Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World was published in 2019. Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist who advocates for women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights through her fiction. Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World examines the life of a sex worker who was murdered in Istanbul, Turkey, exploring key moments in her life while her friends desperately try to arrange her funeral. The novel investigates topics like violence against... Read 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World Summary

1Q84 is a novel written by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The book was first published in Japanese in three volumes and released in 2009 and 2010, ahead of an English translation published in 2011, and includes elements of magical realism and dystopian literature. Set in 1984 in Tokyo, the story concerns an assassin who stumbles upon an alternate world she refers to as 1Q84. There, she becomes embroiled in a conspiracy involving an abusive... Read 1Q84 Summary

1st to Die (2001), by bestselling author James Patterson, is the first novel in The Women’s Murder Club series. The club features four friends—San Francisco homicide detective Lindsay Boxer, medical examiner Claire Washburn, crime reporter Cindy Thomas, and assistant district attorney Jill Bernhardt—who work together, both professionally and personally, to solve crimes. In this first novel, the club works to solve the Honeymoon Murders, the killing of three couples just after their weddings. 1st to... Read 1st to Die Summary

2666 (2004) is a novel by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, published one year after Bolaño's death. Centering around a reclusive German author and his role in investigating the ongoing unsolved murders in the fictional city of Santa Teresa, Mexico, 2666 jumps in location, narrative style, location, and characters over its five sections. The novel is widely acclaimed and was adapted into stage plays three times. The New York Times Book Review ranked 2666 as the... Read 2666 Summary

“55 Miles to the Gas Pump” is the penultimate story in Annie Proulx’s 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The collection includes what is perhaps Proulx’s best-known story, “Brokeback Mountain,” which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film by director Ang Lee in 2005. Like other stories in Close Range, “55 Miles to the Gas Pump” addresses themes of The Dangerous... Read 55 Miles to the Gas Pump Summary

“Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words” by Paul Celan, a Jewish-Romanian poet who wrote in German, was originally published in his 1955 poetry collection From Threshold to Threshold (Von Schwelle zu Schwelle). This was Celan’s third published book of poetry.“Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words” can be read as ars poetica, a Latin term that describes a poem about the process of writing poetry. It also explores the inescapability of the past and the animalistic wildness within humans. Celan’s work is heavily metaphoric and intentionally difficult to parse; he chose to... Read Abend Der Worte Summary

Published in 2014, A Brief History of Seven Killings is a literary crime novel by Jamaican writer Marlon James. To serve as the foundation for his novel, James builds the narrative around a singular historical event: the 1976 assassination attempt on Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley, whom he fictionalizes as the Singer for thematic effect. James draws on his experiences growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1970s, and on his parents’ careers in law... Read A Brief History of Seven Killings Summary

Abuela, Don’t Forget Me (2022) is a memoir-in-verse written by author, poet, and comic book illustrator Rex Ogle about the profound influence his Abuela had on his life. The text follows Ogle from early childhood through his high school graduation, tracing the ways in which his Abuela was a supportive and stable force in a childhood otherwise marked by abuse at the hands of his mother and stepfather. The book was a finalist for the... Read Abuela, Don't Forget Me Summary

Ace of Spades is a 2021 Young Adult novel by British Nigerian author Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé. It is a thriller that follows the struggles and injustices faced by the only two Black students at a prestigious American private high school. Àbíké-Íyímídé wrote the novel while studying at a university in Aberdeen, Scotland, where she was one of the only students of color. When writing the novel, she relied partly on her own experiences to pen a... Read Ace of Spades Summary

A Child Called It: One Child’s Courage to Survive is a memoir detailing author Dave Pelzer’s struggles with his abusive mother until the fifth grade. Published in 1995 by Health Communications Inc., it is the first in a series of books that chronicle Pelzer’s fight to leave his dysfunctional household, move through the foster care system, and enter into a stable adulthood. The book was listed on The New York Times best-seller list for several... Read A Child Called It Summary

