Beans are among the most ancient, versatile, and nutritionally significant food crops in the entire history of human agriculture. Archaeological evidence places bean cultivation in the Andes of South America and in the ancient agricultural civilizations of Mexico and Central America at least 7,000 years ago, and in the Old World — where broad beans … Read more

Things Fall Apart (1958) is the most widely read African novel ever written, a landmark work of world literature that fundamentally changed the way Africa was represented in fiction and permanently altered the conversation about colonialism, cultural identity, and the relationship between tradition and change. Written by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, it was conceived as … Read more

Dead Aid (2009) is one of the most provocative, controversial, and intellectually serious works of economic and political non-fiction to emerge from Africa in the twenty-first century. Written by Dambisa Moyo — a Zambian-born economist with degrees from Harvard and Oxford and experience at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank — it is a book … Read more

The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is one of the most culturally significant and emotionally resonant novels in American literature — a book that has provoked fierce devotion, widespread controversy, and genuine transformation in millions of readers since its publication. Written by Jerome David Salinger, a deeply private and intensely serious writer who published relatively little … Read more

Ulysses (1922) is the most celebrated, most debated, most imitated, and most frequently abandoned novel in the English language — a work of such radical ambition and such staggering technical innovation that it did not merely change the course of literature but effectively divided it into before and after. Published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and … Read more

Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) is, by the consensus of literary history, the first modern novel and one of the greatest works of fiction ever produced by the human imagination. Written by Miguel de Cervantes, a Spanish soldier and writer who composed much of it while imprisoned, it is a book of … Read more

The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, completed just two months before his death, and it is widely regarded as the greatest novel ever written — a work of such philosophical depth, psychological intensity, and spiritual urgency that it stands not merely as the pinnacle of Russian literature but as one of the … Read more

They Both Die at the End (2017) is a contemporary young adult novel that announces its ending in its title and then dares you to keep reading anyway — and you do, compulsively, because Adam Silvera has constructed something genuinely moving and emotionally intelligent out of what could easily have been a gimmick. It is … Read more

The Great Gatsby (1925) is the quintessential American novel — a slim, luminous, and devastating book that captures, with the precision of a perfectly cut diamond, both the dazzling surface and the moral rot of the American Dream. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it in his late twenties, drawing on his own complicated relationship with wealth, … Read more

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is one of the most celebrated and morally urgent novels in American literature — a book that arrived at a precise historical moment, during the gathering storm of the Civil Rights Movement, and spoke to the conscience of a nation with a clarity and emotional force that no political speech … Read more