short nonfiction essay examples

Nonfiction Essay

Nonfiction essay generator.

While escaping in an imaginary world sounds very tempting, it is also necessary for an individual to discover more about the events in the real world and real-life stories of various people. The articles you read in newspapers and magazines are some examples of nonfiction texts. Learn more about fact-driven information and hone your essay writing skills while composing a nonfiction essay.

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What Is a Nonfiction Essay?

Nonfiction essay refers to compositions based on real-life situations and events. In addition, it also includes essays based on one’s opinion and perception. There are different purposes for writing this type of essay. Various purposes use different approaches and even sometimes follow varying formats. Educational and informative essays are some examples of a nonfiction composition.

How to Compose a Compelling Nonfiction Essay

When you talk about creative writing, it is not all about creating fictional stories. It also involves providing a thought-provoking narrative and description of a particular subject. The quality of writing always depends on how the writers present their topic. That said, keep your readers engaged by writing an impressive nonfiction paper.

1. Know Your Purpose

Before you start your essay, you should first determine the message you want to deliver to your readers. In addition, you should also consider what emotions you want to bring out from them. List your objectives beforehand. Goal-setting will provide you an idea of the direction you should take, as well as the style you should employ in writing about your topic on your essay paper.

2. Devise an Outline

Now that you have a target to aim for, it is time to decide on the ideas you want to discuss in each paragraph. To do this, you can utilize a blank outline template. Also, prepare an essay plan detailing the structure and the flow of the message of your essay. Ensure to keep your ideas relevant and timely.

3. Generate Your Thesis Statement

One of the most crucial parts of your introduction is your thesis statement . This sentence will give the readers an overview of what to expect from the whole document. Aside from that, this statement will also present the main idea of the essay content. Remember to keep it brief and concise.

4. Use the Appropriate Language

Depending on the results of your assessment in the first step, you should tailor your language accordingly. If you want to describe something, use descriptive language. If you aim to persuade your readers, you should ascertain to use persuasive words. This step is essential to remember for the writers because it has a considerable impact on achieving your goals.

What are the various types of nonfiction articles?

In creatively writing nonfiction essays, you can choose from various types. Depending on your topic, you can write a persuasive essay , narrative essay, biographies, and even memoirs. In addition, you can also find nonfiction essay writing in academic texts, instruction manuals, and even academic reports . Even if most novels are fiction stories, there are also several nonfictions in this genre.

Why is writing nonfiction essays necessary?

Schools and universities use nonfiction essays as an instrument to train and enhance their students’ skills in writing. The reason for this is it will help them learn how to structure paragraphs and also learn various skills. In addition, this academic essay can also be a tool for the teachers to analyze how the minds of their students digest situations.

How can I write about a nonfiction topic?

A helpful tip before crafting a nonfiction essay is to explore several kinds of this type of writing. Choose the approach and the topic where you are knowledgeable. Now that you have your lesson topic, the next step is to perform intensive research. The important part is to choose a style on how to craft your story.

Each of us also has a story to tell. People incorporate nonfiction writing into their everyday lives. Your daily journal or the letters you send your friends all belong under this category of composition. Writing nonfiction essays are a crucial outlet for people to express their emotions and personal beliefs. We all have opinions on different events. Practice writing nonfiction articles and persuade, entertain, and influence other people.

Text prompt

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Write about the influence of technology on society in your Nonfiction Essay.

Discuss the importance of environmental conservation in your Nonfiction Essay.

Most Read in 2021

Year-End Lists!

We don’t publish a lot of lists. But this year, having launched this new website with nearly complete access to 30 years of magazine archives, we thought it seemed like a good time to look back at the stories that resonated with our readers.

In that spirit, we’ve compiled the most-read pieces published on our website in 2021, as well as the most-read work from our archives.

And for good measure, we’ve pulled together a few pieces worth an honorable mention; our favorite Sunday Short Reads ; CNF content that was republished elsewhere; and the best advice, inspiration, and think pieces from some of our favorite publications.

Finally, if you enjoy what follows, please know there’s plenty more! We have a soft paywall on our site, which allows for three free reads a month. To get unlimited access for as little as $4/month, simply subscribe today.

Top 10 Published in 2021

Almost Behind Us A dental emergency interrupts a meaningful anniversary // JENNIFER BOWERING DELISLE
El Valle, 1991 An early lesson in strength and fragility // AURELIA KESSLER
Stay at Home All those hours alone with a new baby can be rough // JARED HANKS
The Desert Was His Home There are many things we don’t know about Mr. Otomatsu Wada, and a few things we do // ERIC L. MULLER
Just a Big Cat The dramatic boredom of jury duty // ERICA GOSS
What Will We Do for Fun Now? Her parents survived World War II and the Blitz just fine … didn’t they? // JANE RATCLIFFE
Harriet Two brothers and a turtle // TYLER McANDREW
Rango Getting existential at a funeral for a lizard // JARRETT G. ZIEMER
Mouse Lessons from a hamster emergency // BEVERLY PETRAVICIUS
Roxy & the Worm Box Trying to recapture a childhood love of dirt // ANJOLI ROY

Top 5 from the Archive

Picturing the Personal Essay A visual guide // TIM BASCOM
The 5 Rs of Creative Nonfiction The essayist at work // LEE GUTKIND
The Line Between Fact & Fiction Do not add, and do not deceive // ROY PETER CLARK
The Braided Essay as Social Justice Action The braided essay may be the most effective form for our times // NICOLE WALKER
On Fame, Success, and Writing Like a Mother#^@%*& An interview with Cheryl Strayed // ELISSA BASSIST

Honorable Mention ( ICYMI Essays)

Latinx Heritage Month Who do you complain to when it’s HR you have a problem with? // MELISSA LUJAN MESKU
Women’s Work Sometimes, freedom means choosing your obligations // EILEEN GARVIN
Bloodlines and Bitter Syrup Avoiding prison in Huntsville, Texas, is nearly impossible // WILL BRIDGES
Stealth A nontraditional couple struggles with keeping part of their life together private while undertaking the public act of filing for marriage // HEATHER OSTERMAN-DAVIS
Something Like Vertigo An environmental writer sees parallels between her father’s declining equilibrium and a world turned upside down // ELIZABETH RUSH

Our favorite Sunday Short Reads from our partners

from BREVITY

What Joy Looks Like SSR #128 // DORIAN FOX
How to Do Nothing SSR #156 // ABIGAIL THOMAS

from DIAGRAM

At 86, My Grandmother Regrets Two Things SSR #134 // DIANA XIN
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Our favorite stories from around the internet.

Advice & Inspiration

In Praise of the Meander Rebecca Solnit on letting nonfiction narrative find its own way (via Lit Hub )
What’s Missing Here? A Fragmentary, Lyric Essay About Fragmentary, Lyric Essays Julie Marie Wade on the mode that never quite feels finished (via Lit Hub )
Getting Honest about Om A brief essay on audience (via Brevity )
Using the Personal to Write the Global Intimate details, personal exploration and respect for facts (via Nieman Storyboard )
Fix Your Scene Shapes And quickly improve your manuscript (via Jane Friedman’s blog)

The State of Nonfiction

What the NYT ‘Guest Essay’ Means for the Future of Creative Nonfiction Description (via Brevity )
How the Role of Personal Expression and Experience Is Changing Journalism On the future of the newsroom (via Poynter )
50 Shades of Nuance in a Polarized World An essayist ponders when to write black-and-white polemics that attract clicks, and when to be more considered (via Nieman Storyboard )
These Literary Memoirs Take a Different Tack Description (via NY Times )
The Politics of Gatekeeping On reconsidering the ethics of blind submissions (via Poets & Writers )

The Finest Narrative Non-Fiction Essays

Narrative essays that I consider ideal models of the medium

Linguistics

Authors like , , , , , and epitomise this way of writing.

I'm not a Writer , but I write to explore other things – anthropology, weird cultural quirks in the web development community, interaction design, and the rising field of " tools for thought ". These things are all factual and grounded in reality, but have interesting stories twisted around them. Ones I'm trying to tell in my little notes and essays.

Perhaps you're the same kind of non- Writer writer. The playful amateur kind who uses it to explore and communicate ideas, rather than making the medium part of your identity. But even amateurs want to be good. I certainly want to get good.

Knowing what you like is half the battle in liking what you create. In that spirit, I collect narrative non-fiction essays that I think are exceptional. They're worth looking at closely – their opening moves, sentence structure, turns of phrase, and narrative arcs.

The only sensible way to improve your writing is by echoing the work of other writers. Good artists copy and great artists steal quotes from Picasso.

You may want to start your own collection of lovely essays like this. There will certainly be some Real Writers who find my list trite and full of basic, mainstream twaddle. It probably is. I've done plenty of self-acceptance work and I'm okay with it.

Twaddle aside, the essays below are worth your attention.

by Paul Ford

Paul Ford explains code in 38,000 words and somehow makes it all accessible, technically accurate, narratively compelling, and most of all, culturally insightful and humanistic.

I have unreasonable feelings about this essay. It is, to me, perfect. Few essays take the interactive medium of the web seriously, and this one takes the cake. There is a small blue cube character, logic diagrams, live code snippets to run, GIFs, tangential footnotes, and a certificate of completion at the end.

by David Foster Wallace – Published under the title 'Shipping Out'

Forgive me for being a David Foster Wallace admirer. The guy had issues, but this account of his 7-day trip on a luxury cruiseliner expresses an inner monologue that is clarifying, rare and often side-splittingly hilarious.

He taught me it is 100% okay to write an entire side-novel in your footnotes if you need to.

by David Graeber

Graeber explores play and work from an anthropological perspective. He's a master of moving between the specific and the general. Between academic theory and personal storytelling. He's always ready with armfuls of evidence and citations but doesn't drown you in them.

by Malcolm Gladwell

This piece uses a typical Gladwellian style. He takes a fairly dull question – Why had ketchup stayed the same, while mustard comes in dozens of varieties? – and presents the case in a way that makes it reasonably intriguing. He's great at starting with specific characters, times and places to draw you in. There are always rich scenes, details, personal profiles, and a grand narrative tying it all together.

Some people find the classic New Yorker essay format overdone, but it relies on storytelling techniques that consistently work.

by Mark Slouka

by Joan Didion

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Home Essay Samples Literature

Essay Samples on Nonfiction

Are all stories fictional: truth of writing.

Introduction Stories are just that: Stories. It requires characters, a setting, a conflict of some sort, meaning and an end. As my professor, Dr. Morton has taught me, the only real way a “story” can be entirely true is if it is not a story...

Writing Experience

Kennedy's Revenge: A Blend of Fiction and Non-Fiction

Introduction Kennedy’s Revenge: The Election of 2016 by Stephen L Rodenbeck has an enticing format in which the book is split between both fiction and non-fiction, with alternate chapters for each. This interesting structure is something which originally drew me to the novel, as I...

The Intricacies of Fiction and Nonfiction

Exploring the Boundaries of Fiction and Nonfiction Every book, short story, or novel ever written will have bits and pieces of fiction inside of it, and every different type of writing is considered to be a story. What exactly is a story? According to the...

Thematic Analysis Of Marissa Havens' Non-fiction Novel Boys In The Boat

Competing in the Olympics Is the boys way of showing the world how they overcame depression and won against the Nazis. Hitler’s attempts to be victorious by hosting the 1936 Berlin Olympics nevertheless the American rowing team won Hitler’s Third Reich was creative in using...

Literature Analysis

What They Fought For and And the War Came: Examples of War Non-Fiction

His opening paper, 'And the War Came,' offers the conversation starter of why it came. Withdrawal didn't consequently prompt war, McPherson battles; rather, 'a progression of choices and activities by men on the two sides expedited the war' — for the most part Lincoln's choice...

What They Fought For

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Best topics on Nonfiction

1. Are All Stories Fictional: Truth of Writing

2. Kennedy’s Revenge: A Blend of Fiction and Non-Fiction

3. The Intricacies of Fiction and Nonfiction

4. Thematic Analysis Of Marissa Havens’ Non-fiction Novel Boys In The Boat

5. What They Fought For and And the War Came: Examples of War Non-Fiction

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100 Major Works of Modern Creative Nonfiction

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An Introduction to Punctuation
Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
B.A., English, State University of New York

Essays , memoirs , autobiographies , biographies , travel writing , history, cultural studies, nature writing —all of these fit under the broad heading of creative nonfiction , and all are represented in this list of 100 major works of creative nonfiction published by British and American writers over the past 90 years or so. They're arranged alphabetically by author last name.

