Vivian Gornick's memoir Fierce Attachments (1987)

Walter Tevis's novel The Queen's Gambit (1983)

Lawrence Weschler's profile of an artist (or con artist), Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999)

J.M. Ledgard's novel Submergence (2011)

Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, edited by Leonard Marcus (1998)

Penelope Fitzgerald's novel Offshore (1979)

John M. Hull's memoir Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness (1990)

Edward P. Jones's collection of stories Lost in the City (1992)

Douglas Wolk's appreciation of James's Brown's album, Live at the Apollo, part of the 33 1/3 series (2004)

Heinrich von Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas (in the collection The Marquise of O— and Other Stories) (1810)

Jo Ann Beard's collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth (1999)

Simone Schwarz-Bart's novel The Bridge of Beyond (1972)

Mary McCarthy's memoir Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)

Geoffrey Household's thriller Rogue Male

Frederick and Steven Barthelme's memoir of gambling, writing, and family, Double Down

Janet Lewis's historical novel The Wife of Martin Guerre

Marshall Frady's political profile Wallace (1968)

Helen DeWitt's novel The Last Samurai (2000)

John McPhee's account of a 1968 U.S. Open tennis semifinal, Levels of the Game (1969)

James Weldon Johnson's novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)

Charlotte Gill's memoir of tree-planting in British Columbia, Eating Dirt (2011)

Ben Katchor's collection of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer comic strips, Cheap Novelties (1991)

W. Stanley Moss's memoir of the kidnapping of a Nazi general in World War II, Ill Met by Moonlight (1950)

Elizabeth Harrower's novel The Watch Tower (1966)

Rinker Buck's memoir of his teenage flight across the United States, Flight of Passage (1997)

Kathleen Collins's book of stories, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (2016)

Teffi's memoir of traveling through Russia during the Revolution, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (1931)

Josephine Tey's mid-century mystery, Brat Farrar (1949)

John Berger and Jean Mohr's illustrated profile of an English country doctor, A Fortunate Man (1967)

Yasushi Inoue's short novel, Bullfight (1949)

Kao Kalia Yang's memoir of her family in Laos, Thailand, and the United States, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (2008)

Tom Drury's novel The End of Vandalism (1994)

Sidney Lumet's filmmaking memoir, Making Movies (1995)

Angela Carter's show-business novel, Wise Children (1991)

Mary Austin's nature vignettes from the California desert, The Land of Little Rain (1903)

Georges Simenon's crime novel The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (1938)

Thomas Geoghegan’s memoir of his life as a labor lawyer, Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back (1991)

Joan London’s novel Gilgamesh (2001)

David W. Maurer’s guide to the lore and lingo of the underworld, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man (1940)

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic (1972)

Natalia Ginzburg’s book of essays, The Little Virtues (1962)

Seth Kantner’s novel Ordinary Wolves (2004)

Hector Abad’s memoir of his father, Oblivion (2006)

Madeleine St. John’s novel The Women in Black (1993)

Iris Origo’s War in the Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944 (1947)

Toni Cade Bambara’s book of short stories Gorilla, My Love (1972)

Marion Winik’s collection of elegies, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (2008)

Charles Portis’s novel The Dog of the South (1979)

Sooyong Park’s nature memoir, The Great Soul of Siberia: In Search of the Elusive Siberian Tiger

Norah Lofts’s historical novel The Town House

Hettie Jones’s memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones

Patrick Hamilton’s novel The Slaves of Solitude

Brian Fagan’s environmental history, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1650

Molly Gloss’s novella, Outside the Gates

Charles Sprawson memoir and cultural history of swimming, Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero

Charles W. Chestnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition

Jamaica Kincaid’s collection of New Yorker “Talk of the Town” vignettes, Talk Stories

Tim Krabbé’s cycling novel, The Rider

Kate Summerscale’s Victorian true-crime history, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

Carolyn See’s novel Golden Days

Rick Bass’s geologist’s memoir, Oil Notes

Lore Segal’s novel Her First American

Frances Faviell’s memoir of the London Blitz, A Chelsea Concerto

Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian

Nan Shepherd’s nature memoir, The Living Mountain

Andrew Holleran’s novel Grief

C.L.R. James’s history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins

China Miéville’s novel The City & the City

Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir Childhood

Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights

Kenneth Brower’s profile of Freeman and George Dyson, The Starship and the Canoe

Tarjei Vesaas’s novel The Ice Palace

Bill Barich’s racetrack memoir, Laughing in the Hills

William Melvin Kelley’s novel of sudden Black migration from the South, A Different Drummer

Aminatta Forna’s memoir of her childhood in Sierra Leone and Scotland, The Devil That Danced on the Water

