Category Archives: Non-Fiction

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi 

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colours to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Misogyny
  • Queermisia
  • Cancer

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay

In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of colour (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through the culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Queermisia
  • Ableism & ableist slurs
  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Classism
  • Misogyny & sexism discussed (theme)
  • Hate crimes
  • Rape culture discussed
  • Abortion mentioned
  • Eating disorders mentioned
  • Murder mentioned
  • Terrorism mentioned
  • Police brutality mentioned

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Homomisia
  • Death from HIV/AIDS
  • Fire & arson

My Daddy is a Hero: How Chris Watts Went from Family Man to Family Killer by Lena Derhally

My Daddy is a Hero: How Chris Watts Went from Family Man to Family Killer by Lena Derhally

My Daddy is a Hero: How Chris Watts Went from Family Man to Family Killer by Lena Derhally

Chris Watts was a family man. Everybody, including his family, believed that. Yet, on August 13, 2018, he murdered Shanann, his pregnant wife, and two young daughters, burying Shanann and their unborn son in a shallow grave and dumping their daughters’ bodies in separate oil tanks.

As terrible as his story is, it is also a warning because, to this day, living behind bars, Watts is still acting out the character traits that made him kill in the first place.

In this, the first and only psychological exploration of the Watts family murders, psychotherapist Lena Derhally has pieced together the crime, the events leading to it, and most of all, her beliefs about the “why,” including the fact that Chris Watts—now a self-described “man of God”—is not in the least remorseful about killing his family.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic violence resulting in death
  • Murder
  • Death of a child

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford’s campus. Her victim impact statement was posted on BuzzFeed, where it instantly went viral–viewed by eleven million people within four days, it was translated globally and read on the floor of Congress; it inspired changes in California law and the recall of the judge in the case. Thousands wrote to say that she had given them the courage to share their own experiences of assault for the first time.

Now she reclaims her identity to tell her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Rape
  • Sexual assault
  • Medical examination
  • Trauma (theme)
  • Gun violence

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Addiction
  • Alcoholism
  • Abortion
  • Cancer
  • Death of a parent
  • Depiction of grief

The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward

The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward

with contributions from Kima Jones, Garnette Cadogan, Claudia Rankine, Emily Raboteau, Mitchell S. Jackson, Natasha Trethewey, Daniel José Older, Edwidge Danticat, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Wendy S. Walters, Isabel Wilkerson, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Carol Anderson, Kevin Young, Kiese Laymon, and Clint Smith.

National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin’s 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.

In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwin’s 1962 “Letter to My Nephew,” which was later published in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time. Addressing his fifteen-year-old namesake on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Enslavement
  • Police brutality
  • Lynching
  • Terrorism
  • Refugee camps
  • Hurricane Katrina

Lost It by Kristen Tracy

Lost It by Kristen Tracy

Tess Whistle is a high school junior with ridiculous problems. Her best friend is plotting the annihilation of a neighbourhood poodle. Her parents are newly-born-again Christians who just moved to a survivalist Outward Bound–type camp in Utah. And Tess is about to lose her virginity—under a canoe—to her serious boyfriend, Ben Easter.

Luckily, none of these dramatic turns spells catastrophe. Because Tess Whistle is a high school junior who is about to discover that, ridiculous as her life may seem, she is finding out exactly who it is she wants to be.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Alcohol consumption
  • Bombing
  • Car accident
  • Animal death

Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister

Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister

In the year 2018, it seems as if women’s anger has suddenly erupted into the public conversation. But long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women’s March, and before the #MeToo movement, women’s anger was not only politically catalytic—but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates the long history of bitter resentment that has enshrouded women’s slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it comes from women as opposed to when it comes from men.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Misogyny (theme)
  • Emotional abuse & gaslighting

Finding Nevo by Nevo Zisin

Finding Nevo by Nevo Zisin

Meet Nevo: girl, boy, he, she, him, her, they, them, daughter, son, teacher, student, friend, gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender, homosexual, Jew, dyke, masculine, feminine, androgynous, queer. Nevo was not born in the wrong body. Nevo just wants everyone to catch up with all that Nevo is.

Personal, political and passionate, Finding Nevo is an autobiography about gender and everything that comes with it.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Homomisia
  • Transmisia
  • Bimisia
  • Sexism
  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Bullying