Disability in Literature: (some) Final Book Project Options

I’m including a list below of PRE-APPROVED titles. There are MANY more options out there, but this will hopefully provide you with a starting place and some possibilities. An easy place to start is to google any of these titles, or look them up on Amazon, to see if they are interesting to you.

Also note, you don't have to go the book route; review the project packet for more details on other possible ways to go with the final project (a lesson plan or a small service learning project at the Lowell Association for the Blind). I want to help you find a project that you'll enjoy developing.

Please contact me ASAP if you want to use one of these -- remember, I can only assign each book to ONE student.

I am *very* willing to consider other books; consider this a starting place, not a limit, for finding the right book for your project.

One good place to find a text, or find out more about some of these texts, is to look at the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database here: http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Search?action=startann It’s a freely accessible database created at NYU that provides a searchable annotation for a wide variety of texts that connect with illness and disability.

Fiction

David Wroblewski: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel

Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Tsitsi Dangarembga: Nervous Conditions

Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar

Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Flannery O’Connor’s short stories (select a few): “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Displaced Person,” “Good Country People,” “The Enduring Chill,” “The Lame Shall Enter First,” “Parker's Back,” “Revelation”

Non-Fiction

Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump

Nancy Mairs, Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled

Christopher Nolan: Under the Eye of the Clock

Stephen Kuusisto: Planet of the Blind; Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening

Simi Linton: My Body Politic

Cheryl Manguso: The Two Kinds of Decay

Paul Guest: One More Theory about Happiness

Kristin Hersh: Rat Girl

Paul Longmore: Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability

Don Meyer: Thicker Than Water: Essays by Adult Siblings of People with Disabilities

Andre Dubus: Meditations from a Movable Chair

William Styron: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

Lauren Slater: Prozac Diary

Mark Zupan & Tim Swanson: GIMP: When Life Deals You a Crappy Hand, You Can Fold – or You Can Play

Daniel Tammet: Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

Audre Lorde: The Cancer Journals

Georgina Kleege: Sight Unseen

Alice Domurat Dreger: One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal

Temple Grandin: Emergence: Labeled Autistic, or The Way I See It

Nora Ellen Groce: Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard

Cathy Crimmins: Where is the Mango Princess?

Eustacia Cutler: Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin’s Mother Tells the Family Story

Robin Romm: The Mercy Papers

Donald Hall: The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon

Drama

Mark Medoff: Children of a Lesser God

Susan Sontag: Alice in Bed

Susan Nussbaum: Parade

Pomerance: The Elephant Man

William Gibson: The Miracle Worker

Charles L. Mee, Jr.: A Summer Evening in Des Moines

David Freeman: Creeps

Mike Ervin: The History of Bowling

John Belluso: Gretty Good

Susan Nussbaum: No One as Nasty

Graphic Novel

David Small: Stitches

Renee French: The Ticking

David B.: Epileptic

Ellen Forney: Marbles: A Graphic Memoir