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Derek Schaefer
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Grimms' Tales for Young and Old
Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
James Mustich
Stories are humanity’s greatest tools; with them, men and women manipulate those essential elements of experience—fears and hopes, faiths and terrors, worry, grace, wonderment—that otherwise are so intangible. Generations of storytellers have used these implements to widely differing purpose and eff...show more
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
My favorite author. His writing feels as if you are sitting at a table and chatting with him. It is simple, but simultaneously complex.
The Complete Stories
Franz Kafka
Anatomizing the absurdity of modern life through ever more bizarre situations and ironies, Kafka’s tales have a force out of all proportion to their small scale (one, the cat-and-mouse story “A Little Fable,” is just three sentences long). Yet within their deceptive dimensions, they seem to move ele...show more
1984
George Orwell
Even now, six decades after it was written and more than a quarter century after its titular year has come and gone, 1984 continues to haunt us with its aura of pernicious possibility. Orwell’s warning of a spiritless, totalitarian time to come has lost none of its relevance. It would be hard to nam...show more
The Complete Maus
Art Spiegelman
Maus is a comic book about the Holocaust—or, if you prefer, a “graphic novel” or “graphic memoir.” The shock is the same: Who would use a comic strip to document the Holocaust? The answer is the American comics artist Art Spiegelman. His use of this improbable genre as a vehicle for reconstructing a...show more
Night
Elie Wiesel
“I became convinced,” Elie Wiesel recollects of his thirteen-year-old self, “that Moishe the Beadle would help me enter eternity, into that time when question and answer would become ONE.” So opens this slim but powerful testament to the horrors of the Holocaust. First Moishe is expelled from Sighet...show more
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is near the top of the list of most-beloved American novels. Set in Depression-era Alabama, it is the story of six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, better known as Scout; her older brother, Jeremy, nicknamed Jem; and their father, Atticus Finch, a middle-aged lawyer who...show more
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
The Road starts simply enough: A father and son, waking after a night camping in the wilderness, prepare to journey onward. But we’re soon aware that the simplicity belongs to no pastoral idyll—the sky is endlessly gray, the rivers are the color of oil, and ash drips from above. Nearly all plants an...show more
Dreams from My Father
Barack Obama
An emotional and at times disarmingly candid memoir “of race and inheritance,” chronicling his life from childhood in Hawaii to Harvard Law School, the book was written before Obama was even a US senator from Illinois, let alone president of the United States. That makes it an uncommon and especiall...show more
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter S. Thompson
Whacked out and drug crazed; riotous and exuberant; immature and irresponsible; brilliantly original and more than a little insane, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas chronicles the “bad craziness” that overtook Hunter S. Thompson and a sidekick on a journalistic assignment in 1971. It’s a book of headl...show more