HUMANKIND by Rutger Bregman was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. The award, established in 2012, recognizes the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year and serve as a guide to help adults select quality reading material. “This was unquestionably a challenging year for all the obvious reasons,” said 2021 Selection Committee Chair Bill Kelly in an October 26 statement. “And yet, in the end, reading proved to be just the balm one needs to sustain us, to give hope and strength and resilience in the face of an oppressively uncertain future. In that sense, 2020 was a great year to be a reader of outstanding books, and the Carnegie committee sincerely hopes that others will find the same power we did in the books on this year’s longlist.” The shortlist will be released November 17, 2020, with winners being announced on February 4, 2021. Little, Brown and Company published the book on June 2, 2020.

Historian Audrey Clare Farley’s biography of Ann Cooper Hewitt, THE UNFIT HEIRESS, has received two stunning bits of praise. #1 New York Times bestselling author Susannah Calahan calls the book “a sensational story told with nuance and humanity with clear reverberations to the presentt” and “a necessary call to remember the high stakes and terrible history of the longstanding fight for control over women's bodies.” Meanwhile, New York Times bestselling author Luke Dittrich raves: “Audrey Clare Farley has accomplished the rare feat of writing a book that is as thought-provoking as it is page-turning.” Grand Central Publishing will publish the book on April 20, 2021.

Less than a week out from publication, the New York Times published a stunning feature on Becky Cooper’s WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE, detailing Cooper’s decade-long research into the death of Harvard grad student Jane Britton and the college’s role in her murder investigation. Critic Emily Eakin calls the book “a true-crime procedural and a record of its author’s all-consuming obsession,” noting that “is also, more unusually, a young woman’s reckoning with an institution whose mythic reputation belies unsavory secrets.” The book has also been named a best book of November by Shondaland, Amazon Books, Town & Country, the Washington Post, and countless other outlets. Grand Central Publishing will publish the book on November 10, 2020.

The revised edition of Kiese Laymon’s HOW TO SLOWLY KILL YOURSELF AND OTHERS IN AMERICA is one of the most anticipated releases of November, appearing on must-read lists in Book Riot, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and the Millions. The Atlanta Journal Constitution writes that the essay collection “reflects the current moment…[and] in so doing it also reflects the bitter past.” Meanwhile, while a starred review from Library Journal calls the book “[a] profound work…moving and meditative, this reckoning on Blackness, manhood, and self adds to Laymon's legacy as an influential writer." Scribner will publish the book on November 10, 2020.

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s TIGHTROPE has been nominated for Best Nonfiction in the opening round of this year’s Goodreads Choice Awards. Knopf published the book on January 14, 2020.

THE IMMORTALITY KEY by Brian Muraresku was featured at the very top of Goop’s newsletter – which goes to millions – and on The Goop Podcast, where Elise Loehnen describes the book as "completely [captivating]." VICE published an interview with Muraresku, where they spoke with him about “THE IMMORTALITY KEY, the LSD rituals of Ancient Greece, and trippy wine.” Muraresku also appeared on Sirius XM with Jenny McCarthy, who calls Muraresku “the chosen one," and on Andrew Sullivan’s The Dischcast. St. Martin’s Press published THE IMMORTALITY KEY on September 29, 2020.

PERFECT TUNES by Emily Gould was named one of Refinery29’s best books of 2020. Kristin Iversen writes: “Gould's writing is warm, funny, and familiar, though there are moments that are so devastatingly observed that reading them sent sharp prickles of recognition up my skin…PERFECT TUNES feels like a love letter to all the women who have come to terms with the fact that the great adventure of their lives is not some static thing, but rather is something they'll have to work on and toward, in ways they'd never imagined.” Avid Reader Press published the book on April 14, 2020.

THE UNDYING by Anne Boyer was featured prominently in The New York Review. Nellie Hermann writes: “[Boyer’s] book may be classified as a memoir, but it is really a manifesto, declaring that the telling of a single story is in fact a lie, an act that elides the full sinister horror of the system of cancer. THE UNDYING is slippery and elusive in its very form, and you come away feeling that the book itself encapsulates the frustration with the inadequacies of our existing modes for tackling anything of this size. Though there is a quest here, Boyer’s seems to be not for meaning but instead for a narrative that reveals the chaos all of our narratives are a part of.” Farrar, Straus, & Giroux published THE UNDYING on September 17, 2019.

BookPage lauded THE MUTANT PROJECT by Eben Kirksey, writing: “THE MUTANT PROJECT might provoke and disturb as it raises unsettling questions about the nature of human life, technology and corporate and personal greed, but Kirksey’s entertaining and fascinating combination of detective story, medical history and ethics is a must-read.” St. Martin’s Press will publish the book on November 10, 2020.

HUSH by Dylan Farrow was positively featured in the LA Review of Books. Amy Zimmerman writes: “Billed as a ‘feminist fantasy,’ HUSH’s central themes of truth-telling, suppressed speech, and male propaganda all suggest a “#MeToo novel…Through fantasy world-building, Farrow gives internal struggles shape and slippery phenomena substance.” Wednesday Books published HUSH on October 6, 2020.

HELLO NUMBERS! WHAT CAN YOU DO? by Edmund Harriss and Houston Hughes was praised by Publishers Weekly as “[a]n appealingly energetic visualization of numbers and how they can be added, subtracted, and used to organize space…inviting children to keep counting as high as they can go.” The Experiment will publish the book on November 24, 2020.

In a starred review, Booklist calls CROSSING THE LINE by Kareem Rosser "a marvelous addition to the literature of inspirational sports stories. It's an occasionally heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting coming-of-age story…This stereotype-shattering memoir about a Black teenager from Philadelphia who became a polo champion will hook YA readers on many levels." St. Martin’s Press will publish the book on February 9, 2021.