Fall Reading 2021 Nonfiction Recommendations

In his follow up to Mamaskatch, the memoir of his childhood, McLeod offers an intimate window into adulthood as a queer Cree man in Canada. We follow his career path from teaching to negotiating, working with the government towards First Nations rights and treaties, feeling his celebrations and frustrations. We are taken on his personal journey back to his Cree heritage, one forced from him by the systemic erasure and untying of his people. While there is trauma and loss, both personal and generational, there is also healing, generosity, and introspection – a balance that helps us all.

—Melinda

Qian Julie Wang’s memoir is transportive, immersive, her childhood rendered with such a natural hand that each particular pain and joy feels as intimate as one’s own memory. This acuity is strangely healing—Wang pulls no punches when recalling moments of shame—even as the remoteness of her position as an undocumented immigrant, isolated further from her peers by poverty, is a devastating revelation. Powerful, nuanced, and tender, Beautiful Country is essential reading.

—Chorel

Jan Grue unfolds some of the universals of human existence via the specifics of his own body and life in this lovely, powerful memoir. With graceful, poetic narrative translated by B.L. Crook, Grue maneuvers in and out of memories, global locations, meditations on right and wrong, quotations philosophic, filmic, and musical, and careful critique of our inaccessible world, ultimately towards a quiet fire of self-determination and joy. A book that will linger in the body, between breaths.  —Jocelyn

When Kat Chow was thirteen, her mother died of cancer, and she has been living with her ghost ever since. In this powerful memoir, Kat turns to her family’s stories and ephemera to find answers for what she had lost, what haunts her still. In doing so, she unearths and honors the complexity of her entire family, from her father who immigrated from China and dreamed in America, to his parents, to her own childhood and that of her older sisters, all affected by grief and loss and always undying love.

—Melinda

Dawn Turner, notable Chicago journalist, traces the memories of her childhood growing up in Bronzeville, a neighborhood founded with great hope during the Great Migration to ultimately decay under the weight of economic, social, and racial inequities. Turner delivers a powerful, introspective, and heartfelt account of the trajectory of young women who may have had each other but ultimately faced differing levels of support, opportunity, and redemption. —Casey

Only Maggie Nelson could knit together the lexicon of “freedom” with references from academics, writers, and activists in such alluring fashion. This piece is perennial while being timely with the recent adoption of the word “freedom” by authoritarian and right-wing ideologies. She guides the reader along the passageways of freedom and its negative (through paradoxically sometimes truer interpretation) “unfreedom,” through art, sex, drugs, and climate. —Celeste

“Modern medicine always reflects the colonial politics of its time.” I’m a certified health book freak, always scouring the shelves for authors presenting new, insightful information on the connection between our health and the societies we care for it in. Inflamed is all of that and more. Written in an accessible voice, anyone with a body needs to read this. —MJ

Most of us have heard America referred to as a “melting pot” or a “nation of immigrants.” While these self-congratulatory phrases paint a rosy picture of our past and present, they obscure or downright ignore some of the core tenets of this nation: white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalist exploitation of land and bodies. True to form, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s latest work combines incisive criticism with unmatched clarity to provide a comprehensive history of both immigrants and xenophobia in America.

—Travis 

The last couple years have been, quite honestly, a bit wackadoodle. Pandemic, social upheaval, the moldy tangerine finally being removed from the White House. In Never Say You Can’t Survive, Charlie Jane Anders has given us a how-to for survival—by writing stories. She is the pink-hair adorned mind that brought us All the Birds in the Sky, Victories Greater than Death, and The City in the Middle of the Night, as well as multiple short stories. Never Say You Can’t Survive is full of personal anecdotes and helpful ways to not only survive, but maybe even thrive in the crazy current times we’re in.

—Jae 

“Cheaply run prisons were a lot like cheaply run wars.” This book sheds light in the darkest corners in America—prison, Silicon Valley, slaughterhouses—revealing what people do when they have to. Unsurprisingly, insight drips onto every page because Dirty Work is unafraid to show cold, candid truths and a heavy hand of nastiness. The book is morally compromised but that’s no fault. It’s complex in that it presents the perspective of those that engage in these activities, and those that suffer. I recommend this for anyone who is interested in the shades of gray that hide in plain sight. —Morgan