Frederick Douglass's Narrative recounts his life as a slave in Maryland and escape to freedom in 1838. An important slave autobiography, it is significant both for what it tells us about slave life and about its author. It is here reprinted with contexualizing source material and other writings by Douglass, as well as an introduction discussing its literary and historical significance.

Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative is remarkable for its candid exposure of the sexual abuse suffered by slaves at the hands of their owners. Her sufferings, and eventual escape to the North, are described in vivid detail. This edition also includes her brother's short memoir, 'A True Tale of Slavery'.

A BARACK OBAMA FAVOURITE BOOK OF 2020A New York Times best book of 2020One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans. Right after the election of 2016, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio realized the story she’d tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer’s phone number on her hand and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocu...

Mentor and guide to the Lost Generation of expatriate American writers, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein (1874&;1946) is perhaps better known for her Parisian salon than her literary works. Yet her innovative approach to writing and her originality of thought make the impact of her books on contemporary literature enormous.

Tender Buttons, published in 1914, is vintage Stein. She pushes abstraction to its farthest limits by experimenting with words purely as words in a style...