Set on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s, the novel follows Bigger Thomas, a young Black man shaped by crushing poverty and social isolation.

Richard Wright's Black Boy is a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood, following life in the segregated American South and his later move to Chicago where he begins a writing career and political engagement.

Two linked essays presented as letters that question the place of race and religion in American life.

Set in an imagined Antebellum United States, the novel follows Cora, an enslaved woman who flees a Georgia plantation via an Underground Railroad visualized as an actual subterranean railway.

Told from the viewpoint of a returning World War II veteran, the novel follows his arrival in Los Angeles and the tense relationships he forms there while an external string of murders and police investigation encircle him.

A formally inventive novel that stages an Asian American life through the language and beats of television scripts, focusing on how roles and stereotypes shape a character’s ambitions and relations.

A man with intellectual disability undergoes an experimental medical procedure intended to raise his intelligence, and the narrative records the aftermath through dated personal entries.

A young woman in the early 1950s experiences an increasingly severe depression while navigating academic opportunity, social expectations, and the pressures of adulthood. The novel presents her interior perspective as she struggles with identity, career choices, and the medical responses to her mental illness.

A first-person narrator from a small Black community near Los Angeles stands before the Supreme Court and reflects on the chain of incidents that led him there, including provocative attempts to respond to historic racial injustice in his hometown.

A novel told through letters that follow a Black woman’s life in the American South across early adulthood, tracing how she survives sexual and domestic abuse, discovers personal voice, and finds connection with other women.

A young Nigerian woman leaves Lagos to study in the United States and must navigate new social categories, racial visibility, and evolving relationships across continents.

Two contrasting societies — one organized around communal, anarchist principles and the other structured by more conventional hierarchy and market relations — come into contact.