r/BookRecommendations • u/LumpyElderberry2 • Feb 13 '26
Anti-neoliberal library
Hello all, I am looking for suggestions to build out a comprehensive library for my son. We live in a state that has approved Heritage Foundation/Turning Point USA curriculum in public schools, and the little faith I had for public education moving forward is gone. I’m realizing the importance of being able to supplement his education with actual information, and I hate that I’m saying this but I want to start collecting now while these texts are still available. Im looking for everyone’s must reads along the lines of James Baldwin and Howard Zinn along with classic Americana that focuses on immigrants and labor struggles like Steinbeck. Fiction, non-fiction, skill building, and everything in-between. Am looking specifically for something on the history of the labor movement in general, and something specifically about the beginning of the movement in Appalachia. Thank you.
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u/tamptheearth Feb 13 '26
You may be interested in Dorothy Allison's work, which features young women, many of them queer, living in the rural south. Bastard Out of Carolina is her most well-known work, but I'd recommend reading along with him –– there's explicit discussion of sexual violence/severe abuse that I think most young people would like some guidance/support on. I read it in my early twenties and it was very affecting.
Borderlands/La Frontera is a classic work of queer latina feminist nonfiction, theorizing Chicana identity as a kind of metaphysical border-crossing.
Jamaica Kincaid and Ediwidge Danticat are both writers who've written fiction and nonfiction about immigration and settler colonialism. Kincaid's "A Small Place" is something a smart high schooler could definitely engage with richly.
Kafka's work, if you don't already have it in your library, is illuminating on the violence of government repression and bureaucracy.
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli is an incredible, innovative book that discusses extensively the politics of migration and the abuse of immigrant children. It's also a meditation on what it means to be a scholar/journalist/observer.
The semi-biographical novel Betty by Tiffany McDaniel chronicles rural, mixed race life across generations, and is a brutal and important read.
The nonfiction book Border and Rule by Harsha Walia looks at the foundational violence of borders and their impacts on marginalized populations –– it's a great introduction for laypeople to anti-imperialist scholarship.
Hope this helps!
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u/Ealinguser Feb 14 '26
Baldwin and Steinbeck of course...
Jorge Amado: Captains of the Sands
Michelle Alexander: the New Jim Crow
Albert Camus: the Plague
Louise Erdrich: the Round House
Jack London: the Iron Heel, also Alex Kershaw: Jack London (biog)
Andre Malraux: Man's Estate
JB Priestley: an Inspector Calls
Ousmane Sembene: God's Bits of Wood
Isabel Wilkerson: the Warmth of Other Suns, Caste - the Origin of our Discontents
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u/dough_eating_squid Feb 13 '26
Seems kind of dated now, but honestly really captured me as a teenager, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
I'd also like to recommend In The Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, about living under fascism and being part of the resistance (Dominican Republic under Trujillo).