A Trump Era American Reader

With the election of Donald Trump, there are more dimensions (racism, corruption, misogyny, injustice, anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, anti-immigrant, economic injustice) than I can possibly look at, think about or understand. So with the help of some very smart, educated, responsible and reasonable people (here) I have put together this reading list. Many I have read, but will need to read them in in this long American winter.

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.” ― James Baldwin

Contemporary Fiction

• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
• Fine Just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• The Age of Miracles: A Novel by Karen Thompson Walker
• Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko
• Snow by Orhan Pamuk
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Fiction

• It Can’t Happen Here by Upton Sinclair
• All The Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren
• Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coatzee
• Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
• Native Son by Richard Wright
• Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France
• The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.”
― Audre Lorde

Non-Fiction

• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
• Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics by Rebecca Solnit
• Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
• The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics by George Lakoff
• Essays by George Orwell
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
• Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond by Marc Lamont Hill
• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1–6 by Edward Gibbon
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Poetry

• Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
• Omeros by Derek Walcott
• Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano
• The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde
• Look: Poems by Solmaz Sharif
• Only in the Meantime & Office Poems by Mario Benedetti
• Collected Works of Nazim Hikmet by Nazim Hikmet
• Dark Times Filled With Light by Juan Gelman
• Collected Poems 1947–1997 by Allen Ginsberg
• Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972 by Adrienne Rich