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Authors, books, and a film recommended by Omar El Akkad
James Baldwin
William Faulkner
Naguib Mahfouz
Herman Melville
Toni Morrison
John Steinbeck
A Death in the Family by James Agee (1957)
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (2018)
No Knives in the Kitchen of This City by Khaled Khalifa (2016)
The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz (2016)
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (2016, previous W&B Debut Novel selection)
The Worker’s Cup (2017, documentary film about the African and Asian migrant workers in Qatar’s labor camps who are building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup and the football tournament they compete in)
Post-apocalyptic / Dystopian / Utopian / Science Fiction / Speculative / Social Science Fiction / Climate Fiction / Alternative History / Terrorism Fiction
1984 by George Orwell (1948)
2034: Writing Rochester’s Futures (2009)
2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017)
47 by Walter Moseley (2005)
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker (2012, previous W&B Rochester Reads selection)
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (1959)
“All Summer in a Day,” a story by Ray Bradbury (1954)
Ashfall trilogy by Mike Mullin (2012–15)
The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan (2016)
Blindness by José Saramago (1999)
The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch (2017)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
Brave New Worlds (Dystopian Stories) edited by John Joseph Adams (2012)
California by Edan Lepucki (2015)
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (1960)
The Children of Men by P.D. James (1992)
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders (stories, 1996)
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1972)
Collapse: You’re On Your Own by Kay Mahoney (2012)
Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth (2011–13)
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (2013)
The Earth Abides by George R. Stewart (2006)
The End We Start From by Megan Hunter (2018)
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (2017)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus (2012)
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich (2017)
The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
(and The Handmaid’s Tale television series on Hulu.com, 2017–)
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (2008–10)
The Iron Heel by Jack London (1908)
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954)
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935)
Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979, previous W&B Rochester Reads selection)
The Last Days of California by Mary Miller (2104)
The Last Policeman trilogy by Ben H. Winters (2012–14)
The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (2011)
Life As We Knew It (YA series) by Susan Beth Pfeffer (2006–13)
MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood (2003–13)
The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (2017)
The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (1993–96)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell (2015, previous W&B Debut Novel Series selection)
Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) by Octavia Butler
The Pesthouse by Jim Crace (2008)
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004)
The Power by Naomi Alderman (2017)
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (2007)
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007)
Rochester Rewritten: Rochester in the Alternative (stories, 2013)
Scribe by Alyson Hagy (2018)
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)
Stories of Phillip K. Dick (multiple publications)
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895)
Underground Airlines by Ben Winters (2016)
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)
Valley of Day-Glo by Nick DiChario (2008)
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1983)
Who Runs the World? by Virginia Bergin (YA, 2017)
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (1976)
Wool by Hugh Howey (2013)
Zone One by Colson Whitehead (2011)
Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi) / Eco-Fiction
Ecotopia Emerging (1981) and Ecotopia (1990) by Ernest Callenbach
Far North by Marcel Theroux (2010)
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (2012)
A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle (2000)
The Healer by Antti Tuomainen (2013)
The Mercy Journals by Claudia Caspar (2016)
Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich (2013)
Orleans by Sherri L. Smith (2013)
River of Gods by Ian McDonald (2006)
Science in the Capitol trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (2004–07)
Solar by Ian McEwan (2010)
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi (2015)
We Are But a Moment by Ulrich Baer (2017)
When the Water Runs Out by David Canford (2015)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (2009)
Anti-war Fiction
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (1963)
Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo (1938)
Lysistrata by Aristophanes (play, 411 BCE)
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)
On the Beach by Nevil Shute (1957)
Regeneration by Pat Barker (1991)
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
The Thin Red Line by James Jones (1962)
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1990)
The Tin Drum by Günther Grass (1959)
“The War Prayer” by Mark Twain (story, c. 1910)
(Additional) Contemporary Southern fiction authors and books
Flannery O’Connor
Katherine Anne Porter
Jesmyn Ward
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (1992)
The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
Deliverance by James Dickey (1970)
A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews (1998)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips (2009)
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines (1993, previous W&B Rochester Reads selection)
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1961)
Nonfiction
The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present and Future of Rising Sea Levels by Brian Fagan (2014)
Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century by Harald Welzer (2012)
The Next 100 Years by George Friedman (2010)
Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change by Orrin H. Pilkey, Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, and Keith C. Pilkey (2016)
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction by Annalee Newitz (2014)
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (2015)
The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World edited by Jeff Goodell (2017)
What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night edited by John Brockman (2014)
Post-apocalyptic / Dystopian / Speculative Fiction on Film
12 Monkeys (1995)
1984 (1956)
Blade Runner (1982)
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Blindness (2008)
The Book of Eli (2010)
Brazil (1985)
Children of Men (2006)
Dark City (1998)
District 9 (2009)
Divergent (2014)
Elysium (2013)
Escape from New York (1981)
Fahrenheit 451 (1996)
The Giver (2014)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1990)
The Hunger Games (2012–15)
Interstellar (2014)
Logan’s Run (1976)
Minority Report (2002)
The Omega Man (1971)
On the Beach (1959)
Rollerball (1975)
Stalker (1978)Strange Days (1995)