Recommended Creative Nonfiction

Edward Abbey, "Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness" (1968)
James Agee, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941)
Martin Amis, "Experience" (1995)
Maya Angelou , "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (1970)
Russell Baker, "Growing Up" (1982)
James Baldwin , "Notes of a Native Son" (1963)
Julian Barnes, "Nothing to Be Frightened Of" (2008)
Alan Bennett, "Untold Stories" (2005)
Wendell Berry, "Recollected Essays" (1981)
Bill Bryson, "Notes From a Small Island" (1995)
Anthony Burgess, "Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess" (1987)
Joseph Campbell, "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" (1949)
Truman Capote , "In Cold Blood" (1965)
Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring" (1962)
Pat Conroy, "The Water Is Wide" (1972)
Harry Crews, "A Childhood: The Biography of a Place" (1978)
Joan Didion, "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction" (2006)
Joan Didion, "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2005)
Annie Dillard, "An American Childhood" (1987)
Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" (1974)
Barbara Ehrenreich, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" (2001)
Gretel Ehrlich, "The Solace of Open Spaces" (1986)
Loren Eiseley, "The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature" (1957)
Ralph Ellison, "Shadow and Act" (1964)
Nora Ephron, "Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women" (1975)
Joseph Epstein, "Snobbery: The American Version" (2002)
Richard P. Feynman, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" (1964)
Shelby Foote, "The Civil War: A Narrative" (1974)
Ian Frazier, "Great Plains" (1989)
Paul Fussell, "The Great War and Modern Memory" (1975)
Stephen Jay Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History" (1977)
Robert Graves, "Good-Bye to All That" (1929)
Alex Haley, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (1965)
Pete Hamill, "A Drinking Life: A Memoir" (1994)
Ernest Hemingway , "A Moveable Feast" (1964)
Michael Herr, "Dispatches" (1977)
John Hersey, "Hiroshima" (1946)
Laura Hillenbrand, "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption" (2010)
Edward Hoagland, "The Edward Hoagland Reader" (1979)
Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)
Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" (1963)
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, "Farewell to Manzanar" (1973)
Langston Hughes , "The Big Sea" (1940)
Zora Neale Hurston , "Dust Tracks on a Road" (1942)
Aldous Huxley, "Collected Essays" (1958)
Clive James, "Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James" (2001)
Alfred Kazin, "A Walker in the City" (1951)
Tracy Kidder, "House" (1985)
Maxine Hong Kingston, "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts" (1989)
Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962)
William Least Heat-Moon, "Blue Highways: A Journey Into America" (1982)
Bernard Levin, "Enthusiasms" (1983)
Barry Lopez, "Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape" (1986)
David McCullough, "Truman" (1992)
Dwight Macdonald, "Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture" (1962)
John McPhee, "Coming Into the Country" (1977)
Rosemary Mahoney, "Whoredom in Kimmage: The Private Lives of Irish Women" (1993)
Norman Mailer, "The Armies of the Night" (1968)
Peter Matthiessen, "The Snow Leopard" (1979)
H.L. Mencken, "A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing" (1949)
Joseph Mitchell, "Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories" (1992)
Jessica Mitford, "The American Way of Death" (1963)
N. Scott Momaday, "Names" (1977)
Lewis Mumford, "The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects" (1961)
Vladimir Nabokov, "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited" (1967)
P.J. O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores" (1991)
Susan Orlean, "My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere" (2004)
George Orwell , "Down and Out in Paris and London" (1933)
George Orwell, "Essays" (2002)
Cynthia Ozick, "Metaphor and Memory" (1989)
Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1975)
Richard Rodriguez, "Hunger of Memory" (1982)
Lillian Ross, "Picture" (1952)
David Sedaris, "Me Talk Pretty One Day" (2000)
Richard Selzer, "Taking the World in for Repairs" (1986)
Zadie Smith, "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays" (2009)
Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation and Other Essays" (1966)
John Steinbeck, "Travels with Charley" (1962)
Studs Terkel, "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression" (1970)
Lewis Thomas, "The Lives of a Cell" (1974)
E.P. Thompson, "The Making of the English Working Class" (1963; rev. 1968)
Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" (1971)
James Thurber, "My Life and Hard Times" (1933)
Lionel Trilling, "The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society" (1950)
Barbara Tuchman, "The Guns of August" (1962)
John Updike, "Self-Consciousness" (1989)
Gore Vidal, "United States: Essays 1952–1992" (1993)
Sarah Vowell, "The Wordy Shipmates" (2008)
Alice Walker , "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose" (1983)
David Foster Wallace, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments" (1997)
James D. Watson, "The Double Helix" (1968)
Eudora Welty, "One Writer's Beginnings" (1984)
E.B. White , "Essays of E.B. White" (1977)
E.B. White, "One Man's Meat" (1944)
Isabel Wilkerson, "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" (2010)
Tom Wolfe, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968)
Tom Wolfe, "The Right Stuff" (1979)
Tobias Wolff, "This Boy's Life: A Memoir" (1989)
Virginia Woolf , "A Room of One's Own" (1929)
Richard Wright, "Black Boy" (1945)
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Examples of Creative Nonfiction: What It Is & How to Write It

When most people think of creative writing, they picture fiction books – but there are plenty of examples of creative nonfiction. In fact, creative nonfiction is one of the most interesting genres to read and write. So what is creative nonfiction exactly?

More and more people are discovering the joy of getting immersed in content based on true life that has all the quality and craft of a well-written novel. If you are interested in writing creative nonfiction, it’s important to understand different examples of creative nonfiction as a genre.

If you’ve ever gotten lost in memoirs so descriptive that you felt you’d walked in the shoes of those people, those are perfect examples of creative nonfiction – and you understand exactly why this genre is so popular.

But is creative nonfiction a viable form of writing to pursue? What is creative nonfiction best used to convey? And what are some popular creative nonfiction examples?

Today we will discuss all about this genre, including plenty of examples of creative nonfiction books – so you’ll know exactly how to write it.

This Guide to Creative Nonfiction Covers:

Need A Nonfiction Book Outline?

What is Creative Nonfiction?

Creative nonfiction is defined as true events written about with the techniques and style traditionally found in creative writing . We can understand what creative nonfiction is by contrasting it with plain-old nonfiction.

Think about news or a history textbook, for example. These nonfiction pieces tend to be written in very matter-of-fact, declarative language. While informative, this type of nonfiction often lacks the flair and pleasure that keep people hooked on fictional novels.

Imagine there are two retellings of a true crime story – one in a newspaper and the other in the script for a podcast. Which is more likely to grip you? The dry, factual language, or the evocative, emotionally impactful creative writing?

Podcasts are often great examples of creative nonfiction – but of course, creative nonfiction can be used in books too. In fact, there are many types of creative nonfiction writing. Let’s take a look!

Types of creative nonfiction

Creative nonfiction comes in many different forms and flavors. Just as there are myriad types of creative writing, there are almost as many types of creative nonfiction.

Some of the most popular types include:

Literary nonfiction

Literary nonfiction refers to any form of factual writing that employs the literary elements that are more commonly found in fiction. If you’re writing about a true event (but using elements such as metaphor and theme) you might well be writing literary nonfiction.

Writing a life story doesn’t have to be a dry, chronological depiction of your years on Earth. You can use memoirs to creatively tell about events or ongoing themes in your life.

If you’re unsure of what kind of creative nonfiction to write, why not consider a creative memoir? After all, no one else can tell your life story like you.

Nature writing

The beauty of the natural world is an ongoing source of creative inspiration for many people, from photographers to documentary makers. But it’s also a great focus for a creative nonfiction writer. Evoking the majesty and wonder of our environment is an endless source of material for creative nonfiction.

Travel writing

If you’ve ever read a great travel article or book, you’ll almost feel as if you’ve been on the journey yourself. There’s something special about travel writing that conveys not only the literal journey, but the personal journey that takes place.

Writers with a passion for exploring the world should consider travel writing as their form of creative nonfiction.

For types of writing that leave a lasting impact on the world, look no further than speeches. From a preacher’s sermon, to ‘I have a dream’, speeches move hearts and minds like almost nothing else. The difference between an effective speech and one that falls on deaf ears is little more than the creative skill with which it is written.

Biographies

Noteworthy figures from history and contemporary times alike are great sources for creative nonfiction. Think about the difference between reading about someone’s life on Wikipedia and reading about it in a critically-acclaimed biography.

Which is the better way of honoring that person’s legacy and achievements? Which is more fun to read? If there’s someone whose life story is one you’d love to tell, creative nonfiction might be the best way to do it.

So now that you have an idea of what creative nonfiction is, and some different ways you can write it, let’s take a look at some popular examples of creative nonfiction books and speeches.

Examples of Creative Nonfiction

Here are our favorite examples of creative nonfiction:

1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

No list of examples of creative nonfiction would be complete without In Cold Blood . This landmark work of literary nonfiction by Truman Capote helped to establish the literary nonfiction genre in its modern form, and paved the way for the contemporary true crime boom.

2. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is undeniably one of the best creative memoirs ever written. It beautifully reflects on Hemingway’s time in Paris – and whisks you away into the cobblestone streets.

3. World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

If you’re looking for examples of creative nonfiction nature writing, no one does it quite like Aimee Nezhukumatathil. World of Wonders is a beautiful series of essays that poetically depicts the varied natural landscapes she enjoyed over the years.

4. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is one of the most beloved travel writers of our time. And A Walk in the Woods is perhaps Bryson in his peak form. This much-loved travel book uses creativity to explore the Appalachian Trail and convey Bryson’s opinions on America in his humorous trademark style.

5. The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln

While most of our examples of creative nonfiction are books, we would be remiss not to include at least one speech. The Gettysburg Address is one of the most impactful speeches in American history, and an inspiring example for creative nonfiction writers.

6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Few have a way with words like Maya Angelou. Her triumphant book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , shows the power of literature to transcend one’s circumstances at any time. It is one of the best examples of creative nonfiction that truly sucks you in.

7. Hiroshima by John Hershey

Hiroshima is a powerful retelling of the events during (and following) the infamous atomic bomb. This journalistic masterpiece is told through the memories of survivors – and will stay with you long after you’ve finished the final page.

8. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

If you haven’t read the book, you’ve probably seen the film. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is one of the most popular travel memoirs in history. This romp of creative nonfiction teaches us how to truly unmake and rebuild ourselves through the lens of travel.

9. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Never has language learning brought tears of laughter like Me Talk Pretty One Day . David Sedaris comically divulges his (often failed) attempts to learn French with a decidedly sadistic teacher, and all the other mishaps he encounters in his fated move from New York to Paris.

10. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Many of us had complicated childhoods, but few of us experienced the hardships of Jeannette Walls. In The Glass Castle , she gives us a transparent look at the betrayals and torments of her youth and how she overcame them with grace – weaving her trauma until it reads like a whimsical fairytale.

Now that you’ve seen plenty of creative nonfiction examples, it’s time to learn how to write your own creative nonfiction masterpiece.

Tips for Writing Creative Nonfiction

Writing creative nonfiction has a lot in common with other types of writing. (You won’t be reinventing the wheel here.) The better you are at writing in general, the easier you’ll find your creative nonfiction project. But there are some nuances to be aware of.

Writing a successful creative nonfiction piece requires you to:

Choose a form

Before you commit to a creative nonfiction project, get clear on exactly what it is you want to write. That way, you can get familiar with the conventions of the style of writing and draw inspiration from some of its classics.

Try and find a balance between a type of creative nonfiction you find personally appealing and one you have the skill set to be effective at.

Gather the facts

Like all forms of nonfiction, your creative project will require a great deal of research and preparation. If you’re writing about an event, try and gather as many sources of information as possible – so you can imbue your writing with a rich level of detail.

If it’s a piece about your life, jot down personal recollections and gather photos from your past.

Plan your writing

Unlike a fictional novel, which tends to follow a fairly well-established structure, works of creative nonfiction have a less clear shape. To avoid the risk of meandering or getting weighed down by less significant sections, structure your project ahead of writing it.

You can either apply the classic fiction structures to a nonfictional event or take inspiration from the pacing of other examples of creative nonfiction you admire.

You may also want to come up with a working title to inspire your writing. Using a free book title generator is a quick and easy way to do this and move on to the actual writing of your book.

Draft in your intended style

Unless you have a track record of writing creative nonfiction, the first time doing so can feel a little uncomfortable. You might second-guess your writing more than you usually would due to the novelty of applying creative techniques to real events. Because of this, it’s essential to get your first draft down as quickly as possible.

Rewrite and refine

After you finish your first draft, only then should you read back through it and critique your work. Perhaps you haven’t used enough source material. Or maybe you’ve overdone a certain creative technique. Whatever you happen to notice, take as long as you need to refine and rework it until your writing feels just right.

Ready to Wow the World With Your Story?

You know have the knowledge and inspiring examples of creative nonfiction you need to write a successful work in this genre. Whether you choose to write a riveting travel book, a tear-jerking memoir, or a biography that makes readers laugh out loud, creative nonfiction will give you the power to convey true events like never before.

Who knows? Maybe your book will be on the next list of top creative nonfiction examples!

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50 Creative Nonfiction Prompts Guaranteed to Inspire

But not to worry. I present one whole hefty list of prompts just for creative nonfiction writers.

One small note before you dive in: don’t be afraid to mix and match the prompts. Each suggestion was meant to highlight a specific line of inspiration. There is absolutely no reason that two or three of these can’t be explored within one piece.

In fact, just use my tiny suggestions as springboards. Good luck!

1. Explore a scene or story from your memory by reimagining it from an alternate perspective. Write the event from the point of view of a passing bystander, another person close to the event, a pet, or even an inanimate object. When choosing your narrator, pay attention to how objective they would have been, what they would have paid attention to, and what sort of background knowledge they would have had about the scene.

2. Tell the nonfiction story that you don’t want your mother to read. You know the one. Don’t censor yourself.

3. Recall a moment in which you felt a strong spiritual or unidentifiable energy. Describe the scene in vivid detail, with special attention to the senses. Connect that scene to your relationship with your own religious beliefs or lack thereof. Examine how you incorporated that experience into your worldview.

4. Create a timeline of events depicting your life by using newspaper headlines. Try to focus on events that didn’t involve you directly, but connect them to the pivotal events in your life.

5. Tell the story of one of your family holiday gatherings. Identify any of your family’s common trademarks, such as your one aunt that seems to tell the same joke at every Christmas, or your two uncles that always hide from the rest of the family by doing the dishes. Explore how you are linked within this family dynamic, and how these little quirks evolved and changed over the years.

6. Tell the story of a location. Possibly one that is very close to your heart that you already know well, or a new one that inspires your curiosity. Pay particular attention to your own connection to the location, however small or large that connection may be.

7. Choose a location that you’ve come to know as an adult. Compare how you interact with this setting now to how you interacted with similar settings when you were a child. How has your perspective changed?

8. Describe a time in which you expected or wanted to feel a religious or spiritual moment, but couldn’t. What were you hoping would happen? How do you choose to interpret that?

9. Recall a key lesson that parents or family members tried to impart onto you as a child. For example: “live with a healthy mind and healthy body,” or “put others before yourself.” Revisit that lesson as an adult and connect it to how you have come to interpret it as you grew up or in your adult life. Feel free to pick a less serious lesson and have a little bit of fun with it.

10. Revisit a special birthday from when you were younger. Describe specific details, with emphasis upon the senses. Now that you have years of context, how do you feel about what your parents and family did or did not do for you? What does that event mean to you now?

11. Choose an event in your life that someone else remembers differently. Describe both memories and debate the differences. Who do you think is right? Why do you think you remember it differently?

12. Choose a strong emotion and think of two memories associated with it. What are the links between those two memories?

13. Think of a lesson you learned recently and apply it to a memory. How would your behavior have changed if you had applied the lesson back then?

14. Choose a commonplace or otherwise unremarkable memory and describe it in the most dramatic and absurd way possible. For inspiration, I’m leaving you with some quotes from Douglas Adams. “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” “He leant tensely against the corridor wall and frowned like a man trying to unbend a corkscrew by telekinesis.” “It was a deep, hollow malevolent voice which sounded like molten tar glurping out of a drum with evil on its mind.”

15. Have you seen those bizarre Illuminati videos in which some automated voice tries to prove that Arch Duke Ferdinand is actually alive and has a monopoly on the world’s dairy farms? For this prompt, think of people in your life who have believed in crazy conspiracy theories, and write about the time they first shared them with you. Think of how your beliefs might seem naïve to them, and explore the tension between the competing versions of history.

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

16. What do you want more than anything in your life? Write about the burning hot core of your desire, and how that desire has changed over your life.

17. Recall what stressed you out most as a child. Was it the creaking stairs leading to the basement? Or being lost at the store? Explore your current relationship to that stressor. Did you ever move past that fear or anxiety? How do you interact with it now?

18. What relationship in your life has caused the most pain? Write the key scene in that relationship, when everything was at stake.

