What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorGoing to Meet the Man
James Baldwin · 235 pages
"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe · 690 pages
Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee · 288 pages
Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch -- "Scout" -- returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memori
The Power of One
Bryce Courtenay · 518 pages
Follows Peekay, a white British boy in South Africa during World War II, between the ages of five and eleven, as he survives an abusive boarding school and goes on to succeed in life and the boxing ring, with help from a chicken, a boxer, a pianist, black African prisoners, and many others.
The Round House
Louise Erdrich · 352 pages
A young man is upended after a violent attack on his mother, which leaves his family in turmoil. Well-written page turner that is hard to put down!
Mudbound
Hillary Jordan · 335 pages
"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison · 474 pages
Invisible Man is the story of a young black man from the South who does not fully understand racism in the world. Filled with hope about his future, he goes to college, but gets expelled for showing one of the white benefactors the real and seamy side of black existence. He moves to Harlem and becomes an orator for the Communist party, known as the Brotherhood. In his position, he is both threaten
Eight Men: Short Stories
Richard Wright · 250 pages
Here, in these powerful stories, Richard Wright takes readers into this landscape once again. Each of the eight stories in Eight Men focuses on a black man at violent odds with a white world, reflecting Wright's views about racism in our society and his fascination with what he called "the struggle of the individual in America." These poignant, gripping stories will captivate all those who loved B
Kingsblood Royal
Sinclair Lewis · 348 pages
"A neglected tour de force by the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Kingsblood Royal is a stirring and wickedly funny portrait of a man who "resigns from the white race." When Neil Kingsblood - a typical middle-American banker with a comfortable life - makes the shocking discovery that he has African-American blood, the odyssey that ensues creates an unforgettable portrayal of t
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Cormac McCarthy · 337 pages
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indi
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain · 330 pages
Of Love and Dust
Ernest J. Gaines · 281 pages
When young Marcus is bonded out of jail, where he has been awaiting his trial for murder, he is sent to the Hebert plantation to work in the fields. He treats the Cajun overseer, Sidney Bonbon, with supreme contempt, even as Bonbon works him nearly to death. Marcus takes his revenge by first seducing Bonbon's black mistress, Pauline, and then his wife, Louise. Jim Kelly, the tractor driver, watche
The Sellout
Paul Beatty · 304 pages
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's *The Sellout* showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant. Born
For Two Thousand Years
Mihail Sebastian · 240 pages
Small Great Things LARGE PRINT
Jodi Picoult
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 131 pages
Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State, in the heart of Africa, by the story's narrator Charles Marlow. Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest English writers, and Heart of Darkness is considered his best. His readers are
Falling
Anne Provoost · 288 pages
Lucas falls under the influence of an extremist who draws him into violent action against migrants - Then he meets Caitlin, who challenges his views and his very sense of himself - He must make a choice.
The Learning Tree
Gordon Parks · 303 pages
Autobiographical novel about a boy entering his teens in a racially segregated Kansas town in the 1920s.
Snow Falling on Cedars
David Guterson · 424 pages
On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead · 416 pages
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a youn
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
James Weldon Johnson · 122 pages
"The Auto-biography of an Ex-colored Man," by James Weldon Johnson, is the tragic fictional story of an unnamed narrator who tells the story of his coming-of-age at the beginning of the 20th century. Light-skinned enough to pass for white but emotionally tied to his mother's heritage, he ends up a failure in his own eyes after he chooses to follow the easier path while witnessing a white mob set f
Black Like Me
John Howard Griffin · 190 pages
Publisher's description: Studs Terkel tells us in his Foreword to the definitive Griffin Estate Edition of Black Like Me: "This is a contemporary book, you bet." Indeed, Black Like Me remains required reading in thousands of high schools and colleges for this very reason. Regardless of how much progress has been made in eliminating outright racism from American life, Black Like Me endures as a gre