Published in 1962, during the height of Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the West, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange reflects the anxieties and paranoia of the era. It is a dystopian novel about a roving gang of teenagers who instill fear in and inflict violence on the populace. The novel is known for its invented language, called Nadsat, which is an amalgam of Russian-influenced slang and Cockney dialect. The protagonist, the gleefully... Read A Clockwork Orange Summary

Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004) is about Nomi Nickel, an adolescent living in the religious Mennonite town of East Village whose coming of age takes place against the backdrop of her family’s unraveling. Toews, who grew up in the Mennonite community of Steinbach, Manitoba, is the author of several novels set in Mennonite communities, many of which are critical of aspects of the faith. This novel, Toews’s third, has garnered considerable acclaim and many... Read A Complicated Kindness Summary

A Court of Silver Flames (February 2021) is the fifth and final book in the young adult fantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas. Other books in the series include A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015), A Court of Mist and Fury (2016), A Court of Wings and Ruin (2017), and A Court of Frost and Starlight (2018).Maas is a #1 bestselling New York Times author, and her books... Read A Court of Silver Flames Summary

“Act of Union” is a poem by renowned Irish poet Seamus Heaney; it was published in Heaney’s fourth collection, North (1975). The poem, which is in the form of two sonnets, functions at two levels. On the first level, the male speaker describes the pregnancy of a woman carrying his child; at the second level, the poem is an allegory of the fraught relationship between England and Ireland—especially concerning what were known as the "Troubles,”... Read Act of Union Summary

“A Distant Episode,” a modernist short story by Paul Bowles, was first published in 1947 in The Partisan Review. It was one of Bowles’s first published works of fiction. The story follows an unnamed professor of linguistics as he undergoes a horrifying experience while travelling in the remote interior of Algeria.Paul Bowles was born in 1910 and grew up in New York City. He had already developed a reputation as an up-and-coming composer and music... Read A Distant Episode Summary

Morris Gleitzman is an Australian author best known for writing children’s books that focus on adventure and are filled with humor. His seven-volume Once series details the life of a Jewish boy named Felix Salinger as he struggles to survive the Nazi occupation of Poland before, during, and after World War II. As the fourth installment in the series, After specifically concerns the events in Felix’s life in the winter and spring of 1945 as... Read After Summary

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes” is a lyric written by famed American poet Emily Dickinson. Dickinson likely wrote the poem in 1862, but it wasn’t published until it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1929 (Dickinson died in 1886). Also in 1929, the poem appeared in another posthumous volume of Dickinson’s poetry, Further Poems of Emily Dickinson. Despite her notoriety as an American poet, Dickinson hardly published her work while she was alive... Read After great pain, a formal feeling comes Summary

Afterlives, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 10th novel, was published in 2022, a year after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is also known for the critically acclaimed Paradise (1994). Afterlives is a work of historical fiction that tells the story of a disparate group of a half-dozen colonial-era Tanzanians living in the seacoast village of Tanga. Gurnah, himself Tanzanian, who fled Zanzibar when he was 18, returns to the common topics of his previous books... Read Afterlives Summary

After the First Death (1979) by Robert Cormier is a juvenile suspense/horror that examines the fragility of life through a terrorist hijacking of a bus full of children. The book in conjunction with Cormier’s two most famous teen titles, The Chocolate War (1974) and I Am the Cheese (1977), won him the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the Young Adult Services Division of the American Library Association in 1991. Cormier was born in 1925 and... Read After The First Death Summary

In After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America, Jessica Goudeau argues that the United States’ immigration policy has historically been shaped by the American public’s view of itself as either welcoming to those in need, or exclusionary and fearful. Tracing the experiences of two refugees, Goudeau exposes their traumatic journeys and how the latter approach of exclusion makes an already difficult transition to the US all the more so... Read After the Last Border Summary