Exploring Modern and Contemporary Literature in ELA

There’s been a growing number of teachers looking for recent works to infuse in their ELA courses. While there’s safety in teaching older works with established lessons available, there’s something demoralizing about a student saying, “I’ve already read that,” before you even start a book. Here’s a list of classroom-appropriate contemporary literature published in the last 5 years. When possible, I’ve included some suggested themes or class pairings! I’ve marked my personal favorites with a *!

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Fiction

Queen Hereafter* by Isabelle Schuler – pub. 2023

Daughter of an ousted king, descendant of ancient druids, Gruoch has grown up believing that she will be crowned queen of Alba and reclaim the lands of her Pictish kin, a prophecy seemingly fulfilled by her betrothal to Duncan, the heir-elect. Determined never to be powerless again, she leaves behind her home, her family, and her close friend MacBethad, and travels to the royal seat at Scone to embrace her new position.

But Duncan’s court is rife with sly words and unfriendly faces, women desperate to usurp her position, and others whose motives are shrouded in mystery. As her coronation approaches, a deadly turn of events forces Gruoch to flee Duncan and the capital. Alone and at the mercy of an old enemy, her hope of becoming Queen all but lost, Gruoch must make a fateful choice: live a long, quiet life in the shadows, or seize vengeance and a path back to the throne.

A stunning literary reclamation of an iconic character, Queen Hereafter is a gripping story of female ambition, power, history, desire, hate, and vengeance set against the backdrop of early medieval Scotland.

Recommended for Shakespearean pairings or themes of power and corruption.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – pub. 2020

Anyone who enjoys the paranoia-soaked films of Alfred Hitchcock—particularly his Oscar-winning adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca—will recognize the thrills and chills of Moreno-Garcia’s gothic-horror tale set in 1950s Mexico. The story follows Noemí Taboada’s attempt to rescue her cousin Catalina, who is trapped in both a bad marriage and a spooky mansion. The whole plot takes a bizarre, Lovecraftian turn, but by then you’re too hooked on the cousins and their fate to get off the ride. A spooky story best read on a dark and stormy night.

Recommended for Hispanic author literary circles or AP English Literature

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt – pub. 2022

After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago. Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium.

Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors–until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova. Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late. Shelby Van Pelt’s debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.

Recommended for AP English Literature or magical realism literary circles

Demon Copperhead* by Barbara Kingsolver – pub. 2022

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

Recommended for AP English Literature or retakes on classic literature

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy – pub. 2022

After sixteen years of characteristic seclusion, McCarthy returns with a one-two punch: The Passenger, out in October, and Stella Maris, a companion volume set to follow in November. In The Passenger, the stronger of the two works, we meet Bobby Western, a salvage diver and mathematical genius reckoning with his troubled personal history. Western is tormented by the legacy of his father, who worked on the atomic bomb, and the suicide of his sister, who suffered from schizophrenia. Told in meandering form, The Passenger is an elegiac meditation on guilt, grief, and spirituality. Packed with textbook McCarthy hallmarks, like transgressive behaviors and cascades of ecstatic language, it’s a welcome return from a legend who’s been gone too long.

Recommended for pairing with Oppenheimer or AP English Literature

The Midnight Library* by Matt Haig – pub. 2020

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Recommended for discussions of suicide and AP English Literature

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett – pub. 2020

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

Recommended for themes of passing/racial identity or LGBTQ+ characters

Klara and the Sun* by Kazuo Ishiguro – pub. 2021

In the very near future, an AF (Artificial Friend) named Klara, manufactured as a companion for a child, stands in the sunlit window of a quiet shop and narrates her yearning to be purchased and taken home. She’s childlike herself and exceptionally naïve; we are immediately endeared to her, though we know her insides are wire, her thoughts determined by code. Ishiguro has claimed his prose is nothing special, but over the course of his career, he has again and again managed to push readers into mourning for some of the most isolated members of society. 

