Jane Austen

In early nineteenth-century England, a spirited young woman copes with the courtship of a snobbish gentleman as well as the romantic entanglements of her four sisters.

Fiction

Eric L. Gansworth

Eric Gansworth tells the story of his life and family through poems about their Onondaga heritage, from the horrible legacy of government boarding schools, to watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to his fight to be an artist who balances multiple worlds.

Memoir in Verse

Khaled Hosseini

Amir, haunted by his betrayal of Hassan, the son of his father's servant and a childhood friend, returns to Kabul as an adult after he learns Hassan has been killed, in an attempt to redeem himself by rescuing Hassan's son from a life of slavery to a Taliban official.

Fiction

Aldous Huxley

A satirical novel about the utopia of the future, a world in which babies are decanted from bottles and the great Ford is worshipped.

Fiction

Barbara Kingsolver

Taylor, a poor Kentuckian, makes her way west with an abandoned baby girl and stops in Tucson. There she finds friends and discovers resources in apparently empty places.

Fiction

Cormac McCarthy

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

Fiction

George Orwell

An allegory exploring the dangers of life in a strictly totalitarian society governed by Big Brother and the Thought Police.

Fiction

Dashka Slater

If it weren't for the 57 bus, Sasha and Richard never would have met. Both were high school students from Oakland, California, but they inhabited different worlds. Sasha, a white teen, attended a small private school. Richard, a black teen, attended a large public one. Each day, their paths overlapped for a mere eight minutes.

Nonfiction

Art Spiegelman

Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe. The author captures the everyday reality of fear during the Holocaust and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of survival - and how the children of survivors are in their own way affected by the trials of their parents. 

Graphic Novel

One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation.

Nonfiction