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The farm is one field to the east of the railroad track that used to connect New Orleans with Chicago. The track runs beside Highway 45, an old U. On this highway when I was about ten, my dog Rags was killed, smashed flat, and nobody bothered to remove his body.

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For a long time, it was still there when we went to town—a hank of hair and a piece of bone. It became a rag, then a wisp, then a spot. It had something to do with the immutability of fate. There was always something. Injustice, hope, ambition, and the history and truth of New Orleans are the underlying subjects of this novel, explored through the stories of these well-drawn characters. For a less-contemporary but also-great classic, you might try The Moviegoer , by Walker Percy. Five Days at Memorial , Sheri Fink. The story here is gripping, but the moral questions it raises are even more so, and those will stick with you for a long time.

Olive Kitteridge , Elizabeth Strout.

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One of those books that takes regular people in a regular place and makes them feel like epic characters in the story of all our lives. The very charming reflections of a woman who picks up and, well, takes to the woods—the woods of northern Maine, where supplies are as scarce as neighbors, but grit and humor are stocked in full. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to re-emerge on corners and prison tiers.

Dad was at war with this destiny. The book is grim and hazy, the prose experimental at times and wrenching at others. Walden , Henry David Thoreau. Detroit City Is the Place to Be: A series of essays about Detroit that moves past the flashy narratives and digs into the truth—both good and bad, both new and old—of the city. The Virgin Suicides , Jeffrey Eugenides. Lots of evocative descriptions of the desolation and isolation of the landscape here, a kind of cold emptiness that permeates the rest of the book.

The Latehomecomer , Kao Kalia Yang.

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Kao Kalia Yang was born in a Hmong refugee camp in Vietnam. From there, her family made it to the US, settling in St. As much as this is a classic American story of the immigrant experience in a new place, it is also an exploration of the Hmong people—a group about which most Americans are completely ignorant. The winner of the Minnesota Book Award.

Main Street , Sinclair Lewis. Ward mixes the terrifyingly real and the silkily surreal in the best of ways, and this novel should be read by everyone. The Sound and the Fury , William Faulkner. Fantastic, unsentimental writing and a captivating story. By the way, Missouri has a lot of good fiction to its name. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Mark Twain. This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind , Ivan Doig. Doig is a celebrated chronicler of Montana, his homeland, with some sixteen books to his name.

In his memoir, a finalist for the National Book Award for Contemporary Thought, he tells the story of his Montana childhood, with the death of his mother, his grieving father, and the other lives and the wild world that surrounded him. In this novel, a woman named Dalva returns to the Nebraska of her youth to seek out the son she abandoned 30 years earlier, and finds, perhaps it is needless to say, rather more than she expected.

The book grew out of a childhood and adolescence spent among the story-tellers of the frontier. My Antonia , Willa Cather. This is a fantastic collection—strange and wan and oddly sexy and troubled and very much rooted in its setting. The point of view roams, but the Nevada setting provides a hard ground on which the reader counts for stability. Although the individual stories stand alone, together they tell the tale of a place, and of the population that thrives and perishes therein.

So we ended up calling it a fiction. A lot of it is true. The prostitute did write poetry, although the poetry I used in Vegas is not hers. It was actually written by my wife, who as a child had memorized a lot of Sara Teasdale poems. I can write you bad poetry, she said. So there are two little poems in there that Joan actually wrote. I adore this delicious novel about young love and longing at a New Hampshire boarding school, told with a James Salterian distance that turns it into a book as much about the power of storytelling as it is about teenage sex or the lack thereof.

In the s, Norris was a tough nine-year-old growing up in the projects of Manchester with a violent and tyrannical father and a terrified mother. Over the course of this memoir, she escapes—but not without leaving some pieces behind, and taking some others along with her. A Separate Peace , John Knowles. Catholicism and magic, man and nature, mother and father are all at odds here, but the central story is about the relationship of Antonio and Ultima, who does her best to guide him through the conflicts. Death Comes for the Archbishop , Willa Cather.

SO MUCH SNOW! By Robert Munsch Read Aloud by Books Read Aloud For Children

Even two is ludicrously insufficient—you know the drill. Both of these selections, I see only now, are essentially plotless, which seems rather fitting for our fair city, in which chance and change and aimlessness reign. Everyone has their own New York, after all. Two modern classics here: The Famous Option s: The Great Gatsby , F. Apparently—and somewhat incredibly—in the s, North Carolina had more Klan members than all of the other southern states combined. Also incredibly—and horribly, and disgustingly, and frighteningly—the history of the KKK has become suddenly much more relevant to your daily life than it was a month ago.

Cold Mountain , Charles Frazier. Curious how a place unvisited can take such a hold on the mind so that the very name sets up a ringing. To me such a place was Fargo, North Dakota. If you will take a map of the United States and fold it in the middle, eastern edge against western, and crease it sharply, right in the crease will be Fargo.

On double-page maps sometimes Fargo gets lost in the binding. That may not be a very scientific method for finding the east-west middle of the country, but it will do. But beyond this, Fargo to me is brother to the fabulous places of the earth, kin to those magically remote spots mentioned by Herodotus and Marco Polo and Mandeville. From my earliest memory, if it was a cold day, Fargo was the coldest place on the continent. If heat was the subject, then at that time the papers listed Fargo as hotter than any place else, or wetter or drier, or deeper in snow.