Klara and the Sun glides in on tiptoe, tracing delicate circles around Klara’s time in the shop; her life with Josie, the young girl who takes her home; and the realization that Josie’s mother’s decision to genetically “lift” her daughter’s intelligence is costing the girl a normal life. Even in the book’s quietest moments, there’s a sense that humanity’s control over itself is on the line. And much like Ishiguro’s earlier book Never Let Me Go, this novel delivers a tender, enthralling twist.

Recommended for pairing with Frankenstein or AP English Literature

Project Hail Mary* by Andy Weir – pub. 2020

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he?

Recommended for younger readers/conservative districts or science fiction units

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Yu’s Interior Chinatown, which won this year’s National Book Award for fiction, is satire at its best, a shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood (and Asian tropes in particular: Background Oriental Male, Kung Fu Guy, etc.) presented, perfectly, in the sharply hewed format of a screenplay. It follows Willis Wu as he attempts to work his way up the ladder from his own current background position of Generic Asian Male into that of a (more) leading role—in movies, yes, but in his own life too. Peeling back caricatures to paint vivid individual portraits, Yu eviscerates generalizations with the devastatingly specific: the balled-up tissues and partially eaten pear on Willis’s ailing father’s floor, the “almost sweet” garlic and vegetable scent of his mother’s breath, the cold toothpaste she dabs on a burn.

Recommended for satire studies or contemporary American literature

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah – pub. 2023

Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with a vengeance. In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli—like so many of her neighbors—must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life. The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American Dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes an epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America’s most defining eras—the Great Depression.

Recommended for historical fiction units or AP English Literature

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward – pub. 2023

The title of this powerful historical novel is taken from Dante; the descent to which it refers is into the hell of chattel slavery, “this death before death.” Annis, the protagonist, is the child of an enslaved woman who was raped by the owner of the plantation in Carolina where they labor. Her mother secretly passes down ancestral knowledge, teaching Annis to fight and forage as “a way to recall another world.” After an act of resistance, Annis is sold to a slave trader, and during a brutal forced march she discovers the company of spirits, one of whom takes the name of her grandmother, an African warrior. “How am I with none of the people I belong to?” Annis asks. Ultimately, the spirits help her achieve a measure of deliverance from her lonely inferno.

Recommended for pairing with Dante’s Inferno or AP English Literature

Lessons in Chemistry* by Bonnie Garmus – pub. 2022

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results. But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six.

Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo. Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.

Recommended for plot-driven readers or science pairings

Clap When You Land* by Elizabeth Acevedo – pub. 2020

It’s only been some two and a half years since Acevedo’s debut, The Poet X, took the literary world by storm. Yet somehow Clap When You Land is her third novel. Written with Acevedo’s musical ear for language and in free verse, Clap When You Land tells the story of two sisters, Camino and Yahaira, who grew up completely unaware of the other’s existence until their father dies in a plane crash and their separate lives in the Dominican Republic and New York City become forever intertwined. The story is inspired by the true events of the crash of a November 2001 flight between JFK and Las Americas Airport in Santa Domingo, which was overshadowed by 9/11 but devastated the Dominican community in New York City. 

Recommended for poetry in verse literature circles or LGBTQ+ characters

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid – pub. 2021

Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them… and what they will leave behind.

Recommended for pop culture pairings or historical fiction book circles

Nonfiction

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner – pub. 2021

A memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. Michelle Zauner tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band—and meeting the man who would become her husband—her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Recommended for AP English Literature or Asian author units

The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland – pub. 2023

In this moving memoir, Andrew Leland recounts his journey from sight to blindness, tracing his ever-shifting relationship to his diminishing vision. Suspended between the worlds of blindness and sight—he will soon lose his vision entirely—Leland explores the history and culture of blindness: its intersections with medicine, technology, ableism. He travels to a residential school for the blind, where he dons shades that block his vision, and learns to cook meals and cross streets. One former student tells him, “Until you get profoundly lost, and know it’s within you to get unlost, you’re not trained—until you know it’s not an emergency but a magnificent puzzle.” 

