Too often we learn about the world from a linear perspective. The constant flow of statistics in our media and academic landscapes leaves little room for seeing the nuances of people and their stories. So below, we have compiled some of our favorite literary works to highlight the stories of the global human imagination. Our hope is not to blur the boundary between fact and fiction, truth and untruth, but simply to understand international affairs from a more human perspective—because perhaps something does unite us, despite the prevalent “us and them” rhetoric in our national politics, highlighting visible and arbitrary difference between people, alienating us from one another. Reading, therefore, is a step forward, opening us to each other’s lives and humanizing us in the process.
Fiction
–Norwegian Wood By Haruki Murakami
–The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
–Siddhartha By Herman Hesse
–Leche by R. Zamora Linmark
–The Beautiful thing that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu
–1984 By George Orwell
–The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
–A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
–One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcίa Márquez
–Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
–The Emigrants by W.G Sebald
–A Journey Without Maps by Graham Greene
–Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway
–Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Meghana recommends!)
–Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
–Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
–So Long, A Letter by Mariama Ba
–Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
–The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
–Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai
–The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
–Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
–A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
–Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa
–Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
–Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
–This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrίe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa
–If Not, Winter by Sappho (Trans. Anne Carson)
–The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud
–Almost Invisible by Mark Strand
–A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
–The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
–The Gurkha’s Daughter by Prajwal Parajuly
–The Stones Cry Out by Hikaru Okuizumi
–Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje
Nonfiction
–Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his mother by Sonia Nazario (Aastha recommends!)
–The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
–Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
–The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism by Ashis Nandy
–Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
–Altogether Elsewhere: Reflections on Exile by Marc Robinson
–Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
–Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee
–High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty by Jessica Cattelino
-Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
–Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
–Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor by Elizabeth Dunn
–Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
–Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt along a South Asian River (Anthropology of Policy) by Laura Bear
–Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden
–I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Christina Lamb and Malala Yousafzai
–Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
–Our Political Nature by Avi Tuschman
–Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen
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Aastha KC and Meghana Mysore are Editors-in-Chief of The Yale Globalist. Contact them at aastha.kc@yale.edu and meghana.mysore@yale.edu.