This year in the nonfiction hemisphere, some of the greatest essayists and cultural critics of our time are diving deeper than ever before, with releases of all stripes hitting our shelves. In the coming months, we will be asked to look inward and called to action in both our personal lives, as well as our civic duties. And we will travel alongside legendary thinkers, artists, musicians, and more as they grant us access to the inner workings of their hearts and minds. From a riveting exposé to self-help to basketball, 2024 sees a spectrum of ideas floating around, rich with details that will spark your curiosity and illuminate the way you see the world.
Well-researched and endlessly fascinating, this collection of forthcoming titles will provide just the fodder you need for fresh insights, tips, and tricks to make that new year, new you possible. So, curl up, sit back, and drink up these delightfully engaging and ever-pressing topics, from first-timers and favorites alike, that speak with precision to the current moment in our society.
Here are our picks for some of the most intriguing nonfiction books and memoirs arriving on shelves in 2024.
Be A Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—and How You Can, Too by Ijeoma Oluo
Release Date: January 30th from HarperOne
Why We’re Excited: Nearly four years after Black Lives Matter irrevocably changed the nation, we’re checking in on how far we’ve come, and where we still need to go. We see how anti-racist approaches can be applied across systems, distilling them to their basic principles in order to be able to incorporate them into the minutiae of our everyday lives. A practical guide, as well as a necessary status update, Be a Revolution is unique in its loving approach to encouraging us to do better.
Publisher’s Description: In the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offered a vital guide for how to talk about important issues of race and racism in society. In Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, she discussed the ways in which white male supremacy has had an impact on our systems, our culture, and our lives throughout American history. But now that we better understand these systems of oppression, the question is this: What can we do about them?
With Be A Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—and How You Can, Too, Oluo aims to show how people across America are working to create real positive change in our structures. Looking at many of our most powerful systems—like education, media, labor, health, housing, policing, and more—she highlights what people are doing to create change for intersectional racial equity. She also illustrates various ways in which the reader can find entryways into change in these same areas, or can bring some of this important work being done elsewhere to where they live.
This book aims to not only be educational, but to inspire action and change. Oluo wishes to take our conversations on race and racism out of a place of pure pain and trauma, and into a place of loving action. Be A Revolution is both an urgent chronicle of this important moment in history, as well as an inspiring and restorative call for action.
Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict Into Connection by Julie Schwartz Gottman, PhD and John Gottman, PhD
Release Date: January 30th from Harmony
Why We’re Excited: From the minds who brought us the Four Horsemen of conflict in a relationship (Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling), we learn how to navigate arguments with our partners to make our fights constructive and bring us closer together. Fighting without a purpose is a waste of time, effort, and, in some cases, blood pressure medication. By learning about ourselves and the way we each individually show up in conflicts, we can take these skills outside of our romantic relationships to bring an ethos of kindness and connection to all of our love spats.
Publisher’s Description: How we fight predicts the future of our relationships. Most of us blunder into conflict without knowing what we are really fighting about and then quickly become overwhelmed by physiological responses we can’t control and emotions we don’t anticipate. The truth is the happiest and most successful couples fight all the time. Conflict is human, and necessary.
Through decades of research, Drs. John and Julie Gottman, founders of the world-famous Love Lab, have identified the five common mistakes we make when we are at odds. In Fight Right, we learn the five secrets that help us to get back on track and harness conflict to build stronger, healthier relationships. With kindness, clarity, and a deep understanding of the struggles couples are going through, the Gottmans show us that we each have a unique conflict culture, borne of how we were raised and how we experienced past relationships, and they take us through all the possible combinations, from Avoiders, to Validators, to Volatiles, and how they can best work together.
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Release Date: February 6th from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Why We’re Excited: A simple concept from a brilliant mind, Alphabetical Diaries brings us closer than ever to the esteemed author of How Should A Person Be and Pure Colour. Inventive, achingly intimate, and vulnerable, it’s a refreshing experiment with how a sentence lands without further context. A true testament to, a celebration of, and a masterclass in the art of sentences.
