25 Books That Capture This American Moment

Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the United States, we asked 25 literary luminaries to each pick one book that they believe reflects where American life is headed or speaks to the present in a meaningful way. Their answers bring together poetry, nonfiction, and fiction from across the nation's history, within and beyond its borders. Here are their responses—a reading list to match this moment.

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson 

Selected by Oprah Winfrey 

The book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson explains why we’re so racially divided without focusing on the word “race.” It changes the lens through which we see the world. Caste explains the why and how about who automatically holds human value, who has to earn it, and who is denied it all together.
Winfrey is the CEO of Harpo Entertainment and host of The Oprah Podcast.
Buy Now: Caste on Bookshop | Amazon

Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois

Selected by Isabel Wilkerson

This seems a time to remind ourselves that the country’s historic success, wealth, and power came at a very high price—the enslavement of millions of human beings for 12 generations over the course of 246 years to build a modern nation. Slavery was so central a bedrock in the social, economic, and political framework of the country that more Americans died in the war to end slavery than in any other war in American history. It might be said that a President, Abraham Lincoln, gave his life over that existential conflict. After the Civil War, the country embarked on a period known as Reconstruction, which amounted to a short-lived experiment in multiracial democracy in hopes of living up to the founders’ stated ideals. As we work to understand the forces that have led to the ruptures of our time, we would do well to learn from the missed opportunity of Reconstruction and the tragic consequences of its abandonment, which haunt us to this day.
Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. 
Buy Now: Black Reconstruction in America on Bookshop | Amazon

Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service edited by Michael Lewis

Selected by Ann Patchett

There is still so much decency, intelligence, curiosity, kindness, and bravery among the people who work (or worked, before they were fired) in our government. Everyone should read this book to understand the depths to which we are cared for and served by people who ask for no recognition. It's a brilliant book.
Patchett is a writer and the owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville. Her next novel, Whistler, will be released in June. 
Buy Now: Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service on Bookshop | Amazon

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Selected by Amanda Gorman

In Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders wields a vocal chorus of ghosts to draw the reader into purgatory, the eerie cemetery of the Bardo, via Willie Lincoln, deceased son of Abraham Lincoln. The novel demonstrates that even the unspeakable—civil war, familial grief—can be named through a close, humanizing narrative voice. To re-pen history, we must imagine the unimaginable and acknowledge the forgotten. Saunders proves that the most profound writing is not to be idly read, but to be intimately remembered, as ferociously as if it were our own.
Gorman is the youngest presidential inaugural poet in U.S. history, author of the collection Call Us What We Carry, and a UNICEF Ambassador.
Buy Now: Lincoln in the Bardo on Bookshop | Amazon

Dispatches by Michael Herr

Selected by George Saunders

In this moment of national incoherence and ambient cruelty administered by strangely dull-minded minions of the corporate-industrial complex (hello ICE, hello privately-run detention camps for people who’ve enjoyed no due process, hello undeclared wars of shifting rationales, committed from afar!), Michael Herr’s epic, spectacularly written memoir of his time as Esquire’s Vietnam correspondent reminds us that our country’s current tendency to regard other people as objects is not new. The book’s superpower is its voice; Herr’s intensely articulate prose stretches to accommodate the crazy experiences and mind-states created when a high-tech corporate military wages war on a low-tech nation. And yet the book is full of joy—the joy of youth, the joy of camaraderie, and, mostly, the joy of Herr’s wild intelligence, set loose on everything he sees and feels. It’s a masterpiece that John Le Carré described as “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.”    
Saunders won the Booker Prize for his 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo. His latest, Vigil, was published in January. 
Buy Now: Dispatches on Bookshop | Amazon

Vigil by George Saunders 

Selected by R. J. Palacio

Vigil is about souls facing the consequences of the actions and choices they’ve made during their lifetimes. By focusing on one very unsympathetic American tycoon who, knowingly and in the name of corporate profit, caused harm and suffering to the world, it’s a scorching portrait of modern America. And yet it also brings a sense of hope, not only because of the almost mad lyrical language of the text, which reminds us how powerful a great novel can be, but because of the sense—quaint and archaic and vaguely sentimental as it may be—that a universal justice will prevail. Times will get better. And yeah, karma’s a bitch. 
Palacio is the author of Wonder and the graphic novel White Bird. 
Buy Now: Vigil on Bookshop | Amazon