Rosamond Lehmann’s novel of youthful love and friendship, Dusty Answer

Roy Andries De Groot’s book of travel and recipes, The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth

Rita Dove’s poetic imagining of the lives of her parents, Thomas and Beulah

N. Scott Momaday’s ancestral and personal memoir, The Names

David Adams Richards’s novel of family in small-town New Brunswick, Nights Below Station Street

Marina Jarre’s memoir of an outsider’s life in Latvia and Italy, Distant Fathers

R.C. Sherriff’s novel of a family seaside vacation, The Fortnight in September

Sanora Babb’s memoir of growing up in eastern Colorado, An Owl on Every Post

Maryse Condé’s fictional reimagining of a lost figure from the witch trials, I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem

Moss Hart’s Broadway memoir, Act One

Flann O’Brien’s novel of bicycles and strange dimensions, The Third Policeman

Ella K. Maillart’s memoir of traveling by car from Switzerland to Afghanistan, The Cruel Way

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s memoir of traveling by car from Switzerland to Afghanistan, All the Roads Are Open

Kay Dick’s dystopian novel, They

Norman Levine’s memoir of travelling across Canada, Canada Made Me

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel of the Indian forest, Aranyak

Pauli Murray’s family history, Proud Shoes

Winifred Holtby’s social novel of a Yorkshire community, South Riding

Leila Guerriero’s profile of an Argentinian dancer, A Simple Story

Dorothy Baker’s jazz novel, Young Man with a Horn

William W. Warner’s appreciation of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and those who pursue it, Beautiful Swimmers

Michael Shou-Yung Shum’s novel of gambling and suburban Seattle, Queen of Spades

Gillian Rose’s memoir of love and death, Love’s Work

Harry Mulisch’s novel of World War II and its aftermath in the Netherlands, The Assault

Mike Royko’s biography of Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, Boss

A.R. Ammons’s long poem, Sphere: The Form of a Motion

Ellen Ullman’s memoir of software development, Close to the Machine

Colin MacInnes’s novel of teen culture in 1950s London, Absolute Beginners

John Langston Gwaltney's oral history of African Americans, Drylongso

Sanora Babb’s novel of small-town Kansas, The Lost Traveler

Diana Athill’s memoir of early love and artistic discovery, Instead of a Letter

Kim Thúy’s novel of a Vietnamese refugee in Canada, Ru

Rockwell Kent’s memoir of a sailing adventure to Greenland, N by E

Gwendolyn Brooks’s novel of a life in Chicago, Maud Martha

Edmund Gosse's memoir of his Victorian fundamentalist upbringing, Father and Son

Debra Magpie Earling's novel of the Flathead Indian Reservation in the 1940s, Perma Red

Christiane Ritter's memoir of a year spent on an Arctic island, A Woman in the Polar Night

George V. Higgins's crime novel of 1970s Boston, The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Leah Hager Cohen's book of reporting and memoir about a school for the deaf in New York City, Train Go Sorry

Keith Roberts’s alternative history of post-Elizabeth England, Pavane

Joe Hutto’s memoir of raising a brood of wild turkeys in the Florida panhandle, Illumination in the Flatwoods

Edith Wilson’s novel of a woman making a new life for herself in the British Columbia interior, Swamp Angel

Frederic Morton’s history of a deliriously pivotal year in the politics and culture of the late Habsburg Empire, A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889

Sybille Bedford’s autobiographical novel of a transient youth spent among irresponsible adults, Jigsaw

Mary Oppen’s memoir of a shared, independent life of art, adventure, and activism, Meaning a Life

Javier Cercas’s novel of the Spanish Civil War and memory, Soldiers of Salamis

Stanley Crawford’s memoir of garlic farming in New Mexico, A Garlic Testament

Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novel of an English family and their servants before World War II, The Light Years, the first book in her Cazalet Chronicle

Milton Mayer’s post-war examination of ten small-town German men who joined the Nazis, They Thought They Were Free

Barry Hines’s coming-of-age story of a boy training a wild kestrel in a town in England’s industrial north, A Kestrel for a Knave

Alma Guillermoprieto’s account of dance schools in Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival celebrations, Samba

Padgett Powell’s coming-of-age story of a boy in Lowcountry South Carolina, Edisto

Lillian Ross’s eyewitness account of the making of John Huston’s Civil War film, The Red Badge of Courage, Picture

Hervé Guibert’s autobiographical novel set in the early years of the AIDS crisis, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

Anne Moody’s memoir of her childhood and her years in the Civil Rights Movement, Coming of Age in Mississippi

An anthology of fabulist stories spanning fifty years of Carol Emshwiller’s career, Moon Songs

Nicholson Baker’s idiosyncratic investigation of his relationship with John Updike, his “favorite living writer,” U and I