15 Books from Ann Patchett’s Very Long List of Favorites

In 1955, Flannery O’Connor established herself as one of the most original and provocative writers of her generation. Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition, this story collection illuminates O’Connor’s grotesque view of life infused with religious symbolism, haunted by apocalyptic possibility, and sustained by the tragic comedy of human behavior.

Read a Classic by an Author of Color

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in 3 serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson’s passionate concern for the future of our planet reverberated powerfully throughout the world, and her eloquent book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement.

Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor. Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide ("A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have") and a galaxy-full of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox--the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formally Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years. Where are these pens? Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much time between wearing digital watches? For all the answers stick your thumb to the stars. And don't forget to bring a towel!

You might mistake this book for a quiet pastoral, but it’s so much bigger than that. The internal lives of the women passing through and lingering in the house near Fingerbone are by turns haunting, exhilarating, and, ultimately, profound. It’s also just a teensy bit mystical, as if the house is constantly surrounded by fog.

Fifty years after a murder on a rural Illinois farm, a man tries to reconstruct the events and is inevitably drawn back to his childhood friend, whose father was the murderer. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, William Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

Rick Bragg grew up dirt poor in northeastern Alabama and was seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, but because of his mother’s dedication and sacrifice, he instead became a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The New York Times.

Carol Shields won the Pulitzer Prize for this subtle portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy’s vividly described inner life—from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.

As a young man, James McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion—and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain. Here, he retraces his mother’s story and her searing, spirited voice.

In Laurie Halse Anderson's powerful novel, an utterly believable heroine with a bitterly ironic voice delivers a blow to the hypocritical world of high school. She speaks for many a disenfranchised teenager while demonstrating the importance of speaking up for oneself.

The Sudanese civil war is poignantly rendered through the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee now living in the United States. This moving and expansively human novel reveals the determination of one man as his world collapses around him.

BROTHER, I’M DYING is an astonishing true-life epic that follows Edwidge Danticat’s family from Haiti to New York City and chronicles the emotional effects of their emigration. While some family members were able to relocate to the U. S., they continued to fear for the safety of those they left in Haiti as the political climate deteriorated.

This book emphasized to me that America very often is not just the space we occupy, but the histories, traditions, and cultures we/our ancestors brought with us to this space, whether 10 years ago or 300 years ago. America is informed by a multitude of traditions from around the world, and how we negotiate those traditions to form the American ideal is an exciting and fascinating process. – Etinosa Agbonlahor

As Lucy Barton recovers from an operation, her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Though gentle gossip seems to reconnect them, just below the surface Lucy recognizes a familiar tension and a longing to escape from her troubled family and become a writer.