Recommended for nonfiction literary circles or AP English Language

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe – pub. 2021

For the first time, the U.S. has surpassed 100,000 deaths from drug overdoses in a single year — and opioid deaths accounted for more than 75 percent of those. Opioid overdose has grown so common that some cities have installed Narcan vending machines and pharmacies put up posters showing customers how to administer it. The epidemic has spilled into every corner of American life. In Radden Keefe’s meticulously reported and brilliantly assembled Empire of Pain, he traces that spill back to the family at the very center: the billionaire Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma.

Like Gilded Age barons before them, the Sacklers sat atop a massive fortune, behind a fortress of lawyers and corporate privacy screens, while their company pushed OxyContin onto prescription pads and out into America. It’s a blood-boiling story of American apathy — of a family more concerned with putting their name on museums than keeping people from harm, a pharmaceutical industry shrugging its shoulders at staggering death rates, and a medical community entirely unequipped to handle the surge.

Recommended for journalism pairings or AP English Language

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey – pub. 2020

“Memorial Drive is, among so many other wondrous things, an exploration of a Black mother and daughter trying to get free in a land that conflates survival with freedom and womanhood with girlhood … A book that makes a reader feel as much as Memorial Drive does cannot be written without an absolute mastery of varied modes of discourse … In one of the book’s most devastating and artful chapters, Trethewey makes an unexpected but wholly necessary switch to the second person … What happens in most riveting literature is seldom located solely in plot. I’ve not read an American memoir where more happens in the assemblage of language than Memorial Drive… Memorial Drive forces the reader to think about how the sublime Southern conjurers of words, spaces, sounds and patterns protect themselves from trauma when trauma may be, in part, what nudged them down the dusty road to poetic mastery.”

Recommended for memoir literary circles or AP English Language

Fire Weather by John Vaillant – pub. 2023

In 2016, a wildfire ripped through the oil town of Fort McMurray, in Alberta, hot enough to vaporize toilets and bend a street light in half. It was the most expensive disaster in Canada’s history. This alarming account tracks the destruction, the role of fire in industry in the past hundred and fifty years, and the disregarded alarms about the environment raised by scientists, dating as far back as the eighteen-fifties. “Climate science came of age in tandem with the oil and automotive industries,” Vaillant writes, and their futures are as linked as their pasts. The number of places facing fates similar to Fort McMurray’s is rapidly increasing, even as “our reckoning with industrial CO2” moves painfully slowly.

Recommended for environmentalism themes or AP English Language

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson – pub. 2020

What distinguishes Wilkerson is her grasp of the power of individual narratives to illustrate such general ideas, allowing her to tell us what these abstract notions have meant in the lived experience of ordinary people … The dexterity with which she combines larger historical descriptions with vignettes from particular lives, recounted with the skill of a veteran reporter, will be familiar to readers of The Warmth of Other Suns… Caste will spur readers to think and to feel in equal measure.

Its vivid stories about the mistreatment of Black Americans by government and law and in everyday social life—from the violence of the slave plantation to the terror of lynchings to the routines of discourtesy and worse that are still a common experience for so many—retain their ability to appall and unsettle, to prompt flashes of indignation and moments of sorrow. The result is a book that is at once beautifully written and painful to read.”

Recommended for AP English Language or civic studies

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig – pub. 2023

This new addition to the biographical record of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s life presents readers with an alternative to the “de-fanged” version of King that endures in inspirational quotes. Eig’s new sources include the latest batch of files released by the F.B.I., which was surveilling King even more closely than he suspected, and remembrances from King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who recorded her thoughts in the time after his killing. “The portrait that emerges here may trouble some people,” Eig writes—the book recounts a number of King’s affairs, in addition to the allegation, from an F.B.I. report, that King was complicit in a sexual assault.

What Eig mostly provides, though, is a sober and intimate portrait of King’s short life, capturing the ferocity of the forces that opposed King: police dogs, bombs, Klansmen, and, above all, segregationists wielding legal and political authority. He also captures King’s sense of theatre, his enormously canny ability to stage confrontations that heightened the contrast between the civil-rights movement and those who wanted to stop it.

