The 79 best easy books of journalism and reportage

A single January day in a Soviet labor camp in the early 1950s, told through the eyes of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a peasant ten years into a trumped-up sentence for treason. Solzhenitsyn structures the novel as a minute-by-minute account: the pre-dawn wake-up, the roll call in −30° cold, the march to the construction site, the bricklaying in the wind, the return, the thin soup, and lights out. The genius of the book is its scale — one man, one day — and the moral universe Shukhov navigates within it. He is not heroic in any conventional sense; he calculates how to get an extra bowl of gruel, how to pocket a useful piece of metal, how to avoid the guards' notice. Yet these calculations constitute a form of dignity. Published in 1962 in the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir under Khrushchev's brief thaw, the novella hit Soviet readers like a physical shock: the Gulag had existed for decades, but naming it in print was new. In the West it became the first credible inside account of the camp system, a document as much as a novel. Solzhenitsyn's prose is close-grained and unsentimental, the voice tuned to Shukhov's practical intelligence. The cold is not metaphorical; the bread is not symbolic. The facts speak.

The foundational text defining and naming literary journalism as a movement.

Hiroshima is required reading in American journalism schools and widely taught in history, ethics, and literature courses across the country. NYU's journalism faculty voted it the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th century. The book has remained continuously in print since 1946 and appears on virtually every list of essential American nonfiction.

Widely regarded as the definitive narrative history of the American Civil War. A staple on university reading lists for Civil War history and creative nonfiction courses. Ken Burns's landmark PBS documentary brought Foote and this work to national prominence, cementing its place in the American literary canon as essential reading for understanding the conflict.

The Journalist and the Murderer is a staple of journalism school curricula across North America and is widely assigned in media ethics, creative nonfiction, and literary journalism courses. Its opening sentence is among the most frequently quoted lines in American nonfiction. While it does not appear on general literary canons as broadly as major novels, within its domain — journalism studies and media ethics — it is as close to required reading as any single text.

Widely assigned in American journalism, creative nonfiction, and cultural studies courses. The book appears on numerous 'best nonfiction' lists and is a fixture in New Journalism syllabi. Its phrases—'the right stuff,' 'pushing the envelope'—have entered common usage, a rare marker of cultural penetration for a nonfiction work.

It is widely assigned in American history and African American studies courses and read as a modern classic of narrative history. A recent book, it has not yet reached the staple status of the older canon.

Taught in journalism and postmodern American literature courses as the defining Gonzo text.

Standard academic text in literary journalism and journalism history courses.

Evicted has become a staple of sociology, urban studies and public policy courses, and many American universities have chosen it as a common first-year read. It is now a standard text on poverty and housing in the United States.