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The Big Freeze: 
A Reporter’s Personal Journey into the World of Egg Freezing and the Quest to Control Our Fertility

Natalie Lampert (Ballantine)

Journalist Lampert provides an enlightening exploration of the pros and cons of freezing one’s eggs, told through her efforts to decide whether to undergo the procedure herself. Combining sharp reporting on visiting clinics and conferences with smart commentary on how the procedure intersects with societal expectations of women, this is essential reading.

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Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holliday’s Last Year

Paul Alexander (Knopf)

Alexander uses the final year of Billie Holliday’s life as a narrative prism through which to deliver sharp insights into her struggles with addiction, her tortured relationships, and the uncanny performance style that transformed her suffering into art. Giving due to the tragedies that marked Holliday’s life without letting them subsume her legacy, it’s an evocative portrait of a singular artist.

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Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis

Ryann Liebenthal (Dey Street)

Decades of intractable political battles are brought to life in Liebenthal’s illuminating and outraging chronicle of the student debt crisis. Stretching from the 1944 GI Bill to President Biden’s thwarted attempts to cancel student debt, the piercing narrative reveals how higher education became out of reach for many Americans.

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Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

Madhumita Murgia (Holt)

In this eye-opening tour of the profound effects AI is already having on the global workforce—all of it uniformly miserable—Murgia paints an unsettling portrait of a dystopian new world order wherein workers must acclimate to being aimlessly directed by distant and inscrutable forces. (To picture the future, imagine an UberEats driver being dispatched to an out-of-business restaurant—forever.)

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Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry

Ryan Ruby (Seven Stories)

Reviving the archaic verse essay, Ruby proves a skilled tour guide of poetry’s history from ancient Greece through the rise of AI, exploring how form has adjusted to historical and technological developments. Though the unusual format might come across as a gimmick in lesser hands, Ruby’s assured execution makes it feel fresh and original, a perfect marriage of form and subject.

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The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power

Dana Mattioli (Little, Brown)

Crackerjack reporting drives this exceptional deep dive into Jeff Bezos’s corporate leviathan, drawing on internal documents and hundreds of interviews with Amazon personnel to illuminate the company’s merciless tactics for conquering an ever-growing range of industries. It’s the most comprehensive account yet of Amazon’s quest for retail dominance.

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The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without

John Oakes (Avid Reader)

This searching study weaves together science on what happens when the body goes without food, an exploration of fasting’s role in religion and protest, and Oakes’s personal account of forgoing food for a week. Taking an evenhanded tack that recognizes fasting’s benefits without minimizing its dangers, this will change how readers think about what it means to go without.

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Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See

Bianca Bosker (Viking)

Delving into the elite and sometimes opaque world of fine art, Bosker delivers both a riveting account of its eccentricities (collectors who treat artworks “like vital organs”; paintings of Martians with kale for skin) and a moving, perceptive commentary on what it means to observe and appreciate beauty.

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Ghosts of Crook County: An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land

Russell Cobb (Beacon)

Cobb dives down the rabbit hole of a turn-of-the-20th-century scam, bringing to light startling revelations about a scheme to steal oil-rich land from Native Americans that reached all the way to the White House—with Woodrow Wilson implicated—and has surprising legal implications for the control of a modern-day fortune in Oklahoma.

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Grief Is for People

Sloane Crosley (MCD)

In this potent, unforgettable memoir, Crosley illuminates unlikely links between the suicide of her best friend and the burglarizing of her West Village apartment. She paints her late friend, Vintage Books’ Russell Perreault, in unvarnished detail, delivering a searching meditation on loss and friendship that’s also laugh-out-loud funny.

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Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

Richard Beck (Crown)

To account for the rise of Donald Trump, Beck examines the War on Terror and its coarsening effect on American culture, arguing that, after 9/11, Americans became primed for fear, hate, and violence. The result is an urgent and inspired reexamination of the roots of America’s rightward turn.

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In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

Sebastian Junger (Simon & Schuster)

Junger’s near-death experience in 2020—triggered by the rupture of a long-dormant pancreatic aneurysm—serves as a jumping-off point for this stimulating meditation on the afterlife. Interweaving quantum physics with philosophical musings, Junger delivers insights that unsettle and enlighten. It’s an exhilarating exploration of what lies beyond.

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Into the Unknown: The Quest to Understand the Mysteries of the Cosmos

Kelsey Johnson (Basic)

Colliding universes, interdimensional particles, and the nature of time are among the mind-boggling mysteries contemplated in Johnson’s mesmerizing debut. Asking what caused the big bang and what determines the laws of nature, among other enigmas, Johnson introduces readers to heady cosmic questions they didn’t know to ask, proving the universe is far stranger than they imagined.

