“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