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By Leviathan Bookstore

t's always silly to state definitively what the "best" books of the year are, so I'm simply calling this a list of favorites. As long as you know this is secretly the best list of the best non-fiction of 2024. The books below appear in order of their publication date, from oldest to most recent.

bookcover for There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

Hanif Abdurraqib 

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Hardback

$32.00

$29.76

Hanif Abdurraqib's social commentary/autobiography/sports book for people who couldn't care less about sports has been universally praised for reasons that will be apparent as soon as you start reading it. Since I'm only one small voice in the chorus, I'm going to let my bookselling buddy Gary take the lead: “Using basketball as a vehicle for reflection on history and personal memoir, There’s Always This Year is a triumph of contemplative, emotionally-rich writing that will have you wiping tears and on the edge of your seat.”

bookcover for Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders

Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal 

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Hardback

$29.00

$26.97

One of my favorite sections in any bookstore, including my own, is the one that includes intelligent writing that follows the flow of an author’s mind at work. The essay section, in other words. A good essay feels satisfactorily finished, but also makes its readers feel like they were present while it was being conceived, composed, and completed. Such was the sensation I got from this collection of inspired thoughts about the collision of reality and fantasy, culture and colonialism.

bookcover for Mound City: The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis

Mound City: The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis

Patricia Cleary 

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Hardback

$44.95

$41.80

The St. Louis of today is quick to talk about its past, waxing nostalgic about the World’s Fair and Route 66 at the drop of a hat, and it’ll brave a charge into thornier historical territory almost as easily. The one topic it seems hesitant to address is its relationship to its indigenous heritage, which is almost never treated with the significance it deserves. Thankfully, Patricia Cleary’s new volume definitively redresses that problem. Mound City is a marvelous survey covering broad swaths of pre-Columbian culture, colonialism, and conflict, but it’s also replete with fascinating and nuanced stories of accommodation and resistance that continue into the present. I was especially taken with her examination of the strange early 20th-century phase during which the city was infatuated with and even boastful of its native roots, albeit in a highly romanticized and racist fashion. This is an exemplary book that deserves to be a perennial local bestseller.

bookcover for Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life

Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life

Sofia Samatar 

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Paperback

$15.95

$14.83

Samatar writes with a poet's ear and a philosopher's mind about the inadequacy and necessity of her vocation. Opacities is an academic notebook, a series of desperate telegrams, an assemblage of shattered fragments that glitters in the dark as though seen through a nocturnal kaleidoscope.

bookcover for The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

Roland Allen 

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Paperback

$19.95

$18.54

The process of jotting down an idea seems as intrinsic to human nature as . . . well, having ideas at all. But the notebook is a relatively recent development that in many ways enabled us to live the way we do. Roland Allen has given serious thought to a humble subject and restored the notebook to its rightful place beside the wheel, the lever, and all those other profoundly simple machines that we couldn't possibly do without. I’ll be recommending his book as a perfect gift not only for writers and readers, but also engineers, accountants, scientists, scholars, attorneys, doctors (with good handwriting), and almost everyone else.

bookcover for A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

Christopher Brown 

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Hardback

$30.00

$27.90

The time of the great naturalist explorer has long since passed, vanished with the wilderness itself, but we do have Christopher Brown, a pioneer of our new frontier, a John Muir for the urban edgelands. Between the cracks of a badly aging capitalist system, he finds stubbornly resistant flora and fauna; beneath the paving stones, the beach.

bookcover for The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

Wright Thompson 

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Hardback

$35.00

$32.55

The brutal lynching of Emmett Till was both a family tragedy and a monumental historical act that catalyzed the modern civil rights movement. Many Americans, though, have been unable to see what really happened, blinded either by horror or denial. Wright Thompson thoroughly dispels the shameful cloud that has obscured the truth of the murder and looks steadily into its incendiary flame, and in doing so has written a testament for the ages. The Barn is an incalculably important book, written with love, pain, and hope.

bookcover for The Flitting: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Butterflies

The Flitting: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Butterflies

Ben Masters 

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Paperback

$18.95

$17.62

My dilemma: After reading this, I don't want to read anything that isn't like it, I only want to read unforgettable books about family and nature and tradition and change and other unforgettable books, and most of all, deep love for all those things and how, in the stark face of mortality, that isn't ever enough but it has to be because that's all we have. There aren't any other books like that, though, or very few, but there's this one, and it's enough.

bookcover for Notes from an Island

Notes from an Island

Tove Jansson, 

Alexander Chee 

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Hardback

$28.00

$26.04

When you run a bookstore long enough, a small handful of authors become more than favorites. I think of them as patron saints, always there to turn to in times of readerly need. One of those for me is Tove Jansson, whose Moomin stories shaped my childhood and whose adult fiction became even more important to me decades later. The locus of her creative energy was a cabin she built with her painter partner on a remote Finnish island, and through this chronicle she made of her time there, I’ve come to love the place nearly as much as she did. Jansson’s relationships, with art, with nature, with solitude, with her beloved Tooti, are all expressed simply and perfectly in her Notes. It’s a book I feel in my marrow when I read.

bookcover for The Philosophy of Translation

The Philosophy of Translation

Damion Searls 

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Hardback

$28.00

$26.04

99.9% of the time, it’s the author’s name on a book that sells it to me. The edge case is seeing this particular translator’s name on the cover. Damion Searls has brought more than sixty books into English from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, and I’ve come to understand that his involvement in a literary project is an absolute guarantee of quality. His profound and sensible thoughts on the process of translation, as much a creative act as a transformative one, are a revelation.