The Street, written by Ann Petry and published in 1946, follows Lutie Johnson, a single mother of a young boy named Bub, who moves into a new apartment in Harlem during the 1940s. Despite the squalid conditions of the apartment, and the strange and even threatening behavior of the building’s superintendent, Jones, Lutie takes the apartment because she knows she has few other options within her price range. She tells herself it will only be... Read The Street Summary

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Published in 1926, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is a modernist novel regarded as a masterful portrait of the Lost Generation. It is a roman à clef, structured in three acts, that depicts characters based upon Hemingway’s friends and associates. Upon initial publication, it received mixed reviews, but is now considered a classic of 20th-century literature. In 1957, it was adapted into a film starring Ava Gardner (though Hemingway, reportedly, did not like the... Read The Sun Also Rises Summary

In the novel The Sweet Hereafter, published in 1991, author Russell Banks tells the story of a fatal school bus accident and its aftermath through four first-person narrators. As the novel unfolds in the small town of Sam Dent, New York the characters reveal exactly what happened on the day of the accident—January 27, 1990—the immediate reaction of the people involved, and how each of the four characters is changed by the accident. Fourteen children... Read The Sweet Hereafter Summary

“The Swimmer” is a short story by John Cheever that was originally published in The New Yorker in 1964. The story is told in third-person limited narration and utilizes elements of Surrealism. The narrative draws on the myth of Narcissus and alludes to Homer’s The Odyssey while exploring the dynamics of post–World War II American suburbia.Content Warning: The source material and this guide include references to alcohol addiction.“The Swimmer” opens on Neddy Merrill, an upper-middle-class... Read The Swimmer Summary

Published in 1990, The Things They Carried is a collection of interrelated short stories about the Vietnam War written by American author Tim O’Brien. The historical fiction collection is considered essential literature about the Vietnam War and is often used to teach fiction writing techniques. An authorial persona, Tim O’Brien, narrates the stories in the first-person about his experiences during the war. The collection explores themes of Survivor’s Guilt, Talking as a Way of Processing... Read The Things They Carried Summary

The Titan’s Curse (2007) is the third installment in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, following The Lightning Thief (2005) and The Sea of Monsters (2006) and preceding The Battle of the Labyrinth (2008) and The Last Olympian (2009). The series centers around the adventures of Percy Jackson, a boy who is the son of the Greek god of the sea Poseidon and a mortal woman named Sally Jackson. Percy learns that he... Read The Titan's Curse Summary

The Topeka School is a literary novel published by Ben Lerner in 2019. Lerner, an acclaimed writer and a winner of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2015, is well-known for his poetry and his novels. His novels are often referred to as “autofiction,” due to the fact that they feature fictionalized versions of himself and other figures from his life. The Topeka School was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.This guide follows the... Read The Topeka School Summary

Published in 1995, The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle tells the story of two couples living parallel lives in Southern California: Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher, affluent white Americans with a home in the upper-middle-class subdivision of Arroyo Blanco; and Cándido and América Rincón, undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in a makeshift camp at the bottom of the canyon. Rotating among the perspectives of the four protagonists, the novel explores the inequality inherent in the United States... Read The Tortilla Curtain Summary

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The Ugly American is a novel by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. Published in 1958, the book is a venomous satire of America’s presence in Southeast Asia three years into the Vietnam War. While the book is categorized as a novel, it is an overt political commentary that is presented in the form of chapters that could be considered standalone short stories. The title refers to the stereotypical American insensitivity to the native language, customs... Read The Ugly American Summary

The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America is a work of narrative, historical non-fiction written by John Demos, a professor of history at Yale University. Published in 1995, it won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Set in 18th-century New England, The Unredeemed Captive explores the historical events surrounding a Mohawk raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts on February 29, 1704. The... Read The Unredeemed Captive Summary

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The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America is a 2013 work of contemporary political science and history by the American journalist George Packer. It won the National Book Award in 2013 and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award. The book explores the trajectory of the United States from 1978 to 2012 and argues that those years saw a diminishing of the institutions, promises, and social connections that had... Read The Unwinding Summary

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The Violent Bear It Away is a fiction novel published in 1960 by the American author Flannery O’Connor. Written in O’Connor’s trademark Southern Gothic style, the book chronicles the inner turmoil of a 14-year-old boy from rural Tennessee as he struggles against his destiny of becoming a prophet. It is an expansion of O’Connor’s 1955 short story, “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead,” which is presented here as the book’s first chapter.Other works by... Read The Violent Bear It Away Summary

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Published in 1934, The Ways of White Folks is Langston Hughes’s collection of 14 short stories focusing on race relations in the United States. With somber tales of struggle and violence, as well as moments of irony and humor, the collection addresses racism, economic disparity, and hope. This study guide quotes and obscures Hughes’s use of the n-word.Plot Summary“Cora Unashamed” tells the story of Cora Jenkins, who works as a maid for a cruel White... Read The Ways of White Folks Summary