In Still Life, Melissa Milgrom peels back the skin on contemporary taxidermy, revealing all the blood and guts of a hobby focused on making the dead appear alive.

Gina Welch goes undercover into the land of believers in this honest and fair-minded chronicle of the two years she spent attending an evangelical megachurch in Virginia among Christian conservatives.

The trend in positive psychology interested memoirist Ariel Gore, especially after further reading uncovered a rash of male experts seemingly out to prove that women with traditional lifestyles were happiest. Bluebird is her personal journey into happiness.

Waking Up in Eden chronicles a true island romance: the story of a single woman falling head over heels for the beauty and wonder of her new Kauai home.

This academic argument that inequality between the sexes is not historically the “natural” state of things is compelling but dry.