Recommended Reading
Need help choosing what to read next? The Narrative Library offers thousands of stories, poems, and essays. Here’s a list of recommendations that ranges genres, forms, content, and authors—the best of all worlds—to help you get started.
Fiction
“Crusaders” by Natasha Ayaz
“Rouses Point” by Sarah Balakrishnan
“The Woman in the Rose-Colored Dress” by Gina Berriault
“Papi” by Jenzo Duque
“Devil’s Child” by Farnaz Fassihi
“Vieques” by Kevin A. González
“The Crossing Guard” by Sara Houghteling
“Asiana” by Wen Jing
“Araby” by James Joyce
“The Treatment of Bibi Halder” by Jhumpa Lahiri
“Butterfly” by Vivian Ludford
“Red Dress–1946” by Alice Munro
“Friday Night Fish Fry” by Austin Smith
“Burn” by Morgan Talty
“The Black Hole” by Patience Wallace
“Vertical Integration” by Spencer Wise
“Übermensch” by Tobias Wolff
“First Light” by Tryphena Yeboah
Nonfiction
“Dear America” by Scarlett Akeley
“Whale Shark” by Rick Bass
“Oh” by Marianne Boruch
“My Daughter and God” by Justin Cronin
“If I Owned a Gun” by Andre Dubus III
“A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route” by Saidiya Hartman
“Sparrow” by Maria Hummel
“Underaged” by Avianca Jackson
“Dear America” by Hugo Anaya de Jesus
“When You Can No Longer Talk about It, You Have to Sing” by Irene Keliher
“Buried Voices” by Debra Marquart
“The Lost Sister: An Elegy” by Joyce Carol Oates
“Tina Turner and My Father” by Deborah Paredez
“Mysteries of Love and Grief” by Sandra Scofield
“Last Things” by Debra Sparks
Poetry
“My Opera” by Kim Addonizio
“I Carried My Father Across the Sea” by Gbenga Adesina
“Pale Blue Vein” by Ellen Bass
“Am Looking For” by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
“The Tradition” by Jericho Brown
“Muslim Girlhood” by Leila Chatti
“Downhill Triolets” by Natalie Diaz
“Slow Dance” by Matthew Dickman
“Sugaring Season” by Caroline Falzone
“Alderaan” by Maria Hummel
“Double Doors” by Richard Jones
“The Morning” by W. S. Merwin
“The Traveling Onion” by Naomi Shihab Nye
“Kunitzieform” by Sharon Olds
“No One Knows the Way to Heaven” by Ocean Vuong
“A Separate Set of Signs” by Jenny M. Xie
“Then, It Was So” by Javier Zamora
Now that you’ve heard from all these amazing writers, it’s time to find your own voice! We hope these works will guide you in your literary pursuits. We can’t wait to read what you have to share.