19. Write about a road trip you took, and about where all your fellow travelers ended up in life versus where you ended up. Are you glad you didn’t end up where they did, or are you jealous?

20. How has your identity changed over the course of your life? Write a scene from your teenage years that epitomizes the type of person you were, and then write a scene from recent life that shows how you’ve changed.

21. What event in your life has angered you the most? Write the scene where it happened, and tell us what you would do if it happened again.

22. What single experience most shaped who you are? Describe the experience in a single, vivid scene.

23. Who was your first friend to die? Write about how you learned of their death, and how you and their other friends mourned them.

24. Choose a happy or comfortable memory and write it in a way that makes the memory creepy or eerie to the reader. Don’t change the basic facts of the event, only select different facts and present them differently.

25. Show yourself in a scene pursuing the thing you want most in the world. Try to show the reader, without telling them, about your character flaws.

26. If you could throw five items into the fire, what would they be and why? To be clear, by throwing them in this fire, there would be no trace of them left anywhere, even if it’s something on the Internet or a memory. This is a very powerful fire. What would the consequences be?

27. What physical object or family heirloom ties together your grandparents, your parents, and yourself? Describe this object in great detail, and what it has meant to generations of your family.

This is seriously the best anthology out there for creative nonfiction.

Lee Gutkind and Annie Dillard have created a fantastic repository of classics.

In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction

28. Tell a story from your life in inverted chronological order. Start with the end, then backpedal to the middle, then tell the beginning, and then fill in the rest of the gaps.

29. Write about your favorite trip or journey, and how that high level of happiness was eventually threatened.

30. Look at some photographs of your childhood. Look at the pictures of your old room, the clothes you wore, and the places you had been. Try to remember a friend from that time period, and describe the first memory of a time when they pressured you or made you uncomfortable or angry.

31. Take a small, boring moment that happened today and write as much as you can about it. Go overboard describing it, and make this boring moment exciting by describing it in intense detail with ecstatic prose. Eventually connect this small, boring detail with the grand narrative of your life, your bigger purpose and intentions.

32. Describe the best meal you ever ate. Then describe a conflict you had with the people you shared it with, one that happened before, during, or after.

33. Recall an individual that you particularly hated. Describe their cruelty to you, and try to write yourself into an understanding of why they might have done it.

34. What was the best/worst letter you ever received or wrote? Write about the situation surrounding that letter, and why it was so important.

35. Recall a name you’ve given to a toy, a car, a pet, or a child, and tell us the story of how you and your family selected that name. Who fought over the name? What was the significance of that name? What happened to the animal or thing you named?

36. Write about experiencing the craziest natural event you’ve ever seen — tornado, earthquake, tsunami, hurricane. Dramatize the physical danger of the natural event as well as the tension between you and the people you were with.

37. Tell the story of the most important person that has shaped your town and its culture (you might have to do some research). How did the activity of that person influence the way you grew up or live currently?

How do you find good creative nonfiction stories?

This book masterfully teaches you how to discover the stories others will want to hear.

Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life

38. Scientists have wondered for years how nature and nurture plays into the development of human minds and their choices. Explore where you and your siblings are today and the choices that brought you there. Would you like to trade places with your sibling? Would you be happy living in their shoes? How have your personal choices differed over the years?

39. Write a scene of a time when someone older than you gave you advice, and write about how you followed it or ignored it and the consequences.

40. Write a single, three-paragraph scene when your sexual desire was thwarted by yourself or someone else.

41. Describe a scene when you were stereotyping someone. Did someone challenge you, or if you only felt guilty by yourself, how did you change your behavior afterwards?

42. Describe the biggest epiphany of your life, then backtrack and tell the lead-up to that scene or the aftermath. In the lead-up or aftermath, show how the epiphany was either overrated or every bit as valuable as you’d previously thought.

43. Write about a fork in the road in your life, and how you made the decision to go the direction you did.

44. Explore an addiction you had or currently have. Whether the addiction is as serious as alcohol or cigarettes, or something much more mundane like texting, video games, or internet usage, describe in vivid detail the first time you tried it. If you quit, tell the story of how you quit.

45. Recall a scene in which you chose to remain silent. Whether it was your boss’s racist rant, or just an argument not worth having, explore the scene and why you chose not to speak.

46. Revisit a moment in your life that you feel you will never be able to forget. What about that moment made it so unforgettable?

47. What makes you feel guilty? Revisit a moment that you are ashamed of or feel guilty for and explore why that is. Describe the scene and the event and communicate why you feel this way.

48. Write about a moment in which you acted selflessly or against your own benefit. What motivated you to do so? What were the circumstances? How did you feel after words?

49. Write about the most pivotal scene in a relationship with someone in your extended family — Uncle, aunt, cousin, grandmother. Describe the tension or happiness you shared, and how that came to affect your relationship from that point onward.

50. If all else fails, try a writing-sprint. Set an alarm for 5, 10, or 15 minutes and write as much as possible within that time span. Even if you begin with no inspiration, you might be surprised with what you come up with by the end.

The definitive guide to creating riveting true life stories.

Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction

For added pressure, try these writing websites:

Write Or Die

If you stop writing for more than 5 seconds, everything you’ve written disappears. It’s like writing with someone with a whip behind your chair. But with this new update you can choose to get positive reinforcements, too, like a kitten or candy, or to have your words disemvoweled rather than disappear.

A points-based system to encourage writers to write 750 words every single day. You get bonus points for not skipping days, and bonus points for writing more than 750 words.

Written? Kitten!

Every 100 words you write, you get shown a picture of a kitten. Ah, simple motivation. No word whether a dog version of the site is in the works for those who are more dog people.

For more on creative nonfiction writing, I suggest Creative Nonfiction . This website works with its print magazine counterpart to specifically cater to creative nonfiction writers and operates as an excellent starting point for more inspiration. Happy writing!

The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade

In which we cheated..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , the best memoirs of the decade , and the best essay collections of the decade. But our sixth list was a little harder—we were looking at what we (perhaps foolishly) deemed “general” nonfiction: all the nonfiction excepting memoirs and essays (these being covered in their own lists) published in English between 2010 and 2019.

Reader, we cheated. We picked a top 20. It only made sense, with such a large field. And 20 isn’t even enough, really. But so it goes, in the world of lists.

The following books were finally chosen after much debate (and multiple meetings) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Twenty

Michelle alexander, the new jim crow (2010).

I read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow when it first came out, and I remember its colossal impact so clearly—not just on the academic world (it is, technically, an academic book, and Alexander is an academic) but everywhere. It was published during the Obama Administration, an interval which many (white people) thought signaled a new dawn of race relations in America—of a kind of fantastic post-racialism. Though it’s hard to look back on this particular zeitgeist now (when, and I still can’t believe I’m writing this, Donald Trump is president of the United States) without decrying the ignorance and naiveté of this mindset, Alexander’s book called out this the insistence on a phenomenon of “colorblindness” in 2012, as a veneer, as a sham, or as, simply, another form of ignorance. “We have not ended racial caste in America,” she declares, “we have merely redesigned it.” Alexander’s meticulous research concerns the mass incarceration of black men principally through the War on Drugs, Alexander explains how the United States government itself (the justice system) carries out a significant racist pattern of injustice—which not only literally subordinates black men by jailing them, but also then removes them of their rights and turns them into second class citizens after the fact. Former convicts, she learns through working with the ACLU, will face discrimination (discrimination that is supported and justified by society) which includes restrictions from voting rights, juries, food stamps, public housing, student loans—and job opportunities. “Unlike in Jim Crow days, there were no ‘Whites Only’ signs.” Alexander explains. “This system is out of sight, out of mind.” Her book, which exposes this subtler but still horrible new mode of social control, is an essential, groundbreaking achievement which does more than call out the hypocrisy of our infrastructure, but provide it with obvious steps to change. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010)

In this riveting (despite its near 600 pages) and highly influential book, Mukherjee traces the known history of our most feared ailment, from its earliest appearances over five thousand years ago to the wars still being waged by contemporary doctors, and all the confusion, success stories, and failures in between—hence the subtitle “a biography of cancer,” though of course it is also a biography of humanity and of human ingenuity (and lack thereof).

Mukherjee began to write the book after a striking interaction with a patient who had stomach cancer, he told The New York Times . “She said, ‘I’m willing to go on fighting, but I need to know what it is that I’m battling.’ It was an embarrassing moment. I couldn’t answer her, and I couldn’t point her to a book that would. Answering her question—that was the urgency that drove me, really. The book was written because it wasn’t there.”

His work was certainly appreciated. The Emperor of All Maladies won the 2011 Pulitzer in General Nonfiction (the jury called it “An elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.”), the Guardian first book award, and the inaugural PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; it was a New York Times bestseller. But most importantly, it was the first book many laypeople (read: not scientists, doctors, or those whose lives had already been acutely affected by cancer) had read about the most dreaded of all diseases, and though the science marches on, it is still widely read and referenced today. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)

As a strongly humanities-focused person, it’s difficult for me to connect with books about science. What can I say besides that public education and I failed each other. When I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks , I found myself thinking that if all scientific knowledge were part of this kind of incredibly compelling and human narrative, I would probably be a doctor by now. (I mean, it’s possible .) Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, and her cells (dubbed HeLa cells) which were cultured without her permission, and which were the first human cells to reproduce in a lab—making them immensely valuable to scientists in research labs all over the world. HeLa cells have been used for the development of vaccines and treatments as well as in drug treatments, gene mapping, and many, many other scientific pursuits. They were even sent to space so scientists could study the effects of zero gravity on human cells.

Skloot set a wildly ambitious project for herself with this book. Not only does she write about the (immortal) life of the cells as well as the lives of Lacks and her (human, not just cellular) descendants, she also writes about the racism in the medical field and medical ethics as a whole. That the book feels cohesive as well as compelling is a great testament to Skloot’s skills as a writer. “ Immortal Life reads like a novel,” writes Eric Roston in his Washington Post review . “The prose is unadorned, crisp and transparent.” For a book that encompasses so much, it never feels baggy. Nearly ten years later, it remains an urgent text, and one that is taught in high schools, universities, and medical schools across the country. It is both an incredible achievement and, simply, a really good read. –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (2010)

Timothy Snyder’s brilliant Bloodlands has changed World War II scholarship more, perhaps, than any work since Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, an apt comparison given that Bloodlands includes within it a response to Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil (Snyder doesn’t buy it, and provides convincing proof that Eichmann was more of a run-of-the-mill hateful Nazi and less a colorless bureaucrat simply doing his job). Snyder reads in 10 languages, which is key to his ability to synthesize international scholarship and present new theories in an accessible way. But before I continue praising this book, I should probably let y’all know what it’s about— Bloodlands is a history of mass killings in the Double-Occupied Zone of Eastern Europe, where the Soviets showed up, killed everyone they wanted to, and then the Nazis showed up and killed everyone else. By focusing on mass killings, rather than genocide, Snyder is able to draw connections between totalitarian regimes and examine the mechanisms by which small nations can suddenly and horrifyingly become much smaller. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010)

Wilkerson’s history of the Great Migration is a revelation. When we talk about migration in the context of American history, we tend to focus on triumphalist stories of immigrants coming to America, but what about the vast migrations that have happened internally? Between 1920 and 1970, millions of African-Americans migrated North from the prejudice-ridden South, lured by relatively high-paying jobs and relatively less racism. It takes a whole lot to make someone leave their home, and Wilkerson does an excellent job at reminding us how awful life in the South was for Black people (and still is, in many ways). The Warmth of Other Suns is not only fascinating—it’s also thrilling, taking us into the lives of hard-scrabble folk who were equal parts refugees and adventurers, and truly epic, telling a great story on a grand scale. Don’t think that means there aren’t small moments of humanity seeded throughout the book—for every sentence about the conduct of millions, there’s a detail that reminds us that we’re reading about individuals, with their own hopes, wishes, dreams, and struggles. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2012)

While Robert Caro first came to prominence for The Powerbroker, his 1974 biography of divisive urban planner Robert Moses, it’s Caro’s ongoing multi-volume biography of LBJ, America’s most unjustly maligned president (fight me, Kennedy-heads!), that has cemented his legacy. It’s hard to pick one in particular to recommend, but The Passage of Power, which covers the years 1958-1964, captures the most tumultuous period of LBJ’s life in politics, as he went from feared senator, to side-lined VP, to suddenly becoming the post powerful figure in the world. There’s something profoundly moving about the vastness of these works—Caro is 83 now, and has dedicated an enormous part of his life to this singular project. His wife is his only approved research assistant, and together, they’ve upended half a century of LBJ criticism to reveal the complex, problematic, but always striving core of a sensitive soul.

