A selection of great nonfiction

Books

• A Promise of Salt by Lorie Miseck
• My Brother by Jamaica Kinkaid
• I am Herod by Richard Kelly Kemick
• Try Not to Be Strange by Michael Hingston
• The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham
• Know My Name by Chanel Miller
• The Fact of a Body by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
• Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives by Thomas French
• I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
• The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant
• Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip by Jeannette Walls
• The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright by Jean Nathan
• The Best American Crime Writing, collection, 2002-2006
• The Best American Crime Reporting, collection, 2007-2010

Longform

• The Fourth State of Matter by Jo Ann Beard, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996
• Trial by Fire: Did Texas execute an innocent man? by David Grann, The New Yorker, Sept. 7, 2009
• Can you say – hero? by Tom Junod, Esquire,1998
• Let Me Live That Fantasy by Justin Heckert, Grantland, March 11, 2014
• Gritty: The Hero We Deserve by Adam Clark, NJ Advance Media, Aug. 6, 2020
• Fatal Distraction by Gene Weingarten, March 8,  2009
• A Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read by Ocean Vuong, May 13, 2017
• The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob by Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly, Nov. 2005
• Honor Thy Father by Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly, June 1998
• Midnight in the Garden of East Texas by Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly, Jan. 1998
•  A Pickpocket’s Tale: The spectacular thefts of Apollo Robbins by Adam Green, The New Yorker, Jan. 7, 2013
• The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy by Michael Paterniti, Esquire, June 1, 2009
• Metal to Bone by Anne Hull, St. Petersburg Times, 1993
• And always on Longform, Longreads, the Sunday Longread, and in The New Yorker

Classics

• Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Gay Talese, Esquire, April 1966
• Hiroshima by John Hersey, The New Yorker, Aug. 1946
• The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
• The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
• Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Podcasts

• Welcome to Paradise by Anna Maria Tremonti
• Death of an Artist by Helen Molesworth
• Finding Cleo hosted by Connie Walker
• Stolen by Connie Walker
• The Retrievals by Susan Burton
• Natural Life by Richard Kelly Kemick
• The Village hosted by Justin Ling 
• The Thing About Pam by Dateline
• The Longform Podcast
• The Sunday Long Read Podcast

Narrative nonfiction resources

• Working by Robert A. Caro
• Draft No. 4 by John McPhee
• Decolonizing Journalism by Duncan McCue
• Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples by Dr. Gregory Younging
• Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd
• The Art of Creative Research by Philip Gerard
• Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser
• The Art of The Interview by Lawrence Grobel
• The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert S. Boynton
• Nieman Storyboard
• Pandemic University Pop-Up School of Writing