The Best Books to Elevate Your Reading List in 2020 by Esquire

Title: Golden Gates

With riveting block-by-block reporting, New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty parses the history and economic forces that underlie the crisis from its epicenter.

Author(s): Conor Dougherty

ISBN 13: 9780525560210
Pages: 288

Title: American Poison

In American Poison, the New York Times veteran shows how racial animus has stunted the development of nearly every institution crucial for a healthy society, including organized labor, public education, and the social safety net.

Author(s): Eduardo Porter

ISBN 13: 9780451494887
Pages: 272

Title: Had I Known

Now, Had I Known gathers the articles and excerpts from a long-ranging career that most highlight Ehrenreich's brilliance, social consciousness, and wry wit.

Author(s): Barbara Ehrenreich

ISBN 13: 9781455543670
Pages: 352

Title: This Is Big

The true story of a cross-generational, beyond-the-grave and beyond-the-scale friendship that led to the first breakthrough Marisa Meltzer ever had in her quest for self-improvement. Marisa Meltzer began her first diet at the age of 5.

Author(s): Marisa Meltzer

ISBN 13: 9780316414005
Pages: 304

Title: Notes from an Apocalypse

And what is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O'Connell ("wryly humorous, cogently insightful"--NPR) is possessed by these questions. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers.

Author(s): Mark OConnell

ISBN 13: 9780385543002
Pages: 272

Title: Lurking

Long one of the most incisive, ferociously intelligent, and widely respected cultural critics online, McNeil here establishes a singular vision of who we are now, tells the stories of how we became us, and helps us start to figure out what ...

Author(s): Joanne McNeil

ISBN 13: 9780374194338
Pages: 304

Title: Topics of Conversation

The novel is composed almost exclusively of conversations between women--the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves, about shame and love, infidelity and self-sabotage--and careens through twenty years in the ...

Author(s): Miranda Popkey

ISBN 13: 9780525656289
Pages: 224

This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Boys & Sex

Author(s): Peggy Orenstein

ISBN 13: 9780062666970
Pages: 304

Title: Cleanness

Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell’s beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared “an instant classic” by The New York Times Book Review.

Author(s): Garth Greenwell

ISBN 13: 9780374124588
Pages: 208

Title: Uncanny Valley

Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.

Author(s): Anna Wiener

ISBN 13: 9780374278014
Pages: 304

This book is in (3) other book lists, learn more.

Title: The Third Rainbow Girl

Using the past and the present, she shows how this mysterious act of violence has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and the stories they tell about themselves.

Author(s): Emma Copley Eisenberg

ISBN 13: 9780316449236
Pages: 336

Title: Weather

From the author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation--one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year--a shimmering tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a ...

Author(s): Jenny Offill

ISBN 13: 9780385351102
Pages: 224

This book is in (2) other book lists, learn more.

Title: In the Land of Men

Here is the untold story of an intellectual and artistic exchange that grew into a highly charged relationship, and Miller presents a candid portrait of the mercurial man behind the spotlight.

Author(s): Adrienne Miller

ISBN 13: 9780062682413
Pages: 336

Title: The Illness Lesson

"In Ashwell, Massachusetts, at the farm of Samuel Hood and his daughter, Caroline, a mysterious flock of red birds descends.

Author(s): Clare Beams

ISBN 13: 9780385544665
Pages: 288

Title: Minor Feelings

But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers .

Author(s): Cathy Park Hong

ISBN 13: 9781984820365
Pages: 224

Title: My Dark Vanessa

Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood.

Author(s): Kate Elizabeth Russell

ISBN 13: 9780062941503
Pages: 384

This book is in (3) other book lists, learn more.

Title: Enter the Aardvark

More than a ghost story, a love story, or even a political satire, Enter the Aardvark is a stunningly prescient exploration of the consequences for all of us when repressed male love meets oppressive male power.

Author(s): Jessica Anthony

ISBN 13: 9780316536158
Pages: 192

Title: Perfect Tunes

Now I want everyone I know to read this book and talk about it with me.” —ELIF BATUMAN Have you ever wondered what your mother was like before she became your mother, and what she gave up in order to have you?

Author(s): Emily Gould

ISBN 13: 9781501197499
Pages: 288