I had a teacher in high school who spent 20 years working on her dissertation on LBJ. She’d spend each weekend at the LBJ Library at UT Austin, while working full time as a public school teacher, and kicked ass at both. There’s something about LBJ that inspires people to dedicate their entire lives to trying to figure him out, and in the process, trying to understand the world that made him, and that he made. Thanks to Caro, we can all understand LBJ a little bit better. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (2012)

Tom Reiss opens his biography of Thomas Alexandre-Dumas, father of author Alexandre Dumas, with a scene that seems right out of an academic heist film. At a library in rural France, Reiss convinces a town official to blow open a safe whose combination was held only by the late librarian. What Reiss discovers are the rudiments of a grand and, until then, largely unknown story of the man who inspired some of his son’s most beloved tales. The Black Count is also a case study of complex racial politics during the age of revolutionary France. Dumas was born in 1762 in Saint-Domingue, the French Caribbean colony that would become Haiti. As the son of a French marquis and a freed black slave, Dumas was subject both to the privileges of the former and the kind of indignities suffered by the latter. His father, for instance, sells him into slavery when he is 12 only to purchase his freedom later and bring him to France, where the young man receives an aristocratic education. A final rift from his father prompts Dumas to join the military. Reiss creates a dynamic, if somewhat speculative portrait of Dumas based on letters, reports from battlefields, Dumas’ own writings, and more. By the time he is 30, Dumas has vaulted in the ranks from corporal to general and commands a division of more than 50,000 soldiers. It’s no accident that the thrilling militaristic feats Reiss describes sound like events out of The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers . Though the general becomes a cavalry commander under Napoleon Bonaparte, Reiss suggests that it was Napoleon himself who ruined Dumas not only from a personal standpoint, but civilizational as well. Napoleon reintroduced slavery in Haiti, after all, in contradiction to the republican dreams of Dumas’ contemporary, Toussaint Louverture, another rare and successful 18th-century general of African descent. Reiss unearths the ultimately tragic story of a man who was infamous in his own time for enjoying social and professional advantages that would’ve been unheard of for a mixed-race man in the US, a nation which of course went through its own revolution one generation earlier. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (2014)

The premise of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book is a simple scientific fact: there have been five mass extinctions in the history of the planet, and soon there will be six. The difference, Kolbert explains, is that this one is caused by humans, who have drastically altered the earth in a short time. She points out on the first page that humans (which is to say, homo sapiens , humans like us) have only been around for two hundred thousand or so years—an incredibly short amount of time to do damage enough to destroy most of earthly life. Kolbert’s book is so unique, though, because she combines research from across disciplines (scientific and social-scientific) to prepare an extremely comprehensive, sweeping argument about how our oceans, air, animal populations, bacterial ecosystems, and other natural elements are dangerously adapting to (or dying from) human impact, while also tracing the history of both the approaches to these things (theories of evolution, extinction, and other principles). It’s a depressing and horrifying argument on the face of it, but it’s made so delicately, even poetically—Kolbert’s concerned, occasional first-person narration, and her many interviews with professionals capable of the pithiest, most perfect quotes (not to mention that she interviews these experts, sometimes, over pizza) make this book a conversation, more than a treatise. Kolbert talks us through the headiest, most complicated science, breaking down this mass disaster morsel by morsel. This might be The Sixth Extinction’ s greatest achievement—it is so smart while also being so quotidian, so urgent while also being so present. And this fits the tone of her argument: our current mass extinction doesn’t feel like an asteroid hitting the planet. It’s amassed by the small ways in which we live our lives. We are crawling, she illuminates, towards the end of the world. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me 1) won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015, 2) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and 3) was deemed “required reading” by Toni Morrison. What else is there to say? To call it “timely” or “urgent” or even “a prime example of how the personal is, in fact, political” (as I am tempted to do) does not quite capture the unique, grounding, heartbreaking experience of reading this book. Framed as a letter to his teenage son, Between the World and Me is both a biting interrogation of American history and today’s society and an intimate look at the concerns and hopes a father passes down to his son. In just 152 pages, this book touches on the creation of race (“But race is the child of racism, not the father”), the countless acts of violence enacted on black bodies, gun control, and anecdotes from the writer’s own life. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic , exercises a journalist’s concision and clarity and fuses it with the flourish of a novelist and the caring instinct of a father. It is a wonderful hybrid. The way the topics, the tones, bleed into one another reads so naturally: “I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, and that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store…” The list, of course, goes on. Between the World and Me brilliantly forces us to confront these tragedies again—to remember our own experiences watching the news coverage, to see them in the context of history filtered through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ unsurprised perspective, and to see them anew through the eyes of his disillusioned young son. There is an amazing generosity to these personal glimpses, the moments when the writer turns to his son (says “you”). They catch you off guard. (There are even photographs throughout, like a scrapbook you aren’t sure if you’re allowed to look through.) There have been many books about race, about violence and institutionalized injustice and identity, and there will be more, but none quite so beautifully shattering as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature (2015)

Andrea Wulf’s 2015 biography of 18th-century German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt—one of the most famous men of his time, for whom literally hundreds of towns, rivers, currents, glaciers, and more are named—is so much more than the story of a single life. Aside from chronicling a remarkably fertile moment in the history of European ideas (Von Humboldt was good buddies with his neighbor in Weimar, Goethe) Wulf reveals in Humboldt a true forebear of present-day ecology, a jack-of-all-trades scientist less concerned with the reduction of the natural world into its constituent specimens than with our place in a broader ecosystem.

And while it doesn’t seem particularly radical now, Humboldt’s proto-environmentalist ideas about the wider world, much of which he mapped and explored, stood in stark contrast to prevailing notions of Christian dominion, that dubious theological position conjured up in aid of empire. Insofar as Humboldt was among the first to understand and articulate the complex systems of a living forest, he was also the first to sound the alarm about the impacts of deforestation (much of which he encountered on his epic journey across the northern reaches of South America). Part adventure yarn, part intellectual history, part ecological meditation, The Invention of Nature restores to prominence an exemplary life, and reminds us of the tectonic force of ideas paired to action. –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Stacy Schiff, The Witches (2015)

It’s surprising that with a topic as popular and recurring in American culture as the Salem witch trials there have not been more books of this kind. Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the bestselling Cleopatra, Stacy Schiff takes to the Salem witch trials with curiosity and a historian’s magnifying glass, setting out to uncover the mystery that has baffled, awed, and terrified generations since. She pokes at the spectacle that Salem has become in mainstream and artistic depictions—how it has blended with folklore and fiction and has hitherto become a sensationalized event in American history which nonetheless has never been fully understood. Schiff writes that despite the imagination surrounding the Salem witch trials, in reality, there is still a gap in their history of—to be exact—nine months; so the impetus of the book and the intent of Schiff is to penetrate the mass hysteria and panic that ripped through Salem at the time and led to the execution of fourteen women and five men. In her opening chapter, Schiff chillingly sets up the atmosphere of the book and asks key questions that will drive its ensuing narrative: “Who was conspiring against you? Might you be a witch and not know it? Can an innocent person be guilty? Could anyone, wondered a group of men late in the summer, consider themselves safe?” At the heart of Schiff’s historical investigation is the Puritan culture of New England—but part of her masterful synthesis is that she picks apart at each thread of Salem’s culture and evaluates the witch trials from every perspective. Praised for her research as well as her prose and narrative capabilities, Schiff’s The Witches has been described by The Times (London) as “An oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller”; Schiff herself, by the New York Review of Books as having “mastered the entire history of early New England.” A phrase that still haunts me for its resonance throughout human history, is: “Even at the time, it was clear to some that Salem was a story of one thing behind which was a story about something else altogether.” –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Svetlana Alexievich, tr. Bela Shayevich, Secondhand Time (2016)

A landmark work of oral history, Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time chronicles the decline and fall of Soviet communism and the rise of oligarchic capitalism. Through a multitude of interviews conducted between 1991 and 2012 with ordinary citizens—doctors, soldiers, waitresses, Communist party secretaries, and writers—Alexievich’s account is as important to understanding the Soviet world as Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago . Second-hand Time first appeared in Russia in 2013 and was translated into English in 2016 by Bella Shayevich. As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker , “There are many worthwhile books on the post-Soviet period and Putin’s ascent…But the nonfiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history…” It is shockingly intimate, Alexievich’s interviewees sharing their darkest traumas and deepest regrets. In their kitchens, at gravesites, each character tells the story of a nation abandoned by the Kremlin. Like much of Alexievich’s work, it is radical in its composition, challenging with its polyphony of distinctive, human voices the “official history” of a society that presented itself as homogeneous and monolithic—an achievement the Nobel committee recognized when it cited the Belorussian journalist for developing “a new kind of literary genre…a history of the soul.” Like her more recent The Unwomanly Face of War and Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II , Alexievich’s project is one of the most important accounts being produced today. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Jane Mayer, Dark Money (2016)

In addition to being an incredible work of reporting, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is a historical document of what happened to America as a small group of plutocrats funded the rise of political candidates who espoused policies and beliefs that had been, until then, considered a part of the fringe right wing of the Republican Party. Mayer describes this group as “a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and voted.” Mayer’s painstakingly reported work is a monumental achievement; she lays out, in as much detail as could possibly be available, the mechanisms that allowed this group to channel their wealth and power, with the help of federal law, to a set of institutions that aim to fight scientific advancement, justice-oriented movements, and climate change. In doing so, they have overhauled American politics. As Alan Ehrenhalt put it in a review of the book for The New York Times, she describes “a private political bank capable of bestowing unlimited amounts of money on favored candidates, and doing it with virtually no disclosure of its source.”

The stakes here extend beyond American politics; Mayer points out that Koch money upholds some of the institutions most vigorously fighting climate activism and defending the fossil fuel industry. In 2017, she told the Los Angeles Times , “There are many things you can fix and you can bring back, and there are sort of cycles in American history and the pendulum swings back and forth, but there are things you can damage irreparably, and that’s what I’m worried about right this moment … And that’s why this particular book—because it’s about the money that is stopping this country from doing something useful on climate change.” –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

David France, How to Survive a Plague (2016)

To call How to Survive a Plague extensive would be an understatement; France’s account of the epidemic’s earliest days is overwhelmingly generous, letting the reader experience those days, and everything that followed, from within the community that faced it first. France recounts the ways in which scientists and doctors first responded to the virus, tracing the evolution of that understanding from within a small circle to a broad cry for awareness and resources; meanwhile, he shows how a community of people fighting for their lives mobilized alternative systems of communication, education, and support while facing an almost inconceivable wall of barriers to that work. The importance of language in this fight is at the forefront here, from the scientific question of what to call the virus, to its reputation in popular culture as “gay cancer,” to the disagreements within activist groups about how to tell their stories to an unsympathetic world.

This is an enraging history, one of various institutional failures, missed opportunities, hypocrisies, and acts of malice toward a community in crisis, motivated by hatred and horror of queer people and gay men in particular. But I felt equally enraged and in awe. This is a humbling history to read, especially if, like me, you come from a generation of queer people that has been accused of forgetting it. I’m grateful for France’s testimony; it won’t let any of us forget. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery (2016)

Reséndez’s The Other Slavery is nothing short of an epic recalibration of American history, one that’s long overdue and badly needed in the present moment. The story of the assault on indigenous peoples in the Americas is perhaps well-known, but what’s less known is how many of those people were enslaved by colonizers, how that enslavement led to mass death, and how complicit the American legal system was in bringing that oppression about and sustaining it for years beyond the supposed emancipation in regions in which indigenous peoples were enslaved. This was not an isolated phenomenon. It extended from Caribbean plantations to Western mining interests. It was part and parcel of the European effort to settle the “new world” and was one of the driving motivations behind the earliest expeditions and colonies. Reséndez puts the number of indigenous enslaved between Columbus’s arrival and 1900 at somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million people. The institution took many forms, but reading through the legal obfuscation and drilling down into the archival record and first-hand accounts of the eras, Reséndez shows how slavery permeated the continents. Native tribes were not simply wiped out by disease, war, and brutal segregation. They were also worked—against their will, without pay, in mass numbers—to death. It was a sustained and organized enslavement. The Other Slavery also tells the story of uprising—communities that resisted, individuals who fought. It’s a complex and tragic story that required a skilled historian to bring into the contemporary consciousness. In addition to his skills as a historian and an investigator, Resendez is a skilled storyteller with a truly remarkable subject. This is historical nonfiction at its most important and most necessary. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies (2016)

One night, facing a brief gap between plans with different people, I took Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies to a bar. A few minutes after I ordered, deep in Traister’s incredible, extensive history of single women in America, a server came over to offer me another, more isolated seat at the end of the bar, “so you don’t feel embarrassed about being alone,” she said, quietly. I assured her I was okay, trying not to laugh. She was just so worried.

I turned back to my book to find Traister describing this kind of cultural distress— a woman, alone, in public?! —at a new generation of unmarried adult women, who are more autonomous and numerous today than ever before. Far from marking a crisis in the social order, Traister writes, this shift “was in fact a new order … women’s paths were increasingly marked with options, off-ramps, variations on what had historically been a very constrained theme.” She examines the history of unmarried women as a social and political force, including the activists who devoted their lives to establishing a greater range of educational, familial, and economic choices for women, with particular attention to the ways in which that history is also one of racial and economic justice in the US. Traister also highlights the networks of social support that women have created in order to survive patriarchy and establish lifestyles that did not depend on it; intimacy and communication among unmarried women, she shows, were the backbone of activist and reform movements that successfully challenged the dominant order.

The book draws on interviews from dozens of women of varying backgrounds, and their firsthand accounts are a portrait of life amid a historic shift toward female autonomy. Their stories, and Traister’s analysis, make it clear that even as options for many women are expanding, those options are not equally available or beneficial to all women. This is a stunning reckoning with the state of women’s independence and the policies that still seek to curtail it. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires (2017)

Prairie Fires , Caroline Fraser’s Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder is not just a painstakingly researched and lyrically realized account of how the Little House on the Prairie author decanted the poverty and precarity of her homesteader family’s existence into narratives of self-reliance and perseverance—although it is that—it is also a meditation on the human need “to transform the raw materials of the past into art.” Full disclosure, I did not read the Little House on the Prairie books as a child and have no sentimental attachment to Laura, Pa or Ma. But in looking at the life behind the books, Wilder emerges as a tenacious, sometimes fragile figure, and as a literary operator of uncommon nous and self-awareness. Drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Prairie Fires has all the essentials of a great history book. Most importantly, Fraser’s great skill is in pulling back the veils of mythology that have enshrouded her subject and the era her works helped to define, enabling us to see both the real people and the myths themselves with fresh, critical eyes. There is no romanticizing of the Frontier, and a very real understanding of the sentimentality and bias of an overtly racist understanding of “westward expansion.” It is a remarkable book. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018)

In 2017, monuments commemorating heroes of the Confederacy were being debated, defaced and toppled throughout the United States. That same year, months before President Trump signed a law creating a commission to plan for the bicentennial of Frederick Douglass’ birth, he infamously seemed to suggest that Douglass was still around, doing an “amazing job” and “getting recognized more and more.” The irony was hard to miss: it was easy to eulogize a past that was not comprehensively, nor even fundamentally understood. One achievement of historian David Blight’s monumental study of the former slave turned abolitionist is the thoroughness with which it examines the man’s development across three autobiographies he produced in the span of ten years. The popular image of Douglass has long been that of a bushy-haired man affixed to Abraham Lincoln’s side, delivering rousing speeches on abolition and the sins of slavery. And while there is basic truth to that, Blight sets out to fill the gaps in public understanding, guiding readers from the Maryland slave plantation where Douglass was born to the many stops along his European speech circuit, when he established himself as one of the world’s most recognizable opponents of slavery. The vague circumstances of Douglass’ birth (he was born to an enslaved woman and a white man who may also have been his owner) later compelled him to create his own life narratives, a task that he accomplished both in writing and oratory. Blight’s engagement with Douglass’ writing also marks the biography as a triumph of public-facing textual criticism. For decades before Prophet of Freedom astonished critics and general readers, Blight had been making his name as one of the leading Douglass scholars in the US. Blight’s work was not historical revisionism, but rather a considered analysis of a man who relied on actions as much as words. Many may be surprised to learn, for example, what a vocal supporter Douglass was of the Civil War and violence as a necessary means to dismantle the system that had nearly destroyed him. Prophet of Freedom feels as definitive as a Robert Fagles translation of Homer—we hope it’s not the final word, though it will take quite the successor to produce a worthwhile follow-up. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (2019)

One hesitates to label any book by a living writer his “magnum opus” but Macfarlane’s Underland —a deeply ambitious work that somehow exceeds the boundaries it sets for itself—reads as offertory and elegy both, finding wonder in the world even as we mourn its destruction by our own hand. If you’re unfamiliar with its project, as the name would suggest, Underland is an exploration of the world beneath our feet, from the legendary catacombs of Paris to the ancient caveways of Somerset, from the hyperborean coasts of far Norway to the mephitic karst of the Slovenian-Italian borderlands.

