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Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

Danielle Evans · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Z.Z. Packer · 238 pages

Drinking coffee elsewhere takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong, from a Girl Scout camp, where a troupe of black girls are confronted with a group of white girls, whose defining feature turns out to be not their race but their disabilities; to the Million Man March on Washington, where a young man must decide where his allegiance to his father lies; an

Short StoriesCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionCultural Identity
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This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz · 240 pages

This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
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The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 240 pages

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as "one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years" (Baltimore Sun), with "prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes" (The Boston Globe); The Washington Post called her "the twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe." Her award-winning Ha

Short StoriesCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionCultural Identity
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All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories

Edward P. Jones · 403 pages

A collection of fourteen short stories is set in Washington, D.C., and follows morally complex characters caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations of modern city life

Short StoriesCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Sabrina & Corina

Kali Fajardo-Anstine · 212 pages

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Maud Martha

Gwendolyn Brooks · 180 pages

September 2003 marked the 50th anniversary of Maud Martha, the only novel published by esteemed poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Initially entitled "American Family Brown" the work would eventually come to symbolize some of Brooks' most provocative writing. In a novel that captures the essence of Black life, Brooks recognizes the beauty and strength that lies within each of us.

Cultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionShort Stories
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The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he

Short StoriesCultural IdentityLiterary FictionRacism
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Arranged Marriage: Stories

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni · 320 pages

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The Collected Stories Of Grace Paley

Grace Paley · 392 pages

Contains all stories from "The little disturbances of man", "Enormous changes at the last minute" and "Later the same day".

Short StoriesCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri · 352 pages

These eight stories by beloved and bestselling author Jhumpa Lahiri take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Here they enter the worlds of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. Rich with the signature gifts that have established Jhumpa Lahiri as one of our most essential writers,

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenCultural Identity
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Dear Life: Stories

Alice Munro · 336 pages

In story after story in this brilliant collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ri

Short StoriesCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionComing of Age
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In the Country

Mia Alvar · 347 pages

"Mia Alvar's ... debut gives us a vivid ... picture of the Filipino diaspora: exiles and emigrants and wanderers uprooting their families to begin new lives in the Middle East and America--and, sometimes, turning back"--

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Black Album (Faber Classics)

Hanif Kureishi · 276 pages

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenIdentity Formation
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Sag Harbor

Colson Whitehead · 288 pages

The warm, funny, and supremely original new novel from one of the most acclaimed writers in AmericaThe year is 1985. Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on his

Cultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionIdentity Formation
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Sour Heart

Jenny Zhang · 310 pages

Short StoriesCultural IdentityLiterary FictionComing of Age
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Swing Time

Zadie Smith · 464 pages

"An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty Two brown girls dream of being dancers--but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood frien

Cultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionComing of Age
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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

Cultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionComing of Age
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Disappearing Earth

Julia Phillips · 312 pages

Cultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionShort Stories
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Franny and Zooey

J.D. Salinger · 202 pages

Franny came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed in 1957 by Zooey. Both stories are early entries in a narrative series about the Glasses, a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York. In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her boyfriend for a football weekend, where they go to a café. The story is essentially an account of

Literary FictionShort StoriesCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
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Caleb's Crossing

Geraldine Brooks · 369 pages

Growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans, Bethia Mayfield yearns for an education that is closed to her due to her gender. As soon as she can, she slips away to explore the island's glistening beaches and observes its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret friendship

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenComing of Age
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Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Elena Ferrante · 417 pages

Since the publication of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan novels, Elena Ferrante's fame as one of our most compelling, insightful, and stylish contemporary authors has grown enormously. She has gained admirers among authors--Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, Claire Messud, to name a few--and critics--James Wood, John Freeman, Eugenia Williamson, for example. But her most resounding

Cultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionIdentity Formation
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Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction

Elissa Schappell · 304 pages

"From the acclaimed author of Use Me, eight provocative and darkly funny linked stories that explore the commonly shared, but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers, mapping America's shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day"--

Short StoriesCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionComing of Age
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Bee Season

Myla Goldberg · 288 pages

"Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that

Cultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionComing of Age
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Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides · 544 pages

A unique coming of age story. While the main character in this novel is dealing with gender identity issues the main focus of this brilliantly written story is the confusion we all face as we grow into the person we were meant to be. The reader finds himself identifying with the main character's experiences. This is a brilliantly written story. The prose is honest in a way that few authors dare t

Cultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionIdentity Formation




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