Into Thin Air is American is authored by professional mountain climber Jon Krakauer. It is a personal account of attempting to ascend Mount Everest, prompted by an assignment from Outside magazine to cover the commercial development of the communities at the mountain’s base. Krakauer’s climbing attempt, which was fatal for several, became the deadliest expedition ever on the mountain. In the book, he reflects on his experience, reporting it as truthfully as possible.Krakauer recalls being... Read Into Thin Air Summary

Published in 2019, Chanel Miller’s Know My Name: A Memoir is her first book. A harrowing account of surviving rape and reclaiming identity, Miller’s memoir documents her 2015 rape at Stanford University and its aftermath. A New York Times bestselling author, Miller provides a raw yet hopeful examination of sexual assault. Through the intersections of gender, race, and class, Miller, who is Chinese American, explores society’s treatment of survivors. Ultimately, Miller offers a hopeful journey... Read Know My Name: A Memoir Summary

Published in 2016 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, LaRose is a work of fiction written by author Louise Erdrich, an enrolled member of the Ojibwe people. The novel takes place on the land in and around an Ojibwe North Dakota reservation, the same physical setting as Erdrich’s previous award-winning novel The Round House. However, LaRose’s characters and time period differ from her previous book. LaRose takes place primarily during the years... Read LaRose Summary

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Lila is a work of literary fiction by American novelist Marilynne Robinson. Originally published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, the novel is set in Robinson’s fictional Gilead universe and tells the story of Reverend John Ames’s enigmatic wife, Lila Dahl. When Lila discovers that she is pregnant with the reverend’s child, she begins to reflect on her life. She is happy with John but still struggles to make sense of how much her... Read Lila Summary

Lonesome Dove is a 1985 novel by American author Larry McMurtry. Chronologically, it is the third book in the Lonesome Dove series, although it was published before its two prequels, Dead Man’s Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997). One of the most celebrated novels in the Western genre, Lonesome Dove tells the story of former Texas Rangers Augustus (Gus) McRae and Woodrow Call (Call) as they take a herd of cattle on an ill-fated drive... Read Lonesome Dove Summary

Lost Children Archive is the first English-language novel by Mexican author Valeria Luiselli. Published in 2019, Lost Children Archive was awarded the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2019 Booker Prize. The novel illustrates the intersections and overlaps between a troubled family’s cross-country journey and the treacherous journeys of “lost” children migrating from Mexico to the United States.Lost Children Archive is also an archive in... Read Lost Children Archive Summary

American author Louise Erdrich’s debut novel, Love Medicine, was first published in 1984 to critical acclaim. A bestseller and winner of the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the novel follows three generations of members from five Ojibwe families in Minnesota and North Dakota. Lyrical, metaphorical, and a complex exploration of oppression, joy, and family, the novel is both a record of history and an analysis of love. Blending the genres of historical... Read Love Medicine Summary

In the 2007 nonfiction book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, medical researcher Harriet A. Washington describes the long history of American medical experiments on Black Americans. Although some of these abuses are well-known, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the book presents a comprehensive history that describes the long-standing pattern of exploitative practices. By uncovering how American medicine has been built upon the... Read Medical Apartheid Summary

Milkman is author Anna Burns’ third novel and the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize in Fiction (widely regarded as one of the most prestigious awards in literature). Burns was the first Northern Irish writer ever to receive the award, and Milkman’s subject matter is inseparable from its author’s nationality. Like Burns herself, the novel’s protagonist grows up in 1970s Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles: a 30-year political, ethnic, and religious... Read Milkman Summary

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Newjack is a nonfiction book written by Ted Conover. Conover, a journalist, spends a year as a correction officer in Sing Sing Prison and keeps a detailed record of events in a spiral notebook. The story takes place largely at Sing Sing, a historic prison located in Ossining, New York. Sing Sing is a palimpsest of structures dating back to the 1800s: spread across fifty-five acres, the prison includes massive cell blocks, a solitary-housing unit... Read Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing Summary

No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us (2019) was written by Rachel Louise Snyder, an associate professor of creative writing and journalism at American University. A world traveler, longtime contributor to magazines and podcasts, and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Snyder has won awards for both her fiction and nonfiction works, which include Fugitive Denim and What We’ve Lost is Nothing. No Visible Bruises, published by Bloomsbury Publishing, won the... Read No Visible Bruises Summary

Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings is a memoir comprised of three essays, each exploring a different aspect of what makes a writer. Adapted from a series of lectures Welty delivered at Harvard University, the book explores “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice.” Each section presents both the author’s personal memories and philosophy of writing: Art is rooted in attention to the world, in an openness to memory, and in a voice shaped by... Read One Writer's Beginnings Summary

On Photography is a 1977 collection of seven essays by American scholar, activist, and philosopher Susan Sontag. The essays were published in the New York Review of Books from 1973 to 1977 before publication in a single volume. Sontag explores the history of photography and its relationship to reality, the fine arts, and sociopolitical power structures. Individual essays explore these various relationships between photography and the world through a different lens before the culminating exploration... Read On Photography Summary

Teju Cole’s first full-length novel, Open City was published in 2011 to widespread acclaim, winning the PEN/Hemingway Award, The New York City Book Award, and the Rosenthal Foundation Award. Open City made many lists of the best books of the year, including at the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR. Cole was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Nigerian parents and spent most of his childhood in Lagos, Nigeria before returning... Read Open City Summary

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Roots is a 1976 historical fiction novel by Alex Haley. Haley served in the United States Coast Guard during World War II and as a military journalist after the war. Prior to writing Roots, Haley interviewed famous Black Americans and ghostwrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which has remained a bestselling work since its publication in 1965. In Roots, Haley combines his journalistic experience with Black America and his family’s oral history, bolstered with research... Read Roots Summary

Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland interprets the Irish “Troubles” in which clashing state and paramilitary forces in Northern Ireland fought an unofficial ethno-nationalist war. Though the monograph is a work of non-fiction investigative journalism, it unfolds like a murder mystery, focusing on the case of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10 that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) abducted and secretly killed in 1972. The... Read Say Nothing Summary

So Long, See You Tomorrow is the acclaimed final novel by American writer and editor William Maxwell. Originally published in two parts in New Yorker magazine in 1979, the book appeared the following year and received the prestigious National Book Award in 1982. Maxwell was the fiction editor of the New Yorker from 1936 to 1975, making him one of the most influential literary editors of the era. He worked closely with J. D. Salinger... Read So Long, See You Tomorrow Summary