Be careful of farmboys , we warned each other. They know how to plant seeds. Luckily, your bookshelf has no limits. American Splendor , Harvey Pekar. A chronicle of the day-to-day goings-on and existential crises of Harvey Pekar, native of Cleveland, Ohio, written by Pekar and illustrated by such luminaries as Alison Bechel, Robert Crumb, and Gilbert Hernandez. Winesburg, Ohio , Sherwood Anderson. Killers of the Flower Moon , David Grann.

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Then someone begins to murder them. More than two dozen people were shot, poisoned, or otherwise killed between and , and eventually, the F. I was sent to investigate. Grann turns the whole story into a captivating large-scale murder mystery that also happens to be true. The Outsiders , S. A vivid novel about a teenage orphan who does what all orphans used to do, and heads west, to the frontier town of Century, Oregon, where she finds her cattle ranching cousin and a whole world she never imagined. Esther observes the lay of the land after arriving: The vast quiet, the singular negotiations between a cold, calm man and a colder, calmer plain.

Hole in the Sky , William Kittredge. In the first chapter, he writes:. Maybe children wake to a love affair every other morning or so; if given any chance, they seem to like the sight and smell and feel of things so much. Falling for the world could be a thing that happens to them all the time, I hope so, I hope it is purely commonplace.

Think of light and how far it falls, to us. To fall, we say, naming a fundamental way of going to the world—falling. In the evening my father would drive along the central banks to study his crops as they emerged in undulating rows across the dark peat soil of the old swamplands. We could speculate on how much the seedlings had grown in just one day.

We thought we could smell the growing. That little boy had no intimation that those moments would come to stand in memory as his approximation of perfection: The Pittsburgh Cycle , August Wilson. An American Childhood , Annie Dillard. The Lovely Bones , Alice Sebold.

The Witches of Eastwick , John Updike. A coven of three thrives in the town of Eastwick: Enter Darryl Van Horne, mysterious un-handsome stranger, who rather stirs the cauldron, resulting in death, destruction, and a darkly hilarious ending. Bastard Out of Carolina , Dorothy Allison. Perhaps needless to say, he only makes things worse, sexually abusing his stepdaughter and driving an even bigger wedge through the center of the family.

Brown Girl Dreaming , Jacqueline Woodson. A grim portrait of life on a reservation, infused with dark humor and not a little violence. My Own Country , Abraham Verghese. A specialist in infectious diseases, Verghese was the best-equipped doctor in the area to deal with this sudden rash of what turned out of HIV-positive patients, but still, he watched the number of AIDS cases go from zero to eighty over four years.

I read this memoir long ago, in high school, and still I remember it, and the sense of both the specific place and the country at large that it imparted. A Death in the Family , James Agee. Woman Hollering Creek , Sandra Cisneros. A classic collection of short stories—mostly about Mexican-American women, largely set in San Antonio, though the border is crossed and crossed again in mind and body—separated into three sections that investigate childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The end effect is a tapestry of longing and belonging, a portrait in pattern.

No one writes like Mary Karr—all whip-crack heart and shiny-edged eyes—and her memoir of growing up in an East Texas oil town is a full-fledged knockout. Lonesome Dove , Larry McMurtry. A memoir that traces Mary Albanese's experiences as a geological explorer in Alaska, mapping remote wilderness areas around the state.

An oral history of Alaska conservationist and outdoorswoman Ginny Hill Wood. A real-life adventure story and an ethnography about commercial fishing from the view of a former boat captain who grew up in a fishing family. An autobiography that traces the author's experiences in World War II, his role as a delegate to the Alaska Constitutional Convention and other government appointments, and continuing relationship with Russia.

This story focuses on an Alaska Native family struggling to survive in two worlds. Memoirs of a 20th Century Master Mariner" by J. A memoir about master mariner J. Holger Christensen of Nome and his passion for the sea. Made in Alaska" by Chuck Heath Sr. Sarah Palin's father and brother share stories from her life. A Survival Story" by Abigail B. Calkin; Fern Hill Press. An adventure story about Captain Larry Hills' attempt to rescue his deckhand — and then himself -- after both become trapped in the net reel of a trawler.

Arctic researcher Matthew Sturm shares the story of his 2,mile snowmobile expedition across arctic Alaska and Canada, weaving his narrative with other stories of exploration and adventure. Juneau author and photographer Larry Johansen traveled to all 18 wilderness areas in the Alexander Archipelago, and documents those travels and surrounding issues here through words and pictures.

The second edition of this book on skijoring, or being pulled on skis by a dog in harness, covers what equipment is needed, how to teach a dog to pull, and how to work with your dog year-round. An analysis of the distribution of caribou herds in northwest Alaska, based on modern research as well as sources that predate western science. In Frontier Romance, Judith Kleinfeld examines Americans' love of the frontier and its cultural influence. A comprehensive guide to the natural history of the North Slope, with information on climate, geology, landforms, and ecology; a guide to the identification and natural history of common animals and plants; and a primer on the human prehistory of the region.

Recipes for cooking with the more abundant and popular species of wild berries indigenous to Alaska, from currants to watermelon berries.

The City Beneath the Snow: Stories (The Alaska Literary Series)

Peggy Shumaker: Projects

The Literary United States: A Map of the Best Book for Every State

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