Asim, Jabari. A Taste of Honey: Stories. Broadway Books, 2010.

Through a series of fictional episodes set against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent years in modern history, Asim brings into pin-sharp focus how the tumultuous events of ‘68 affected real people’s lives and shaped the country we live in today. The sixteen connected stories in this exciting debut are set in the fictional Midwestern town of Gateway City, where second generation offspring of the Great Migrators have pieced together a thriving, if fragile existence.

Maas, Peter. Serpico. HarperCollins, 2005.

The 1960s was a time of social and generational upheaval felt with particular intensity in the melting pot of New York City. A culture of corruption pervaded the New York Police Department, where payoffs, protection, and shake- downs of gambling rackets and drug dealers were common practice. The so-called blue code of silence protected the minority of crooked cops from the sanction of the majority. Into this maelstrom came a working class, Brooklyn born, Italian cop with long hair, a beard and a taste for opera and ballet. Frank Serpico was a man who couldn’t be silence—or bought—and he refused to go along with the system.

Beatty, Paul. The Sellout. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, the narrator spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father’s pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family’s financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that’s left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Vintage International, 1995. (Originally published in 1956.)

A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of “the Brotherhood”, and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.