Non-Fiction
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man | 2007 | Buy |
| Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century | 2017 | Buy |
| Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance | 2020 | Buy |
Jessica Bruder is a journalist whose reporting on American life outside the mainstream has produced three nonfiction books. Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017) follows older Americans who have given up conventional housing to live in vans, RVs, and cars, traveling between seasonal jobs at Amazon warehouses, sugar beet farms, and campgrounds. The book documents a growing subculture of people pushed out of the housing market by the 2008 financial crisis and rising costs of living.
Her earlier work, Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man (2007), documents the history and culture of the annual Nevada desert festival. Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance (2020), co-written with Dale Maharidge, tells the story of a package from Edward Snowden and what it revealed about privacy in the digital age. Bruder’s work focuses on communities and individuals who exist at the edges of American society.