The New Yorker's Favorite Nonfiction of 2024 So Far

Billie Holiday's life ended too early: in poor health, at age 44, having been framed for drug possession and cheated out of royalties by her estranged husband. Paul Alexander, who has written biographies of tragic figures like Sylvia Plath and James Dean, paints Holiday in a new light, not as powerless victim, but as as a once-in-a-generation talent with a remarkable career and fulfilling personal life, who overcame great personal hardship. Jazz fans will love this gracious portrait of a great American artist.

Founded in 1955 as an alternative daily paper for downtown New York, The Village Voice grew to national prominence for its sharp, ahead-of-its-time commentary on feminism and gay rights. Tricia Romano, who started as an intern and eventually became a nightlife columnist, interviewed former editors, writers, photographers, and downtown personalities for this book, full of dishy and illuminating anecdotes from the Voice's heyday.

Lucy Sante, longtime critic and author of classics like The Lures and Snares of Old New York, had a revelation while using a gender-swap Instagram filter: the woman she saw on the screen was her. So begins her memoir of transitioning to womanhood in her late 60s in a time of heightened discourse and attacks on trans rights. Sante takes readers through the highs and lows of her journey, from joyful shopping trips through more quotidien anxieties about aging and vanity. The Washington Post called I Heard Her Call My Name a "joy to read" and soon to become a "standard for those in need of guidance."

Is your favorite restaurant overrun by TikTokers? Does it feel like every coffee shop looks the same? Blame the algorithm. In his sophomore book, New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka explores all of the ways our culture has seemingly flattened in service of the algorithm. Elle Magazine calls it "the kind of book worth wrestling with, critiquing, and absorbing deeply."

Before there was Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, the telegenic power couple of the Instagram era, there was Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, whose romantic ups and downs were obsessively cataloged by the press and public. Roger Lewis, whose biography The Life and Death of Peter Sellers inspired the Palm d'Or-nominated film of the same name, approaches Burton and Taylor with a novelistic eye, resulting in a compulsively readable portrait of these entirely human yet larger-than-life figures of the Cold War era.

2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year That Everything Changed follows seven ordinary New Yorkers – among them a bar manager, a school principal, and a subway custodian – as they navigate an unprecedented year in an early epicenter of the pandemic. Although the book zooms out of New York to Wuhan, the labs racing to develop a vaccine, and to policymakers in London and Australia, its heart remains with its affecting, empathetic portraits of normal people navigating an entirely new world.

"Rabbit Heart is a powerful treatise on love and loss, on mothers and daughters, but it is also a warning to all of us who consume true crime. Reading about the afternoon Ervin ran across an image of Kathy Sue posted to a website called “Victims, Young, Beautiful — Murdered,” I found myself considering my own relationship to catastrophe-gazing," said the New York Times in their rave review.

Following five American families in suburbs across the country, Disillusioned tells the story of how race, wealth, and the American Dream collide in the suburbs. The Atlantic called the book "an astonishingly important work."

"Splinters narrates the author’s rigorous transformation from maiden to mother. Jamison recounts the birth of her daughter, the dissolution of her marriage, and the early days of single parenthood; the result is a cunningly written story about the sacred, sometimes tedious capacity of small children to ensnare time," praised the LA Review of Books of Jamison's "warts and all" memoir of new motherhood.