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.

A multigenerational family saga that traces a Greek-American family's migration, domestic life, and inherited biology which shapes one child's unusual development.

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

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.

Presented through a collage of documents, memoir excerpts, and alternate accounts, the novel orients on a secretive, immensely wealthy financier and the contested stories about him and his wife.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Several loosely connected characters across different eras encounter anomalies that call into question the nature of reality, time, and memory.

An American living in Paris confronts his feelings for another man while his fiancée is away, forcing him to face desire, social expectations, and his own self-image.

An academic family in the American Midwest navigates everyday routines, consumer culture, and family dynamics while an external technological/industrial threat forces questions about death, risk, and how people manage fear.