Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever

When Politics & Prose hosted a “wake” last month for The Washington Post’s Book World, the rite of mourning was familiar. The closure of the section and the laying off of the paper’s books editors and critics were just the latest in a series of unkind cuts to serious books in this century. They follow the Trump administration’s gutting of the National Endowment for the Humanities (which supports authors), Barnes & Noble’s fire-sale acquisition of the cherished Denver bookshop the Tattered Cover, the demise of local papers that covered books, the shuttering of hundreds of independent bookstores, and the closure of the Borders chain in 2011. The latter two developments were brought about in part by the market dominance of Amazon—which began as an online bookseller and whose founder, in a grim irony, now owns the books-deprived Post.

Another recent cut has gotten less attention. In January, Simon & Schuster laid off several prominent editors of nonfiction books. Among them were two renowned editors who had breakthrough books early in their careers: Colin Harrison, of the Scribner imprint, who published Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead (an account of a Marine’s service during the Gulf War), and Eamon Dolan, who at Houghton Mifflin published Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (as bold a work of investigative reporting as ever ascended the bestseller lists). Recently at Simon & Schuster, Dolan published Mary L. Trump’s memoir Too Much and Never Enough (where she observed that the election of her uncle Donald turned “this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family”); Harrison published Mikhail Zygar’s The Dark Side of the Earth: Russia’s Short-Lived Victory Over Totalitarianism, about the ways Vladimir Putin has perpetuated the Cold War to his advantage.

The layoffs followed what New York Times publishing reporter Elizabeth A. Harris called a “difficult year” for nonfiction—a year in which only one of the 10 strongest-selling nonfiction books was a new book: the Kamala Harris campaign memoir 107 Days. “The decline in sales of new nonfiction might reflect a changing information ecosystem,” Elizabeth Harris observed. “People looking for information can now easily turn to chatbots, YouTube, podcasts and other free online sources.” Last December, The Guardian cited NielsenIQ figures indicating a one-year drop of 8.4 percent in nonfiction book sales (twice that of fiction) and quoted a writer who had “heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t ‘Hollywood friendly.’”

These developments suggest a rough future for a certain kind of writing: nonfiction that’s based on reportage more than on personal experience or celebrity—a.k.a. long fact, literary nonfiction, or narrative nonfiction. The form is as essential as it is hard to define. Nonfiction books of this kind are the basis for much of our understanding of the world we live in, and their impact extends far beyond bookstores, book review sections, libraries, and universities. They are a crucial bulwark against the surging public culture of “alternative facts,” outright lies, and the brazen embrace of ignorance.

Fretful narratives about the demise of books and the rise of devices have been in play for half a century or longer. “Our world of books, like most other worlds now, is the arena of an increasingly bitter struggle for space, and for the limited reading time that a busy citizen in this electronic age can afford,” John Updike lamented when accepting the American Book Award in 1982. Narrative nonfiction in particular has faced headwinds in mass culture before. And in many respects, the challenges it faces are built in. Long fact is hard to publish and always has been. Reportage and research take time, resources, attention, and fortitude. A book can require several years to write and another year and a half to be edited, checked, printed, and publicized—only to wind up coming out during a news cycle dominated by a sex scandal, school shooting, pandemic, or war. It was as true half a century ago as it is today that readers expect to pay for fiction but are used to getting nonfiction passively through the media. I know firsthand that even habitual readers often need a mix of factors—reviews, media hits, friends’ recommendations, eye-catching placement on the “new and recommended” table, all on top of long passion for a topic—to induce us to buy a particular nonfiction book.

So there’s little point in harking back to a golden age. And yet the decline in serious reading has accelerated in recent years: Forty percent of Americans did not read a single book in 2025. Sure, this is owing in part to the shift in public attention to other media, but the stories told in those other media are ultimately grounded in books, nonfiction in particular. Even as the buying and reading of books declines, then, we as a society depend on long fact to a remarkable degree—so much so that we take it for granted. The journalism we read, the newscasts we watch, the panels of expert commentary, the hard-hitting 60 Minutes reports: All are informed, and shaped, and buttressed from the ground up by long fact—nonfiction developed at length and with a narrative arc that sets it at an angle to the self and the present. So are plenty of movies (Killers of the Flower Moon), streaming series (Say Nothing), and stage productions—notably the breakout Broadway hit Hamilton, based on Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of the Founding Father. At Sunday’s Academy Awards, Hamnet was nominated for best adapted screenplay—adapted from the 2020 novel, whose author, Maggie O’Farrell, cites half a dozen works of narrative nonfiction in the book’s acknowledgments.

The challenges of narrative nonfiction are also its advantages. The authors of narrative nonfiction must play a long game, which often means, paradoxically, that they wind up anticipating current events. I saw this from a publisher’s point of view after Islamist terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a quarter-century ago. Eric Darton’s Divided We Stand, a cultural history of the World Trade Center born of his personal curiosity, had been published quietly in 1999; in September 2001, it seemed positively topical. Jason Elliot’s An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan had been turned down by the house I worked for and was published instead as a low-cost, low-risk “paperback original”; all at once journalists, TV news folks, and engaged citizens recognized it as an intrepid update on a place whose story is often told in centuries. That October, V.S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature—for his 20-volume body of work, certainly, but on the particular strength of Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, travelogues from 1981 and 1998 that registered the variety and internal fission of societies where surging Islamic fundamentalism was leaving its mark.

