Next month offers an incredible selection of nonfiction, including work by David Treuer, Wendy S. Walters, Thomas Frank, and more.

David Treuer is a true triple threat as a writer: an accomplished novelist and celebrated memoirist, the book of his that captured the most national attention is something like a history, 2019’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee , which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Regardless of the form he’s working in, Treuer is, above all else, a master storyteller; and with The Savage Mind , we can now add epistolary treatise to the aforementioned list. Written as a letter to his three children (now in their late teens), the book begins with an incredible tale of reservation life that reads like a Denis Johson story, and shifts, with Treuer’s customary mix of history and memoir, into a wide-ranging exploration of the so-called American frontier, both its historical reality as a place of brutal violence and cruelty, and its dominance as a mythic imaginary suffusing every aspect of this country’s imperial project, foreign and domestic.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Thomas Frank has turned his old-fashioned American skeptic’s eye on the “move fast and break things” crowd. Long one of this country’s finest critics of the demography of power, Frank applies his well-earned erudition and acid wit to the endless post-war gallery of conmen and hucksters who’ve used “innovation” as cover for a quick-fix, cliche-ridden approach to progress that siphons wealth from the bottom to the top, and leaves most of us worse off than before.

Lawrence Wright is one of the great narrative journalists of our time so it is fitting—and important—that he now turns his attention to one of America’s most urgent moral issues: capital punishment. Writing about the unlikely relationship between a group of nuns and the women on death row at a prison in Gatesville, Texas (the former seeing to the spiritual and emotional needs of the latter) Wright, among other things, reveals the contradictions and injustices at the heart of the American legal system.

Dispatches From Rural America , Wendell Berry

This is an important primer of the wonderful work of Wendell Berry, who we lost last month at the age of 92. Berry, who is sometimes too narrowly typecast as “American pastoralist,” in the lineage of Thoreau and Emerson, has a down-to-earth (literally) grit and unflinching pragmatism that makes him an ideal critic of modernity. And lord knows the late capitalist moment of the last 50 years deserves all the criticism it receives (and then some).

Anxious and Hairy: The Evolution and Culture of Human Hair , Judy Wearing

You want a cultural history of body hair to have a sense of humor, and Judy Wearing’s exploration of the history, aesthetics, social hang-ups, and science of body hair understands the inherent funniness of her topic while also taking it seriously. Anxious and Hairy , at once personal and universal, is a gift to curious minds. Perfect for lovers of a nonfictional romp.