Top 12 Nonfiction Books – 2018

Collected via:

• Our 10 Best Books of 2018: From ‘Boom Town’ to ‘Douglass’ to ‘Overstory,’ seeing the big in everything – Chicago Tribune
• More Books We Loved in 2018 | The New Yorker
• The Best Fiction and Nonfiction of 2018 – WSJ
• Amazon Book Review
• Favourite Nonfiction of 2018 | Five Books Editors’ Recommendations
• The Best Books of 2018 | The New Yorker

1. “Feel Free” by Zadie Smith (Penguin, 464 pages, $28)
2. “This Land: America, Lost and Found” by Dan Barry (Black Dog & Leventhal, 400 pages, $29.95)
3. Just the Funny Parts … And a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking into the Hollywood Boys’ Club by Nell Scovell
4. “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” by Anand Giridharadas
5. “Essayism,” by Brian Dillon
6. “Small Fry,” by Lisa Brennan-Jobs
7. Why Art? by Eleanor Davis
8. Darwin Comes To Town: How The Urban Jungle Drives Evolution by Menno Schilthuizen
9. Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, And Progress by Steven Pinker
10. Impossible Owls: Essays by Brian Phillips
11. She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer
12. Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom, by Erica Benner

National Book Critics Circle Finalists – 2014

Source: National Book Critics Circle: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE ANNOUNCES FINALISTS; Sandrof Award to Toni Morrison – Critical Mass Blog

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

1. Blake Bailey, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (W.W. Norton & Co.)
2. Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury)
3. Lacy M. Johnson, The Other Side (Tin House)
4. Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure (Random House)
5. Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not (Metropolitan Books)

 

BIOGRAPHY

1. Ezra Greenspan, William Wells Brown: An African American Life (W.W. Norton & Co.)
2. S.C. Gwynne, Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson (Scribner)
3. John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (W.W. Norton & Co.)
4. Ian S. MacNiven, “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
5. Miriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (Bloomsbury)

 

CRITICISM

1. Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Innoculation (Graywolf Press)
2. Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (Graywolf Press)
3. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press)
4. Lynne Tillman, What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (Red Lemonade)
5. Ellen Willis, The Essential Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz (University of Minnesota Press)

 

FICTION

1. Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press)
2. Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Books)
3. Lily King, Euphoria (Atlantic Monthly Press)
4. Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead Books)
5. Marilynne Robinson, Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

 

GENERAL NONFICTION

1. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Alfred A. Knopf)
2. Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (Pantheon)
3. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt & Co.)
4. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press)
5. Hector Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

POETRY

1. Saeed Jones, Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press)
2. Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Books)
3. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press)
4. Christian Wiman, Once in the West (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
5. Jake Adam York, Abide (Southern Illinois University Press)

 

NONA BALAKIAN CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN REVIEWING: Alexandra Schwartz

JOHN LEONARD PRIZE: Phil Klay, Redeployment (Penguin Press)