This reading list features the five nonfiction nominees for the National Book Awards. The winner be announced on November 18, 2015.
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Interview with a Torturer
Documentary filmmaker and Khmer Rouge survivor Rithy Panh spent hundreds of hours interviewing Duch, the commandant of the Cambodia “killing fields” and one of the most notorious torturers of the 20th century. This is his haunting memoir of those interviews.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
A Liberated Woman: The Story of Margaret King
Inspired by her governess, the radical feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret King cast aside her immense privilege, cross-dressed as a man to go to medical school, and inspired a new generation of women to push against the rigid conventions of their era.
Posted inNonfiction
The Remnants of War: A Meditation on Peleliu
Our latest Exclusive is a new essay by Anna Vodicka about the island of Peleliu, which was home to one of World War II’s bloodiest battles.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Is W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ the Most Pillaged Piece of Literature in the English Language?
[W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem] “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Back in the USSR: A Reading List
Six stories that examine the complicated heritage of the fall of the Soviet Union.
Posted inGuest Pick, Reading List
Six Stories About the Swimming Pool
Stories about swimming and swimming pools.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Postwar New York: The Supreme Metropolis of the Present
Forty labor strikes on one day, French existentialists on the loose, and a 50-foot G.I. blowing enormous puffs of REAL smoke.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Way Theater Worked in 1955
In 1955, playwright Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman, published the essay “The American Theater” in the American travel magazine Holiday. Holiday ran from 1946 and 1977. Joan Didion’s “Notes from a Native Daughter” first appeared in Holiday. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Paul Bowles and John Steinbeck wrote for it. Though E.B. White’s […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Etgar Keret Learned About Storytelling from His Father
Author Etgar Keret’s new memoir, The Seven Good Years, chronicles the time between the birth of his son and the death of his father. Keret’s parents were both Holocaust survivors, and in an interview with Fresh Air, Keret said that experience shaped his father’s stories: My father was very charismatic and a very good storyteller […]
