8 Fascinating New Nonfiction Books to Read in April 2023

In her second memoir, Nicole Chung writes with incredible grace and tenderness about grief, class, health care inequality, and familial separation during COVID. The memoir centers around the death of her parents, and Chung’s openness, intimacy, and willingness to write her grief onto the page is truly extraordinary. She also has an incredible gift for connection and for illuminating not only her experiences, but how those experiences are a part of a larger, devastating story about America. This is a must-read book made up of anger, loss, and healing.

In this beautiful collection celebrating nature and excavating our relationship to it, words and illustrations blend to create a new language of trees and the natural world. Irish artist Katie Holden fills the book with her extraordinary illustrations of trees, which are accompanied by pieces by over 50 writers, including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ross Gay, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. The book also features older writing from a diverse array of artists, from Plato to Ursula K. Le Guin.

Is illustrated nonfiction becoming a thing? I hope so! In this hybrid blend of memoir, photography, and original art, drag legend Sasha Velour shares her life story alongside the story of drag and queer life more broadly. She writes about her own journey as an artist, her successes and failures, and the people who’ve inspired her along the way. Along the way, she digs into drag in pop culture and queer history. This is a vibrant book, a celebration of and love letter to drag queens everywhere.

It is absolutely an event when the incredible scholar Christina Sharpe blesses us with new book, so mark your calendars! In this collection of notes, Sharpe writes about the cadences of Black life. These singular notes — about loss, memory, art, writing, culture, family, music, history, and more — build and blend and coalesce into a symphony that is both celebration and elegy. Like so much of Sharpe’s work, this book transcends and reinvents genre.

This book is the culmination of Indigenous author and artist Matika Wilbur’s years-long project to visit with and photograph people from the 562 Tribal Nations recognized by the U.S. government. Over the course of a decade, Wilbur traveled from one end of the country to the other, listening to and learning from the stories of Indigenous people. She shares many of those stories in this book, which is full of photographs, narratives, and interviews with dozens and dozens of Native people. It’s a beautiful celebration of contemporary Indigenous life, art, and culture.

In this genre-expanding memoir, Maggie Smith writes about the end of her marriage — and all the places, ideas, and new ways of being that stem from this monumental event. Told in a series of moments, vignettes, meditations, and musings, it’s not a straightforward memoir but a nonlinear collection of memory and possibility. Smith explores marriage, womanhood, parenting, forgiveness, and the art of narrative itself, all with a poet’s attention to language and detail.

My favorite memoirs are the ones that tell a big story through a personal lens. Chin does this beautifully in Mott Street. In her search to understand her own family’s history, she traces the history of Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants, as well as the history of racist immigration laws, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. She shares the stories of the families whose lives were forever impacted by this law, and rediscovers her own roots — and those of her wider community — in a building in Chinatown. It’s a visceral, vital book that exposes some of America’s most shameful history, while uplifting the people who resisted and thrived despite it.

Raise your hand if you didn’t learn Indigenous history in school — or if you only learned a racist, white-centric, colonizer version of it. Infuriatingly, the prevalence of harmful myths about Native history is still far, far too common. In this comprehensive history of Native America, Ned Blackhawk adds his voice to the growing chorus of Indigenous scholars and historians who are fighting back against this erasure.