“Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures”
~ Jessamyn West
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
~ Franz Kafka
From an early age, I talked to books. And they talked back. This dialogue represented my initial foray into the practice and experience of learning, assimilation, stimulation and distillation. I began to “mark up” the books that I read (still do); I underlined, asterisked, annotated, highlighted, and furiously dog-eared. I layered my thoughts and responses on top of the primary text, creating a palimpsest of inquiry and excavation. I asked questions, drew conclusions, expressed counterpoints and consternations, and exclaimed passionately in agreement. There was no end to the churning that took place in my mind as I delved deeper and deeper into the world of the book and the animation it fostered in the world beyond its pages.
When I annotate a text, my hand acts independently of my eyes, both mechanically and metaphorically. Information is presented to me first through sight, but it is sifted through, interrogated, and synthesized through writing. This application is not itself a mode of sensory perception, yet it is inherently linked to one, and, in my experience, it becomes one by virtue of what it offers: a discrete and unique method of filtering language, thought, and being. This “processor” dictates the limit of my “processing speed.” I can only assimilate information incrementally, as I unravel each line of text and render it meaningful through dynamic, intimate, continuous interaction.
Considering how to impose order on the selections gathered below presented me with several options. I could arrange the list by year of publication, geography, genre, field of inquiry, the chronology of my reading, or according to some sort of hierarchical order of preference. But none of these seemed appropriate to the task nor aligned with my intentions. So here a few of them are: my beloved community of voices, inspirations, and interlocutors, in some semblance of order, sometimes. But mostly just materialized out of a vast chain of associations, hazy remembrances, vivid recall, and psychological imprint. These books, authors, activists, and ideas have ignited, delighted, surprised, amused, angered, depressed, and enlightened me. They have all moved me in some way or another ~ and sometimes, in many directions all at once….
If any of the following authors/books call to you, and you are looking for their work, please check your amazing local libraries’ catalogs. If they are not in the collection, place a request for purchase and/or an interlibrary loan. I also have extra copies of many of these books and operate my own informal lending library, so you can always reach out directly: rosekindness@gmail.com.
*I am extremely fond of poetry and short stories, but there are far more poems, poets, and short story titles to list on this page, so pardon the exclusion of many here. In addition, many of my books and reading journals are housed elsewhere, so this list is of necessity fragmentary and loose.
** I also love children’s literature! Picture books, in particular, orient our selves in the world, framing our earliest perceptions, experiences, and observations. Many talented authors rise to this challenge through embracing and representing an ethic of care that is inclusive and exploratory rather than didactic. They are incredible in every respect, but nfortunately, for brevity’s sake, they are not included below.
***I am not sophisticated enough to learn to employ diacritics on this platform, so please excuse their omission from first and last names below.
BELOVED COMMUNITY
Any and all anthologies I can get my hands on…!
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles & Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
Edward Soja
Chester Himes
Frederick Douglass
Robert Hayden
Barbara Ehrenreich
Cornel West
Faith Ringgold
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities & The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History
Studs Terkel
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
Pierre Bourdieu
Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations
David Roediger
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Terry Eagleton
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender
Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies
Franz Kafka
Percival Everett
Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California & Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation
Pervical and Paul Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution
William A. Darity, Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century
The Verso Book of Dissent: Revolutionary Words from Three Millennia of Rebellion and Resistance
David Graeber
Carl Anthony, The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race
Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement
Leah Penniman, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land
Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
Ericka Huggins and Stephen Shames, Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education
John D.H. Downing, Radical Media: Rebellion Communication and Social Movements
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
Edwidge Danticat
Bayard Rustin
The Damned, Lessons from the Damned: Class Struggle in the Black Community
Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart & Jesus and the Disinherited
Deborah Willis
Ellen Willis
Susan Willis
Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance
Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
Naomi Klein, No Logo
Jane Lazarre, The Mother Knot
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America & America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s
Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice
Wesley C. Hogan, On the Freedom Side: How Five Decades of Youth Activists Have Remixed American History
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
Sophocles
Heraclitus
Lewis R. Gordon
Robert Stepto
Arnold Rampersad
Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism
George Yancy
George Santayana
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880; Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept; The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study
Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California
Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era
Karl Marx
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas & Race, Nation, Class
Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments & The Wealth of Nations
Friedrich Nietzsche
Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History
Andrew Ross, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing & No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture
Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston, Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality
Sharon Olds
Farah Griffin, Who Set You Flowin’: The African-American Migration Narrative & If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday
James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s
Peter Orner
Colson Whitehead
Shel Silverstein
Maria Popover and Claudia Bedrick, eds., A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader
Marcia Reed and Glenn Phillips, Artists and Their Books | Books and Their Artists
Sara K. Zettervall and Mary C. Nienow, Whole Person Librarianship: A Social Work Approach to Patron Services
Wayne A. Wiegand, Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library
Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
Wesley Hogan, On the Freedom Side: How Five Decades of Youth Have Remixed America
Eileen Myles, ed., Pathetic Literature: An Anthology
Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton, ed., Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945
Kevin Powell, ed., Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
John Dos Passos
Nathanel West, Miss Lonelyhearts
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish & Madness and Civilization
Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Malcolm X, “The Ballot or The Bullet” & The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
David Harvey, Social Justice and the City & The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change & The Enigma of Capital
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
William Faulkner
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
Tricia Rose and Andrew Ross, eds., Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture
Cathy Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics & The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics
Manuel Castells
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
Edgar Villanueva, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
Alma Flor Ada
Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching
Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Brothers Karamazov
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
CLR James, The Black Jacobins & American Civilization
Edouard Glissant
Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States
Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, To Make Our World Anew
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
Stephen Pimpare, A People’s History of Poverty in America
Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro
Matthew Frye Jacobson
Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)
Arkan Lushwala, The Time of the Black Jaguar: An Offering of Indigenous Wisdom for the Continuity of Life on Earth
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up, Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
Sigmund Freud
Martha C. Nussbaum
Tami Simon, ed., Darkness Before Dawn: Redefining the Journey Through Depression
Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World
Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
Langston Hughes
Dorothy West
Olufemi O. Taiwo, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)
Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles & Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
Frederick Douglass
Ida B. Wells
Robert Hayden
Thomas Merton
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Claude McKay
Jessie Fauset
Margaret Walker
Jean Toomer
Mumia Abu Jamal
Barbara Ehrenreich
Jayati Lal
Leslie Marmon Silko
Cornel West
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities & The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History
Studs Terkel
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
Pierre Bourdieu
Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations
David Roediger
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Terry Eagleton
Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Black Freedom Struggle
Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy
Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution
The Verso Book of Dissent: Revolutionary Words from Three Millennia of Rebellion and Resistance
Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
Ericka Huggins and Stephen Shames, Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
Subcomandante Marcos, Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings
Margaret A. Burnham, By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners
Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City
Michael G. Long, ed., We the Resistance: Documenting a History of Nonviolent Protest in the United States
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Got Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Kate Rushin, The Black Back-Ups
Mark Strand
Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
Terrance Hayes
Letters from Robben Island: A Selection of Ahmed Kathrada’s Prison Correspondence: 1964-1989 (Robert D. Vassen, ed.)
