Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important

Summary

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 journal...