Here are 82 books that Little Comrades fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am convinced that my life would be better if I had read more books by Latina/Latine authors while growing up. To be able to see oneself in a story is powerful. I didn’t have that for a long time. It made me feel invisible. It made me feel like being an author was as realistic as becoming an astronaut or a performer in Cirque du Soleil. Now, as a professor of Creative Writing and author of several books (and more on the way!), I dedicated my life to writing the books I needed as a young Latina. I hope others find something meaningful in my stories, too.
This is the first book I ever read by a Latina author. I was nineteen years old and a student at a small private liberal arts college in Connecticut. My professor assigned it to my American Literature class. I thought she’d made a mistake because some of the words in the book were in Spanish. I didn’t know you could do that—write in English but have some words in Spanish peppered throughout the dialogue and text. I was stunned.
I remember reading about Esperanza and her experiences in her Mexican neighborhood in Chicago, meeting characters on Mango Street, and falling in love with both the story and Cisneros’ playful, vulnerable, poetic writing style. After reading this book, I knew I also wanted to be a writer.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Told in a series of vignettes-sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous-Sandra Cisneros' masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.
I’m a writer, theatre artist and calligrapher who has spent a lifetime dedicated to the look, sound, texture and meaning of words. Writing in verse and prose poetry gives me a powerful tool to explore hard themes. Poetry is economical. It makes difficult subjects personal. Through poetry, I can explore painful choices intimately and emerge on a different path at a new phase of the journey. While my semi-autobiographical novel These Are Not the Words “is about” mental health and drug addiction, I’ve shown this through layers of images, sounds, textures, tastes—through shards of memories long submerged, recovered through writing, then structured and fictionalized through poetry.
I’ll Be Watchingis a verse novel that evokes place and character in tight, specific moments. It’s a page-turner that tells a harrowing story of children in 1941 surviving on their own through the brutal winter in a small Prairie town. Nuanced and impressionistic, moments are layered to create a world of childhood without a supportive adult net. I love the restraint and the specificity of Porter’s writing. She has focussed on childhood, during the war, in a very ordinary, very unlikely location and written a thriller.
In a small prairie town like Argue, Saskatchewan, everyone knows everybody else's business. It's common knowledge that the Loney family has been barely hanging on, but when the Loney children's father George dies in a drunken stupor and their stepmother takes off with a traveling Bible salesman, it looks as though the children are done for. Who's to save them when everyone is coping with their own problems the lingering Depression and the loss of the town's young men to the Second World War? Under the watchful eye of their ghostly parents and…
I’m a writer, theatre artist and calligrapher who has spent a lifetime dedicated to the look, sound, texture and meaning of words. Writing in verse and prose poetry gives me a powerful tool to explore hard themes. Poetry is economical. It makes difficult subjects personal. Through poetry, I can explore painful choices intimately and emerge on a different path at a new phase of the journey. While my semi-autobiographical novel These Are Not the Words “is about” mental health and drug addiction, I’ve shown this through layers of images, sounds, textures, tastes—through shards of memories long submerged, recovered through writing, then structured and fictionalized through poetry.
My Book of Life by Angel is an unlikely subject for a novel in verse—the life of a young prostitute on Vancouver’s East side. Drugs, illness, abandonment, violence are all shown in a first-person narrative of incredible sensitivity and honesty. It is a novel that will both open and break your heart as you see life on the street through Angel’s flawed and imperfect humanity. I love the grace and delicacy of Leavitt’s poetry as it contrasts with the horror of Angel’s life.
When 16-year-old Angel meets Call at the mall, he buys her meals and says he loves her, and he gives her some candy that makes her feel like she can fly. Pretty soon she's addicted to his candy, and she moves in with him.