Publisher’s Description: Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. Passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are her alphabetical diaries.
Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg
Release Date: February 20th from Random House
Why We’re Excited: From the best-selling author of The Power of Habit comes a timely and poignant analysis of how we communicate, and how we can do it better. In a world where we speak with one another at exceeding rates via social media and the Internet, it’s crucially important, now more than ever, to improve this invaluable social skill.
Publisher’s Description: Come inside a jury room as one juror leads a starkly divided room to consensus. Join a young CIA officer as he recruits a reluctant foreign agent. And sit with an accomplished surgeon as he tries, and fails, to convince yet another cancer patient to opt for the less risky course of treatment. In Supercommunicators, Charles Duhigg blends deep research and his trademark storytelling skills to show how we can all learn to identify and leverage the hidden layers that lurk beneath every conversation.
Communication is a superpower and the best communicators understand that whenever we speak, we’re actually participating in one of three conversations: practical (What’s this really about?), emotional (How do we feel?), and social (Who are we?). If you don’t know what kind of conversation you’re having, you’re unlikely to connect.
Supercommunicators know the importance of recognizing—and then matching—each kind of conversation, and how to hear the complex emotions, subtle negotiations, and deeply held beliefs that color so much of what we say and how we listen. Our experiences, our values, our emotional lives—and how we see ourselves, and others—shape every discussion, from who will pick up the kids to how we want to be treated at work. In this book, you will learn why some people are able to make themselves heard, and to hear others, so clearly.
With his storytelling that takes us from the writers’ room of The Big Bang Theory to the couches of leading marriage counselors, Duhigg shows readers how to recognize these three conversations—and teaches us the tips and skills we need to navigate them more successfully.
In the end, he delivers a simple but powerful lesson: With the right tools, we can connect with anyone.
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley
Release Date: February 27th from MCD
Why We’re Excited: Following the success of her second novel, Cult Classic, we see the hilarious and ever-funny Sloane Crosley take on a sobering challenge with a telling exploration of a deeply felt loss in her life. It’s a departure from her usual form, and we’re looking forward to how this humor essayist brings us along on her achingly personal journey of grief. Where she also excels is in mapping her close, lived experience onto a cultural framework, so this book is exceptionally apropos for much-needed insight into how we cope, through humor, grace, and fresh eyes, with this ubiquitous human emotion.
Publisher’s Description: Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship, and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.
For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, while Russell is still alive, Sloane’s apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place.
When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels her on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll brought on by the pandemic.
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib
Release Date: March 26th from Random House
Why We’re Excited: What I love most about Hanif Abdurraqib’s work is how adeptly he writes about truly any cultural topic, especially music, and now, basketball. We’re excited to hear how he brings his poetic imagination and deep sensitivity to our interconnectedness to the most beautiful game. With an astute grasp on the human condition and how we interact with the world around us, we can’t wait to hear how he draws a line between the performance of this elegant sport and how we show up in this world. We’re willing to bet that it’ll be an inspirational and eye-opening slam-dunk of a success.
Publisher’s Description: Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”
There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it’s basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.
Like Love by Maggie Nelson
Release Date: April 2 from Graywolf Press
Why We’re Excited: As anyone who has spent enough time with artists and creatives can attest, they imbue a sense of heart into their worldview, feverish to understand and capture the complex beauty of life. Through Maggie Nelson’s powerful prose and expansive reflection on a wide breadth of subject matter, we see one of the most wonderful, poetic minds of this generation detail how she’s come to see the world through a lens of love through friendship with some of the world’s most influential artists and creative thinkers.
Publisher’s Description: Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.
Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking, and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.
The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure by Gabriel Brownstein
Release Date: April 16th from Public Affairs
Why We’re Excited: An unveiling of the true origins of Freud’s groundbreaking psychoanalysis practice, through the story of Bertha Pappenheim, the woman who actually invented it. It certainly comes as no surprise, in this day and age, to discover that an unsung hero is behind the work that’s now seminal to our modern society. In this revelatory tale, we learn that the entire field of “talk therapy,” as it is now known, and Freud’s major influence on psychology was based on the quietly buried work of one woman. This is some tea I’m ready to sip.
