The Mandarins (1954) by Simone de Beauvoir 

The Middlemarch or War and Peace of the mid-20th century—an incredible novel about Paris intellectuals trying to remake the world along better lines after the Second World War, based on the lives of the existentialist circle. It features a love affair based on Beauvoir’s real-life relationship with the American writer Nelson Algren.—Keri Walsh

Devil’s Teeth (2006), The Wave (2011), and The Underworld (2023) by Susan Casey

Susan Casey, a popular science writer specializing in the ocean, is a fantastic writer who I use for writing exercises. With her vivid descriptions of undersea life and skillful integration of sources, she is a great example of the mid-range of expository prose that’s not academic but notches above Wikipedia and Reddit. Her three best books are Devil’s Teeth (about great white sharks), The Wave (about waves and surfing), and The Underworld (about deep-sea exploration).—Martin Northrop

Salvage: Readings from the Wreck (2024) by Dionne Brand

This book is an important read for anyone, especially for literary scholars, and especially as we encourage people from all different backgrounds to join the English department. Brand rereads classic English novels, pointing out that “learning to read English literature involved learning not to notice who, or what, was missing.”—M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon

The Demon of Unrest (2024) by Erik Larson

Earlier this fall, I read Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, which looks at the four months in 1860-61 between Abraham Lincoln’s election and his inauguration (which back then, was held in March). It’s about the growing secessionist crisis leading to the firing on Fort Sumter, and the new president’s response to it.

Larson manages to tell some of the critical moments of the Fort Sumter siege almost like a “tick tock” (to use an old journalist’s phrase). It’s hour by hour at some points, as telegrams fly and emergency meetings are hurriedly convened (and recorded). You really feel like you’re at a cabinet meeting in the White House, or sitting nervously behind an artillery battery in Charleston harbor. And the narrative is told through the eyes of about seven individuals from the north and south, including Lincoln. And it’s all seamlessly woven together. 

I mentioned it to my students as a wonderful example of creative nonfiction, in the sense that it’s well-researched history, but told in a creative, artful way.—John Hanc

An Authentic Life (2024) by Jennifer Chang

An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang is filled with poems that I needed these last few months, not only because their topics—ranging from patriarchy to war to school shootings to religious doubt to marriage—seemed crucial, but because of the sublime way Chang mixes syntactical care with the precise wielding of wild imagery.—Meghan Dahn

The Copenhagen Trilogy (2022) by Tove Ditlevsen

This Danish novel is quite close to a memoir: like the protagonist, Ditlevsen grew up poor in Denmark during the early 20th century, and despite many obstacles, found a way to become a writer. It’s a beautiful, melancholy short trilogy (all in one volume), with poverty, political engagement, and the world wars on the margins of a very special coming-of-age story. I read it last winter and it has stuck with me all year. The scenes of her bicycling around Copenhagen are glorious. A beautiful book. —Anne Fernald

Counternarratives (2016) by John Keene 

A fascinating, richly layered collection of stories and novellas about the history of colonialism in the Americas. Wildly experimental and electric historical fiction. For anyone interested in immersing themselves in the intricate entanglements of the multi-century encounters of colonial crisis.—Shonni Enelow

My Struggle, Books 1-6 (2013-2019) by Karl Ove Knausgaard 

I’m finally reading this six-volume series from the 2010s––one of the defining works of that decade, along with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Like those, Knausgaard’s books are consuming, addictive, and kind of manic––unlike them, they are fundamentally non-dramatic, all about the banal details of the everyday that he manages to make totally compelling.—S.E. 

An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth (2024) by Anna Moschovakis 

Full disclosure: I haven’t read this yet, but I’m so excited to. I love Moschovakis’s writing: it’s sparse, elegant, and strange. And––another full disclosure––my book, A Discourse on Method, apparently makes a cameo in it!—S.E.

Book recommendations were edited for clarity.

–By Mary Bly, English department chair, with Fordham News