Macfarlane has always been a generous guide in his wanderings, the glint of his erudition softened as if through the welcoming haze of a fireside yarn down the pub. Even as he considers all we have wrought upon the earth, squeezing himself into the darker chambers of human creation—our mass graves, our toxic tombs—Macfarlane never succumbs to pessimism, finding instead in the contemplation of deep time a path to humility. This is an epochal work, as deep and resonant as its subject matter, and would represent for any writer the achievement of a lifetime. –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True History of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland (2019)

Attempting, in a single volume, to cover the scale and complexity of the Northern Ireland Troubles—a bloody and protracted political and ethno-nationalist conflict that came to dominate Anglo-Irish relations for over three decades—while also conveying a sense of the tortured humanity and mercurial motivations of some of its most influential and emblematic individual players and investigating one of the most notorious unsolved atrocities of the period, is, well, a herculean task that most writers would never consider attempting. Thankfully, investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (whose 2015 New Yorker article on Gerry Adams, “Where the Bodies Are Buried”, is a searing precursor to Say Nothing ) is not most writers. His mesmerizing account, both panoramically sweeping and achingly intimate, uses the disappearance and murder of widowed mother of ten Jean McConville in Belfast in 1972 as a fulcrum, around which the labyrinthine wider narrative of the Troubles can turn. The book, while meticulously researched and reported (Radden Keefe interviewed over one hundred different sources, painstakingly sorting through conflicting and corroborating accounts), also employs a novelistic structure and flair that in less skilled hands could feel exploitative, but here serves only to deepen our understanding of both the historical events and the complex personalities of ultimately tragic figures like Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and McConville herself—players in an attritional drama who have all too often been reduced to the status of monster or martyr. Once you’ve caught your breath, what you’ll be left with by the close of this revelatory hybrid work is a deep and abiding feeling of sorrow, which is exactly as it should be. –Dan Sheehan, BookMarks Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011)

Maggie Nelson, if evaluated from a first glance at her authored works, may appear to be a paradox. That the author of Bluets, a moving lyric essay exploring personal suffering through the color blue, also wrote The Red Parts , an autobiographical account of the trial of her aunt’s murderer, may seem surprising. Not that any person cannot and does not contain multitudes but the two aesthetics may seem diametrically opposed until one looks at The Art of Cruelty and understands Nelson’s fascination with art on the one hand, and violence on the other. Nelson hashes out the intersection of the two across multiple essays. “One of this book’s charges,” she writes, “is to figure out how one might differentiate between works of art whose employment of cruelty seems to me worthwhile (for lack of a better word), and those that strike me as redundant, in bad faith, or simply despicable.” The Art of Cruelty is a self-proclaimed diagram of recent art and culture and does not promise to take sides, to deliver ethical or aesthetic claims masquerading as some declarative truth on the matter. So cruelty is very much approached from Nelson’s poetic sensibility, with a degree of nuance, and an attitude of reflection and curiosity but also one of a certain distance so that all the emotions—anger, disgust, discomfort, thrill etc.—can be viewed as part of a whole rather than in isolation. Cruelty, counterbalanced with compassion—especially with reference to Buddhism—is certainly not hailed by Nelson as a cause for celebration but worthy of rumination and analysis so that it is not employed tacitly and without recourse. No book could ever, I think, provide an exhaustive evaluation of this topic, nor is Nelson’s approach that of a philosopher or art-historian looking to propose a theory. Nevertheless, she dexterously, and creatively, manages to hold a mirror to our culture’s fascination with cruelty and invites us to reflect on our personal reasons for indulging it. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Óscar Martinez, The Beast (2013)

For over a decade, Martinez has been a witness and a chronicler of the ground-level effects of the war on drugs, reporting from across Latin America with a special focus on Central America and his home country of El Salvador, where more recently he’s been writing about the bloody culture of MS-13 and other narco-cliques that have expanded their power. Before that, he was charting the plight of migrants running the terrible gauntlet across borders and through narco-controlled territories. Martinez rode the dreaded train known as “The Beast” and collected the stories of those traveling north on this perilous journey. While crime isn’t strictly the focus of the book, Martinez looks at the direct effects of mass crime at a regional/global level, as well as the outlaw communities springing up to prey on the vulnerable. The subject matter is dark, but Martinez writes with the terrible, piercing clarity of a Cormac McCarthy. The Beast is a dispatch from a nearly lawless land, where families struggle and suffer, narcos get richer, violence spreads, the drugs head north, the guns head south, and so it goes on. Forget the rhetoric, the politics, and the propaganda. The Beast is the real story of the drug war. “Where can you steer clear of bandits?” Martinez asks. “Where do the drugs go over? Where can you avoid getting kidnapped by the narcos? Where is there a spot left with no wall, no robbers, and no narcos? Nobody has been able to answer this last question.” To call this book prescient disregards how long our problems have persisted, and how long we’ve managed to ignore the chaos our country’s policies have created. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Matthew Desmond, Evicted (2016)

There are more evictions happening now, per capita, in the United States, than there were during the Great Depression. As it turns out, there’s a lot of money to be made from poverty—not, course, for those who need it, but for the landlords who orchestrate the kind of housing turnover that traps people in deeper and longer cycles of debt. Poverty in America has long been conflated with moral failure, but as Matthew Desmond’s Evicted illustrates in great detail, if there’s any moral failing happening, it’s with those who would take advantage of such systemic and generational iniquities.

Desmond, a Princeton-trained sociologist and MacArthur fellow, went to see for himself in 2008, at the height (depths?) of the housing crisis, undertaking a year-long study of eight Milwaukee-area families, spending six months in a mobile home and another six months in a rooming house, creating much more than a journalist’s snapshot of life as an American renter. With Evicted , Desmond has widened our perspective on cyclical hardship and its disproportionate impact on people of color, illustrating (with neither the leering nor the condescension of so much reporting on the poor) that eviction is more often a cause of poverty than a symptom. –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government (2017)

I recommend this book to those who wish to demonstrate their physical strength in public and show off that they can read a giant Russian history book one-handed, but also I recommend this book to everyone, ever, in the world, because it’s so fantastic. At first glance, this is a lengthy tome inspired by a Tolstoyan approach to lyrical history, ostensibly concerned with the history of an apartment complex that was home to much of the early Soviet elite—and was subsequently depopulated by Stalinist purges. Within this apartment building, however, lay the central irony of the revolution—those who believed deeply enough in an idealistic system to embrace violent, repressive means of revolution, were soon enough subjected to those same mechanisms of repression. From this central irony, Slezkine, always concerned with how the micro fits into the macro, zooms out to look at the Soviets as just another bunch of millenarians (and to understand what an insult that is, you’ll have to pick up the book). –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami (2017)

Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for The Times of London, begins his book by describing the way his office building in Tokyo shook in March 2011 when an earthquake hit the city. He called his family and checked that they were OK and then walked through the streets to see the damage. Used to quakes, this one seemed bad, but not the worst he had lived through. Less than an hour after the earthquake, though, a tsunami killed an estimated 18,500 Japanese men, women and children. In Ghosts , Parry focuses his story on Okawa, a tiny costal village where an entire school and 74 children washed away. In somewhat fragmentary threads, Parry explores the families that survived, the ghosts that follow them, and the landscape of a place that will never be the same. In localizing the story in one community, Parry is able to clearly define the painfully individual fallout of a national tragedy. It is emotionally draining to read, which is a warning I give everyone when I recommend the book (which I do constantly). But it is one of my favorite books and I would be remiss not to include in our list for best nonfiction of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019)

I grew up in a town named after a body of water—Rye Brook—and went to a high school also named after that body of water—Blind Brook—but growing up, no one seemed to actually know where the brook was, at least none of the kids. We didn’t talk about it, except to note its hiddenness— it’s behind the school, someone once told me, while another person said it was behind that hotel, behind the park, behind the airport . Recently, I decided to find it on a map and noticed, for the first time, that the brook, far from being a hidden thing, defines the majority of Rye Brook’s borders. Recognizing this foundational feature of my hometown for the first time, more than a decade after I left it, was disorienting, completely re-rendering my perception of the place I thought I knew best.

My search that day came after I read Jenny Odell’s account of her similar awakening to the ecology of her hometown, Cupertino, and all the features in or around it: Calabazas Creek, nearby mountains, and the San Francisco Bay. “How could I have not noticed the shape of the place I lived?” she writes, and, later, describing her own disorientation in a way that resonates with my own, added, “Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along.”

One way of describing the premise of this book is to say “that which has been present all along” is reality itself: each of us, from day to day, living our physical lives in a physical place. But in 2019, life doesn’t usually feel like that; it feels like an onslaught of forces that aim to turn our attention away from this reality and monetize it in a shapeless virtual space. In that environment, Odell writes, doing “nothing,” or finding any way to disrupt the capitalistic drive to monetize, is an act of political resistance, even as she recognizes that not everyone has the economic security or social capital to opt out. “Just because this right is denied to many people doesn’t make it any less of a right or any less important,” she writes. This book also draws on philosophy, utopian movements, and labor organizing to describe how various people have attempted to “do nothing” in their own way throughout history, with an outlook that is grounded in ecology. (And bird watching!) Ultimately, Odell writes, the act of doing nothing creates space for the kind of contemplation and reflection that is essential to activism and to sustaining life. I experienced this book as a space of sanity and as a beginning; I hope you do, too. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Peter Hessler, Country Driving (2010) · Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (2010) · Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy (2010) · Marina Warner, Stranger Magic (2012) · Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012) · Oscar Martinez, The Beast (2013) · Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2013) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2013) · David Epstein, The Sports Gene (2013) · Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial (2013) · David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service (2013) · George Packer, The Unwinding (2013) · Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (2013) · Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (2014) · Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (2014) · Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring (2014) · Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald (2014) · Mary Beard, SPQR (2015) · Sam Quinones, Dreamland (2015) · Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning (2016) · Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson (2016) · Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers In Their Own Land (2016) · Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures (2016) · Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life (2017) · David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) · Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart (2017) · Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals (2017) · Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown (2017) · Michael Tisserand, Krazy (2017) · Lawrence Jackson, Chester Himes (2017) · Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon (2018) · Beth Macy, Dopesick (2018) · Shane Bauer, American Prison (2018) · Eliza Griswold, Amity and Prosperity (2018) · David Quammen, The Tangled Tree (2018).

Emily Temple

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Essays About Creative Non-Fiction: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

Check out our essay examples and writing prompts guide if you’re writing essays about creative non-fiction.

Creative non-fiction is a skilled and artistic way of telling stories based on true accounts, facts, and interviews. It can include essays, long-form articles, or books. Writing creative non-fiction can be very challenging when writing a literary work as it combines in-depth research and authentic, creative storytelling.

This work requires great attention to detail and getting the facts straight while keeping your readers engaged with your imaginative writing style. In short, authors of creative non-fiction enjoy the best — as well as the paramount challenges — of both the journalistic and poetic worlds.

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5 Intriguing Essay Examples

1. Whatever You Write, There You Are by Kristen Martin

2. The 5 Rs Of Creative Nonfiction Story by Lee Gutkind

3. svetlana alexievich’s nobel prize is a huge win for nonfiction writing by katy waldman, 5. legends of the fall by chiqui jabson chua, 1. types of creative non-fiction writing, 2. creative non-fiction writing tips, 3. a personal memoir, 4. a travel guide and experience essay, 5. business writing, 6. a memorable family gathering, 7. the story behind a painting, 8. creative non-fiction works you love, 9. an unforgettable lesson in class, 10. the person who inspires you the most, 1. whatever you write, there you are by kristen martin.

“Creative nonfiction can take many forms, be it a meandering lyric essay or long-form narrative journalism, and its practitioners don’t always agree on how creative one can be with the truth.”

For the most part, the authors of creative non-fiction have to constantly choose between sharing their personal experiences and the universal. While creative non-fiction seems biased toward the latter, authors surprisingly understand their inner selves more deeply when they embark on an outward journey to explore material facts. Nine creative non-fiction authors share their experiences of this so-called “backdoor memoir” phenomenon.

“What is most important and enjoyable about creative nonfiction is that it not only allows but encourages the writer to become a part of the story or essay being written. The personal involvement creates a special magic that alleviates the suffering and anxiety of the writing experience; it provides many outlets for satisfaction and self-discovery, flexibility and freedom.”

Gutkind lets readers into his 5R techniques of being a creative non-fiction journalist. These Rs are real, reflection, research, reading, and riting. This immersion journalist, whose extensive experience included participating in an open-heart surgery as a wallflower observer, talks about the main elements of creative non-fiction while writing one along the way.

“After conducting hundreds of interviews, she arranges people’s intimate testimonies into a choir of almost impersonal witness; the resulting works have been called “novels-in-voices,” immersions in experience that are governed by a fierce, purposeful intellect.”

The Swedish Academy surprised the world in 2015 as it awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to a creative non-fiction writer, marking a first in half a century since it happened. The move makes a resounding statement in the literary world on the essence of reportorial documentation after years of its unacceptance and criticism as a literary work.

4. Africa’s Cold Rush And The Promise Of Refrigeration by Nicola Twilley

“Over the next four or five hours, as the heat of the day sets in, gradually wilting the cassava leaves and softening the tomatoes, these men will cover hundreds of miles, carrying food from the countryside to sell in markets in the capital, Kigali.”

In this remarkably creative non-fiction, a journalist poignantly and painstakingly chronicles the daily hardships in Rwanda, where men rise before dawn and help bring food to the market in the next town, often just in the nick of time before spoilage. Twilley immerses in Rwanda and its cold chain problem, interviewing scientists, cold economy experts, and policymakers who all work toward making refrigeration happen for the African country.

“In the foothills of western Kyoto, towering bamboo trees sway in the mild wind, turning the sunlight into a delicate jade. Nearby, temples and villas sit amid fine gardens and, not too far uphill, a town pulsates with living traditions from ancient Japan.”

This article is an enjoyable descriptive non-fiction piece, giving us a Kyoto tour in early fall and autumn. We follow the author on her commute through an urban neighborhood, up to the mountain, and into one temple after another. With the author’s vivid imagination and ingenuity for words, the readers are led on to a journey in Japan as though they are experiencing firsthand the stillness of Kyoto’s green trails and the serene beauty of its mountainous landscape.

10 Great Writing Prompts on Essays About Creative Non-fiction

List down the many types of creative non-fiction and explain how they simultaneously promote the presentation of facts and creative storytelling. Like this guide, you may also find your best picks for each type of creative non-fiction.

