For my students–current and past–who are searching for terrific writers and powerful books to read (for synopses & my recently read books and reviews go to Goodreads).
Fiction
Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin
Chinua Achebe’s When Things Fall Apart
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus
Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids
Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose
Sinan Antoon’s I’jaam: An Iraqi Rapsody
Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter
Anouar Benmalek’s The Lovers of Algeria
John Berger’s From A to X
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower
Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge
Teju Cole’s Open City
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions
Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of the Bones
Kiran Desai’s Hullaballoo and the Guava Orchard
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt
Nuruddin Farah’s Secrets
Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Moshin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
Githa Hariharan’s Ghosts of Vasu Master
Sonallah Ibrahim’s The Committee
Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun
Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
K.R. Meera’s Yellow is the Colour of Longing
Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Mbuelo Viz Mzmane’s Children of Soweto
Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow
Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meat
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy
Bapsi Sidwa’s Ice Candy Man
A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies
Leslie Marmon Silko’s An Almanac for the Dead
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer
Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus
Mizra Waheed’s The Collaborator
Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town
Poetry
Meena Alexander’s Birthplace with Buried Stones
Agha Shahid Ali’s The Country without a Post Office
Taha Mohammad Ali’s So What?
Sujata Bhatt’s Point No Point
Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden
Nissim Ezekiel’s Collected Poems
Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us
Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
Suheir Hammad’s breaking poems
Nathalie Handal’s Poet in Andalusia
Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle
Mohja Kahf’s E-mails from Scheherazad
June Jordan’s Living Room
Yusef Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular
Audre Lorde’s The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance
Lisa Suhair Majaj’s Geographies of Light
Lee Maracle’s Bent Box
Naomi Shihab Nye’s 19 Varieties of Gazelle
Simon Ortiz’s From Sand Creek
Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Walking Back Up Depot Street
Adrienne Rich’s An Atlas of the Difficult World
Sridala Swami’s Escape Artist
Cathy Wagner’s My New Job
Non-Fiction
Ali Abunimah’s One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse
Claribel Alegria’s They Won’t Take Me Alive
Bill Ayers’ To Teach
Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like
Max Blumenthal’s Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism
Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982
Santosh Desai’s Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India
Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
Jordan Flaherty’s Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena 6
Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Jane Goodall’s Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe
Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
Christopher Hitchens’ The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice
Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal
Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine
Joel Kovel’s Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine
Jiddu Krishnamurti’s On Education
Beth Loffreda’s Losing Matt Shepard
Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals
Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II
Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror
Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
Edward W. Said’s The Question of Palestine
Rosemary Sayigh’s The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries
Vandana Shiva’s Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply
Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream
Malcom X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
