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All Boys Aren't Blue : a Memoir-manifesto
by George M. Johnson
A first book by the prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist shares personal essays that chronicle his childhood, adolescence and college years as a Black queer youth, exploring subjects ranging from gender identity and toxic masculinity to structural marginalization and Black joy.
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Gender Queer : a Memoir
by Maia Kobabe
Gender Queer: A Memoir is a 2019 graphic memoir written and illustrated by Maia Kobabe. It recounts Kobabe's journey from adolescence to adulthood and the author's exploration of gender identity and sexuality, ultimately identifying as being outside of the gender binary.
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The 1619 Project : a New Origin Story
by Nikole Hannah-Jones
This ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began on the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery reimagines if our national narrative actually started in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of 20-30 enslaved people from Africa.
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When the Emperor Was Divine
by Julie Otsuka
A story told from five different points of view--a mother receiving the evacuation order, her daughter on the train ride to the camp, the son in the desert internment camp, the family's return home, and the final release of the father after years in captivity--chronicles the experiences of Japanese Americans caught up in the nightmare of the World War II internment camps.
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Lawn Boy : a Novel
by Jonathan Evison
Faced by a life of menial prospects in the years after high school, Mike Muǫz, a young Mexican-American, attempts over and over to change his life for the better and achieve the American dream only to be stymied by social class distinctions and cultural discrimination.
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How to Be an Antiracist
by Ibram X. Kendi
Combines ethics, history, law, and science with a personal narrative to describe how to move beyond the awareness of racism and contribute to making society just and equitable.
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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
In the Republic of Gilead, a Handmaid named Offred lives in the home of the Commander, to the purpose that she become pregnant with his child. Stripped of her most basic freedoms, (work, property, her own name), Offred remembers a different time, not so long ago, when she was valuable for more than her viable ovaries, when she was mother to a daughter she could keep, and when she and her husband lived and loved as equals. Darkly prescient, scathingly sarcastic, and eminently frightening, The Handmaid's Tale has only gained relevance since it was originally published, and remains one of the most powerful, widely read stories of our times.
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Frequently Banned & Challenged Books
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.
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Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
An African-American man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Tom Joad and his family are forced from their farm in the Depression-era Oklahoma Dust Bowl and set out for California along with thousands of others in search of jobs, land, and hope for a brighter future. Considered John Steinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath is a story of human unity and love as well as the need for cooperative rather than individualistic ideals during hard times.
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A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess
In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, criminals take over after dark. Teen gang leader Alex narrates in fantastically inventive slang that echoes the violent intensity of youth rebelling against society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom.
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The Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie
Gibreel Farishta, a legendary Indian movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices, fall earthward from a bombed jet toward the sea, singing rival verses in an eternal wrestling match between good and evil.
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The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
The lives of two sisters--Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a southern woman married to a man she hates--are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.
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Native Son
by Richard Wright
Native Son tells the story of a young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.
Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X
Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America.
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The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros
Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous–it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become.
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Push
by Sapphire
A courageous and determined young teacher opens up a new world of hope and redemption for sixteen-year-old Precious Jones, an abused young African-American girl living in Harlem, who was raped and left pregnant by her father.
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the fukú–the ancient curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love.
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The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son, in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.
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Pedagogy of the oppressed
by Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire's methodology has helped to empower countless people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm.
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Loverboys
by Ana Castillo
A new collection of stories by the award-winning author of So Far from God explores the experience of love in all its diverse modes, from rapturous beginnings to bittersweet ends, in "La Miss Rose," "Vatolandia," and the title tale. Tour.
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic.
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The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
The unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world's most gifted and imaginative storytellers. The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family.
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Buck : a Memoir
by Molefi K. Asante
An account of the author's youth in Zimbabwe and in violent Philadelphia street gangs explores how his life was shaped by his father's absence, his brother's imprisonment, and his mother's and sister's struggles with mental illness.
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Soul On Ice
by Eldridge Cleaver
The now-classic memoir that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the civil rights movement and the black experience.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love—in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as "magical realism."
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Fifty Shades of Grey
by E. L. James
When literature student Anastasia Steele goes to interview young entrepreneur Christian Grey, she encounters a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating. The unworldly, innocent Ana is startled to realize she wants this man and, despite his enigmatic reserve, finds she is desperate to get close to him. Unable to resist Anas quiet beauty, wit, and independent spirit, Grey admits he wants her, too but on his own terms. Shocked yet thrilled by Greys singular erotic tastes, Ana hesitates. For all the trappings of success-his multinational businesses, his vast wealth, his loving family Grey is a man tormented by demons and consumed by the need to control. When the couple embarks on a daring, passionately physical affair, Ana discovers Christian Greys secrets and explores her own dark desires.
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Bless Me, Ultima
by Rudolfo A Anaya
Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will probe the family ties that bind and rend him, and he will discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past-a mythic legacy as palpable as the Catholicism of Latin America. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world...and will nurture the birth of his soul.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
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Black Boy : (American Hunger)
by Richard Wright
The author relates his life as an African American growing up in the South during the Jim Crow years.
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Kaffir Boy : the True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa
by Mark Mathabane
When first published 20 years ago, Kaffir Boy changed the way the West understood South Africa. As powerful today as when it was first written, Mathabane's remarkable story of life under apartheid is told with brutal honesty and gives the reader a rare glimpse, behind the protests and boycotts, of the daily fear and hunger which was so devastating to the soul.
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How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez
Uprooted from their family home in the Dominican Republic, the four Garcia sisters - Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia - arrive in New York City in 1960 to find a life far different from the genteel existence of maids, manicures, and extended family they left behind. What they have lost - and what they find - is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories that make up this exquisite novel.
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