Year-End Lists

Electric Lit: Best Nonfiction of 2025

Top 5 Nonfiction Books of the Year

• Alligator Tears

  A Memoir in Essays
  Edgar Gomez
• The Dry Season

  A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
  Melissa Febos
• I Want to Burn This Place Down

  Essays
  Maris Kreizman
• Uncanny Valley Girls

  Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love
  Zefyr Lisowski
• The Hollow Half

  A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
  Sarah Aziza

Additional Favorite Nonfiction

• Aggregated Discontent

  Confessions of the Last Normal Woman
  Harron Walker
• Black in Blues

  How a Color Tells the Story of My People
  Imani Perry
• I'll Tell You When I'm Home

  A Memoir
  Hala Alyan
• A Truce That Is Not Peace
  Miriam Toews
• Clam Down

  A Metamorphosis
  Anelise Chen
• Goblin Mode

  A Speculative Memoir
  Caroline Hagood
• Nightshining

  A Memoir in Four Floods
  Jennifer Kabat
• Searches

  Selfhood in the Digital Age
  Vauhini Vara
• A Silent Treatment

  A Memoir
  Jeannie Vanasco
• Authority

  Essays
  Andrea Long Chu
• Human/Animal

  A Bestiary in Essays
  Amie Souza Reilly
• You Have a New Memory

  Essays
  Aiden Arata
• Deep House

  The Gayest Love Story Ever Told
  Jeremy Atherton Lin
• Gaza

  The Story of a Genocide
  Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro (editors)
• How to Be Unmothered

  A Trinidadian Memoir
  Camille U. Adams
• Things in Nature Merely Grow
  Yiyun Li
• Bibliophobia
  Sarah Chihaya
• So Many Stars

  An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color
  Caro De Robertis
• Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

  My Cemetery Journeys
  Mariana Enriquez
• The Wanderer's Curse

  A Memoir
  Jennifer Hope Choi