Jim Harrison
Barry Lopez
Kimberle Crenshaw, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement
Kimberle Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, and George Lipsitz, The Race Track: How the Myth of Equal Opportunity Defeats Racial Justice
Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present
Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World & Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Martha Minow
Wendy Brown
Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing
Emile Durkheim
Max Weber
Czeslaw Milosz
Sterling Brown
Gershom Scholem
Walter Benjamin
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance
Ping-Chun Hsiung, Living Rooms as Factories: Class, Gender, and the Satellite Factory System in Taiwan
Albert Camus
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, The Book of Hours, Duino Elegies
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born
E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America & Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Stuart Hall
Shobha Rao, Girls Burn Brighter
Kazuo Ishiguro
Anna Deveare Smith
Herbert Gans
Richard Sennett
Pierre Bourdieu
Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1977
Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
Mia E. Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Barbara D. Savage, eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women
Glenda Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918
Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til The Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation
Linda Villarosa, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government
Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays & Living My Life
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse & A Room of One’s Own
Frantz Fanon
Natasha Trethewey, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast & Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Disturbances in the Field
Alice Koller, An Unknown Woman: A Journey to Self-Discovery
Joan Anderson, A Year By the Sea
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Erich Fromm
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Reverend William J. Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear
Michelle Wilde Anderson, The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America
bell hooks
Katherine Franke, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition
Joyce Ladner, The Death of White Sociology: Essays on Race and Culture
Rachel G. Bratt, Michael E. Stone, Chester Hartman, eds., A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda
Muriel Rukeyser
June Jordan
Gayl Jones, Corregidora
Gloria Naylor, Mama Day & The Women of Brewster Place
ntozake shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology
Margaret Busby, ed., New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent
Audre Lorde
Andre Malraux
Andre Gide
Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Richard Wright, The Color Curtain, Black Boy, Native Son & 12 Million Black Voices
Paul Valery
Aime Cesaire
Sheryll Cashin, White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality
Alex Zamalin, Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in America’s Obsession with Civility
Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin & The Pleasures of Exile
Edward Said
Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave
J.M. Coetzee
Mary Oliver
Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta
Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eaters
Wendell Berry
Rachel Brahinsky and Alexander Tarr, A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area
Fredric Jameson
Jamieson Webster
Henry James
William James
James Baldwin
Simone Weil
Pema Chodron
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, and more, more, more
Yusef Komunyakaa
Lucille Clifton
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
Rebecca Solnit
Dr. Seuss
Shel Silverstein
Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Bishop
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
Hannah Arendt
Vijay Prashad
Mat Callahan, The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975
Derrick Jensen
Louis Althusser
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Paule Marshall
Derek Walcott
Peter Schrag, Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, eds., Ecofeminism
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Wallace Stevens
Siri Hustvedt
Paul Tillich
Flannery O’Connor
Jamaica Kincaid
Nikole Hannah-Jones, ed., The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
Zora Neale Hurston
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Elizabeth Bishop
Scott Russell Sanders
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Emily Dickinson
Henry David Thoreau
Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Raymond Williams, Culture & Society: 1780-1950
Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood
Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures & The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: the Social Logic of Postmodern Culture
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy
Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class & Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prison, Torture, and Empire & Are Prisons Obsolete?
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
George Orwell, 1984 & A Collection of Essays
George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture
Lisa Goldfarb, authored and edited texts
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Yaa Ngasi, Homegoing
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Toni Morrison
Nancy Fraser
Sylvia Plath
Alan Watts
Joy Harjo
Ada Limon
Anne Sexton
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Gwendolyn Brooks
Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector
Brian Evenson, The Wavering Knife
Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations
Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
Haruki Murakami
Yusef Kumunyakaa
Vinay Lai, Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy
Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache
Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Keri Hulme, Bone People
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Heinrich Heine
Robert N. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools
Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem
Joy James, Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader
Joy James, ed., The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings
Haki R. Madhubuti
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
sonia sanchez, homegirls and handgrenades
David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
© Rachel Rosekind, PhD, MLIS