Best Nonfiction Releases — March 2026

From the author of Monkey Mind — a New York Times bestseller about anxiety — comes a book about the emotions we usually try to suppress. Anger, shame, envy, regret, jealousy, despair. Daniel Smith argues these aren't enemies to fight. They're messengers trying to tell us something. Smith is a psychotherapist, and this is part memoir, part intellectual exploration. He traces how our relationship with negative emotions has evolved — from the Seven Deadly Sins to modern psychology's sometimes equally damning classifications. There's a fascinating section on how the Inuit handle anger, which is radically different from how we do it in the West.

From a psychopathy expert at the University of British Columbia. Leanne ten Brinke draws on the latest research to explain how dark personalities cause harm — and more importantly, she offers science-based strategies to identify and manage them. The question isn't whether these people exist — it's how do you protect yourself without becoming paranoid?

Ken Rideout grew up in a broken family outside Boston — drugs, crime, his stepfather incarcerated in the same prison where Ken worked as a guard at eighteen. Despite all of that, he broke free, made it to Wall Street, built a career — and then spent a decade addicted to opioids. The turning point came when he adopted a daughter from overseas. Running became his salvation. In three years, he went from a "running nobody" to the world's fastest marathoner over fifty. His mantra: win, or die trying.

Paul Krugman calls Arindrajit Dube "the go-to guy on minimum wage." This book is a deep dive into one of the biggest questions of our time: why did wages for most workers freeze while productivity soared 70% and incomes at the top exploded? Dube has spent over two decades researching this. He shows the data, explains the mechanisms, and argues this wasn't inevitable — it can be reversed. He lays out the levers: corporate decisions, policy, power dynamics, social norms.