In the years that followed, there came Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars (a history of the CIA’s dealings in Pakistan and Afghanistan that preceded the attacks), Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (a narrative history of the run-up to the attacks), and Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (an account of the ways governments exaggerate social problems in order to apply excessive solutions). Right now, much of the reporting and commentary about the U.S. and Israel’s fresh war against Iran is rooted in the vast nonfiction narrative literature about the Middle East—books reported, researched, written, and published in the years after 9/11. In the past two weeks, amid war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, PBS, CNBC, the Financial Times, The Hill, Barron’s, Fortune, and a number of YouTube shows and podcasts have featured fresh interviews with Daniel Yergin, whose 912-page narrative work The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, about the emergence of the global oil market, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1999—and is still an essential work on the subject nearly three decades later.

Many of today’s popular new media forms—podcasts, Substacks, and social media feeds—rely for their techniques and their content on the old medium of long fact. The popular podcast Freakonomics Radio was derived from the host’s 2005 book. The pioneering Serial podcast used the techniques of narrative nonfiction writing in audio form—and emerged out of public radio’s This American Life, whose founder, Ira Glass, edited the 2007 anthology The New Kings of Nonfiction, which linked audio storytelling with literary storytelling of prior eras. Reams of streaming documentaries and fictional dramas that strive for verisimilitude (such as Succession and The Diplomat) are made by showrunners and screenwriters versed in narrative nonfiction. Shows from Morning Joe to Rachel Maddow present authors as experts alongside policymakers and elected officials, and Maddow is herself the author of four narrative nonfiction books. Opening the broadcast, she often relates an episode drawn from the history books—literally—and then pointedly joins it to the present.

Those figures generally present books that are recognizably “on topic.” That’s good and necessary. But through my own work as an author and teacher, I’ve been struck by the pertinence of nonfiction books that don’t deal directly with current affairs. These books develop narratives that at first glance are well outside the news cycle, but as you read them, you find they speak powerfully to the moment precisely because they don’t succumb to the presentism, partisanship, and winners-and-losers schemas too often regarded as inviolable norms of media today.

Truly, current events make more sense when narrative nonfiction books are there to offer a backstory. Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party? See Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley, about William F. Buckley, the paragon of American conservatism—who staked out proto-Trumpian positions on Israel, the United Nations, and the U.S. as a Christian nation, and whose program Firing Line took the culture wars to television. Similarly, Brooke Nevil’s Unspeakable Things is not about the Epstein files, but it goes deep into the networks through which powerful men commit sexual assault and make it seem normal, and Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc. (its title notwithstanding) is a bracing portrait of a power elite who consort with one another in a world unto itself of mansions, yachts, and private islands, styling themselves as beyond politics, law, and morality.

The rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani fits into the story told in Ross Perlin’s Language City, which reveals present-day New York (and Queens, especially) as a boomtown of linguistic diversity, stirred by immigration, where 40 percent of citizens are foreign-born and 700 languages are spoken. ICE’s crackdown on illegal immigrants in Chicago and Minneapolis has a forerunner in Chinese exclusion, which Michael Luo traces in Strangers in the Land, a chronicle of the federal government’s persecution of immigrants from China in the late nineteenth century.

America’s and Israel’s wars in the Middle East? Pankaj Mishra’s After Gaza, a short book long in the writing, presents regional wars as the inevitable outcome of half a century of policies that invoked an “existential threat” to Israel as a justification for a military buildup that now poses an existential threat to global peace. Artificial intelligence? Michael Pollan’s just-published A World Appears addresses the question at the core of the present tech revolution—what does it mean to propose that machines are “intelligent”?—by burrowing deep into current research into our everyday experience of intelligence, known as consciousness.

Now, I’m not saying each of us personally must read each of those books in order to understand those developments. But our broader cultural understanding depends on the context and insight they provide. This is why the thinning out of the nonfiction book culture is so distressing. Book reviews don’t just apprise customers of products they might want to buy; like the books themselves, they’re ways for us to encounter narratives and ideas we might not encounter otherwise. In a review of John Updike’s Hugging the Shore—a collection of over 800 pages of book-review essays—the novelist David Lodge pointed out that “most people’s knowledge of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, arguably the three most important thinkers of the modern era, is second- or third-hand. Hence the importance of the generalist reviewer, to monitor and disseminate information about the endless production of new ideas and artefacts, on behalf of the rest of us, who will never have the time, opportunity or will to encounter them all directly.”

In societies where freedom is under threat, an informed citizen is countercultural and deep reading is an act of resistance. Just as protest and vigilance are essential, so is the ability to read and think. In a would-be autocracy, the autocrat aims to subsume our society’s particular narratives into his master narrative—in which his name fills the headlines, his voice and image dominate the broadcasts, and his airbrushed visage appears on the facades of government. To read a book, however, is to enter a narrative that stands outside the politics-and-media maelstrom. In a would-be autocracy, even a small bookstore—with hundreds of books, classic, recent, and current—is a space of contrary narratives, where truth is recognized as both essential and complicated.