Archive for May, 2018

For Your Consideration: Great American Read Nominees Part I

May 31st, 2018

Fellow readers, the time has come to choose America’s favorite book! This year PBS is launching a months-long campaign to celebrate the wonder of reading and ultimately crown America’s best-loved novel. Choosing from a list of one hundred titles—including everything from Pride and Prejudice to Fifty Shades of Grey—will be a challenge, but we know you’re up to the task.

Today, we’re taking a closer look at a few of the nominees. 

 Want to see more nominees? Click here for part two and here for part three.

(Voting for The Great American Read series has wrapped up. Click here to see the results.)


9781400033416Beloved by Toni Morrison

“A masterwork. . . . Wonderful. . . . I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

Read an excerpt | More on PBS.org | Buy the book


9781400032716The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

“This original and affecting novel is a triumph of empathy.” —The New Yorker

Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.

This improbable story of Christopher’s quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.

Read an excerpt | Get the reader’s guide | More on PBS.org | Buy the book


9780385490818The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale deserves the highest praise.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable.

Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now….

Read an excerpt | Get the reader’s guide | More on PBS.org | Buy the book


9780679732761Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

“A book of the very first order, a superb book.”—Saul Bellow

A first novel by an unknown writer, Invisible Man remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of “the Brotherhood”, and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.

Read an excerpt | Get the reader’s guide | More on PBS.org | Buy the book


9780679781585Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

“Captivating, minutely imagined . . . a novel that refuses to stay shut.” —Newsweek

Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men’s solicitude and the money that goes with it.

Read an excerpt | Get the reader’s guide | More on PBS.org | Buy the book