten years of diaries and sort the sentences alphabetically? In her experimental new memoir Sheila Heti has done just that. The result is an electric anaphora that juxtaposes Heti’s thoughts — whether they originally occurred days or years apart — against one another. 

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler

In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, the globally renowned thinker Judith Butler examines how a fear of gender has fueled reactionary politics, and brought rise to an anti-gender movement. While interrogating the rise of authoritarian regimes and trans-exclusionary feminists, Butler’s intervention imagines new possibilities toward liberation that are as essential as they are timeless.

Woman of Interest: A Memoir by Tracy O’Neill

In her nonfiction debut, the novelist Tracy O’Neill recounts her search for her birth mother, who she suspects is dying in South Korea during the height of the COVID pandemic. This genre-bending memoir pulls from noir and mystery novel conventions to chart O’Neill’s quest toward her mother and herself. In our interview with the author, she discusses the memoir and her relationship with herself as a “character” in a book.

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

Taken at face value, Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is a book about basketball. But it’s also a story of grief, mortality, and what it means for a person, especially a Black man, to make it in this world. The National Book Awards Long-lister tracks  LeBron James via Ohio, where he was born a year apart from Abdurraqib and he considers his own literary ascent alongside James’ success. 

Electric Lit’s Additional Favorite Nonfiction Books

 A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging by Lauren Markham

In A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, Lauren Markham blends reporting, memoir, and essay to interrogate how migration became a crime, and how nostalgia fuels the exclusion of migrants. Markham’s writing brings clarity to how long held myths about migration say as much about the past as they do the future.

Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class by Sarah Smarsh

A first generation college student who grew up on a farm in Kansas, journalist Sarah Smarsh felt disillusioned and disconnected from many in her industry. Bone of the Bone, which collects her essays, reportage, and lyrical reflections, examines the key class divisions, the rural-urban divide, environmental crises and so much more. It’s a book that tackles the crux of America’s current political and cultural movement. 

Consent: A Memoir by Jill Ciment

Jill Ciment’s deftly written memoir accounts the love affair between herself and her painting teacher, which began when she was a teenager and while he already had a family of his own. The author revisits the power dynamics of her relationship, now reflecting with the further clarity provided to her in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement.

Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik

Though her writing has long been celebrated, Joan Didion has largely been an enigmatic figure. In Didion and Babitz, Lili Anolik seeks to break Didion from this mystery. Using the fellow literary titan Eve Babitz’s letters as a gateway into Didion’s life, Anolik explores the two California writers’ complicated relationship.

First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger

In First Love: Essays on Friendship considers the bonds between her friendships with other women as their own kind of great love. The essays in this collection are grounded in the personal — Dancyger’s own friendships and in particular her relationship with her murdered cousin take center stage — but the book also interrogates cultural assumptions about friendship.

Frighten the Horses by Oliver Radclyffe

Oliver Radclyffe’s memoir of mid-life transition is a coming of age story. Radclyffe examines the emotional stakes of transitioning and coming to terms with his gender identity as an adult, with children. His story of finding acceptance and self-love offers a fresh perspective on the  terrain of gender identity and exploration. 

I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition by Lucy Sante

Lucy Sante’s memoir documents her journey breaking out of her self-imposed “prison of denial,” in order to live out her life as a woman. As an immigrant from Belgium, born to conservative, working class parents, Sante only started to feel at home when she found the bohemians of New York City. I Heard Her Call My Name speaks to the trans journey with empathy, humor, and tenderness.

Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” by Emily Raboteau

Emily Raboteau considers how we can parent responsibly in the face of climate crisis, pandemics, White Supremacist violence, and the other perilous challenges today’s parents have to navigate across 20 essays. These intersecting crises could make for a dispiriting read, but Emily Raboteau’s mix of personal narrative, reportage and photography captures the radical act of hope it takes to bring up children in today’s world. 