Recommended for biography book clubs or American History units

Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo – pub. 2023

In 1848, Ellen and William Craft escaped slavery in Georgia by disguising themselves—the light-skinned Ellen as a sickly white gentleman, William as his slave—and making their way north by train and steamer. Woo’s history draws from a variety of sources, including the Crafts’ own account, to reconstruct a “journey of mutual self-emancipation,” while artfully sketching the background of a nation careering toward civil war. The Crafts’ improbable escape, and their willingness to tell the story afterward on the abolitionist lecture circuit, turned them into a sensation, and Woo argues that they deserve a permanent place in the national consciousness.

Recommended for American History units or AP English Language

Poetry, Essays, & Short Story Collections

The Anthropocene Reviewed* by John Green – pub. 2021

The Anthropocene is the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, bestselling author John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale—from the QWERTY keyboard and sunsets to Canada geese and Penguins of Madagascar.

Funny, complex, and rich with detail, the reviews chart the contradictions of contemporary humanity. As a species, we are both far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough, a paradox that came into sharp focus as we faced a global pandemic that both separated us and bound us together.

John Green’s gift for storytelling shines throughout this masterful collection. The Anthropocene Reviewed is an open-hearted exploration of the paths we forge and an unironic celebration of falling in love with the world.

Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong – pub. 2022

Vuong’s second collection of poetry is a bruising journey through the devastating aftershocks of his mother’s death. Like Orpheus descending into the underworld, Vuong takes us to the white-hot limits of his grief, writing with visionary fervor about love, agony, and time. Without his mother, Vuong must remake his understanding of the world: what is identity when its source is gone? What is language without the cultural memory of our elders? Aesthetically ambitious and ferociously original, Time Is A Mother interrogates these impossibilities. “Nobody’s free without breaking open,” Vuong writes in one searing poem. Here, he breaks open and rebuilds.

Recommended for themes of identity or LGBTQ+ authors

Grand Tour  by Elisa Gonzalez  – pub. 2023

This vivid, searching début collection traverses and troubles borders between nations, languages, lovers, the past and the present, the living and the dead; combining reflections on art and history with astute observations of everyday life, Gonzalez contends with the world’s capacity for profound suffering and for near-unbearable beauty in equal measure.

Recommended for themes of art and imagism or AP English Literature

Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021 by Yusef Komunyakaa – pub. 2021

Komunyakaa, 74, has achieved a distinctive, recognizable and unifying style. The poems in this new book engage in various formal and thematic experiments—and yet the works embody the same spirit and sing with the same voice. Komunyakaa’s poems are as contemporary as poems can be: Some of them feel as if they were written a day, a year or a https://amzn.to/3OWSi97decade from now. At the same time, they draw liberally on historical, mythical or biblical sources … Komunyakaa tends to reach peak intensity in longer works that afford him the space to stretch out, gather momentum and amplify resonances … To praise Komunyakaa’s longer pieces is not to minimize the accomplishment of his shorter poems … In an era when there is great temptation to offer consoling sentiments, Komunyakaa dares to disturb.”

Recommended for AP English Literature or Black authors

Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby – pub. 2020

When, on April 1, weeks into the lockdown and just as NYC was heading into a terrifying period of the pandemic, I read Parul Sehgal’s review of Irby’s Wow, No Thank You., declaring it “wildly funny,” well—who wouldn’t have run directly to the bookstore? And Irby did not disappoint. Her searingly funny essays took me out of the creeping sense of national terror and directly into the uncomfortable comfort of her own home, her own life, and her own mind, where self-deprecation is high art and a tool for rendering the rest of society. Oh, my God, did I love this book. Wow, thank you, Samantha Irby.

Recommended for humor units or Covid reflections

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri – pub. 2023

Jhumpa Lahiri’s remarkable third collection of short fiction delineates the lives of newcomers to Rome and of those born there, as all find their histories and that of the eternal city entwined. The stories, two of which first appeared in The New Yorker, describe a relationship to place that can be by turns intoxicating and forbidding.

Recommended for AP English Literature or short story units

Finna by Nate Marshall – pub. 2020

These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope.

Recommended for Black History Month or AP English Literature

I’m sure I’ve forgotten or missed some titles that ought to be on this list, so tell me: what have been your newest texts from the past five years? Leave me a comment to let me know!