The New York Times’ Notable Nonfiction Books of 2023

A sixty-year saga of frostbite and fake news that follows the no-holds-barred battle between two legendary explorers to reach the North Pole, and the newspapers which stopped at nothing to get — and sell — the story.

Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand — and fail to understand — mental illness.

Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections — a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life.

A multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, known as “Black Wall Street,” that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification.

An autobiography of one of the towering figures of contemporary American music and a powerful meditation on history, race, capitalism, and art.

A stunning account of a colossal wildfire that collided with a city, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, bestselling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce.

From “one of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time” (Brain Pickings): a journey through competing ideas of paradise to see how we can live more peacefully in an ever more divided and distracted world.

The bestselling author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café explores seven hundred years of writers, thinkers, scientists, and artists, all trying to understand what it means to be truly human.

A landmark, magisterial history of the trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals — the largely overlooked Asian counterpart to Nuremberg.

An urgent, wide-ranging portrait of the divisions among Israelis today, and the external threats to their country, at a critical juncture in its history. Through moving narratives and on-the-ground reporting, a veteran New York Times correspondent who has spent decades working in Israel reveals what holds the country together.

October 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. “My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,” she writes in her request to the attorney general, “and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.” It’s been twenty-nine years since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, Cristina embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is the account — and the outcome — of that quest.

A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. Can we love the work of controversial classic and contemporary artists but dislike the artist?

Barbra Streisand is by any account a living legend, a woman who in a career spanning six decades has excelled in every area of entertainment. No entertainer’s memoir has been more anticipated than Barbra Streisand’s, and this engrossing and delightful book will be eagerly welcomed by her millions of fans.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe — the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind — and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world.

A “journalistic masterpiece” (The New Yorker) about a nation careening into violent autocracy — told through harrowing stories of the Philippines’ state-sanctioned killings of its citizens — from a reporter of international renown.

A “rich hybrid of memoir and history” (The New Yorker) of the literary art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by one of its influential practitioners, an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion.

From the award-winning author comes the gripping tale of one of the most scandalous murderers in modern Irish history, at once a propulsive work of true crime and an act of literary subversion.

As the living memory of the Second World War fades, Time’s Echo proposes new ways of listening to history, and learning to hear between its notes the resonances of what another era has written, heard, dreamed, hoped, and mourned. A lyrical narrative full of insight and compassion, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the renewed promise of art for our lives today.

The shocking inside story of the struggle for power and control at Paramount Global, the multibillion-dollar entertainment empire controlled by the Redstone family, and the dysfunction, misconduct, and deceit that threatened the future of the company, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who first broke the news.

Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity, no books to read. Yet despite this — or, in her words, because of it — Simmons would become the first Black president of an Ivy League university. The former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M, Texas’s oldest HBCU, Simmons has inspired generations of students as she herself made history.

From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil’s friends disappeared. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China’s establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is a harrowing tale of a family’s escape from genocide, a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.

From the author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way, a brilliant scientific investigation into owls — the most elusive of birds — and why they exert such a hold on human imagination.

This is the story of the marriage behind some of the most famous literary works of the 20th century — and a probing consideration of what it means to be a wife and a writer in the modern world.