THE WRITTEN WORD
New Journalism & Literary Nonfiction
12 books
Reporting written with the tools of fiction — scene, character, voice — by the people who proved journalism could be art. Wolfe, Mailer, and Talese built the New Journalism; Kapuściński did it from the collapsing courts of dictators; Boo and Conover embedded until the reporting became the story. Keefe's Say Nothing and Junger's WAR are the modern proof the form is still alive. Agee and Evans's Depression book is the strange, towering ancestor of all of it. This is nonfiction that reads better than most novels. Start with Say Nothing, then The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for where the style was born.
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Say Nothing
Patrick Radden Keefe
In December 1972, Jean McConville — a widowed mother of ten — was dragged from her Belfast flat by masked strangers and never came home. She had been abducted by the IRA, suspected of being an informer. Keefe uses her disappearance as the thread through the full history of the Troubles: Dolours Price, the hunger strikes, Gerry Adams, and the peace process that required everyone to agree to forget what they knew. The best book ever written about the Troubles, and one of the great works of narrative non-fiction of the last decade. The AoM reader who thinks the Troubles were a distant British problem will finish this book understanding it was something far more intimate, far more local, and far less resolved than the history books suggest.
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WAR
Sebastian Junger
Although the war in Afghanistan has been going on for more than a decade, soldiers and cultural pundits alike have often noted how completely removed the vast majority of the American public is from that reality. Journalist Sebastian Junger closes that gap a little by transporting us to a hooch in the Korengal Valley where he spent five months living, sleeping, and coming under fire with the US 2nd Battalion. Junger offers a vivid, page-turning portrait of what it’s like to be in combat, the powerful bond between men who experience it together, the nature of the love and courage born from battle, and why despite its danger and hardships, men are drawn to it again and again. The book is a must-read, however, not simply because of its penetrating observations on war, but for its insight into the very nature of manhood and honor –- stripped to its most basic core.
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Friday Night Lights
H.G. Bissinger
Bissinger spent a year in Odessa, Texas following the Permian Panthers through their 1988 season — and the result is the most complete account of what high school football means in America available. Around 357 pages covering the specific economics of a town that exists around an oil field and a football team, the specific racial fault lines of West Texas in 1988, and the specific weight placed on seventeen-year-old boys who carry an entire community's identity on their shoulder pads every Friday night. The americana entry and the uncomfortable entry simultaneously — Bissinger is reporting from inside something he finds both moving and troubling and the tension never resolves, which is why the book holds up thirty years later.
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Among the Thugs
Bill Buford
Buford was an American literary editor living in England who spent eight years embedded with English football hooligan firms — organizations that treated match days as scheduled violence — and the result is one of the great pieces of immersive journalism in print. The violence is not cartoon thuggery but something more unsettling: the specific altered state that large crowds produce, the way ordinary men become capable of extraordinary brutality in numbers, and the genuine attraction of that state for men whose lives offer nothing comparable. Buford is honest about his own fascination throughout, which is what separates this from simple horror documentation. Under 300 pages, reads like a thriller, and is one of the more useful books on mob psychology available regardless of what sport surrounds it. Cross-seeds with the Essays & Longform Journalism list.
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe
Travel can open your mind and often feel like you’re looking through a kaleidoscope. Travelers seeking mind-altering excursions need to trip out on Tom Wolfe’s nonfiction epic, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test . Jump on this psychedelic American road trip with novelist Ken Kesey. You’ll be sharing a bus with LSD-loving hippies and traveling through Americana and back in time to ’60s counterculture. Pack some extra body wipes because there are no showers aboard this rowdy buggy. Buy at Amazon
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The Armies of the Night
Norman Mailer
On October 21, 1967, Norman Mailer marched on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, was arrested, and spent a night in jail. He then wrote a book narrating himself in the third person — "the Participant," "the Novelist," "the Beast" — that won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award simultaneously. The primary source entry on this list and its most formally radical American work: Mailer's argument is that the standard journalist's claim to objectivity is itself a form of dishonesty, and that narrating your own consciousness during a historical event is more truthful than pretending you weren't there. Cross-references to the Cold War and Essays & Longform lists. The reader who finishes it will understand why the New Journalism was a genuine literary movement and not a style affectation.
