10 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Novels of 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

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

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

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

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