From the Libby Book Award finalists to Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations and book banning news, here’s the latest in the world of nonfiction books.
“Announcing the finalists for the 2025 Libby Book Awards”
Libby Announced the Finalist for the 2025 Book Awards, including many nonfiction books. In the nonfiction category, the finalists are:
- By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle
- There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib
- Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higgenbotham
- Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson
In the autobiography category, the finalists are:
- Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
- Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley
- Whiskey Tender: A Memoir by Deborah Jackson Taffa
- Another Word for Love: A Memoir by Carvell Wallace
- We Loved It All: A Memory of Life by Lydia Millet
There’s also a cookbook category and a business book category.
“Four More Books Banned Statewide in South Carolina Public Schools” and “Utah Has Banned Two More YA Books From All Public Schools”
As book bans keep sweeping through the United States, I’ve grown intensely grateful for Kelly Jensen’s coverage of book bans on Book Riot. In South Carolina, where I currently live, four more books have been banned. They had pulled 97 books from Beaufort County public schools in efforts to ban them last year. Not long before that, two more books were banned in all of Utah’s public schools.
2025 Edgar Allan Poe Award Nominations Announced
While most people are familiar with the Edgar Allan Poe Awards fiction categories, they also include The Best Fact Crime category. This year, their finalists are:
- Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers by Frank Figliuzzi
- The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson
- A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton by Deb Miller Landau
- The Amish Wife: Unraveling the Lies, Secrets, and Conspiracy that Let a Killer Go Free by Gregg Olsen
- Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery by Earl Swift
- The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age by Michael Wolraich.
You can listen to Katie McClain Horner and me discuss the entire shortlist over on the Read or Dead podcast.
You can find me over on my substack Winchester Ave, over on Instagram @kdwinchester, on TikTok @kendrawinchester, or on my podcast Read Appalachia. As always, feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]. For even MORE bookish content, you can find my articles over on Book Riot.
)
English (US) ·