8 Upcoming Nonfiction Books to Get You Excited About Fall

If you, like me, have been eagerly awaiting a new book from Myriam Gurba ever since Mean — well, we’re all in luck! In this blend of memoir and cultural criticism, Gurba explores the idea of “creep” from a wide variety of angles. She looks at abusers, toxic internet culture, and the way institutions, communities, and individuals, both consciously and unconsciously, perpetuate oppression — and how we can all do better.

If you need something fun and joyful to look forward to this fall, look no further! This anthology includes work from 29 trans and nonbinary comic artists who share intimate, personal stories about their lives, gender journeys, and identities. It’s a beautiful celebration of the messy complexity of trans and nonbinary lives and includes a diverse array of art and comics styles.

Sara Ahmed’s feminist scholarship is a gift to all of us — she writes so incisively, with such clear passion, about the realities of the world we live in and how we might go about changing them. In this book, she offers a roadmap for feminist killjoys everywhere. She argues that getting in the way, taking up space, and inviting confrontation is exactly what we need to do in order to build the just world we dream of living in. If you’re angry and wondering what to do with all that anger — me too. I’ll be reading this book.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen has written a memoir, so if you’ve been waiting on his fiction, now might be the time to finally dive in. In his first work of nonfiction, he tells the story of his own life: fleeing Vietnam with his family as a child, his early life in America, the violence he has experienced as a refugee and immigrant, and the ways his life has been shaped by fatherhood, displacement, popular culture, and more. He uses his family’s story to tell a much bigger story about what it means to be American and Vietnamese, about colonization and empire, and how we talk about place and identity.

This is the celebrity memoir I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I’m sure it will be warm and funny and kind (how could it not be?) and fascinating, too. But let’s be real: Patrick Stewart could spend 400 pages telling me about the errands he’s running and, I don’t know, his favorite ice cream flavors, and I’d happily listen. But, sure, I’m also looking forward to hearing all about his career and the many extraordinary things I’m sure he’s done that I know nothing about.

When I found out The Feminist Press was publishing this extraordinary book in the U.S., I screamed. It’s so good and so necessary and so beautifully, sharply written. In a series of poignant essays about their life, Alabanza, a trans writer and performer, explains just how violent the gender binary is. They expose all the ways it works to uphold patriarchy and white supremacy, and they do so in a way that’s immediate, funny, creative, moving, and smart. This is one of the best books about gender I’ve read in ages.

I always get excited when poets write anything other than poetry. I firmly believe that novels and memoirs written by poets are some of the best there are; they always bring something new and exciting to whatever form they work in. In her new book, former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith explores her family history, and Black history more generally, to try to make sense of the present moment — and the future. She blends historical scholarship, personal stories, and reflections on her spiritual practice into a book that unflinchingly asks hard and important questions about American history, culture, and myth.