There’s something so satisfying about letting your imagination luxuriate in all angles of a topic. When times feel big and uncertain, focusing on the specific and knowable can be a comfort. From beautiful single-subject meditations to exhaustively detailed histories and accounts of fandom and obsession, these are some of the best nonfiction deep dives ever—plus one famously elaborate autobiographical novel—perfect for inspiring your next rabbit hole.
A mind-bending journey into the hidden world of fungi that will change your understanding of life on Earth....
Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people. Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up....
The seminal rap group A Tribe Called Quest brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces. This narrative follows Tribe from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues....
My Struggle
Book 1: My Struggle
Books in Series: My Struggle (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, Book 4, Book 5, Book 6)
This autobiographical series made massive literary waves with its brutally candid depictions of events based on the author's life. Across six books, My Struggle depicts scenes from Knausgaard's life, from a childhood in an unsteady home where he found comfort in music to his present literary ambitions, culminating with his struggle to be a decent and caring father. Written with pathos and narrated with a matching level of carefully paced focus, this is a heady series that makes for thoroughly engaging listening.
Part H Is for Hawk, part The Soul of an Octopus, The Book of Eels is both a meditation on the world’s most elusive fish - the eel - and a reflection on the human condition....
Here is David Foster Wallace's extraordinary writing on tennis, collected for the first time in an exclusive digital-original edition....
First published in 1621, and hardly ever out of print since, it is a huge, varied, idiosyncratic, entertaining and learned survey of the experience of melancholy, seen from just about every possible angle that could be imagined....
Since 2009, when it first published, to today, Bluets has drawn scores of readers and listeners with its surprising insights into the emotional depths that make us most human - via 240 short pieces, at once lyrical and philosophical, on the color blue....
From award-winning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions....
The nation's greatest voice, David Attenborough, reads J. A. Baker's extraordinary classic of British nature writing, The Peregrine....
In the picturesque village of Guzmán, Spain, in a cave dug into a hillside on the edge of town, an ancient door leads to a cramped limestone chamber known as "the telling room"....
In the insightful How Music Works, David Byrne offers his unique perspective on music....
In December 2017 the famous porn star August Ames committed suicide in a park in the Conejo Valley. It happened a day after she’d been the victim of a pile-on, via Twitter, by fellow porn professionals - punishment for her tweeting something deemed homophobic....
Kill ’Em and Leave is more than a book about James Brown. Brown embodied the contradictions of American life: He was an unsettling symbol of the tensions between North and South, black and white, rich and poor....
In this masterpiece of nature writing, beautifully narrated by Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland....
Humans, unlike other animals that are drawn to water, are not natural-born swimmers. We must be taught. Our evolutionary ancestors learned for survival; now in the 21st century, we swim in freezing Arctic waters and piranha-infested rivers to test our limits....
Michael Pollan, known for his best-selling nonfiction audio, including The Omnivores Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, conceived and wrote Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World as an Audible Original....
