New books for the year! There is a fresh new group of novels coming out to join in the fun as 2023 approaches quickly. This selection won’t let you down if you’re trying to expand your collection of intriguing nonfiction books. These nonfiction novels are like catnip for the curious, regardless of your preference for self-help, science, politics, or history. Here are 10 Most Anticipated nonfiction novels of 2023.
The Noise of Typewriters
Lance Morrow
W.H. Auden famously wrote: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Journalism is a different matter. In a brilliant study that is, in part, a memoir of his 40 years as an essayist and critic at TIME magazine, Lance Morrow returns to the Age of Typewriters and to the 20th century’s extraordinary cast of characters—statesmen and dictators, saints and heroes, liars and monsters, and the reporters, editors, and publishers who interpreted their deeds. He shows how journalism has touched the history of the last 100 years, has shaped it, distorted it, and often proved decisive in its outcomes. Lord Beaverbrook called journalism “the black art.”
Release Date: January 24, 2023
You’re That Bitch
Bretman Rock
Hilarious and earnest, this collection of essays, drawings, recipes, how-tos and never-before-seen photos goes far beyond what we know of Bretman Rock from social media. Who is Bretman Rock Sacayanan behind the screen and how did he become the original superstar influencer and today’s beloved best friend of the internet?
This book welcomes you into Bretman Rock’s world—from how his childhood in the Philippines, his family, Filipino culture, and being a first-generation immigrant helped shape him into who he is today. Peek into how Bretman became a social media sensation at the precocious age of 14.
Release Date: February 14, 2023
The Climate Book
Greta Thunberg
In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts – geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders – to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act?
Release Date: February 14, 2023
Transitional
Munroe Bergdorf
Transitioning is an alignment of the invisible and the physical. It is truth rising to the surface. It is one of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition—a part of our experience as a conscious being, no matter who we are. As time goes on, we all develop as people. None of us ever becomes someone else entirely—regardless of how we identify—but nor do we stay the same forever. We all transition. It’s what binds us, not what separates us. In Transitional, activist and writer Munroe Bergdorf draws on her own experience and theory from key experts, change-makers and activists to reveal just how deeply ingrained transitioning is in human experience.
Release Date: February 21, 2023
Who Gets Believed?
Dina Nayeri
Former refugee and award-winning author Dina Nayeri begins with this question, turning to shocking and illuminating case studies in this book, which grows into a reckoning with our culture’s views on believability. From persuading a doctor that she’d prefer a C-section to learning to “bullshit gracefully” at McKinsey to struggling, in her personal life, to believe her troubled brother-in-law, Nayeri explores an aspect of our society that is rarely held up to the light. Who Gets Believed? is a book as deeply personal as it is profound in its reflections on morals, language, human psychology, and the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.
Release Date: March 7, 2023
Black Ball
Theresa Runstedtler
Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation’s imagined descent into disorder. A new generation of Black players entered the league then, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Spencer Haywood, and the press and public were quick to blame this cohort for the supposed decline of pro basketball, citing drugs, violence, and greed. Basketball became a symbol for post-civil rights America: the rules had changed, allowing more Black people onto the playing field, and now they were ruining everything. Enter Black Ball, a gripping history and corrective in which scholar Theresa Runstedtler expertly rewrites basketball’s “Dark Ages.”
Release Date: March 7, 2023
The Body Liberation Project
Chrissy King
When Chrissy King first joined a gym, she had one goal in mind: to “get skinny.” In pursuit of this goal, she fell into the all-too-common cycle of “not enough-ness”; no matter what she achieved, there was always something she felt she needed to change about her body, her appearance, herself. This made her realize the most liberating truth of all: She was not the problem. Diet and fitness industries rooted in white supremacy were the problem; Eurocentric and carefully manufactured beauty standards were the problem; discourses telling her that her happiness was directly tied to her physical appearance.
Release Date: March 14, 2023
Real Self-Care
Pooja Lakshmin
You may have noticed that it’s nearly impossible to go even a couple days without coming across the term self-care. A word that encompasses any number of lifestyle choices and products—from juice cleanses to yoga workshops to luxury bamboo sheets—self-care has exploded in our collective consciousness as a panacea for practically all of women’s problems.
Board-certified psychiatrist Dr. Pooja Lakshmin finds this cultural embrace of self-care incomplete at best and manipulative at worst. Fixing your troubles isn’t simple as buying a new day planner or signing up for a meditation class.
Release Date: March 14, 2023
Mott Street
Ava Chin
As the only child of a single mother in Queens, Ava Chin found her family’s origins to be shrouded in mystery. She had never met her father, and her grandparents’ stories didn’t match the history she read at school. Mott Street traces Chin’s quest to understand her Chinese American family’s story. Over decades of painstaking research, she finds not only her father but also the building that provided a refuge for them all. Breaking the silence surrounding her family’s past meant confronting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first federal law to restrict immigration by race and nationality, barring Chinese immigrants from citizenship for six decades.
Release Date: April 25, 2023
Better Living Through Birding
Christian Cooper
When birdwatching in New York’s most famous park one morning in May 2020, Christian Cooper was engaged in the ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old. But when a routine encounter with a dog walker devolved into a tense racial confrontation, Cooper’s video of the incident would spark a firestorm at a moment when America’s conscience on race was awakening. Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay.
Release Date: June 13, 2023