100 Must-Read Works of Genre-Bending Nonfiction

100 Must-Read Works of Genre-Bending Nonfiction My favorite kind of book is the kind that is hard to describe. The kind that makes booksellers struggle to decide where it should be shelved. Is it memoir or science? Philosophy or essay? Biography or criticism? Current events or autobiography? I dont have to make the bookstore shelving decision myself, not being a bookseller, but I do often have a hard time deciding where to browse in stores. My favorite books are those that hide out in Womens Studies but could also go with Essays, or are in the Nature section but could also fit in Philosophy. Hence this list. Each of these books combines two or more genres or bends the rules or better yet the rules of an already-established form. I considered trying to separate the books in this list into loosely-defined categories such as books with a lot of memoir in them or books that contain science and/or math, but that seemed like an excellent way to give myself a huge headache, and it undermines my whole point: that some books do everything they can to resist classification. So I stuck with alphabetizing them by title. You will see my biases in this list: its very memoir- and essay-heavy, as those are the nonfiction forms I read most often. Its also heavy on the literary and philosophical and leans toward the experimental. As with all lists of this sort, its possible to write an alternate, entirely different list thats equally interesting if not more so. That said, what genre-bending nonfiction would you add? 100 Essays I Dont Have Time to Write, Sarah Ruhl 2500 Random Things About Me Too, Matias Viegener About a Mountain, John DAgata The Address Book, by Sophe Calle Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson At the Existentialist Cafe, Sarah Bakewell The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad C. Chaudhuri A Bestiary, Lily Hoang Ban en Banlieue, Bhanu Kapil Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West The Blue Jays Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood, Louise Erdrich The Body: An Essay, Jenny Boully The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa The Compleat Purge, Trisha Low Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Dont Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras, Diana Eck Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy Krouse Rosenthal Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, Anne Carson Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, D. T. Max The Face: A Time Code, Ruth Ozeki The Fall of Language in the Age of English, Minae Mizumura A Fans Notes, Frederick Exley The Folded Clock: A Diary, Heidi Julavits Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer: Richard Holmes The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, Kevin Young The Hare with the Amber Eyes: A Familys Century of Art and Loss, Edmund de Waal H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald Heroines, Kate Zambreno A History of Bombing, Sven Lindqvist Hood, Alison Kinney Hotel, Joanna Walsh How to be Black, Baratunde Thurston How to Suppress Womens Writing, Joanna Russ How to Talk About Books You Havent Read, Pierre Bayard In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Olaudah Equiano Is God a Mathematician?, Mario Livio Lab Girl, Hope Jahren The Lifespan of a Fact, John DAgata Little Labors, Rivka Galchen The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Olivia Laing The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism, Geoff Nicholson Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Lauren Slater The Magicians Book: A Skeptics Adventures in Narnia, Laura Miller The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden, Katherine Swift The Motion of Light Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing In the East Village, Samuel R. Delany My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe My Paris, Gail Scott My Poets, Maureen McLane A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman Negroland: A Memoir, Margo Jefferson The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death, Colson Whitehead Now and at the Hour of Our Death, Susana Moreira Marques The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir, Vivian Gornick Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, Sarah Manguso Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, by Geoff Dyer The Periodic Table, Primo Levi The Pharmacists Mate, Amy Fusselman The Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, A.J.A. Symons Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment, John Horgan Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, Thomas Browne The Republic of Imagination: A Life in Books, Azar Nafisi The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald The Rodrigo Chronicles: Conversations about America and Race, Richard Delgado Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje Self-Portrait in Green, Marie NDiaye The Self Unstable, Elisa Gabbert A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit, Alan Lightman The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions, Jenny Diski Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptics Search for Health and Healing, Tim Parks The Temptation to Exist, E.M. Cioran Things I Dont Want to Know: On Writing, Deborah Levy Things Seen, Annie Ernaux Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, Gish Jen Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss Unmastered: A Book on Desire Most Difficult to Tell, Katherine Angel Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Michael Sorkin U and I: A True Story, Nicholson Baker Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir, Ander Monson A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, Bill Bryson The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image, Jeffrey C. Robinson Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story, P.L. Travers When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, Terry Tempest Williams The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, Wendy McClure The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston The Women, Hilton Als Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, John Edgar Wideman Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig