From the Nightmares of the Third Reich to Elon Musk: 10 Nonfiction Books to Read in April

Each month, we here at Lit Hub pore over literally hundreds of nonfiction titles—here are ten coming out in April that are worth your time. (Sign up to our weekly nonfiction newsletter for evidence of all that work…)

*

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World
(Milkweed, April 2, edited by Ada Limón)

Ada Limón edited a collection of fifty poems about the local landscapes of poets including Jericho Brown, Diane Seuss, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. I assume, for readers of this website… enough said?

Shaun Walker, The Illegals
(Knopf, April 15)

At the risk of oversimplification, this book tells the real-life story of The Americans, the beloved (if not slightly pedestrian) FX show about a pair of deeply embedded Russian spies masquerading as the parents of a typical American family. Except this is all true, and told in gripping prose. For 23 years “Ann and Don Foley” pretended to be Canadians living in the United States, until they were found out and returned to Russia, along with their two sons (who thought they were American). Crazy. 

Heather Christle, In the Rhododendrons
(Algonquin, April 15)

The experience of reading Heather Christle’s hybrid memoir, in which she weaves together threads of trauma shared by herself, her mother’s life, and Virginia Woolf, feels like being in a conversation with a brilliant and deeply curious friend. It’s a knockout.

Jessica Slice, Unfit Parent
(Beacon, April 15)

Jessica Slice draws from her own experience to write about the  unsurprisingly punishing landscape of being a parent and a disabled person in a society that fails to provide support for either. Slice unsparingly explores the challenges, but also spends time in the joy, and the possibility. An essential addition to the motherhood canon. 

Ishion Hutchinson, Fugitive Tilts
(FSG, April 15)

It’s difficult to adequately describe poet Ishion Hutchinson’s prose debut, except to say that this is what you hope a poet’s prose debut will be. This is a wide-ranging and deeply personal collection of essays that engages deeply with art, poetry, and history, all with the kind of attention to language that makes you grateful for poets who grace us with prose.

Martha A. Sandweiss, The Girl in the Middle
(Princeton University Press, April 15)

Who among us hasn’t stared at an archival photograph, its subjects long dead, and wondered at the lives behind the faces, everyone posed just so in a particular place and time now lost to the sepia sweep of history… Ok, maybe not everyone. But that’s the compelling project at the heart of Martha A. Sandweiss’s Girl in the Middle, which examines an 1868 photograph taken in Fort Laramie, Wyoming by a prominent Civil War photographer named Alexander Gardner. There, flanked by assorted white men of power and conspicuous facial hair, stands a lone, then-unidentified girl who Sandweiss will eventually discover is as an Oglala Lakota Metis woman name Sophie Mousseau. A truly revealing image of American empire. 

Faiz Siddiqui, Hubris Maximus
(St. Martin’s, April 22)

At the end of all this, if there are still books, there will be an entire library devoted to the arrogance, stupidity and, yes, hubris, of Elon Musk and his minions. Hubris Maximus (which, yes, duh) takes as its focus Musk’s often vain, always aggressive approach to running a company, destroying it from the inside with delusions of rebuilding it into something better. An important book now that Musk’s taking his little sledge hammer to American government.

Don Gillmor, On Oil
(Biblioasis, April 22)

As a young roughneck, Canadian Don Gillmor had a front row seat on Alberta’s first big oil boom in the 1970s (in 1979, Calgary built more new office space than New York or Chicago), a boom created in part by geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East. But has anything really changed? Gillmor, of course, is uniquely positioned to answer that question, and draws a line from the greed and hubris at the heart of that first explosion straight to the present day—and beyond.

Drew Harvell, The Ocean’s Menagerie
(Viking, April 22)

The strange creatures of the deep ocean are endlessly fascinating, and Drew Harvell’s fascinating exploration of the depths (sorry) of their wondrousness is as gripping as you’d hope. 

Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams
(Princeton University Press, April 29, trans. Damion Searls)

Even the greatest novelistic fabulists of human despair as byproduct of industrial-scale fascism could not have conceived of this book (looking at you Bolańo). In 1933, after the rise to power of Adolph Hitler, Charlotte Beradt began having terrible dreams—and she wasn’t alone. Forbidden from working (Beradt was Jewish) she started to chronicle not only her own dreams, but those of her friends and family: all the uneasy nightmares conjured up by Hitler’s horrible dream of a thousand-year reich. First published in German in the 1960s, they’re translated here by Damion Searls, with an introduction by Dunya Mikhail.