Lit Hub’s 50 Noteworthy Nonfiction Books of 2024
This past year was as dismaying as it was disorienting (as was the year prior, as will be the year to come). As we collectively drown in a daily deluge of disinformation it is to books that we turn for something like an anchor to truth—facts still matter, and reality is still there to be witnessed. The following 50 books are just some of the texts that helped Lit Hub editors better understand the world as it is, and, perhaps, where it might be headed.
The following list was assembled by Brittany K. Allen, Drew Broussard, Jonny Diamond, Emily Firetog, James Folta, Jessie Gaynor, and Molly Odintz.
The Rebel’s Clinic charts the life of Fanon, who left Martinique to fight for France in WW2, then found himself drawn into Existentialism in the postwar years. An examination of one of the pre-eminent writers and activists of the postcolonial period, The Rebel’s Clinic also serves as a primer for Fanon’s most famous works, Black Skin, White Masks, and The Wretched of the Earth. Essential reading in this forever moment of post-colonial violence.
This fresh take on a subject that is becoming overly familiar and hence, Stone argues, simplified and banal, shakes up our understanding of the Holocaust. Stone’s analysis of the sheer brutality of the Holocaust undermines the strangely comfortable image presented by the use of terms like “industrial” or “factory-line” murder which misrepresents the large number of Jews killed by face-face execution or by starvation as well as by sanitizing the horrors of killing factories like Auschwitz. Stone brilliantly shows the way the Nazis in particular and segments within European society enthusiastically embraced apocalyptic visions and violence, and how this has parallels with current responses to climate change, migration, pandemics and xenophobia.
