#nonfiction

#nonfiction

This year I couldn't narrow it down to 15, so you get 20 recommendations. Call it literary inflation. Also, after last year's list was published, I got an email from a reader who decried that I had so few titles by female authors on my list (fair enough). This time I made a special effort to include a majority of books written by women.

"The stories that are most rewarding are often the ones that really fill you with a cold dread as you begin, because you're inventing something that doesn't lean into a template," the New Yorker staff writer tells Bustle. "It requires a lot more imagination, and I think it's perfectly natural to stop and think 'I could have just done this the easy way. Why didn't I?'"

To read Rachel Clarke's The Story of a Heart is to experience an onslaught of often competing emotions, showcasing the medical marvels at play in tragic circumstances.

Bolin's collection examines millennial pop culture obsessions through a lens of (post)feminism, late capitalism, and technology, linking these themes to cultish thinking.