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The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

Zoë Schlanger (Harper)

This superlative debut will challenge what readers thought they knew about flora, drawing attention to shape-shifting vines, peas that can “hear,” and willow trees that warn their neighbors of nearby predators. The luminous prose finds revelation in the secret life of plants, and Schlanger’s winning combination of reporting and research announces her as a major new talent.

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Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

Carrie Courogen (St. Martin’s)

Cult favorite director Elaine May leaps off the page in journalist Courogen’s spirited biography. Tracing May’s ascent from her improv comedy days through her turbulent film career, Courogen portrays her as a force of nature, too sui generis for the Hollywood machine she fought from within. It’s a vivid tribute to an overlooked talent.

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Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church

Gareth Gore (Simon & Schuster)

This investigation into the alleged misdeeds of Catholic lay organization Opus Dei will leave readers wide-eyed and chilled to the bone. Having stumbled onto a cache of banking records that he says connects the group to shadowy dealings around the world, Gore paints an expansive, gruesome picture of abuse and money laundering, one that he asserts stretches back to the organization’s early-20th-century origins.

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Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown

Andreas Malm and Wim Carton (Verso)

Malm and Carton warn that the world has been seduced by the false promise of “overshoot”—the notion that blowing past carbon emissions goals is no big deal because technology will come along in the future to fix it. They marshal extensive evidence to prove that this strain of tech utopianism is a dangerous, unfounded belief promoted by oil companies. It’s a galvanizing wake-up call for a world grown complacent.

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Planes Flying over a Monster: Essays

Daniel Saldaña París, trans. from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman (Catapult)

Saldaña París travels from Mexico City to Montreal and beyond in these striking meditations on place, identity, and the warped truths that underlie the construction of the self. Prose that’s sometimes subtle and sometimes lands like a gut punch distinguishes this as one of the year’s standout essay collections.

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The Playbook: The Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War

James Shapiro (Penguin Press)

In this shrewd and witty account of the rise and fall of the Federal Theatre Project—the first New Deal program to be shut down for promoting “un-American activity”—Shapiro trains his eye on the overblown dramatics of the right-wing congressmen of the House Un-American Activities Committee as they go toe-to-toe with the program’s progressive dramatists.

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Question 7

Richard Flanagan (Knopf)

Booker winner Flanagan shatters memoir conventions with a strange, intoxicating tapestry that weaves narrative strands about his parents, Australian history, and the atomic bomb. At once elliptical and deeply moving, this unique book achieves something rare: it authentically communicates the tumbling patterns of human thought without indulgence or pretension.

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Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank

Justene Hill Edwards (Norton)

In this propulsive piece of financial sleuthing, Edwards sheds light on the collapse of the Freedman’s Bank, which stole millions of dollars from formerly enslaved people and transferred their wealth into the hands of crooked white trustees, most notably the family of industrialist Jay Cooke—and in its final act roped Frederick Douglass into serving as president, tarnishing his legacy. It makes for a revelatory new perspective on the forces behind Reconstruction’s failure.

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Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto

Kohei Saito, trans. from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom (Astra House)

Saito offers the best defense yet of degrowth. To stop climate change, he argues, society needs to challenge increasing demands on workers’ time. It’s a scintillating treatise that draws on a wide swath of political philosophy to engage earnestly with the idea of what it would mean to slow down.

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Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories

Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In this brilliant history of the opium trade, Ghosh portrays the present world as sunk into an amnesiac state. The massive wave of exports that flowed out of China in the 19th century as opium flowed in has been erased from the historical record, Ghosh argues, because descendants of the British aristocrats and Boston Brahmins who profited from the drug trade sought to keep their ancestors’ involvement secret.

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A Termination

Honor Moore (A Public Space)

With lyrical prose that masks simmering rage, poet Moore revisits her 1969 abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The account examines her feelings of fear and liberation when she decided, at 23, to terminate her pregnancy, and culminates in an artful battle cry against backsliding into the secrecy of previous generations.

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There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

After writing some of the finest music criticism of recent years, Abdurraqib proves his sports writing is just as incisive. With his trademark lyricism, he seamlessly weaves reflections on LeBron James, hometown high school basketball heroes, and his own relationship with the sport into a searching meditation on community and belonging.

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We’re Alone: Essays

Edwidge Danticat (Graywolf)

The poignant latest collection from Danticat centers her native Haiti, exploring its thriving arts scene, vulnerability to climate change, and resilience in the face of earthquakes and political unrest. Her clarity of purpose and lucid prose distill complex emotions and ideas into unforgettable turns of phrase that readers will carry with them for a long time to come.

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Whiskey Tender

Deborah Taffa (Harper)

Questions of assimilation and American mythology animate Taffa’s devastating memoir, which recounts her 1980s childhood as a “Native girl in a northwestern New Mexico town where cowboys still hated Indians.” Given little information about her heritage from her parents, Taffa was forced to piece together the story of her people on her own—a painful, edifying process that she recounts in visceral, haunting prose.

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