Reading Lists

Daphne Du Maurier is considered one of the premier writers of the supernatural. The stories in her collection, Don’t Look Now, demonstrate the art of concocting compelling and concise stories that, despite their brevity, offer complex characters dealing with extraordinary events. Students will read all of the stories in the collection. They will analyze how Du Maurier creates a succinct short story and why the short story may heighten the power of the suspense genre.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

ISBN: 978-101970162

One of Yaa Gyasi’s characters in Homegoing describes to his cousin that what he wants to capture in a project he’s working on as “the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it -- not apart from it, but inside of it.” So the novel tells the stories of multiple generations of one family split by the North Atlantic slave trade and shows how people experience “impossibly large” moments. Students will look at how form and meaning intersect, how people navigate hostile societies, and how literature can bring alive voices that have been silenced.

Wait Until Dark by Frederick Knott

ISBN: 978-0822212164

Set in the confines of an apartment in New York, the action of the play revolves around an elaborate attempt by a trio of con men to recover a doll that they believe has come into the possession of Sam Hendrix. The doll,  the reader ultimately discovers, contains heroin—a treasure that at least one of the con men is perfectly willing to kill for. When Sam is lured away from the apartment, Susan, his blind wife, is left alone to cope with the conspirators… Students will identify how playwrights create tension and suspense, examine the conventions of crime writing, and see how writers play with those conventions to challenge long-established power dynamics.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

ISBN: 978-0618871711

This memoir—in the form of a graphic novel—traces Bechdel’s journey as she discovers her sexual identity. The focus is on her strained relationship with her father, a cold and distant man, who hides his own sexual identity. Both father and daughter pay a great price for that suppression of his true self. Bechdel’s book examines the bond between them with compassion, humor, and searing honesty. The title is a play on words, as the Bechdel home is definitely not fun, and the father runs a funeral home that the family refers to as “Fun Home.”  Students will examine the ramifications of living a life either in or out of the “closet.” They will examine how a writer forms a memoir—what is included, what is left out, and what is gained by forcing the reader to share the author’s perspective. And students will examine the power of the graphic novel, words combined with pictures,  to tell a personal story. 

Three children, who are clones, attend a boarding school in the English countryside. These three pupils’ entire purpose in life is to serve as mandatory organ donors for the people from whom they were cloned. The world does not really consider them as real people, but a substantial part of the story shows how these children are humans despite what society thinks of them. Students will encounter critical questions of agency, power, identity, medical ethics, and the scope of human morality. What does it mean to be human? What attributes constitute our humanity? Students will recall echoes of Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, among other texts they may have read.