Memories of Distant Mountains by Orhan Pamuk; translated by Ekin Oklap

Combining his daily musings and paintings, Orhan Pamuk’s Memories of Distant Mountains offers a record of the artist’s practices. The result is an intimate look at the artist’s process, with reflections on what inspired his novels and his relationship to Turkey, where he grew up.

Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery by Annie Liontas

After sustaining a concussion as a result of a bike accident and then another one less than a year later, Annie Liontas grappled with migraines, disorientation, memory loss and other symptoms of their brain injury for years. In Sex with a Brain Injury they combine personal experience with research and reportage to understand how brain injuries affect our daily lives and closest relationships. 

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison 

In a straightforward memoir, Leslie Jamison documents her divorce and her first years as a single mother. Much of the book centers on her love for her young daughter, who was 13 months old, at the time of the separation. The book is a testament to how people reassemble their lives and loves in the wake of loss. 

Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Through Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs offers fans of Lorde a deeper engagement with her life, essays, and often-overlooked poetry. As the first research to explore the full depth of Lorde’s manuscript archives, Gumbs reveals what we can learn from the ethics of the Black feminist lesbian warrior poet.

Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in Verse by Brontez Purnell

In thirty-eight autobiographical pieces, Brontez Purnell combines levity with brutal honesty as he addresses topics such as loneliness, capitalism, Blackness, and the ethics of art. With aspects of poetry and performance art, this memoir in verse pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in literature.

The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo

“How do we keep doing this—making art?” Stacey D’Erasmo had already written for twenty years when she asked herself this question. In response, she interviewed older artists such as Valda Setterfield, Merce Cunningham, and Samuel R. Delany about their respective art-making journeys. As she makes connections between the great artists of our time, D’Erasmo finds what drives and shapes her most as a writer.

The Story Game by Shze-Hui Tjoa

In her debut The Story Game, Shze-Hui Tjoa documents the power of conversation. The memoir follows Hui, who tells stories of her life to her younger sister, Nin. This book-length conversation leads to her uncovering the lasting effects of complex-PTSD, and reveals how she eventually reconstructed her sense of self in its wake.

This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life by Lyz Lenz

Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife steps onto the stage in a year when divorce memoirs are having a moment in 2024. There’s splashy, celebrity titles like “Men Have Called Her Crazy” by Anna Marie Tendler, ex-wife of comedian John Mulaney, and those by talented writers examining how their careers caused friction with their spouses (Leslie Jamison’s Splinters and Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, albeit published in 2023, fit into this category. Lenz’s unapologetic memoir-as-manifesto uses reportage, sociological research and popular culture to make the case that divorce can be powerful and empowering for women.

We’re Alone: Essays by Edwidge Danticat

What does it mean to be both alone and together? In We’re Alone Edwidge Danticat attempts to answer this question. Her essays consider her childhood, her relationship to Haiti, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the works of her writerly influences — Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin. The resulting collection excavates territories — both physical and emotional — marred by colonialism and environmental catastrophe in an effort to understand what it means to persist. 

Whiskey Tender by Deborah Jackson Taffa

A National Book Awards shortlist pick, Whiskey Tender considers Deborah Jackson Taffa’s efforts to understand her own identity — a mixed tribe native girl, who was born in California and raised in New Mexico — alongside her family’s experiences with government institutions designed to strip Indigenous people of their culture. Her grandparents were sent to government-backed boarding schools. Her parents believed if she gave up her culture, land and values she could achieve the American Dream. This deft, weighty memoir considers the emotional consequences of colonialism through the lens of one family’s struggle. 

Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell

Following the loss of her mother, Erica N. Cardwell turns to the art world — reading books, writing poetry, and viewing art from Black artists such as Blondell Cummings, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker — in order to come back to herself. Through poetic essays and lyrical stream-of-consciousness, Wrong Is Not My Name explores legacy, grief, and art’s ability to reclaim one’s life and livelihood. 

You Get What You Pay for: Essays by Morgan Parker

In her first essay collection, poet Morgan Parker turns her gaze toward herself. In a series of vulnerable essays she explores her own struggles with depression and loneliness within the context of what it would mean to create a society and culture that is truly safe for Black women.