theLeftAhead Literary Canon
Fiction
[In Reverse Chronological Order]:
Charles Yu - Interior Chinatown
Madeline Miller - Circe
Andrew Sean Greer - Less
Colson Whitehead - The Underground Railroad
Harper Lee - Go Set a Watchman
Viet Thanh Nguyen - The Sympathizer
Phil Klay - Redeployment
Jason Mott - The Returned
Salman Rushdie - Joseph Anton: A Memoir
Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl
Stephen King - 11/22/63
Jess Walter - The Financial Lives of the Poets
John Updike - Terrorist
Jeff Lindsay - Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Jen Banbury - Like a Hole in the Head
Norman Mailer - The Gospel According to the Son
Ethan Hawke - The Hottest State
Mona Simpson - A Regular Guy
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
John Updike - Rabbit at Rest
Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses
Toni Morrison - Beloved
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Bret Easton Ellis - Less Than Zero
John Updike - Rabbit Is Rich
Norman Mailer - The Executioner's Song
Stephen King - The Shining
John Updike - Rabbit Redux
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
Norman Mailer - An American Dream
Jack Kerouac - Big Sur
Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
John Updike - Rabbit, Run
Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
Jack Kerouac - On the Road
James Baldwin - Go Tell It on the Mountain
J. D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls
James Joyce - Finnegans Wake
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
James Joyce - Ulysses
James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
D.H. Lawrence - The Rainbow
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles
Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
John Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress
Non-Fiction
[In Reverse Chronological Order]:
Barack Obama - A Promised Land
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio - The Undocumented Americans
Edward Snowden - Permanent Record
Michelle Obama - Becoming
Bob Woodward - Fear: Trump in the White House
Ta-Nehisi Coates - We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Bernie Sanders - Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution
Neil deGrasse Tyson - Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Timothy Snyder - On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Michael Eric Dyson - Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White People
Bernie Sanders - Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In
Alice Y. Walker - Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, & the Foundations of a Movement
Gloria Steinem - My Life on the Road
Bernie Sanders- Outsider in the White House
Ta-Nehisi Coates - Between the World and Me
David McCullough - The Wright Brothers
David Axelrod - Believer: My Forty Years in Politics
Bryan Stevenson - Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Suki Kim - Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite
Naomi Klein - This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Hillary Clinton - Hard Choices: A Memoir
Elizabeth Warren - A Fighting Chance
Michael Lewis - Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Doris Kearns Goodwin - The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt and the Golden Age of Journalism
Malala Yousafzai - I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
Malcolm Gladwell - David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
Reza Aslan - Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Ray Kurzweil - How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
Nate Silver - The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't
Rachel Maddow - Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
Jon Ronson - The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Bill Clinton - Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy
Walter Issacson - Steve Jobs
Philip Dray - There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America
Michelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Bill Simmons - The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy
Edward M. Kennedy - True Compass: A Memoir
Fareed Zakaria - The Post-American World
Thomas L. Friedman - Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America
David Plouffe - The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory
Malcolm Gladwell - Outliers: The Story of Success
Scott McClellan - What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception
Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Barack Obama - The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Doris Kearns Goodwin - Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Marcus J. Borg - The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith
Hillary Clinton - Living History
John Feinstein - The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight That Changed Basketball Forever
John Wooden - They Call Me Coach
Alan Dershowitz - Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000
William Shaw - Westside: Young Men and Hip Hop in L.A.
Jennifer Harbury - Bridge of Courage: Life Stories of the Guatemalan Compañeros and Compañeras
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. - A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Joyce Johnson - Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir
Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States
Eduardo Galleano - Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Saul D. Alinsky - Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals
Abbie Hoffman - Steal This Book
Alex Haley & Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Martin Luther King, Jr. - Why We Can't Wait
Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Thomas Jefferson - Notes on the State of Virginia
Poetry
[In Reverse Chronological Order]:
Kevin Coval - A People's History of Chicago
Tyehimba Jess - Olio
Tony Hoagland - Application for Release from the Dream
Amy Gerstler - Scattered at Sea
Peter Balakian - Ozone Journal
James Franco - Directing Herbert White: Poems
Rae Armantrout - Money Shot
Charles Bukowski - The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems
Saul Williams - Said the Shotgun to the Head
Frank Marshall Davis - Black Moods: Collected Poems
Tupac Shakur - The Rose that Grew from Concrete
Donald Hall - Without: Poems
Maya Angelou - And Still I Rise
Jack Kerouac - Heaven and Other Poems
Seamus Heaney - North
Shel Silverstein - Where the Sidewalk Ends
Maya Angelou - Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie
Gary Snyder - The Back Country
Sylvia Plath - The Colossus and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg - Howl and Other Poems
T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets
Fernando Pessoa - Poesia Inglesa (1)
Ezra Pound - Personae
Alfred Tennyson - Idylls of the King
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven
George Gordon Byron - Don Juan
William Blake - Songs of Innocence and Experience
Phillis Wheatley - Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
John Milton - Paradise Lost
William Shakespeare - Shakespeare's Sonnets
Homer - The Odyssey
Homer - The Iliad