• The Best 19th-Century American Novels - Hope Leslie: or, Early Times in the Massachusetts by Catharine Maria Sedgwick
  • The Best 19th-Century American Novels - Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
  • The Best 19th-Century American Novels - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs & Koritha Mitchell (editor)
  • The Best 19th-Century American Novels - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  • The Best 19th-Century American Novels - The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt

The Best 19th-Century American Novels, recommended by Nathan Wolff

In the novels of the 19th century, the United States comes alive with all its contradictions and complications. Nathan Wolff, a professor of English at Tufts and author of Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Ageintroduces us to his picks of the best 19th-century American novels, including two works of historical fiction and a memoir that influenced the novel form.

  • The Best African Novels - The Famished Road by Ben Okri
  • The Best African Novels - The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna
  • The Best African Novels - Burma Boy by Biyi Bandele
  • The Best African Novels - Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • The Best African Novels - Opening Spaces: An Anthology of Contemporary African Women's Writing by Yvonne Vera (editor)

The Best African Novels, recommended by Blessing Musariri

“We are connected to the spirit and it’s an active connection. It’s not somewhere that’s only in the afterlife, it’s here in the present as well. That, I think, is endemic across all African cultures and traditions,” says Zimbabwean novelist and poet Blessing Musariri. Here she recommends some of the best African novels, books that had a big personal impact and have stayed with her.