We’ve entered the third month of our 2024 Reading Challenge. Spring is near and reading slumps are in full swing, so we’re visiting some collections for March. Select any collection of poems, short stories, essays or anything else that peaks your interest. View our list of recommendations and visit the full category below.
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And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems
by Maya Angelou
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size But when I start to tell them, They think I’m telling lies. I say, It’s in the reach of my arms, The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me. Thus begins “Phenomenal Woman,” just one of the beloved poems collected here in Maya Angelou’s third book of verse. These poems are powerful, distinctive, and fresh–and, as always, full of the lifting rhythms of love and remembering. And Still I Rise is written from the heart, a celebration of life as only Maya Angelou has discovered it.
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Black Enough: Stories of Being Young and Black in America
edited by Ibi Zoboi
Black is…sisters navigating their relationship at summer camp in Portland, Oregon, as written by Renee Watson. Black is…three friends walking back from the community pool talking about nothing and everything, in a story by Jason Reynolds. Black is…Nic Stone’s high-class beauty dating a boy her momma would never approve of. Black is…two girls kissing in Justina Ireland’s story set in Maryland. Black is urban and rural, wealthy and poor, mixed race, immigrants, and more–because there are countless ways to be Black enough.
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Bliss Montage: Stories
by Ling Ma
What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake us up? Could that waking be our end? In Bliss Montage , Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything–if you bury yourself alive. These and other scenarios investigate the ways that the outlandish and the ordinary are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly alike.
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Edgar Allan Poe: Collected Works
by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was a master of tales of the mysterious and macabre. From the eerie incantations of “The Raven” to the persistent fright of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his stories and poems are unforgettable explorations of the darker side of life that still offer lessons and insight into human behavior today. This Canterbury Classics edition of Edgar Allan Poe collects some of his best-known work–from “Annabel Lee” to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Lenore” to “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and many more.
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Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
by Neil Gaiman
The thirty-two gems of prose and verse in this astonishing collection stretch the imagination and engage the intellect even as they illuminate the vagaries of human experience. Whether he’s conjuring a mysterious traveling circus, exploring the rarefied tastes of an exclusive epicurean club, or visiting a strangely altered Victorian England, Gaiman reveals how the ordinary and the fantastical are transmutable and intertwined.
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Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd
edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci
Acclaimed authors Holly Black (Ironside)and Cecil Castellucci(Boy Proof) have united in geekdom to edit short stories from some of the best-selling and most promising geeks in young adult literature. With illustrated interstitials from comic book artists Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O’Malley, Geektastic covers all things geeky, from Klingons and Jedi Knights to fan fiction, theater geeks, and cosplayers.
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Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
by Carmen Maria Machado
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment.
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Homesick for Another World: Stories
by Ottessa Moshfegh
Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author’s short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel. And for good reason. There’s something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition.
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I, Robot , the first and most widely read book in Asimov’s Robot series, forever changed the world’s perception of artificial intelligence. Here are stories of robots gone mad, of mind-reading robots, and robots with a sense of humor. Of robot politicians, and robots who secretly run the world–all told with the dramatic blend of science fact and science fiction that has become Asimov’s trademark. In I, Robot , Asimov chronicles the development of the robot from its primitive origins in the present to its ultimate perfection in the not-so-distant future–a future in which humanity itself may be rendered obsolete.
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If It Bleeds: Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, the Life of Chuck, Rat
by Stephen King
Four brilliant new tales in If It Bleeds are sure to prove as iconic as their predecessors. Once again, King’s remarkable range is on full display. In the title story, reader favorite Holly Gibney (from the Mr. Mercedes trilogy and The Outsider ) must face her fears, and possibly another outsider–this time on her own. In “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” an intergenerational friendship has a disturbing afterlife. “The Life of Chuck” explores, beautifully, how each of us contains multitudes. And in “Rat,” a struggling writer must contend with the darker side of ambition.
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Night of the Living Rez
by Morgan Talty
Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty–with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight–breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance, Night of the Living Rez is an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction.
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Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird: Stories
by Agustina Bazterrica
From celebrated author Agustina Bazterrica, this collection of nineteen brutal, darkly funny short stories takes into our deepest fears and through our most disturbing fantasies. Through stories about violence, alienation, and dystopia, Bazterrica’s vision of the human experience emerges in complex, unexpected ways–often unsettling, sometimes thrilling, and always profound. In “Roberto,” a girl claims to have a rabbit between her legs. A woman’s neighbor jumps to his death in “A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound,” and in “Candy Pink,” a woman fails to contend with a difficult breakup in five easy steps.
Our Stories, Our Voices
by Ellen Hopkins
This collection of twenty-one essays from major YA authors–including award-winning and bestselling writers–touches on a powerful range of topics related to growing up female in today’s America, and the intersection with race, religion, and ethnicity. Sure to inspire hope and solidarity to anyone who reads it, Our Stories, Our Voices belongs on every young woman’s shelf.
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Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror
edited by Jordan Peele
A cop begins seeing huge, blinking eyes where the headlights of cars should be that tell him who to pull over. Two freedom riders take a bus ride that leaves them stranded on a lonely road in Alabama where several unsettling somethings await them. A young girl dives into the depths of the Earth in search of the demon that killed her parents. These are just a few of the worlds of Out There Screaming, Jordan Peele’s anthology of all-new horror stories by Black writers.
Toil and Trouble: 15 Tales of Women and Witchcraft
edited by Jessica Spotswood and Tess Sharpe
Scorn the witch. Fear the witch. Burn the witch. History is filled with stories of women accused of witchcraft, of fearsome girls with arcane knowledge. Toil & Trouble features fifteen stories of girls embracing their power, reclaiming their destinies and using their magic to create, to curse, to cure–and to kill. This collection reveals a universal truth: there’s nothing more powerful than a teenage girl who believes in herself.
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