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Selected by Jon Meacham

Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men is a profound meditation on the perils of populism as well as the possibilities of politics. Warren’s central insight: We are all sinners. The test, therefore, is not whether we are perfect—which we can never be—but whether we manage to make something good out of the bad. Life is tragic, yes, but it need not be unrelievedly bleak.
Meacham is a historian and biographer. His latest book is American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union: An Anthology.
Buy Now: All the King’s Men on Bookshop | Amazon

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Selected by Edwidge Danticat

Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy feels particularly attuned to this anniversary and to this moment. The attempts by the current administration to whitewash or erase certain aspects of American history, especially the horrors of slavery, are powerfully countered by the novel’s investigation of America’s origins and its polyphonic voices. In this brilliant late-career work, Morrison shows that the United States of America and Americans are constantly shaping and reshaping a complicated tale, and that silencing or erasing parts of it is futile. As long as brave storytellers exist, stories remain acts of resistance and proof of survival, worth honoring and celebrating even centuries later.
Danticat is the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Her new novel Dèy will be published in August 2026.
Buy Now: A Mercy on Bookshop | Amazon

Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez

Selected by Laila Lalami

An aging tyrant spends his days alone in his palace, indulging in his paranoias, throwing tantrums, abusing young girls, and hatching money-making schemes like selling off the Caribbean to the gringos. The novel can be read as historical or speculative, depending on one’s position.
Lalami’s The Moor’s Account was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel is The Dream Hotel.
Buy Now: Autumn of the Patriarch on Bookshop | Amazon

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Selected by LeVar Burton

It grabs our attention and points—it points to the now, to the moment we find ourselves in, from the vantage point of the future. And it's a cautionary tale. It is a warning that, unless we get our acts together, the future looks not just dim, but dangerous. 
Burton is an actor, director, and the former host and executive producer of Reading Rainbow.
Buy Now: The Parable of the Sower on Bookshop | Amazon

Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement by the Friends of Attention

Selected by Ben Lerner

One book that “captures” our moment is this exploration of how tech companies seek to capture (and divide and monetize) our attention—and how we might experiment together with freeing it from these corporations’ zombifying algorithms. This book makes an impassioned case for “attention activism,” for cultivating new ways of attending to each other and the world. Both our public and our innermost lives depend upon it. I think every artist is a partisan of the "Attention Liberation Movement."
Lerner is a poet, novelist, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His latest novel is Transcription.
Buy Now: Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement on Bookshop | Amazon

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 

Selected by Lauren Groff

The book that seems most prescient about the United States of America in 2026 is, perhaps, Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian. Only McCarthy could have given us Judge Holden, a bald, sociopathic pedophile with weird skin and a predilection for chaos. He causes the utmost destruction to all good and moral things that he comes across on his journeys across the United States. McCarthy made him smart and well-educated; as we all know by now, the real-life destroyer holding us all hostage may as well have never read a book in his life.
Groff’s Florida was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. Her latest collection of short fiction is Brawler.

Blacktop Wasteland or All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

Selected by Blake Crouch 

For me, S.A. Cosby has his finger firmly on the pulse of what it means to live in America at this moment in history—in particular the backward slide into simmering class, religious, and racial division amid what should be our bright and shining future.
Crouch is the author of Dark Matter, the deluxe edition of which will be released in June; the second season of Apple TV’s Dark Matter premieres in August.
Buy Now: Blacktop Wasteland on Bookshop | Amazon and All the Sinners Bleed on Bookshop | Amazon

