October's best-written recent releases in nonfiction II

Read the opening pages of our picks below

COMING SOON:

—Booker shortlistee and author of the best-written work on this year’s Ursula K. Le Guin Prize shortlist, Samantha Harvey has answered, brilliantly, our new set of questions on prose style. We’ll be publishing her responses on the 29th of October.

—Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes will be joining me on the 16th of November for a live video discussion of what we mean by the term ‘literary’. All of you are welcome to join us, and you can find more information here.

IN TODAY’S ISSUE

—‘How did pop music, which was once supposed to be exclusively about the shock of the new, come to have such a comfortable relationship with its past?’: our next pick from the recent releases in nonfiction. Our previous pick is here, along with the the full list of books considered.

—’Maybe something would happen that would indicate the arrival of a new historical epoch, a sign that we were living in an era of meaning and purpose that would be remembered for many decades to come’: and …