Essays About Creative Non-fiction: Creative non-fiction writing tips

Taking tips from some of the essay examples above, determine the common denominators in the authors’ techniques in producing creative non-fictional works. Then, explain how these techniques helped the authors achieve their desired effects.

If you were to write your memoir, what events would you be putting in the spotlight? For your essay, imagine how you would structure your memoir. You can choose either a sad or joyous event. What matters the most is to describe memorable experiences so that you can narrate them in exact detail. To ensure your essay will enthrall your readers, read our storytelling guide .

Traveling creates wanderlust, a desire to feed yourself with new information and experiences. For this easy, recall a trip, or embark on a new adventure. First, write about the culture of the place and the people around you. Next, describe the place and culture and share the most important lessons you have learned from this adventure. Finally, describe the other future adventures you’d like to go on.

Business writing is not a usual source of attraction for several writers — especially for writers who chose to write because they despised math. There are joys never imagined in weaving stories from numbers. In this essay, offer your readers some tips to enjoy and make a profit in writing creative non-fictional pieces about business.

For this writing prompt, recount a memorable gathering with family and relatives. To make this pass as creative non-fiction, first detail the purpose of the gathering, the settings, and the decorations as vividly as you can. Then, describe each family member present and their unique qualities that make them unforgettable. Finally, recount the conversations and the emotions surging in you as they chattered away.

Pick a painting that captivates you the most and try to peel into its layers of meaning by researching its history, the stories, and the people that inspired the painter of the work. Next, try to mull the connection between the painting’s story and yours. This could explain what made you entranced at first glance.

If there are creative non-fiction literary works that have shaped who you are today, talk about them in your essay and elaborate on the reasons you have admired the author’s thoughts. Then, convince your readers to pick up this book to see their self-transformation.

Some classroom lessons succeed in keeping us engrossed in learning. Some could form the foundations of a hobby, while some could be our first step toward a professional career path. In this essay, reminisce on a class lecture you will never forget. Explain briefly what the subject matter was at the time and what your professor said about it that was forever etched on your memory.

Each of us has an idol we look up to as an inspiration to reach our goals, whether a historical figure, a fictional character, or a living personality. Share yours and write a piece of creative non-fiction about their story as a hero. Then, point out their qualities, achievements, or advocacies that made you realize your bigger ambitions, find confidence, and believe in yourself.

If you liked this article and want to put these ideas into practice, check out our round-up of storytelling exercises .

What Are the 10 Best Nonfiction Essays of the Past 50 Years?

There were innumerable notable essays written between 1961 and today. However, even though it’s a crazy idea to attempt to make a top ten list of the pieces that shaped the era, that’s what we do at Flavorpill — so go with it, and tell us what we left out in the comments section below. This post was inspired by the University of Iowa’s nonfiction Essay Prize, which is “given each year to the work that best exemplifies the art of essaying — inquiry, experimentation, discovery, and change.” Get more details on the 2011 nominees here .

1. “ White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art ” by Manny Farber – Film Culture, Winter 1962

Farber defends the unpolished, B-grade, underground films and directors that make what he deems “termite art” great. The author is sick of the overwrought attempts at creating and sustaining masterpieces, instead calling for art to devour its own boundaries. Let’s shake it up already!

2. “ Frank Sinatra Has A Cold ” by Gay Talese – Esquire , April 1965

This was an incredible essay, not only because of the insane amount of reporting involved, but because of the fact that Talese overcame the blow of not being able to access his subject by interviewing every single person possibility affiliated with Sinatra. Through this prismatic lens, we get a clearer view of Ol’ Blue Eyes than we ever could have with him stealing the show. He writes, “They are wise to remember, however, one thing. He is Sinatra. The boss. Il Padrone.”

3. “ Slouching Toward Bethlehem ” by Joan Didion – The Saturday Evening Post , 1967

On the hunt for a hippie named “Deadeye,” Didion takes us to the nexus of counterculture: San Francisco. It’s an astute analysis of American society, but also one that is ultimately empathetic; the author attempts to understand what others would merely disregard or shun.

4. “ The Long-Winded Lady ” by Maeve Brennan – The New Yorker , January 10, 1970

It’s as if Brennan is simply writing her weekly letters to a good friend; there’s an intimacy to her work as she details the perfect moments of living in a city. In this particular essay, Brennan explains a night out on the town and an encounter with a woman who was absolutely blotto on the corner of 45th and Broadway.

5. “ Fascinating Fascism ” by Susan Sontag – The New York Review of Books , February 6, 1975

Sontag dissects the jacket copy in The Last of the Nuba by Leni Riefenstahl line by line in order to take down the lauded filmmaker by reminding us of her Nazi past. It’s a convincing tack by the master of the polemic.

6. “ Dark Icons ” by Gary Indiana – Random House’s Boldtype column, 1997

Christopher Fowler writes in the Independent : “Indiana is as detested as he is adored.” In “Dark Icons,” he profiles the criminal superstar, Charles Sobhraj. He writes, “We have made these people stars because their implacable nature is somehow unbelievable, and utterly fascinating in a nauseating sort of way.”

7. “ Consider the Lobster ” by David Foster Wallace – Gourmet , August 2004

DFW attends the 56th Annual Maine Lobster Festival and investigates how and why we indulge in consuming this aquatic arthropod with such gusto. (Yes, there are footnotes.)

8. “ I Can’t Get it for You Wholesale ” by David Rakoff – Harper’s Bazaar

Rakoff’s sardonic take on Paris Fashion Week makes this one of his most memorable essays. Here’s what he has to say about Mssr. Karl Lagerfeld: “Seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin overrisen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, inhuman oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money.”

9. “ Getting In ” by Malcolm Gladwell – The New Yorker , October 10th, 2005

A Canadian outsider looks into the Ivy League college phenomenon in the US and analyzes the social logic involved in the process. It’s a fascinating rumination on the history of the admissions process.

10. Carl Wilson, “ Let’s Talk About Love ” – The 33 1/3 series collection, December 2007

In this essay (which is really a novella), Wilson attempts to understand the appeal of the award-winning Quebecois chanteuse, while also acknowledging his previously held disdain for Dion’s music and personality. It is a masterful “journey to the end of taste,” and by the end we’re all thumping our chests and rooting for Céline Marie Claudette Dion.

50 Short Nonfiction Books You Can Read in a Day (Or Two)

Sarah Ullery

Sarah suffers from chronic sarcasm, and an unhealthy aversion to noise. She loves to read, and would like to do nothing else, but stupid real life makes her go to work. She lives in the middle of a cornfield and shares a house with two spoiled dogs and a ton of books.

View All posts by Sarah Ullery

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln is an excellent book. I have no doubt. But by the time you’re done reading all 916 pages, there’s a real chance you’ll have developed carpal tunnel in your wrists.

Big books are heavy! They take FOREVER to read. And you know there’s going to be boring parts. Nonfiction is intimidating enough without the extra worry of physical pain that might be associated with reading it.

That’s why it’s nice to have a good selection of short nonfiction books on your TBR. Books that are easy on the wrists. Books that get to the point and stay on point without the requisite “boring parts” of larger books. Books that can be read in a day (or two). Books that are fun, but leave you feeling like a better person or better reader for having read them.

Nonfiction does not have to be long to be important. In fact, many of the titles I’ve listed below are the absolute best nonfiction books I’ve ever read. All of the books (except one) are under 300 pages, and the books closer to the 300-page mark are so absorbing and fast-paced that they can be read in a single sitting. I’ve also included graphic memoirs and other graphic nonfiction that can be read quickly. Nonfiction can be just as fun as fiction as long as you find a subject that interests you and don’t feel bogged down by an endless number of pages.

I like my books short too! So let’s share the love…

50 short nonfiction books you can read in a day or two. Get your true reading on. book lists | short books | short nonfiction books | nonfiction to read | reading lists

Short Nonfiction Books Under 100 pages

Notes on nationalism by george orwell (52 pages).

“In this essay, Orwell discusses the notion of nationalism, and argues that it causes people to disregard common sense and become more ignorant towards factuality. Orwell shows his concern for the social state of Europe, and in a broader sense, the entire world, due to an increasing amount of influence of nationalistic sentiment occurring throughout a large number of countries.”

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (80 pages)

“In 1903, a student at a military academy sent some of his verses to a well-known Austrian poet, requesting an assessment of their value. The older artist, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), replied to the novice in this series of letters—an amazing archive of remarkable insights into the ideas behind Rilke’s greatest poetry.”

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau (48 pages)

“ Civil Disobedience argues that citizens should not permit their governments to overrule their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing their acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War, but the sentiments he expresses here are just as pertinent today as when they were first written.”

Lifeboat No. 8: An Untold Tale of Love, Loss, and Surviving the Titanic by Elizabeth Kaye (70 pages)

“One hundred years after that disastrous and emblematic voyage, Elizabeth Kaye reveals the extraordinary, little-known story behind one of the first lifeboats to leave the doomed ship.”

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (53 pages)

“With humor and levity, here Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century—one rooted in inclusion and awareness.”

The Art of War by Sun Tzu (72 pages)

“Twenty-Five Hundred years ago, Sun Tzu wrote this classic book of military strategy based on Chinese warfare and military thought. Since that time, all levels of military have used the teaching on Sun Tzu to warfare and civilization have adapted these teachings for use in politics, business and everyday life. The Art of War is a book which should be used to gain advantage of opponents in the boardroom and battlefield alike.”

Africa’s Tarnished Name by Chinua Achebe (56 pages)

“Electrifying essays on the history, complexity, diversity of a continent, from the father of modern African literature.”

Short Nonfiction Books Under 200 pages

Difficult women: a memoir of three by david plante (184 pages).

“ Difficult Women , the book with which David Plante made his name, presents three portraits—each one of them as detailed, textured, and imposing as the those of Lucian Freud—of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women, while also raising intriguing and in their own way difficult questions about the character and motivations of the keenly and often cruelly observant portraitist himself.”

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel (translator) (188 pages)

“While training for the New York City Marathon, Haruki Murakami decided to keep a journal of his progress. The result is a memoir about his intertwined obsessions with running and writing, full of vivid recollections and insights, including the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, here is a rich and revelatory work that elevates the human need for motion to an art form.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli (128 pages)

“Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction of the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants with the reality of racism and fear both here and back home.”

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (106 pages)

“At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two ‘letters,’ written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.”

Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (115 pages)

“At long last, Mary Beard addresses in one brave book the misogynists and trolls who mercilessly attack and demean women the world over, including, very often, Mary herself. In Women & Power , she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial.”

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (160 pages)

“The Tao Te Ching , the esoteric but infinitely practical book written most probably in the sixth century BC by Lao Tsu, has been translated more frequently than any work except the Bible. This translation of the Chinese classic, which was first published twenty-five years ago, has sold more copies than any of the others. It offers the essence of each word and makes Lao Tsu’s teaching immediate and alive.”

The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison (114 pages)

“America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?”

Why I Write by George Orwell (120 pages)

“Whether puncturing the lies of politicians, wittily dissecting the English character or telling unpalatable truths about war, Orwell’s timeless, uncompromising essays are more relevant, entertaining and essential than ever in today’s era of spin.”

The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir (162 pages)

“In The Ethics of Ambiguity , Madame de Beauvoir penetrates at once to the central ethical problems of modern man: what shall he do, how shall he go about making values, in the face of this awareness of the absurdity of his existence? She forces the reader to face the absurdity of the human condition and then, having done so, proceeds to develop a dialectic of ambiguity which will enable him not to master the chaos, but to create with it.”

The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria by Helon Habila (128 pages)

“On April 14, 2014, 276 girls from the Chibok Secondary School in northern Nigeria were kidnapped by Boko Haram, the world’s deadliest terrorist group. Most were never heard from again. Acclaimed Nigerian novelist Helon Habila, who grew up in northern Nigeria, returned to Chibok and gained intimate access to the families of the kidnapped to offer a devastating account of this tragedy that stunned the world. With compassion and deep understanding of historical context, Habila tells the stories of the girls and the anguish of their parents; chronicles the rise of Boko Haram and the Nigerian government’s inept response; and captures the indifference of the media and the international community whose attention has moved on.”

The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science by Joyce Sidman (160 pages)

“One of the first naturalists to observe live insects directly, Maria Sibylla Merian was also one of the first to document the metamorphosis of the butterfly. In this visual nonfiction biography, richly illustrated throughout with full-color original paintings by Merian herself, the Newbery Honor–winning author Joyce Sidman paints her own picture of one of the first female entomologists and a woman who flouted convention in the pursuit of knowledge and her passion for insects.”

Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard (177 pages)

“Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.”

The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry (151 pages)

“Grayson Perry has been thinking about masculinity—what it is, how it operates, why little boys are thought to be made of slugs and snails – since he was a boy. Now, in this funny and necessary book, he turns round to look at men with a clear eye and ask, what sort of men would make the world a better place, for everyone?”

Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place by Scott McClanahan (169 pages)

“When Scott McClanahan was fourteen he went to live with his Grandma Ruby and his Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Crapalachia is a portrait of these formative years, coming-of-age in rural West Virginia.”

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot (143 pages)

“ Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma.”

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury (158 pages)

“Zen in the Art of Writing is more than just a how-to manual for the would-be writer: it is a celebration of the act of writing itself that will delight, impassion, and inspire the writer in you. Bradbury encourages us to follow the unique path of our instincts and enthusiasms to the place where our inner genius dwells, and he shows that success as a writer depends on how well you know one subject: your own life.”

A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape From North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa, Risa Kobayashi (159 pages)

“In this memoir translated from the original Japanese, Ishikawa candidly recounts his tumultuous upbringing and the brutal thirty-six years he spent living under a crushing totalitarian regime, as well as the challenges he faced repatriating to Japan after barely escaping North Korea with his life.”

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (165 pages)

“Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival.”

The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography by Deborah Levy (144 pages)

“The Cost of Living explores the subtle erasure of women’s names, spaces, and stories in the modern everyday. In this ‘living autobiography’ infused with warmth and humor, Deborah Levy critiques the roles that society assigns to us, and reflects on the politics of breaking with the usual gendered rituals. What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage?”

Short Nonfiction Books Under 300 pages

Ain’t i a woman by bell hooks (205 pages).

“A groundbreaking work of feminist history and theory analyzing the complex relations between various forms of oppression. Ain’t I a Woman examines the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the historic devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism within the recent women’s movement, and black women’s involvement with feminism.”

Can You Tolerate This? By Ashleigh Young (256 pages)

“A dazzling – and already prizewinning – collection of essays on youth and aging, ambition and disappointment, Katherine Mansfield tourism and New Zealand punk rock, and the limitations of the body.”

The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir by Yrsa Daley-Ward (224 pages)

“From the poet behind bone , a lyrical memoir—part prose, part verse—about coming-of-age, uncovering the cruelty and the beauty of the wider world, and redemption through self-discovery and the bonds of family.”

