14 New Nonfiction Releases Coming in 2020

2019 hasn’t shown itself out quite yet but I’m already looking forward to what new nonfiction 2020 has in store. Here are some upcoming new releases from the new decade that I have my eye on.

F*ck Your Diet: And Other Things My Thighs Tell Me, by Chloé Hilliard (January 7) –Hilliard was cursed with the “fat trilogy”: “slow metabolism”, “baby weight”, and “big boned”. She burned through the usual suspects of diet pills and fad diets before “realizing that everything—from government policies to corporate capitalism—directly impacts our relationship with food and our waistlines.” These essays mix “cultural commentary, conspiracies, and confessions” on the familiar quest so many people have been on to lose weight and “feel better”, misguided as that may be. Sounds fascinating enough already, but she’s also a comedian and humor definitely helps this topic. (Amazon / Book Depository)

Of Morsels and Marvels, by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox (January 20) – Renowned French Caribbean author and 2018 winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize Maryse Condé’s writing on cooking is one of my most anticipated. Her food writing is connected to her travels in places like India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Australia. She defies the idea that “cooking is simply the mechanical act of reproducing standard recipes” and instead “implies creativity and personal invention, on par with the complexity of writing a story.” It’s translated by her husband, a detail I love. (Amazon / Book Depository)

Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag, by Monika Zgustova, translated by Julie Jones (February 4) –  More translated nonfiction by women! I’m reading this oral history right now and so far it’s exceptional. Zgustova shares the stories of women who survived Stalin’s Gulag and it’s emotional and powerful in that Svetlana Alexievich way. It also may surprise you, like Alexievich’s work does, in that it’s not all bleak, rather there’s an emphasis on the power of resilience and survival: “Where one would expect to find stories of hopelessness and despair, Zgustová has unearthed tales of the love, art, and friendship that persisted in times of tragedy.” (Amazon / Book Depository)

American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI, by Kate Winkler Dawson (February 11) – The author of 2017’s Death in the Air returns to historical true crime with a look at the life and groundbreaking casework of Edward Oscar Heinrich, one of America’s first forensic scientists, working in the 1930s. Each chapter explores one case Heinrich was involved with that was innovative or had long-lasting implications. He pioneered multiple disciplines and developed techniques and tools that are still in use today, but Winkler Dawson also examines how some were flawed or problematic — like blood spatter analysis. (Amazon / Book Depository)

The Storm Before the Calm: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, by George Friedman (February 25) – Geopolitical forecaster Friedman stresses that American history is cyclical, and that two major cycles – “institutional” and “socio-economic,” are converging in the 2020s, leading to foundational change. It “covers issues such as the size and scope of the federal government, the future of marriage and the social contract, shifts in corporate structures, and new cultural trends that will react to longer life expectancies.” Friedman is known for making these topics highly readable and this seems like an important primer for understanding issues we’ll soon face. (Amazon / Book Depository)

Gone at Midnight : The Mysterious Death of Elisa Lam, Jake Anderson (February 25) – College student Elisa Lam died while staying at LA’s infamous Cecil Hotel, the onetime home to multiple serial killers, among other sinister details. Disturbing security footage of Lam behaving erratically in an elevator, possibly reacting to an unseen figure, deepened the mystery. Anderson delves into Lam’s writings, criticizes the investigation around her death, and experiences a “descent into one of America’s quiet epidemics.” Would that be our handling of mental illness? I’m wary since the author is part of the narrative, but this story is such a confounding mystery, and it sounds like he devotes considerable time to understanding who Lam was. (Amazon / Book Depository)

Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country, by Sierra Crane Murdoch (February 25) – A white oil worker, Kristopher “KC” Clarke, drawn by the North Dakota Bakken oil boom, disappeared from where he worked on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in 2012. A Native, Lissa Yellow Bird, investigates his disappearance when she felt others weren’t looking, in what’s also “a pursuit of redemption, as Lissa atones for her own crimes and reckons with generations of trauma.” Recent narrative works looking at crime on Native lands have been illuminating, and the different perspective this one takes sounds promising. (Amazon / Book Depository)

The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Uncovering Secrets, Reuniting Relatives, and Upending Who We Are, by Libby Copeland (March 3) – Journalist Copeland takes a “deeply reported look at the rise of home genetic testing and the seismic shock it has had on individual lives” while exploring the implications of widespread at-home genetic testing, the background on companies offering it, like Ancestry.com and 23andMe, and what it means for the future. This sounds fascinating, and is a topic that’s holding ever greater importance for our lives and health. (Amazon / Book Depository)

Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir, by Rebecca Solnit (March 10) – Solnit’s memoir sounds more personally focused than the broader view her essays tend to take, although still with her keen eye on bigger sociocultural issues as she “describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas.” Her writing resonates widely but I haven’t fallen totally in love with it yet, so a turn towards memoir appeals to me more. (Amazon / Book Depository)

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning, by Alex Halberstadt (March 10) – Halberstadt’s grandfather was “most likely…Stalin’s last living bodyguard,” which understandably means he’s confronted some issues of lingering ghosts in his family history. In this generational memoir and investigation of ancestry across Russia and Ukraine to Queens, he explores his family’s immigration to the US and ideas of identity in connection with their native region’s troubled politics and history. (Amazon / Book Depository)

Wow, No Thank You.: Essays, by Samantha Irby (March 31) – The hilarious Samantha Irby’s new essay collection, on the heels of 2017’s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, is sure to be one of the year’s biggest. In dispatches from her life, she “goes on bad dates with new friends, spends weeks in Los Angeles taking meetings with “skinny, luminous peoples” while being a “cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person,” “with neck pain and no cartilage in [her] knees,” and hides Entenmann’s cookies under her bed and unopened bills under her pillow.” I love her but I hope it has less poop than the last book. (Amazon / Book Depository)

Last Book on the Left: Stories of Murder and Mayhem from History’s Most Notorious Serial Killers, by Ben Kissel, Marcus Parks, and Henry Zebrowski (April 7) – I’ve written enough about my love for Last Podcast on the Left, but just thinking about their book makes me excited in that kind of childhood way that seems to happen less and less as you get older. I’m beside myself with joy. It sounds like it’ll be Marcus’s meticulous research and writing about some of the bigger stories they’ve covered, but otherwise I’m not even sure what to expect. I don’t care though, I’m ready to love it! (Amazon / Book Depository)

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker (April 7) – Lost Girls author Kolker’s latest is a detailed look at an American family, the Galvins, whose six out of twelve children were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The family was studied by the National Institute of Mental Health, trying to understand if a genetic component was involved, and if so, what could be learned from it. It provides a stark look at mid-century American family dynamics that’s both intriguing and disturbing but very revealing of the era, and a brilliantly constructed narrative. (Amazon / Book Depository)

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, by Mark O’Connell (April 14) – Irish writer O’Connell became obsessed with “worst-case scenarios”: climate change and the end of the world. He talks to right-wing conspiracy theorists, doomsday preppers and hopeful Mars colonizers, travels to rich people’s survival bunkers built in South Dakota, to New Zealand where billionaires plot their new civilization while scheming how to profit on the collapse of our current one, and to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion that’s already seen a world end. Lest it sound depressing, it promises a “surprisingly hopeful meditation on our present moment” “with insight, humanity, and wit” and relief of some collective anxiety. (Amazon / Book Depository)

Are you looking forward to any of these too? (P.S.: release dates were correct when posted, but keep an eye out as they can change.)