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.
2 volumes
SortEditorial Year Title
Subject·Small town✕clear
Nonfiction · Sports

Friday Night Lights

A Town, A Team, And A Dream
Buzz Bissinger
1990 · 367 pages

Bissinger spent the 1988 season in Odessa, Texas, where a whole town's self-worth rode on schoolboy football and one black star's ruined knee took his only way out. Odessa answered with death threats.

★ 6.4
Nonfiction · Reporting

Killings

Calvin Trillin
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