Michael Lewis Tops Indie Bestseller List as Nature Books Dominate

Michael Lewis's Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State holds the No. 1 spot on this week's Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for nonfiction. The list, compiled by The Independent Publishers Caucus, draws on sales from hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide and is distributed with data from the American Booksellers Association.

W. W. Norton publishes Lewis's chart-topper, and Norton's imprints anchor the upper reaches of the list. The publisher or its W.W. Norton imprint accounts for 11 of the 40 titles, including two entries in the top three.

Who else made the top ten?

John U. Bacon's The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald (Liveright) appears twice, at No. 2 and No. 10. Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed) takes No. 3, more than a decade after its original publication. Emily Wilson's Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature (Liveright) lands at No. 4.

• No. 5: Guinness World Records 2027 (Guinness World Records)
• No. 6: Jill Lepore, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (Liveright)
• No. 7: Wendell Berry, Dispatches from Rural America: Sixteen Essays (Counterpoint)
• No. 8: Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss (W.W. Norton)
• No. 9: Merritt R. Turetsky, Bogland: The Secret World That Defies Death and Protects Life (W. W. Norton)

Which authors appear more than once?

Robert Macfarlane is the only author with two distinct titles on the list: The Book of Birds at No. 8 and Is a River Alive? (W.W. Norton) at No. 15. Wendell Berry doubles up with Dispatches from Rural America at No. 7 and the 50th anniversary edition of The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Counterpoint) at No. 40. Robin Wall Kimmerer pairs Braiding Sweetgrass with Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State University Press) at No. 25. Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay appears in two editions, at No. 24 (Dalkey Archives) and No. 31 (Princeton University Press).

What does the list say about reader tastes?

Nature writing is the single strongest current, with at least ten titles devoted to plants, animals, rivers, forests and land. They range from Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees (Greystone Books) at No. 12 to Ethan Tapper's How to Love a Forest (Broadleaf Books) at No. 30, alongside Helen Whybrow's The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life (Milkweed Editions) at No. 18 and Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian's Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature (Spiegel & Grau) at No. 17.

Backlist staples keep their footing. Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning (Beacon Press) sits at No. 16, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press) at No. 33, and Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law (Liveright) at No. 34. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Beacon Press) holds No. 35.

What else stands out in the lower half?

Mary Roach's Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy (W.W. Norton) enters at No. 22, and Tom Piazza's Living in the Present with John Prine (W. W. Norton) at No. 23. Humor and comics are present: Lisa Hanawalt's I Can't Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex (Drawn and Quarterly) ranks No. 14, and James Thurber's Thurber's Dogs (Library of America) closes at No. 37. Peter King's The Game (W. W. Norton) takes No. 19.

International and working-life perspectives appear too. Hu AnYan's I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (Astra House) ranks No. 13, and Simon Pare-Poupart's Trash!: A Garbageman's Story (Melville House) No. 27. Verso places three titles: Anton Jäger's Hyperpolitics (No. 26), Frédéric Gros's A Philosophy of Walking (No. 28) and Dean Spade's expanded Mutual Aid (No. 29). Eleanor Johnson's Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women (Princeton University) lands at No. 21.

The full Top 40 refreshes weekly at indiepubs.org/top40, giving independent presses a recurring national scoreboard as the holiday sales season approaches.