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung (238 pages)

“From a childhood survivor of the Cambodian genocide under the regime of Pol Pot, this is a riveting narrative of war crimes and desperate actions, the unnerving strength of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit.”

Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear (240 pages)

“A writer’s search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this intimate and exuberant meditation on creativity and life—a field guide to things small and significant.”

Teaching Community: a Pedagogy of Hope by bell hooks (200 pages)

“Teaching Community tells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues—among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning—these values motivate progressive social change.”

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton (280 pages) (it has pictures!)

“The Architecture of Happiness starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and it argues that it is architecture’s task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.”

Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich (236 pages)

“On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy.”

Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth About Cuba Today by Yoani Sanchez (256 pages)

“Yoani Sánchez is an unusual dissident: no street protests, no attacks on big politicos, no calls for revolution. Rather, she produces a simple diary about what it means to live under the Castro regime: the chronic hunger and the difficulty of shopping; the art of repairing ancient appliances; and the struggles of living under a propaganda machine that pushes deep into public and private life.”

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell (273 pages)

“When the unconventional Durrell family can no longer endure the damp, gray English climate, they do what any sensible family would do: sell their house and relocate to the sunny Greek isle of Corfu.”

The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Oscar Martinez (224 pages)

The book has pictures, which is so helpful in nonfiction! It chronicles the migrant trail through Mexico to the U.S. border. “The Beast” is the freight train that migrants cling to as they make their way north. Oscar Martinez is a fantastic writer. I love this book but I would also like to recommend A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America—both are harrowing and important stories.

The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail, translated by Max Weiss (240 pages)

“Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women. The Beekeeper , by the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, tells the harrowing stories of several women who managed to escape the clutches of Daesh.”

What Are the Blind Men Dreaming? By Noemi Jaffe, translated by Julia Sanches (266 pages)

“A groundbreaking use of storytelling to bear witness to the Holocaust features three generations of women’s own voices—Liwia’s diary written upon liberation from Auschwitz; daughter Noemi Jaffe exploring the power of memory, survival, and bearing witness; and granddaughter Leda, Noemi’s daughter, on the significance of the Holocaust and Jewish identity seventy years after the war.”

Everything Lost is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho by Will McGrath (224 pages)

“Funny and heartfelt, this amalgamation of memoir and essay collection tells the story of twenty months the author spent in Lesotho, the small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, surrounded by people who take strangers’ hands as they walk down the road, people who—with sweetest face—drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded pride incites murder and families are devastated by the AIDS epidemic.”

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester (242 pages)

“The Professor and the Madman , masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary —and literary history.”

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (232 pages)

“In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father.

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.”

Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 by Albert Marrin (210 pages)

“From National Book Award finalist Albert Marrin comes a fascinating look at the history and science of the deadly 1918 flu pandemic—and the chances for another worldwide pandemic.”

Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and Schools Closings in Chicago’s South Side by Eve L. Ewing (240 pages)

An unflinching look at Chicago Public Schools and the damage inflicted on communities when schools are shutdown.

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt (224 pages)

“As an aging, tenacious Elizabeth I clung to power, a talented playwright probed the social causes, the psychological roots, and the twisted consequences of tyranny. In exploring the psyche (and psychoses) of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, and the societies they rule over, Stephen Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the catastrophic consequences of its execution.”

Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug (288 pages)

“A revelatory, visually stunning graphic memoir by award-winning artist Nora Krug, telling the story of her attempt to confront the hidden truths of her family’s wartime past in Nazi Germany and to comprehend the forces that have shaped her life, her generation, and history.”

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing (282 pages)

“In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice. For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world.”

The Little Book of Feminist Saints by Julia Pierpont, Manjit Thapp (Illustrator) (208 pages)

“This inspiring, beautifully illustrated collection honors one hundred exceptional women throughout history and around the world.”

Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, and Future by Lauren Redniss (261 pages)(Graphic Novel)

“Weather is the very air we breathe—it shapes our daily lives and alters the course of history. In Thunder & Lightning , Lauren Redniss tells the story of weather and humankind through the ages.”

Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga, Jordan Stump (translator) (250 pages)

“Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches is the story of growing up a Tutsi in Hutu-dominated Rwanda—the story of a happy child, a loving family, all wiped out in the genocide of 1994. A vivid, bittersweet depiction of family life and bond in a time of immense hardship, it is also a story of incredible endurance, and the duty to remember that loss and those lost while somehow carrying on. Sweet, funny, wrenching, and deeply moving, Cockroaches is a window onto an unforgettable world of love, grief, and horror.”

Over 300 pages (Bonus)

Arbitrary stupid goal by tamara shopsin (336 pages).

It’s my mission in life to get everyone to read this book! I mean, if the title didn’t draw you in, or the cover; well, maybe my mission is a lost cause…I can promise that it’s a really fast and funny read that you’ll have no problem finishing in a day!

I’ll admit that I’ve listened to a good amount of these books as audiobooks, so for more great, short, nonfiction audiobook ideas, check out 50 of the Best Short Nonfiction Audiobooks Under 10 Hours —or, if you’re just interested in more great nonfiction ideas, check out Book Riot’s nonfiction page !

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Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest . The creative nonfiction stories on this page deliver exactly what it says on the tin: true stories told in weird and wonderful ways.

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“ dear coldplay, i love you. wait. scratch that. ” by éan bird.

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This letter isn’t to you, the band. This letter is for the band’s front man.My apologies. Let’s start over.Dear Chris Martin,I love you. But we need to break up.You don’t know me, Chris. We’ve never met. You grazed my hands at a concert once, but I’m told that doesn’t count. But you and I have history, my dear; decades of triumph, grief, adoration, frustration knotted and woven together in indecipherable patterns. I’ve discovered, in recent contemplations about our relations, it...

“ Careful—You’ll Slip, Fall, and Die on Those Slippery Slopes ” by Liv Chocolate

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cw: references to sexual assault, kidnapping, and murderThe first time I crossed a street by myself—as in, without one or both of my parents present—I was seventeen. My parents warned me that the outside world was dangerous, and that, if something were to happen to me, I wouldn't know what to do. According to my parents, kidnappers, murderers, and kidnapper-murderers lurked on every corner of our small, suburban town where, statistically, my chances of becoming the victim of a violent crim...

“ Letting go ” by Rebecca Miles

🏆 Winner of Contest #166

I dedicate this story to my partner and to everyone who has carried or is carrying the burden of grief.Sitting by the bed, holding my hand, you think my mind is fighting against the decision of my body to quit life’s game. My eyes are closed, but I sense your will through the fingers laced tightly around my own. Tenderness is a force and you stake my claim to life through the insistent pressure of your hand. How it has grown over these long years from its immaculate small perfection to this manifestati...

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“ psst...(jill killed jack) ” by tommy goround.

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #256

“I very much need some socks pretty please with sugar on top.” This was the text that I sent to my estranged ex-wife. The one who wanted to drag me out to the wilderness under the guise of talking about financing our first childs’ entrance into college. I knew that she was old fashioned and wanted to push me from a hill. Just like Fellini. So my last request was not very sinister. I mean, even death row inmates should get some free laundry or a meal. Maybe even a prayer? I looked into the pantry of my rental and decided there ...

“ Never counted on wishes (breaks a man to see what he misses) ” by Fletcher Fox

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #253

“I wish we could stay here forever.” Of course, everyone says that their first year of university. The excitement, the freedom of being away from home, the longing for an impermanent state to be permanent - that wish is genuine, yet rarely was it quite as potent as it was for you. You didn’t know at the time just how fleeting here would be - weeks later, you would again return to your childhood bedroom, a pandemic having closed down your new barely existent friendships, never again to be as easy to maintain as they had at that dinner table w...

“ The Bookkeepers ” by Niamh O'Dea

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #251

Lying down lazily on her green velvet sofa, Jane placed her tepid coffee on the enormous rug beside her and returned to her ebook. Wind chimes tinkled in her blissfully overgrown garden outside, the lightest misting of rain tickled the windows. For the last 20 years, Jane had planned her retirement to a tee. Some of her friends had planned round the world e-tours, others were e-touring planets Jane had never even heard of. Her plans were simpler. Late nights, late mornings, and books. The rest of her days would be the same, save some obligat...

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“ fooling fate ” by nina h.

Submitted to Contest #257

I sat in my car staring at the time. It was 8:47am, so I had 18 minutes until my interview. No, not 18, 13 minutes! Dang it, math was my downfall. Would always be. I gathered my folder, purse, and keys as I stepped from my car into the mostly empty parking lot of Dodson High School. During the summer months, it was mostly administration that had to continue showing up while the students and teachers enjoyed their summer vacations. This was my first job interview after staying home for a ye...

“ Doubles ” by John K Adams

The twinkling lights strung from the trees made the patio a magical experience. Light music from the acoustic trio filtered up to them. Mark and Sandy’s favorite restaurant, they always came for their anniversary and often throughout the year. While waiting for the hostess to escort them, Mark discreetly placed his hand on Sandy’s bottom. She swatted it away with a laugh. “Mark!”“I couldn’t help it. It begged me.”She flashed her smile. “Did I tell you how great you look in that dress?”“Yes. Thank you, again. Your hand confirmed it… Thought o...

“ the 3.0 GPA ” by James DeMaio

Life is pretty short. And in the brevity and idiocy of youth, decisions are made which can have only the direst of consequences. Ideas and ideations that start with the most innocent of desires can have unrelenting and painful ends. In my younger years I spent hours reading a medical encyclopedia at my grandparents’ house. I learned about heart disease, hives, sexually transmitted diseases and types of bone breaks. Later on, I suffered an epileptic seizure which turned me into a patient. I had a spinal tap. I had to take two EEG tests, compl...

“ Moth Ado About Nothing ” by Marien Oommen

Moth came a-flying into the living room as the family lounged on the sofa after lunch. He had followed his natural homing instinct, and the garden door, left wide open, beckoned him inside. Mama was eating a generous slice of the sumptuous Christmas cake because it was the twelfth day of Christmas and ‘her true love’ had brought nothing else. The song was an annual recurrent betrayal of her romantic notions.Now there were two pretty women sitting on their high chairs leaning against the kitchen slab. One was Mama, her mouth full, checking ou...

“ Honor Killing ” by Cedric Herman

Sensitive content note: implied sexual abuse, violence & gore, mental disability. Inside a cell encased by four-inch thick walls, housing one narrow bed and a toilet, locked behind a heavy, iron door with a narrow slit window of fortified glass, sits a man humming. His face has no hair, only scars littering his skin like an infection—none bigger than a needle but more numerous than a flock of locusts. His left eyelid is permanently swollen, swallowing half of his sight. Inmates call him ‘The Cyclops’. His nose has a dent in the middle, c...

“ The Ghost in The Black Box Theater ” by Kacie Foos

It was a warm sunny day in London. I had just left a market and had my sandwich in hand and script in the other. I made my way up the street to my theater school nervously repeating my lines in my head.Today was my final rehearsal of 'The Scottish Play', known to most as 'Macbeth', with my scene partner Houston, and my Drama Teacher, who shall be known as D.T. We had been assigned the schools Black Box theater as our rehearsal space. This was an area of the school I was not familiar with.The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art was a large school f...

“ That Body Was Mine ” by Allie Mae Sakry

Submitted to Contest #256

And just like that, I am dead. I have been defeated. With a few quick shots to the chest, and my final breath, I am done. There is no more of me. Where I once was, I am no longer. The brick behind me will forever be stained with my blood and a few bullet holes from that powerful tommy gun. Red on red, with the lake at my side. Yes, that body was indeed mine. Allow me to explain. I was young, approximately 12 years old, when I came into the life I lived until my dying breath. My owner, Paul, had ordered me many customers. I hated them all. Th...

“ The price of being ambitious ” by Kirte Pärila

“Chess!” I shout, “it has something to do with it, I am sure of it. My prediction is infallible.” I sit on grass holding a brown box in my hands. I put it on the grass. “I feel like it is all coming to me now. It is rather late for that but what can I do?” I say as I shrug my shoulders. “You will do good, trust me. One day you will play even better than me, but I can't study when you can't say still. Will you give me a little quiet, can you do that for me, pretty please?” says Anabel. I guess she tries to comfort me (it is not...

“ The Medicine Man ” by Robin Shepherd

I love that first week of uni. That young, excited energy buzzing around the dorms. I’m ready for them with a full selection of goodies. Although the students refer to me as a vending machine, I consider myself a healer of sorts. I would go as far as saying, I’m a medicine man. I’ve been of service to those with broken hearts, failed grades, grief of all sorts, betrayal, homesickness, and loneliness. You name it. So far, I’ve been here in the study lounge for two semesters. I’m breathing a sigh of relief while the little angels are ho...

“ The Art of Being Boring ” by Maisy Stevens

Perhaps the answer is to pack your bags and move to the city. As a somewhat shy and partially introverted twenty-year-old, recieving the opportunity to complete an internship in Central London felt like a gift straight from the graceful fingertips of God, like I’d finally been looked down on with something less pitiful than disdain. I quit my tedious retail job in the middle of an industrial retail park, so barren a piece of tumbleweed was a regular, without so much as a regretful smile. My manager had begged me not to leave, but, no m...

“ From Now to Now ” by Johanna Parry

I was spindly, wild and always hunting for that place in nature where no one could find me. Except, of course, the toadstool fairies and elves I loved hiding with. Ducking under the bushes in the backyard, I crawled into a semi-clearing around an old tree stump. My toadstool.Here I conversed with that world no one else seemed interested in. The translucent other side. The realm where loud words did not have to fall out of my mouth. I was simply and fully understood.Here even smells were translucent. Sun-warmed grass, breeze-blown thicket lea...

“ Tommy's Stop ” by Joseph Hawke

This is a true story. Tom, my high school friend and teammate, and I, despite interruptions over the course of forty years, now in our mid-fifties, remain connected to one another. We went to Concord High School in Wilmington Delaware, where we also attended the same church, Holy Child, less than a mile from the high school. Tom, even though he played no instrument and his singing was off-key, was also in our church music group, the SIGN of Peace. I was the group’s drummer. SIGN stood for Singing in God's Name. It was started by a guy ...

“ Shortage ” by Allie Gunnarson

It was always my favorite question to answer because I already knew my answer “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Growing up, I had everything figured out. I knew I wanted to be a teacher before I even knew what teacher's lives looked like. I grew up forcing my brothers to play school, to which they begrudgingly obliged. Once my brother’s got tired of me I moved on to my baby cousin, who was just happy to have someone’s attention. I never thought that achieving this dream would be this hard. I never thought that achieving my dre...

