The Unlisted List

IIn 2013, we compiled the Unlisted List: a compilation of long and short-form nonfiction written by women that future list-makers and anthologists, should they notice that their inclusion of women is on the paltry side, might peruse and thereby make their “bests” and “greats” better and greater, their collections more representative of the world we live in, rather than reminiscent still of those dead white guys we were raised up on.

Because here’s the rub as we see it: women read works by and about men and by and about women, but the male experience and the male perspective is still seen as more universal, more public, than the female. And the only way we can begin to rectify this is by making writing by women as visible as writing by men, and by extension the female perspective as normal and the female experience as mainstream, as universal, as the male.

We asked our readers for their suggestions, and we spent weeks poring over our long list of selections, debating them, discussing them, bonding in our dorky writerly ways over our favorites. Up until the last minute, we were still remembering essays we’d read and loved and included in syllabi, but surely we’ve forgotten many, which is where you come in. Please leave your recommendations in the comments; we’ll review and consider them carefully and keep adding to the list.

We know, sadly, how much easier it is to pack a syllabus or an anthology with male writers, and so this list is meant to serve as a reminder of the abundant, stellar nonfiction by women. It’s a space we’ll return to when we want to remember those who’ve inspired us and who continue to root us in tradition, when we want to craft our own workshops, and simply when we want to pick out something to read or reread. We hope that you, too, will use it in these ways, and will pass it along to your friends and colleagues in order to move one step closer to equality in that old creaky canon of men.

Happy reading!

Longform

Narrative/Literary Journalism

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family
Alma Guillermoprieto, The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed
Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns
Janet Malcolm, Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial
Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion
Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl 
Jeanne Marie Laskas, Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work
Joan Didion, Salvador
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Laura Hillebrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption
Martha Gellhorn, The View from the Ground
Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for Sheetrock
Michela Wrong, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell
Sonia Faleiro, Beautiful Thing
Sonia Nazario, Enrique’s Journey
Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief

Memoir

Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping
Alexandra Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
Alice Sebold, Lucky
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Elizabeth Scarboro, My Foreign Cities
Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind
Gretel Ehrlich, A Match to the Heart: One Woman’s Story of Being Struck by Lightening
Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place 
Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother
Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood
Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain
Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave
Judith Moore, Fat Girl: A True Story 
Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Kathleen Finnernan, The Tender Land: A Family Love Story
Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies 
Leymah Gbowee, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation At War
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman
Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club
Mary Karr, Cherry
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Megan Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar: An Education in War
Michelle Tea, Valencia
Michelle Tea, The Chelsea Whistle
Natalie Kusz, Road Song
Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai 
Patti Smith, Just Kids
Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith
Sarah Manguso, The Guardians: An Elegy
Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave
Suzannah Lessard, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family 
Tracy Ross, The Source of All Things
Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

Essays

Amy Leach, Things That Are
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never
Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder
Cynthia Ozick, Art & Ardor
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
Eula Biss, Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays
Janet Malcolm, The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings
Jo Ann Beard, The Boys of My Youth
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion, The White Album
Kim Dana Kupperman, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence
Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit
Lia Purpura, On Looking
Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures
MFK Fisher, How To Cook a Wolf
Michelle Orange, This is Running for Your Life
Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues
Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
Pam Houston, A Little More About Me
Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Sherry Simpson, The Way Winter Comes: Alaska Stories
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Unconventional

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Barrie Jean Borich, Body Geographic
Jenny Boully, The Book of Beginnings and Endings
Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, a Tale of Love and Fallout
Lisa Gill, Caput Nili: How I Won the War and Lost My Taste for Oranges
Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Travel

Andrea Lee, Russian Journal
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Beryl Markham, West With The Night
Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle
Doris Lessing, African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe
Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Freya Stark, The Valley of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels
Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia: A Journey Through Yemen
Freya Stark, Riding to the Tigris
Gretel Ehrlich, In The Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape
Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
Jane Kramer, Europeans
Jane Kramer, The Last Cowboy
Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica
Kira Salak, Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea
Mary Morris, Nothing to Declare
M.F.K Fisher, As They Were
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Gray Falcon
Rosemary Mahoney, Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff
Rosemary Mahoney, Whoredom in Kimmage
Sara Wheeler, Terra Incognita
Susan Jane Gilman, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven
Susan Orlean, My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere

Nature/Environment/Science

Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone and Sky
Florence Williams, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History
Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces
Kathleen Norris, Dakota 
Mary Austen, Land of Little Rain
Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography
Olivia Laing, To The River
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams
Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

Family/Motherhood

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Intuition
Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year
Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
Emily Rapp, Still Point of the Turning World

Writing Life

Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings
Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them
Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

Short form

Essays

Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora“
Amy Boesky, “The Ghost Writes Back”
Amy Leach,” I’ll Be The Moon”
Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue”
Anne Fadiman, “Under Water”
Anne Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”
Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse”
Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels”
Ariel Levy, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia”
Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, “I Can Handle It: On Relationship Violence, Independence, and Capability”
Cheryl Strayed, “The Love of My Life”
Courtney Queeney, “The View From the Victim Room”
E.J. Levy, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”
Emily Bernard, “Fired”
Emily Rapp, “Where is God in Tay-Sachs?”
Emily Witt, “What Do You Desire?”
Eula Biss, “Goodbye to All That”
Eula Biss, “The Pain Scale”
Eula Biss, “No Man’s Land”
Francine Prose, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink”
Jamaica Kincaid, “On Seeing England for the First Time“
Jamaica Kincaid, “A Small Place”
Jamaica Kincaid, “Flowers of Evil”
Jennifer Percy, “Life Keeps Changing: Why Stories, Not Science, Explain the World”
Jina Moore, “The White Correspondent’s Burden”
JoAnn Beard, “The Fourth State of Matter”
Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”
Joan Didion, “Marrying Absurd”
Joan Didion, “Why I Write”
Katherine Anne Porter, “The Future Is Now“
Katy Butler, “What Broke My Father’s Heart”
Lauren Slater, “Tripp Lake”
Lauren Slater, “A Raccoon of My Own”
Leslie Jamison, “The Empathy Exams: A Medical Actor Writes Her Own Script” 
Lia Purpura, “On Gunmetal”
Mary McCarthy, “Artists in Uniform”
Maya Angelou, “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”
Maxine Hong Kingston, “No Name Woman”
Meghan Daum, “My Misspent Youth”
Meredith Hall, “Shunned”
Natalia Ginzburg, “He and I”
Naomi Shihab Nye, “This Is Not Who We Are”
Nora Ephron, “A Few Words about Breasts”
Rachel Carson, “The Marginal World”
Roxane Gay, “Bad Feminist”
Sandra Tsing Loh, “The Bitch is Back”
Sandra Cisneros, “Only Daughter”
Sherry Simpson, “Killing Wolves“
Susan Griffin, “Our Secret”
Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others”
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”
Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill”
Zadie Smith, “Joy”

Literary Journalism