Rabbit Redux by John Updike

Selected by Ron Chernow

Amid the upheaval of the Trump years, the postwar novel that strikes me as most prophetic is the second book in John Updike's extraordinary quartet of novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. An erstwhile high school basketball star in the fictional town of Brewer, Pa., Harry deplores his job as a Linotype operator, which feels like a sad anticlimax after his schoolyard heroics. Once solid and prosperous, his red-brick, blue-collar town now seems seedy and abandoned and he yearns for the supposed simplicity of the 1950s. As a white male who inhabited a once homogeneous town, Harry feels marooned, marginalized by the social and racial turmoil of the late 1960s. A young Connecticut runaway, Jill, and a drug-dealing Black hustler, Skeeter, camp out in his house with explosive results. As they try to educate him about race, slavery, and welfare, Harry feels embittered that the America he has known is slipping away. He has his redeeming qualities, to be sure, but it is hard not to see the embattled Harry as an early forerunner of President Trump's angry, working-class base.
Chernow won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Washington: A Life. His latest biography, Mark Twain, will be released in paperback in June.
Buy Now: Rabbit Redux on Bookshop | Amazon

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone

Selected by Luis Alberto Urrea

This book is a lighthouse of witness warning of the conscious and cynical use of power—both economic and political—to exploit the underclass and poor. It is a direct line from the working homeless of Atlanta to Alligator Alcatraz and the streets of Milwaukee, and it is a legacy that will haunt this country forever. In the America of 2026, too often the cry is “there is no place for us.” Moving beyond our 250th year, we need to reclaim our compassion and demand dignity for all. 
Urrea was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction for The Devil’s Highway.
Buy Now: There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America on Bookshop | Amazon

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

Selected by Emily Henry

Kristin Hannah is a storyteller with a profound ability to humanize history in a way that effortlessly reveals its relevance and parallels to our world today. This book explores a moment in time when the American working class was pitted against itself for the benefit of the ultra-wealthy—but it also captures the incredible power of community and the human spirit to effect change, one small step at a time.
Henry is the author of, among other books, Beach Read, Book Lovers, and Great Big Beautiful Life.
Buy Now: The Four Winds on Bookshop | Amazon

Make the Impossible Possible by Bill Strickland

Selected by Angela Duckworth

Bill Strickland grew up poor in Pittsburgh with no hope for a better life—until a ceramics teacher at his high school named Frank Ross invited him into the art room and showed him how to coax a wet lump of clay into form. This book tells his story, including the founding of a one-of-kind art center that is, as Bill says, an anti-poverty job training program that doesn't look like poverty. I read it cover to cover and was so inspired I flew to Pittsburgh to see for myself. Now I'm a believer. Wherever there are Bills and Franks, there is hope.
Duckworth is the author of Grit and of the forthcoming Situated.
Buy Now: Make the Impossible Possible on Bookshop | Amazon

America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan

Selected by Min Jin Lee

I read Carlos Bulosan’s autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart when I was a junior in college. In a story set in the Great Depression, the Filipino-American novelist wrote courageously of the struggles of the migrant worker who wishes to live with dignity in a world that chooses not to see him as fully human. As our nation reaches its Sestercentennial, I honor Bulosan’s indestructible love for the promises of America’s highest ideals.
Lee’s novel Pachinko was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. Her next, American Hagwon, will be released in September.
Buy Now: America Is in the Heart on Bookshop | Amazon

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Selected by David Sedaris

The best book about America I've read lately is Long Island Compromise by the great Taffy Brodesser-Akner. The novel concerns being Jewish, being an immigrant, class, family, wealth, and how that wealth can disfigure people. It’s all terribly funny, which always helps.
Sedaris won the 2001 Thurber Prize for American Humor for his essay collection Me Talk Pretty One Day. His latest collection, The Land and Its People, will be released in May; find tour dates here. 
Buy Now: Long Island Compromise on Bookshop | Amazon

Mercy by Lucille Clifton

Selected by Tayari Jones

Lucille Clifton is the greatest poet in American history; any understanding of this nation that does not include her voice will have failed to capture the soul of the country. Mercy was written just after 9/11. Rather than pick up the pieces of a shattered world, these poems examine the shards—they can be beautiful when they catch the light, yet are as cruel as any other daggers. The poems make connections in loss and reclamation, in the realm of the deeply personal and the vastly political. Clifton knows that the U.S. has never been innocent, yet she portrays a nation of Americans worthy of empathy, even when deserving of profound criticism. Understanding America is an ongoing work of excavation. When she asks this of poetry, she is also speaking to the messy complications of history: “Why is there under that poem always another poem?”
Jones is an author and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University. Her latest novel is Kin. 
Buy Now: Mercy on Bookshop | Amazon