“ Think(air). Feel(water). Act(earth). Be(fire). ” by Lena Chou

It's as simple as that when it comes to manifestation. Those are the 4 golden must have steps when it comes to ACHIEVING ANYTHING you want. It follows the astrological principles of having enough of a bit of everything of the 4 elements, in order to really achieve balance and create and manifest things in your life that you really put your mind to. Don't get me wrong, there are different steps as to how to get to the fucking place you want to be at. You don't sit in a dark room and stare intensely at a lit flame and pray that you'll be the p...

The Best Creative Nonfiction Short Stories

Made for those bookworms who love the compelling freedom of fiction but are looking for a little bit of the real world in their reading, creative nonfiction is the radiant lovechild of elegant poetry and rigorous reportage. Writers of this genre aim to present the truth — factually accurate prose about real life and real people — in a brilliant and creative way. Its faithful readers find themselves as enthralled by fact as they are by fantasy.

As a literary form, nonfiction can be a little hard to pin down. At its crux, creative nonfiction applies literary techniques drawn from poetry and fiction to content that would be at home in a textbook — making for an entertaining read that you might just learn something from! Among creative nonfiction short stories, you could find an insightful memoir, a dramatic monologue, hot, witty journalism, or a tight, personal essay.

Looking for new creative nonfiction stories?

Look no further! Every week, hundreds of writers submit stories to Reedsy’s short story contest. On this page, you’ll find all of those that are categorized as creative nonfiction stories. This means that the featured writers were triggered by one of our prompts to look to their own experiences and reveal a true-life story — but, crucially, they decided to tell it in a brilliant and creative way.

If you want to find the cream of the crop — perhaps the next Joan Didion or Jia Tolentino — then look to the top of the page: that’s where we’ve gathered all the winning and shortlisted entries. And don’t forget, if you’ve got a story to tell (fact or fiction), you too can enter our weekly contest and be in with a chance of nabbing the $250 prize plus a shot at publication in Prompted , our new literary magazine . Now wouldn’t that be a story?

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Lyric Essays

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Because the lyric essay is a new, hybrid form that combines poetry with essay, this form should be taught only at the intermediate to advanced levels. Even professional essayists aren’t certain about what constitutes a lyric essay, and lyric essays disagree about what makes up the form. For example, some of the “lyric essays” in magazines like The Seneca Review have been selected for the Best American Poetry series, even though the “poems” were initially published as lyric essays.

A good way to teach the lyric essay is in conjunction with poetry (see the Purdue OWL's resource on teaching Poetry in Writing Courses ). After students learn the basics of poetry, they may be prepared to learn the lyric essay. Lyric essays are generally shorter than other essay forms, and focus more on language itself, rather than storyline. Contemporary author Sherman Alexie has written lyric essays, and to provide an example of this form, we provide an excerpt from his Captivity :

"He (my captor) gave me a biscuit, which I put in my

pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it under a log, fear-

ing he had put something in it to make me love him.

FROM THE NARRATIVE OF MRS. MARY ROWLANDSON,

WHO WAS TAKEN CAPTIVE WHEN THE WAMPANOAG

DESTROYED LANCASTER, MASSACHUSETS, IN 1676"

"I remember your name, Mary Rowlandson. I think of you now, how necessary you have become. Can you hear me, telling this story within uneasy boundaries, changing you into a woman leaning against a wall beneath a HANDICAPPED PARKING ONLY sign, arrow pointing down directly at you? Nothing changes, neither of us knows exactly where to stand and measure the beginning of our lives. Was it 1676 or 1976 or 1776 or yesterday when the Indian held you tight in his dark arms and promised you nothing but the sound of his voice?"

Alexie provides no straightforward narrative here, as in a personal essay; in fact, each numbered section is only loosely related to the others. Alexie doesn’t look into his past, as memoirists do. Rather, his lyric essay is a response to a quote he found, and which he uses as an epigraph to his essay.

Though the narrator’s voice seems to be speaking from the present, and addressing a woman who lived centuries ago, we can’t be certain that the narrator’s voice is Alexie’s voice. Is Alexie creating a narrator or persona to ask these questions? The concept and the way it’s delivered is similar to poetry. Poets often use epigraphs to write poems. The difference is that Alexie uses prose language to explore what this epigraph means to him.

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Well-read in No Time: 100 Short Nonfiction Books

1. the prince, 2. civilization and its discontents, 3. fear and trembling, 4. a room of one's own, 5. the world of odysseus.

6. The Origin of Others

7. the music of life: biology beyond genes, 8. black skin, white masks, 9. the problems of philosophy, 10. the art of always being right, 11. why i write, 12. double helix, 13. common sense, 14. america, 15. ill fares the land, 16. the motorcycle diaries, 17. ways of seeing, 18. straw dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals, 19. the society of the spectacle, 20. on violence, 21. liberty before liberalism, 22. existentialism is a humanism, 23. the perpetual race of achilles and the tortoise, 24. representations of the intellectual, 25. media control: the spectacular achievements of propaganda, 26. days of reading, 27. the athenian revolution, 28. on the medieval origins of the modern state, 29. discourse on inequality, 30. the myth of sisyphus, 31. the hedgehog and the fox: an essay on tolstoy's view of history, 32. hiroshima, 33. beyond good and evil.

34. Pandemics: What Everyone Needs To Know

35. climate change: a very short introduction.

36. The Communist Manifesto

37. the character of physical law, 38. experience and education, 39. the leafcutter ants: civilization by instinct, 40. the two cultures, 41. the rule of law, 42. the spirit in man, art and literature, 43. what is life, 44. jefferson and civil liberties: the darker side, 45. israel/palestine: how to end the war of 1948, 46. the four little dragons: spread of industrialization in east asia, 47. gaia: a new look at life on earth, 48. quantum physics: illusion or reality, 49. pedagogy of the oppressed, 50. what is history, 51. the elements of style, 52. the medium is the massage, 53. the treason of the intellectuals.

54. A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity across the World

55. the greek philosophers from thales to aristotle, 56. we have never been modern, 57. the gift, 58. the sovereignty of good, 59. historical capitalism with capitalist civilization, 60. morality: an introduction to ethics, 61. mysticism: christian and buddhist, 62. why leaders lie, 63. the moral law, 64. lives of a cell, 65. design as art, 66. the golem: what you should know about science, 67. on bullshit.

68. The Limits of State Action

70. blood and guts: a short history of medicine, 71. letters to a young novelist, 72. why europe the rise of the west in world history 1500-1850, 73. rethinking history.

74. The Ethics of Ambiguity

75. a history of the cuban revolution, 76. the second world war, 77. top heavy: the increasing inequality of wealth in america and what can be done about it.

78. Women & Power: A Manifesto

79. a rulebook for arguments, 80. the first crusade, 81. accumulation and power: economic history of the united states, 82. the specter of communism: the united states and the origins of the cold war, 1917-1953, 83. on liberty, 84. medieval women, 85. the divided self: an existential study in sanity and madness.

86. The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

87. islam: a short history, 88. nations and nationalism, 89. the great financial crisis: causes and consequences, 90. a question of trust, 91. an experiment in criticism, 92. empire and superempire: britain, america and the world, 93. the art of being.

94. Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths

95. why nuclear disarmament matters, 96. the passions and the interests: political arguments for capitalism before its triumph, 97. the demise of nuclear energy: lessons for democratic control of technology, 98. man's search for meaning, 99. feminism is for everybody, 100. an introduction to mathematics.

IMAGES

Nonfiction Essay
70+ Nonfiction Essay Topics for College Students
Example of literary text in creative non-fiction and its definition and
What is Creative Non-Fiction Writing? An explanation for anyone
🎉 What is a nonfiction essay. Free Nonfiction Essay Examples and Topic
Nonfiction Essay

VIDEO

Differences between Fiction and Non Fiction
[MIRRORED + SHORT] Nonfiction!!
Fiction or Nonfiction Game
The art of nonfiction
Fiction and Types of Fiction
Hints Towards An Essay on Conversation by Jonathan Swift

COMMENTS

25 Great Nonfiction Essays You Can Read Online for Free
Besides essays on Book Riot, I love looking for essays on The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature. But there are great nonfiction essays available for free all over the Internet. From contemporary to classic writers and personal essays to researched ones—here are 25 of my favorite nonfiction essays you can read today.
Short English Essays for Students: Small Non-Fiction ...
Short Essays for Students. This page contains short essays and other non-fiction writing for students or anyone who wants to read and think about an opinion piece. It will only take a few minutes or less to read any of these texts. They are all under 2,000 words. Each non-fiction selection has a short summary or teaser and some possible themes ...
6 Types of Creative Nonfiction Personal Essays for Writers to Try
In this post, we reveal six types of creative nonfiction personal essays for writers to try, including the fragmented essay, hermit crab essay, braided essay, and more. Take your essay writing up a notch while having fun trying new forms. Robert Lee Brewer. Apr 22, 2022. When faced with writing an essay, writers have a variety of options available.
Nonfiction Essay
That said, keep your readers engaged by writing an impressive nonfiction paper. 1. Know Your Purpose. Before you start your essay, you should first determine the message you want to deliver to your readers. In addition, you should also consider what emotions you want to bring out from them. List your objectives beforehand.
Most Read in 2021
In that spirit, we've compiled the most-read pieces published on our website in 2021, as well as the most-read work from our archives. And for good measure, we've pulled together a few pieces worth an honorable mention; our favorite Sunday Short Reads; CNF content that was republished elsewhere; and the best advice, inspiration, and think ...
The Finest Narrative Non-Fiction Essays
Narrative non-fiction is the catch-all term for factual writing that uses narrative, literary-like techniques to create a compelling story for the reader. It's non-fiction work that goes beyond presenting bland information in chronological order, and instead uses plot, character, structure, tension, and drama to make plain reality more ...
Literary Nonfiction
A nonfiction essay is a short text dealing with a single topic. A classic essay format includes: An introductory paragraph, ending in a statement of thesis (that is, the purpose of the essay ...
Creative Nonfiction: How to Spin Facts into Narrative Gold
Creative nonfiction is not limited to novel-length writing, of course. Popular radio shows and podcasts like WBEZ's This American Life or Sarah Koenig's Serial also explore audio essays and documentary with a narrative approach, while personal essays like Nora Ephron's A Few Words About Breasts and Mariama Lockington's What A Black Woman Wishes Her Adoptive White Parents Knew also ...
100 Short Memoir Examples
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan. Irritable Hearts by Mac McClelland. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. Hunger by Roxane Gay. A Sliver of Light by Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal and Sarah Shourd. 100 more great nonfiction books. Great examples of short memoir essays and personal narrative in creative nonfictio.
Nonfiction Essay Examples for College Students
What They Fought For and And the War Came: Examples of War Non-Fiction. His opening paper, 'And the War Came,' offers the conversation starter of why it came. Withdrawal didn't consequently prompt war, McPherson battles; rather, 'a progression of choices and activities by men on the two sides expedited the war' — for the most part Lincoln's ...
Nonfiction: Personal Essays
Nonfiction: Personal Essays. 1. Read top essayists. Don't start in a vacuum, mimic poetry, or copy novelistic techniques. Study the specific format you want to emulate. For an overview, check out Phillip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay. Linger over 50 lovelorn stories in Modern Love, edited by Daniel Jones. Memorize Daphne Merkin.
100 Major Works of Modern Creative Nonfiction
Essays, memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, travel writing, history, cultural studies, nature writing—all of these fit under the broad heading of creative nonfiction, and all are represented in this list of 100 major works of creative nonfiction published by British and American writers over the past 90 years or so.They're arranged alphabetically by author last name.
10 Examples of Creative Nonfiction & How to Write It
8. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. If you haven't read the book, you've probably seen the film. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is one of the most popular travel memoirs in history. This romp of creative nonfiction teaches us how to truly unmake and rebuild ourselves through the lens of travel. 9.
1,000 Narrative Nonfiction Articles & Essays to Read Online
The best examples of narrative nonfiction writing, short articles and essays to read online ... The best examples of narrative nonfiction writing, short articles and essays to read online Life Death. Sex Love Happiness. Psychology Success and Failure. Women Men. Science & Technology The Environment Climate Change. Computers
A Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction
Teaches Storytelling and Writing. Teaches Creating Outside the Lines. Teaches Writing for Social Change. Teaches Fiction, Memory, and Imagination. Teaches Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing. Teaches Poetic Thinking. Teaches Writing and Performing Poetry. Icons and Their Influences. Teaches Investigative Journalism.
50 Creative Nonfiction Prompts Guaranteed to Inspire
Examine how you incorporated that experience into your worldview. 4. Create a timeline of events depicting your life by using newspaper headlines. Try to focus on events that didn't involve you directly, but connect them to the pivotal events in your life. 5. Tell the story of one of your family holiday gatherings.
The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade ‹ Literary Hub
We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, the best poetry collections, the best memoirs of the decade, and the best essay collections of the decade. But our sixth list was a little harder—we were looking at what we (perhaps foolishly) deemed "general" nonfiction: all the nonfiction excepting memoirs and essays ...
Essays About Creative Non-Fiction: Top 5 Examples
These Rs are real, reflection, research, reading, and riting. This immersion journalist, whose extensive experience included participating in an open-heart surgery as a wallflower observer, talks about the main elements of creative non-fiction while writing one along the way. 3. Svetlana Alexievich's Nobel Prize Is A Huge Win For Nonfiction ...
What Are the 10 Best Nonfiction Essays of the Past 50 Years?
5. " Fascinating Fascism " by Susan Sontag - The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975. Sontag dissects the jacket copy in The Last of the Nuba by Leni Riefenstahl line by line in order ...
50 Short Nonfiction Books You Can Read in a Day (Or Two)
Short Nonfiction Books Under 200 pages. Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three by David Plante (184 pages) " Difficult Women, the book with which David Plante made his name, presents three portraits—each one of them as detailed, textured, and imposing as the those of Lucian Freud—of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women ...
4510+ Creative Nonfiction Short Stories to read
This letter isn't to you, the band. This letter is for the band's front man.My apologies. Let's start over.Dear Chris Martin,I love you. But we need to break up.You don't know me, Chris. We've never met. You grazed my hands at a concert once, but I'm told that doesn't count.
Lyric Essays
A good way to teach the lyric essay is in conjunction with poetry (see the Purdue OWL's resource on teaching Poetry in Writing Courses ). After students learn the basics of poetry, they may be prepared to learn the lyric essay. Lyric essays are generally shorter than other essay forms, and focus more on language itself, rather than storyline.
Well-read in No Time: 100 Short Nonfiction Books
The How to be Well-read in No Time: 100 Short Nonfiction Books list comprises the greatest short factual works ever written. The titles cover a wide range of subjects including politics, economics, art, literary criticism, philosophy, science, sociology, biography, and history. They range in time mainly from the enlightenment era to the present ...