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee & Walker Evans
In the summer of 1936, Agee and Evans were commissioned by Fortune magazine to document the lives of Alabama sharecroppers during the Depression. Fortune rejected what they produced. Agee had refused to write journalism: what he submitted was 400 pages of lyrical reconstruction — meals, furniture, the texture of cotton sacks, the sound of a family sleeping — interspersed with Evans's photographs and Agee's own furious disclaimers about the ethics of watching people too poor to refuse observation. No genre contains this book. It was ignored on publication in 1941 and rediscovered in the 1960s as the founding document of literary nonfiction. The most formally demanding entry on this list and the one most likely to permanently change what the reader thinks journalism is allowed to do.
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Shah of Shahs
Ryszard Kapuściński
Kapuściński was in Tehran when the Shah fell in 1979, and instead of writing a conventional account of the revolution he assembled one from fragments: photographs in a hotel room, conversations with survivors, memories, documents. The result is a meditation on how revolutions begin — not the political analysis but the moment when enough people simultaneously decide that fear is no longer sufficient reason to comply — structured as a series of linked fragments rather than a narrative. Under 200 pages and formally unlike anything else on this list. Kapuściński appears twice; the books share an author and nothing else. The Emperor is the entry point to his work; this is the specific historical application of the method he spent a career developing. Cross-references to the Middle East and Islam History and Political History & Power lists.
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Katherine Boo
Boo spent three years in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum built on reclaimed land beside the international airport, following the families who survived by sorting garbage for recycling. Then one of them was accused of setting a neighbor on fire. Boo documented the case through the police investigation, the courts, and the years of legal proceedings that followed, and what she built is simultaneously a portrait of extreme poverty and a study of how institutions function when the people inside them are poor enough to be invisible. Pulitzer Prize, 2012. The international entry on this list that happens to be reported by an American. Nothing here was observed from a distance — every scene was witnessed, every conversation documented. Cross-references to the South Asian History and World History lists.
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The Emperor
Ryszard Kapuściński
After the Ethiopian revolution of 1974 deposed Haile Selassie, Kapuściński tracked down the surviving members of the imperial court and interviewed them about what life in the palace had actually been like. What they described — the minister whose job was to wipe the emperor's shoes after a dog urinated on them, the elaborate rituals by which information was filtered and suppressed before reaching the throne — is simultaneously a precise account of a specific African monarchy and an allegory for every authoritarian system that has ever protected its leader from reality. Under 175 pages. The short entry on this list and the entry point to Kapuściński, who covered twenty-seven revolutions for the Polish press and wrote about all of them with the eye of a novelist. Cross-references to the African History and Political History & Power lists.
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Honor Thy Father
Gay Talese
Talese spent six years inside the Bonanno crime family — not as an observer but as a presence so familiar that Bill Bonanno talked to him the way men talk to people they trust — and produced the definitive account of how the American Mafia actually operated as a family and a business. The structure follows Bonanno through a period of internal mob warfare, federal prosecutions, and the slow collapse of everything his father built, and what emerges is less a crime book than a tragedy about inheritance and obligation. Better reported than any mob biography and more honest about the texture of that world than any mob fiction. The deep dive into the criminal subculture half of this list. Cross-references to the Outlaws & Rogues Bios list.
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Newjack
Ted Conover
Conover applied to be a New York State corrections officer, was hired, and spent a year working as a guard at Sing Sing before writing this. The access available to a journalist carrying a badge and working the tiers is categorically different from what any prison visitor or embedded reporter can obtain, and Conover used it to document the daily texture of American incarceration from the inside of the institution — the inmate economy, the guard culture, the specific violence of confined proximity — with a precision that advocacy journalism rarely achieves. The uncomfortable entry on this list: the portrait of what the prison system requires from the people running it is as disturbing as the portrait of the people inside it. Cross-references to the True Crime list.