Ten Great Nonfiction Titles to Read in May

From essential memoirs of grief, loss, and becoming to histories of rollicking life in pre-Revolutionary America and the grim management strategies of the corporate world, May offers some great nonfiction for readers of all tastes.

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Turn Where: A Geography of Home, Chet’la Sebree
May 5, The Dial Press

Always trust a poet to deliver a beautiful memoir. For instance: Chet’la Sebree’s essays about, broadly, searching for home as a Black woman in America, blend memoir, cultural criticism, and history and deliver a formally inventive, emotionally rich personal history that stretches beyond the bounds of them self.

Ghost Stories, Siri Hustvedt
May 5, Simon & Schuster

Fragmented is both an overused literary descriptor and a worn-out formal conceit, too often employed by writers who otherwise don’t quite know how to structure their work. Not so for Siri Hustvedt, whose shattering and beautiful new memoir mirrors, in fragmented structure, the broken bewilderment of grief. Hustvedt’s husband and partner of 43 years, the writer Paul Auster, died in April 2024 following a non-small cell lung cancer diagnosis in January 2023.

From the first page of Ghost Stories Hustvedt captures grief’s extreme disorientation, that insoluble “derangement of time” that accompanies the loss of someone very close. What follows, though, is the tenderest of bricollage, as Hustvedt gathers thoughts and memories in whatever format is at hand: journal entries, found notes, essayistic meditations, biographical sketches, email updates to friends… Of particular poignancy is a series of letters that Auster wrote to his young grandson, who was born mere months before his maternal grandfather died. They ache with life and joy and playful wisdom, as does the entire memoir. Essential reading for anyone currently living who may someday encounter death (that’s everyone, folks).

Mother Tongue, Sara Nović
May 5, Random House

“Radiantly outraged” is a phrase Maile Meloy used to describe Sara Nović’s debut novel True Biz in the New York Times, and it applies to Mother Tongue, too. Nović tells the story of her years navigating the hearing world as a deaf person, her path to finding deaf community, and the fertile space between the two. This virtuosically researched book weaves together Nović’s own history with that of the disability rights movement in America (among others). More radiant outrage in literature, please.

Against Money, JW Mason and Arjun Jayadev
May 5, University of Chicago Press

Any book that namechecks Thomas Piketty and David Graeber is probably unafraid to ruffle the proverbial feathers, and even if you’re suspicious of economists (for no other reason than they chose the dismal science) you have to admit this book has the perfect title. Because really, what even is money? Is it real? And why does it rule (and ruin) our lives? What Mason and Jayadev argue is that no, money does not represent something real about the world (like value or time), and is not, in fact, a legitimate measure of intrinsic worth. It’s just not. And for this reason (among others) it has remained a tool of the powerful, a readily accessed magic trick deployed as needed to maintain the order of things. Money is tyranny. Money is bad… AGAINST MONEY!

Newcomers, Alan Mikhail
May 12, Liveright

Are Anthony and Grietje America’s original reality tv couple, even though they lived three centuries before the invention of the  television? Did they show up in New Amsterdam in the early 1630s, shrouded in mystery and intrigue? Check. Did they live loud and outsized lives of rancorous drama, often of the public variety? Yup. Did they end up in court over a dozen times because of said rancorous drama? Oh you bet. Did they survive and thrive their season 2 exile to, gasp, Brooklyn? A thousand percent. Could what details we can glean of their unique lives sustain an entire history of early Manhattan, written with meticulous research and a flair for storytelling, across 250 pages? Abso-fucking-lutely.

Control Science, Henry Snow
May 12, Verso

Unfortunately, it’s hard to think of a book more painfully relevant than this. In it, Henry Snow traces the history of management, from William Petty’s “political arithmetic” to Amazon’s exploitation machine. A lucid, expansive intellectual history which will leave you both better informed and angrier (both of which are important for knock-down drag-outs at this summer’s family reunion!).

Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, Zayd Ayers Dohrn
May 19, W.W. Norton

This incredible memoir from the younger child of celebrity radicals and Weather Underground poster couple, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, starts off at about hundred miles an hour and rarely lets up, telling the tender and breathless story of life on the run in America when your mom is on the FBI’s most wanted list. But beyond its account of a family in flight, from both the authorities and its own murkier truths, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young interrogates the radicalism of the 1960s and 70s, its unlikely alliances, its political legacies, and its many, many casualties along the way.

Dog Days, Emily LaBarge
May 19, Transit Books

At the beginning of Dog Days, Emily LaBarge recounts the terrifying, absurd violence of being held hostage with her family by six masked men with machetes, while Mrs. Doubtfire, and then its DVD menu screen, play in the background. The book is an enactment of the struggle to translate trauma into language that braids memoir, cultural criticism (Woolf and Bishop, but also It’s a Wonderful Life), and psychoanalytic theory. You haven’t read anything like it.

Relegated, Todd Smith
May 19, Gallery Books

This book, the story of one American’s immersive, investigative journey into the world of lower division English football (aka soccer), seems lab-designed to satisfy the reading needs of Lit Hub editor Jonny Diamond. Published into a cultural moment that adores Ted Lasso, binges Welcome to Wrexham, and eagerly awaits a World Cup on US soil for the first time in 30 years, Relegated follows landscaper-turned-sports writer and lifelong soccer fan (and dedicated Sunday player) Todd Smith as he encounters the highs and lows of British soccer from the ground up. As he spends time with groundskeepers, publicans, diehard supporters, and, of course the dedicated amateurs, semiprofessionals, and barely professional players who make up the bulk of the English soccer pyramid, Smith reveals a fascinating world built on dreams, perseverance, and an absolute surfeit of annual heartbreak. For the soccer-mad reader in your life.

I Would Die If I Were You, Emily Rapp Black
May 19, Counterpoint

Emily Rapp Black has written extensively, and beautifully, about her own experience with grief and loss, including about the life and death of her son, who was born with Tay-Sachs. I Would Die If I Were You blends memoir and craft, while also drawing on her experience as a divinity school student. The result is an exceptionally wise book that should be required reading not only for writers, but for those in grief, and those who love them.