Reading Lists

29 Lists
    • Poetry
      Ada Limón
      Longlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
      An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
    • Poetry
      Ada Limón

      A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
      A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” Selection

      Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty

    • Nonfiction
      J. Drew Lanham

      This memoir is a riveting exploration of the contradictions of Black identity in the rural South, asking what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”

    • Nonfiction
      Max Ritvo and Sarah Ruhl

      Studded with poems and songs, this correspondence is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and joy.

          • Fiction
            Debra Magpie Earling

            Bold, passionate, and more urgent than ever, Debra Magpie Earling’s powerful classic novel is reborn in this new edition.

          • Fiction
            Diane Wilson

            A haunting novel spanning several generations, following a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.

          • Fiction
            Richard Wagamese

            Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty, but finds a tentative salvation in hockey.

          • Young Readers
            James DeVita

            Marena struggles to remember what life was like before the Zero Tolerance Party installed listening devices in every home and eliminated difference. But when the new Minister of Education cracks down in her school, Marena decides it’s finally time to…

          • Fiction
            Deirdre McNamer

            From Deirdre McNamer, a masterful exploration of the rich and hidden facets of human character, as illuminated by the mysterious connections among the residents of a senior residence in Montana.

          • Fiction
            Bapsi Sidhwa

            As the young daughter of an affluent Parsee family in Lahore, Lenny is keenly observant of the city’s astonishing diversity—Muslims and Hindus, Christians and Sikhs, coexisting together. But as Lahore descends into sectarian violence, Lenny’s…

          • Fiction
            Seth Kantner

            Born and raised in the Arctic, Cutuk Hawcley has learned to provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading. But when he leaves for the city as a young man, incompatible realities collide, forcing Cutuk to choose between two worlds—both…

          • Fiction
            Larry Watson

            In this modern classic, the charges of a young Sioux woman force David Hayden’s father, the sheriff of their small town, to confront his older brother, a charming war hero and respected doctor. This novel is an astonishing tale of love and courage…

          • Fiction
            Richard Wagamese

            Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty, but finds a tentative salvation in hockey.

          • Fiction
            Dalia Rosenfeld

            The characters of these stories are animated by forces at once passionate and perplexing. Fiercely funny and entirely original, this collection takes readers from the United States to Israel and back again to examine the mystifying reaches of our own…

          • Fiction
            David Rhodes

            Home to a few hundred people yet absent from state maps, Words, Wisconsin, comes richly to life by way of an extraordinary cast of characters: a cantankerous retiree, a lifelong paraplegic, a former drifter, and many others. At once intimate and…

          • Fiction
            Richard Wagamese

            When sixteen-year-old Franklin Starlight is summoned by his ailing father, Eldon, Franklin’s sense of duty clashes with the resentment he feels for his father’s many years of neglect and drinking. But when the two men set out together on one last…

          • Fiction
            Galsan Tschinag

            Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people, the first novel in Galsan Tschinag’s saga—reissued as a Seedbank title—weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood with the tale of a people’s vanishing way of life.

          • Young Readers
            Laura E. Williams

            It is 1942. Korinna is an active member of the local Nazi youth group. When she discovers that her parents—who are secretly members of an underground resistance group—are sheltering a family of Jewish refugees behind her bedroom wall, she is shocked…

            • Fiction
              Diane Wilson

              A haunting novel spanning several generations, following a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.

            • Nonfiction
              Juliet Patterson

              A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family.

            • Poetry
              Michael Kleber-Diggs

              Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

            • Poetry
              Claire Wahmanholm

              A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.”

            • Fiction
              Faith Sullivan

              One winter’s night, Ruby Drake’s beloved parents perish in an accident—and suddenly, Ruby finds herself penniless and nearly alone in the world. 

            • Fiction
              Danielle Sosin

              Frigid, lethal, and wildly beautiful, Lake Superior is as alluring as it is dangerous. Featuring three women living on its shores in three different centuries, this novel—haunting, rich in historical detail, and universal in its exploration of the…

            • Nonfiction
              Beth Dooley
              Beth Dooley arrived in Minnesota from New Jersey with preconceptions about the Midwestern food scene. Having learned to cook in her grandmother’s kitchen, shopping at farm stands and making preserves, she couldn’t help but wonder, “Do people here…
            • Poetry
              Michael Bazzett

              By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.

            • Poetry
              Su Hwang

              This collection offers a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.

            • Poetry
              Claire Wahmanholm

              Claire Wahmanholm maps an alien but unnervingly familiar world as it accelerates into cataclysm.

            • Fiction
              Faith Sullivan

              Widowed, penniless, responsible for her beloved baby boy, and subject to the small-town gossip of Harvester, Minnesota—Nell Stillman’s lot is not an easy one. Yet she finds strength in lasting friendships and in the rich inner life awakened by the…

            • Nonfiction
              James P. Lenfestey

              As the author approached his thirtieth birthday in a state of acute anxiety, a bookseller prescribed to him a singular literary diet—the poems of a Tang Dynasty hermit named Han-shan. His pilgrimage to Han-shan’s cave decades later comes to life in…

            • Nonfiction
              William Souder

              In the century and a half since John James Audubon’s death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was—or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America—as…

            • Poetry
              Chris Santiago

              Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for “poem.” Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, the winner of the 2016 Lindquist &…

            • Poetry
              Jennifer Willoughby

              Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the winner of the 2015 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is filled with explosive wit and humor. Yet even at their most surreal—whether taking as their subject a Kaiser Permanente hospital, Shark Week, or…

            • Poetry
              Michael Bazzett

              A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. The winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is a…

            • Fiction
              Miriam Karmel

              Esther Lustig has led a seemingly conventional life—marriage, two children, a life in suburban Chicago. Now, at the age of eighty-five, she’s left with questions and her memories, as the unforgettable Esther attempts to come to terms with the meaning…

            • Young Readers
              Molly Beth Griffin

              Growing up in the 1920s, Garnet Richardson watches the birds outside her window, admiring their freedom and beauty. When Garnet is sent away to a lakeside resort town for the summer, she discovers a chance to finally spread her wings, and her…

            • Poetry
              Patricia Kirkpatrick

              A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in this collection fighting for her life. The winner of the 2012 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry creates from loss a dreamlike reality: Odessa, “roof of the underworld,” a refuge at once real and…

            • Fiction
              Jim Heynen

              Modeled after the character sketches of Theophrastus, these stories deftly introduce a series of oddly recognizable individuals. In these brief interactions—moving from a nightly Sad Hour hosted by a bar to the moonlit sandbox of a retired army…

            • Fiction
              Jim Heynen

              On the surface, Alice Marie Krayenbraak has it all: she’s beautiful and witty, a star student and a gifted athlete. But nothing is as it seems: the family farm is failing, Alice’s mother awaits the apocalypse, her parents are planning to send her…