The Nonfictionist is not a blog. It’s not a review site. It’s not even particularly polite.
It is, however, a reckoning.
Founded by a small cadre of insatiably curious, occasionally condescending readers with PhDs, startup scars, and mild caffeine dependencies, The Nonfictionist aims to be the last place you’ll ever need to check before investing 8 to 40 hours of your life in a nonfiction book that promises the world and delivers a TED Talk.
We read the footnotes. We check the sources. We roll our eyes when authors name-drop Kahneman or Foucault and then backpedal into banality. We also celebrate brilliance—when it dares to appear. Our reviews are deep reads disguised as sharp cultural commentary: part critique, part context, and occasionally a public intervention.
We draw connections between books, ideas, historical moments, and the sociotechnical sludge we all live in now. If you’re the kind of person who wants to know whether a new book on AI ethics is actually saying something new—or just gentrifying a Wikipedia article—you’re in the right place.
This is nonfiction criticism for the thinking reader. The impatient reader. The reader who has been burned by buzzy bestsellers that turned out to be rewarmed blog posts with a thinkfluencer’s haircut.
The Nonfictionist operates under a few assumptions:
- Books matter. But not all books are worth your time.
- Intelligence is undervalued. So we offer it with unapologetic style.
- Most book criticism is too nice, or too lazy. Ours is neither.
- Good writing is a service. So we deliver it—meticulously, occasionally with sarcasm, always with insight.
We cover books in politics, economics, science, technology, history, philosophy, media theory, cultural criticism, and those weird hybrids that get filed under “Big Ideas.” We read across ideological lines. We fact-check those who claim to be facts-first. And we still believe that well-argued, well-written criticism can shape what gets read, published, and taken seriously.
The Nonfictionist is edited by Dr. Johny McFliggen, Oxford-educated literary and business theorist, known for his razor-sharp insights and borderline academic showboating. He’s joined by a rotating cast of thinkers, readers, and dissenters—most of whom have day jobs but believe in the nighttime power of nonfiction done right.
You can quote us. You can argue with us. Just don’t ask us to review your friend’s self-published memoir on “resilience.”