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.
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”
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
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
David Small: Stitches
Renee French: The Ticking
David B.: Epileptic
Ellen Forney: Marbles: A Graphic Memoir