Back in the Days
2001 · 128 pages
Between 1980 and 1989, Shabazz stopped young New Yorkers on the street and photographed them in shell-toe Adidas, sheepskin coats, and gold ropes. Everything hip hop later sold the world is already here.
★ 4.3
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Case Study Houses
Elizabeth A. T. Smith
2002 · 440 pages
A Los Angeles magazine asked architects how postwar America should live, and Eames, Koenig, and Neutra answered in steel and glass on hillsides. Julius Shulman's photographs sold California modernism to the world.
★ 4.3
Business Adventures
1969 · 464 pages
Twelve New Yorker reports on how companies behave: Ford burning millions on the Edsel, a grocer trying to corner his own stock. Bill Gates calls it the best business book he has read.
★ 4.3
A Field Guide to American Houses
1984 · 880 pages
Every American house is a set of clues: roof pitch, window shape, porch depth. McAlester supplies the vocabulary, from Georgian mansions to postwar ranches, and you walk out able to name your street.
★ 4.5
Born Standing Up
A Comic's Life
2007 · 208 pages
Working the Disneyland magic shop as a teenager, Martin set out to build comedy without punchlines, so laughter had nowhere to land. He filled arenas with it, then quit for good.
★ 4.6
The Chill
1964 · 279 pages
A husband hires Lew Archer to find the bride who fled their honeymoon, and the trail runs back decades into two families' history. In Macdonald's California, crimes are inherited rather than committed.
★ 4.6
A Season on the Brink
1986 · 368 pages
Feinstein spent the 1985-86 season inside coach Bob Knight's Indiana basketball program and printed all of it, the profanity and the fury and the players absorbing both. Sports reporters still envy that access.
★ 4.6
Hackers
1984 · 659 pages
Levy found the hacker ethic among MIT students who monopolized the university's computers all night: all information should be free, mistrust authority, judge a person by the code. Silicon Valley still recites it.
★ 4.7
The Sweet Flypaper of Life
1955 · 106 pages
Sister Mary Bradley, a grandmother Hughes invented, tells death to wait because her feet are caught in the sweet flypaper of life, then walks you through DeCarava's photographs of her Harlem block.
★ 4.7
Killings
1984 · 320 pages
One killing per chapter, in towns no reporter usually visits, including a Kentucky landowner who shot a documentary filmmaker for trespassing. Trillin cares how these Americans lived, not how they died.
★ 4.7
The Taste of Country Cooking
1976 · 310 pages
Freetown, Virginia was founded by freed slaves, including Edna Lewis's grandfather, and her cookbook is that community's year: what the farm gave in each season and the meal it made.
★ 4.7
When Pride Still Mattered
A Life of Vince Lombardi
1999 · 541 pages
The finest life written of an American coach. Maraniss takes Lombardi from a Brooklyn butcher's son studying for the priesthood to the Packers dynasty, and shows what the discipline cost his family.
★ 4.7
Kitchen Confidential
2000 · 312 pages
Bourdain cooked for two decades, then told everything: the drugs, the immigrant crews who hold restaurants up, why you never order fish on Monday. He made the line cook a figure Americans envied.
★ 4.7
Can't Stop Won't Stop
2005 · 546 pages
No history of hip hop is better. Chang begins with landlords burning the Bronx, arrives at Kool Herc's turntables, and reads Public Enemy and the Los Angeles riots as one generation's politics.
★ 4.7
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
1925 · 160 pages
Lorelei Lee, a blonde from Arkansas, keeps a diary about the men who buy her diamonds and gives away far more than she knows. Edith Wharton called it the great American novel.
★ 4.8
Moneyball
2003 · 320 pages
Oakland spent a third of what the Yankees spent and won as many games, buying the hitters scouts despised. Every team in baseball now runs on the arithmetic Lewis watched Billy Beane use.
★ 4.8
Fight Club
1996 · 208 pages
Men beat each other in basements because nothing else in their lives is real. Palahniuk's narrator fakes illness for the support groups, meets the soap salesman Tyler Durden, and builds an army.
★ 4.8
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
2007 · 240 pages
Soldiers killed Sepha Stephanos's father in Ethiopia, and seventeen years on he keeps a failing store in a Washington neighborhood gentrifying around him. With two African friends he plays at naming dictators.
★ 4.8
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Selected Stories
2015 · 432 pages
Berlin cleaned houses, worked emergency rooms, raised four sons, and drank. Forty-three stories out of that life, Alaska to Mexico City, written so plainly and fast you miss how much is inside them.
★ 4.8
A Separate Peace
1959 · 208 pages
In the summer of 1942, at a New Hampshire boarding school, Gene envies his fearless friend Finny enough to jounce the branch they are standing on. Knowles found the war inside a friendship.
★ 4.8