reading

Sister Outsider

Audre Lorde · 2020

Women Don't Owe You Pretty

Florence Given · 2020

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Paulo Freire · 2014

Emma

Jane Austen · 1886

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath · 2005

<p><i>The Bell Jar</i> chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made <i>The Bell Jar</i> a haunting American classic.</p> <p>This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.</p>

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · 2016

<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (<i>NPR</i>) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.<br></b><br><b><b><b><b><b><b><b>NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST <b><b><b>•</b></b></b></b> MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST <b>• <b><b><b><b><b> WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE</b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b></b><br><br><i>A Little Life</i> follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.

Perfume

Patrick Süskind · 2015

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr · 2014

<b>*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy <i>(Stranger Things)</i> starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti*</b><br> <br><b>Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant <i>New York Times</i> bestseller and <i>New York Times Book Review </i>Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.</b><br><br>Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.<br> <br>In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.<br> <br>Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, <i>All the Light We Cannot See</i> is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (<i>Los Angeles Times</i>).

The Woman Destroyed

Simone De Beauvoir · 2013

<b>One of the most influential thinkers of her generation<i> </i>draws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises in these three “immensely intelligent stories about the decay of passion” (<i>The Sunday Herald Times</i>).</b><br><br>Suffused with de Beauvoir’s remarkable insights into women, <i>The Woman Destroyed </i>gives us a legendary writer at her best. Includes "The Age of Discretion," "The Monologue," and "The Woman Destroyed."<br><br>"Witty, immensely adroit...These three women are believable individuals presented with a wry mixture of sympathy and exasperation." —<i>The Atlantic</i>

Noor

Sorayya Khan · 2006

If Cats Disappeared from the World

Genki Kawamura · 2019

I Who Have Never Known Men

Jacqueline Harpman · 1997

A work of fantasy, I Who Have Never Known Men is the haunting and unforgettable account of a near future on a barren earth where women are kept in underground cages guarded by uniformed groups of men. It is narrated by the youngest of the women, the only one with no memory of what the world was like before the cages, who must teach herself, without books or sexual contact, the essential human emotions of longing, loving, learning, companionship, and dying. Part thriller, part mystery, I Who Have Never Known Men shows us the power of one person without memories to reinvent herself piece by piece, emotion by emotion, in the process teaching us much about what it means to be human.

The Plague

Albert Camus · 1991

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka · 2020

The Cases That Haunt Us

John Douglas, Mark Olshaker · 2012

Everybody Loves Our Town

Mark Yarm · 2011

The Right to Sex

Amia Srinivasan · 2022

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky · 2012