New Nonfiction for Spring 2022

The Trayvon Generation began as an essay originally published in The New Yorker. For the book, Alexander has expanded that essay into a wide-ranging look at race in America. She interweaves her ideas and observations with works of art by contemporary artists. It’s an essential book for understanding tragedies of the past and present and the current movement for change.

Susan Cain is best known for her 2012 book Quiet. In this new one, she uses a similar method of combining research and memoir to explore sorrow and the lessons we can learn from painful experiences. She argues for the importance of acknowledging grief and longing and the power those experiences hold to bring humans together. She shows how pain can transform into creativity and connection.

In this follow-up to her 2015 book Negroland, Margo Jefferson takes the memoir genre in an entirely new direction. She writes in fragments about central life moments, combining criticism and personal writing to capture how she has constructed a self. With a wide range of cultural references and analysis, this book is dazzlingly varied, wide-ranging, and intimate.

Left on Tenth tells a story of grief and new love. Delia Ephron lost her husband and sister to cancer and was reeling from those blows when a friend from over 50 years earlier contacted her. Soon, romance bloomed. But not long after this, she was diagnosed with a form of leukemia. Ephron’s memoir is a warm, honest look at life’s highs and lows.

Thin Places is both a memoir and a work of nature writing. Kerri ní Dochartaigh describes growing up in Derry, a city on the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. During the Troubles, she was subject to poverty and violence and found solace and escape in the natural world. Her book is an argument for understanding the landscapes that surround us and a call to live in peace with nature and with each other.

Shelter is a memoir in essays about real estate, fatherhood, and race. Jackson returned to his childhood city of Baltimore after getting a job at Johns Hopkins. His new neighborhood was shaped by racial covenants and is largely white. In the book, he describes what this move was like as a Black man, while also exploring his own past and Baltimore’s history.

Finding Me tells the story of Viola Davis’s life from her childhood in Rhode Island to her time on the stage in New York City to her success in film. It’s an honest and personal tale of overcoming adversity and finding her purpose and voice. It’s also an inspirational call for readers to find their own sources of creativity and courage.

Linea Nigra is an intimate, philosophical meditation on pregnancy and motherhood. The book ranges widely, bringing earthquakes, plants, animals, books, and more into the discussion. Barrera, known for her previous book On Lighthouses (also translated by Christina MacSweeney), makes a call for a new canon of literature on pregnancy and the body.

Ill Feelings tells the story of Hattrick’s mother’s struggle with pneumonia and then Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, followed by Alice’s own illness. Alice seemed to have the same sickness as their mother but with no physical cause. The book blends memoir, medical history, biography, and more to explore Alice and their mother’s illnesses as well as the maladies of famous women in literature, arts, and history.

Essential Labor is a much-needed look at how little support our society offers to mothers, even though the labor of mothering is essential. Garbes uses research and personal experience to explore cultural assumptions about the value of care and labor. She offers her perspective as a first-generation Filipino American, showing how that experience affects her understanding of the work of mothering and its potential to affect social change.

Putsata Reang’s family fled Cambodia when she was 11 months old. Reang barely survived the journey. Ma and Me is a memoir of Reang’s efforts to live up to her mother’s high expectations of what a daughter should be. Reang also described what happens to their relationship when she came out as gay and married a woman. Her book is an in-depth look at cultural traumas and familial debts.

This essay collection gathers some new work and some old in a tribute to the great environmental writer, Barry Lopez, who died in Christmas Day, 2020. The pieces include memories, stories, reports, and meditations on landscape. They include travel writing and reflections on Lopez’s teachers. It’s a book about the importance of remaining present to the beauty around us on earth.