Publisher’s Description: In 1880, young Bertha Pappenheim got strangely ill—she lost her ability to control her voice and her body. She was treated by Sigmund Freud’s mentor, Josef Breuer, who diagnosed her with “hysteria.” Together, Pappenheim and Breuer developed what she called “the talking cure”—talking out memories to eliminate symptoms. Freud renamed her “Anna O” and appropriated her ideas to form the theory of psychoanalysis. All his life, he told lies about her. For over a century, writers have argued about her illness and cure.
In this unusual work of science, history, and psychology, Brownstein does more than describe the controversies surrounding this extraordinary woman. He brings Pappenheim to life—a brilliant feminist thinker, a crusader against human trafficking, and a pioneer—in the hustling and heady world of nineteenth-century Vienna. At the same time, he tells a parallel story that is playing out in leading medical centers today, about patients who suffer symptoms very much like Pappenheim’s, and about the doctors who are trying to cure them—the story of the neuroscience of a condition now called FND.
Mean Boys by Geoffrey Mak
Release Date: April 30 from Bloomsbury Publishing
Why We’re Excited: Transcending social spheres, we get a sense of how easily our ache for community in our coming-of-age can pull the wool over our eyes of what really matters. From the voice behind the experiential reading series Writing on Raving comes a compelling look at the ‘bad boy’ trope, and the tangible, lasting effects its perpetrators have on the health, happiness, and wellbeing of society, as told through an individual account of its influence.
Publisher’s Description: You know them when you see them: mean boys take up space, wielding cruelty to claim their place in the pecking order. Some mean boys make art or music or fashion; others make memes. Mean boys stomp the runways in Milan and Paris; mean boys marched at Charlottesville. And in the eyes of critic and style expert Geoffrey Mak, mean boys are the emblem of our society: an era ravenous for novelty, always thirsting for the next edgy thing, even at our peril.
In this pyrotechnic memoir-in-essays, Mak ranges widely over our landscape of paranoia, crisis, and frenetic, clickable consumption. He grants readers an inside pass to the spaces where culture was made and unmade over the past decade, from the antiseptic glare of white-walled galleries to the darkest corners of Berlin techno clubs. As the gay son of an evangelical minister, Mak fled to those spaces, hoping to join a global, influential elite. But when calamity struck, it forced Mak to confront the costs of mistaking status for belonging. Fusing personal essay and cultural critique, Mean Boys investigates exile and return, transgression and forgiveness, and the value of faith, empathy, and friendship in a world designed to make us want what is bad for us.
Rebel Girl: My Life As a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna
Release Date: May 14 from Ecco
Why We’re Excited: A compliment to the movie about her life, The Punk Singer, this memoir takes an in-depth look at the life of the celebrated and revolutionary lead singer of Bikini Kill.
Music history comes alive when told from the artist’s perspective, and in this singular account, we hear first-hand what the feminist punk revolution was really like, the players who were involved, and what it takes to make it. Particularly, we’re excited to learn about the sense of community that runs through the punk scene, when often that image goes against the many misconceptions of what punk music is all about. This book seems to challenge these beliefs with raw and real accounts of a musical icon.
Publisher’s Description: Kathleen Hanna’s band Bikini Kill embodied the punk scene of the 90s, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like “Rebel Girl” and “Double Dare Ya” are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from?
In Rebel Girl, Hanna’s raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood to her formative college years and her first shows. As Hanna makes clear, being in a punk “girl band” in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.
But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her, including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman. And her friendships with musicians like Kurt Cobain, Ian MacKaye, Kim Gordon, and Joan Jett reminded her that, despite the odds, the punk world could still nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its exclusivity.
In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how they continue to fuel her revolutionary art and music.
Felicia Reich is an entertainment writer and culture reporter. She lives in Brooklyn with her complex first person perspective, collection of decorative pillows, and insatiable curiosity.