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley

Selected by Kaveh Akbar

Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, first published in 1773, has affirmed for centuries the sanctuary of the imagination and the irrepressibility of true genius. Wheatley was born in West Africa before being kidnapped and enslaved, and wrote timeless, staggering lyrics of elegy and Biblical allusion while enduring the bondage of slavery. Published three years before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Poems continues to illuminates the shameful hypocrisy and murderously selective application of that tract’s most famous lines: “All men are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...”  
Akbar is a poet, author, and editor. His debut novel, Martyr!, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Buy Now: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral on Bookshop | Amazon

My Friend Julia: A Sesame Street Book about Autism by Jennifer Cook

Selected by Mychal Threets

Each day more and more people are realizing that our brains function, learn, and process information differently than what is considered “typical.” And that is not a bad thing! In My Friend Julia, friends from the beloved neighborhood show Julia what makes her special. Reading Jennifer Cook’s book is encouragement that there’s a beautiful truth in discussions of neurodivergence: that it’s okay to be different.
Threets is a librarian, mental health advocate, host of Reading Rainbow on YouTube, and the author of the new picture book I'm So Happy You're Here: A Celebration of Library Joy
Buy Now: My Friend Julia: A Sesame Street Book about Autism on Bookshop | Amazon

Native Son by Richard Wright

Selected by Zinzi Clemmons

Native Son is Wright’s social-realist masterpiece centered on Bigger Thomas, a son of Chicago’s Black Belt slums, who commits a heinous murder. Published in 1940, Wright wrote that Thomas’s character was an archetype also found in Nazi Germany and Russia, the product of “a world whose fundamental assumptions could no longer be taken for granted: a world ridden with national and class strife [...] a highly geared world whose nature was conflict and action... a world that existed on the plane of animal sensation alone.” This astute portrait connects Jim Crow-era America and pre-World War II Europe, and is as fitting a portrait of the current sociopolitical moment. 
Clemmons is the author of What We Lose and the forthcoming Freedom: Essays. 

A Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Selected by Norah O’Donnell

It became clear to me while researching my book that women have been at the center of all of America’s great moral and political battles. For 250 years, women have fought to ensure that it wasn’t just “all men are created equal” but that “all men and women are created equal.” That’s what is so remarkable about the Declaration of Sentiments and why I believe everyone should read the 1848 document as we celebrate America’s Semiquincentennial. Elizabeth Cady Stanton took the Declaration of Independence and mirrored the text to argue that, while the 13 colonies fought for independence from tyrannical British rule, women wanted independence from a patriarchal U.S. government. It would take another 72 years after Stanton’s declaration before women would gain the right to vote with the 19th Amendment, and the battle for equality continues.
O’Donnell is a senior correspondent for CBS News, a contributing correspondent for 60 Minutes, and the author of We the Women: The Hidden Heroes Who Shaped America. She anchored America’s Ball for the Mall, kicking off Semiquincentennial celebrations in Washington, D.C., this month.
Buy Now: A Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions on Bookshop | Amazon

Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan

Selected by Abby Jimenez

Kennedy Ryan wants readers to be seen, and her books reflect the diversity across our nation. She writes strong, ambitious women who do not settle, and that’s an energy we need reflected in the books we read, especially now. Before I Let Go (the first book in the Skyland series) showcases Kennedy’s masterful storytelling and thoughtful research. Depicting grief after two great family losses, Kennedy navigates mental health, champions the power of therapy, and brings back together a couple who thought their relationship was broken beyond repair. This is why I love the romance genre—because it depicts how, despite difficult situations, people from all walks of life can always find a happily ever after.
Jimenez is the author of novels including, most recently, The Night We Met, and the forthcoming A Married Little Christmas.
Buy Now: Before I Let Go on Bookshop | Amazon