flâneur

25 books to convince you about nonfiction - by Elle

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If fiction is the umbrella term in which all untrue, imaginative stories live, nonfiction acts as the same for the true ones. So why does it get a bad rap? I think, in part, it stems from the preconceptions about what nonfiction is and who reads it. Back when I worked in a bookstore, the nonfiction readers really boiled down to three categories: the older gentlemen reminiscent of my own grandfather who came in for dense history books for leisure and/or as bricks to build a house, the middle aged town mothers who came in to buy Prince Harry’s autobiography, and the young men who came in to scare me and buy things like Can’t Hurt Me or The 48 Laws of Power. All legitimate crowds, for sure, but they’re not capturing the breadth, insight, and diversity of nonfiction in the last five years, let alone nonfiction in the hundred years prior. Nonfiction writers are publishing with every ounce of creativity their fiction counterparts are, yet for every five fiction books that go viral or get lau

If fiction is the umbrella term in which all untrue, imaginative stories live, nonfiction acts as the same for the true ones. So why does it get a bad rap? I think, in part, it stems from the preconceptions about what nonfiction is and who reads it. Back when I worked in a bookstore, the nonfiction readers really boiled down to three categories: the older gentlemen reminiscent of my own grandfather who came in for dense history books for leisure and/or as bricks to build a house, the middle aged town mothers who came in to buy Prince Harry’s autobiography, and the young men who came in to…

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