As a favor, he asks her to hook up with a couple of friends of his, and then a couple more. Now Angel is stuck working the streets at Hastings and Main, a notorious spot in Vancouver, Canada, where the girls turn tricks until they disappear without a trace, and the authorities don't care. But after…
I’m a writer, theatre artist and calligrapher who has spent a lifetime dedicated to the look, sound, texture and meaning of words. Writing in verse and prose poetry gives me a powerful tool to explore hard themes. Poetry is economical. It makes difficult subjects personal. Through poetry, I can explore painful choices intimately and emerge on a different path at a new phase of the journey. While my semi-autobiographical novel These Are Not the Words “is about” mental health and drug addiction, I’ve shown this through layers of images, sounds, textures, tastes—through shards of memories long submerged, recovered through writing, then structured and fictionalized through poetry.
In A Wreath for Emmett Till, Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the unique beauty of a life, of the vibrancy of youth at 14 years old. Written as a “crown of sonnets,” where the last line of one sonnet becomes the first of the next, it is a book that bears witness and conveys huge themes of justice, loss, and remembrance while focussing on small moments, gestures, and images. I am in awe of Nelson’s ability to use a very formalized writing style to depict one of the most brutal murders of the twentieth century.
In 1955, people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention.
Award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights movement.This martyr's wreath, woven from a little-known but sophisticated form of poetry, challenges us to speak out against modern-day injustices, to 'speak what we see.'
Marxian Economics and its relevance to a better world and socialism has been my passion since I became an adult. My expertise in this subject, such as it is, has been sharpened by the study of Marx and Engels’ great works, but also by the efforts of so many others since; some of whom are included in my five best books. But above all, it is the knowledge that in this world of nearly 8 billion people, most do not have a happy and fulfilling life but face daily toil and struggle to live (and die). Humanity has the power and technology to do better; we just need to organise our social and governmental structures to achieve it.
It’s a page-turner, taking us through the lives and tribulations of Karl Marx’s wife, Jenny, and her daughters, in living and working with the world’s most well-known revolutionary. It’s a rare glimpse into the human side of the formidable critic of capitalism showing him as a devoted father and husband. And above all, the book opens us up to the important but forgotten role of Jenny in the romance of revolutionary change in the mid-19th century.
Brilliantly researched and wonderfully written, LOVE AND CAPITAL is a heartbreaking and dramatic saga of the family side of the man whose works would redefine the world after his death.
Drawing upon years of research, acclaimed biographer Mary Gabriel brings to light the story of Karl and Jenny Marx's marriage. We follow them as they roam Europe, on the run from hostile governments amidst a secret network of would-be revolutionaries, and see Karl not only as an intellectual, but as a protective father and loving husband, a visionary, a jokester, a man of tremendous passions, both political and personal.
I am a total sucker for people who are so complicated I can’t get a read
on them. This love comes from growing up without any extended family. When I heard little bits of my parents’ pasts, it felt like the world got more interesting, and I wanted to dig in to know everything there was to know about what shaped them and, by proxy, what shaped me. I’m drawn to
shady characters who don’t want to give up the goods, as they present a
joyful challenge by withholding mystery, and those types of characters
are the ones I love to read and write about.
I’ve never encountered such a duplicitous and complicated character as the Captain. Having to survive life in Vietnam before and during America’s entry into the war, and after as an immigrant in America, I kept thinking I understood why the character behaved the way he did. His actions made sense. Then I’d get what I thought was a glimpse at his heart and intentions and know I had him all wrong, only to turn the page and see a completely different facet of him again.
Over and over his past and present and desires for the future kept morphing him. The stunning thing about this story is I totally understood why he would be this complex as each section doled out enough clues how someone like him could be so strange and malleable and twisted up in the most odd and fascinating ways.
It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain:…
I am a historian of modern Poland. I teach, write, and think a lot about Poland and its place in Europe and the world. Regardless of where I live, Poland will always be my first home, where strawberries taste the best, the forest offers the most calming shade in the summer, and the language sounds the sweetest. But Poland is also a conundrum—perhaps similar to anywhere else and unique simultaneously. Its successes and failures, the traumas it caused and experienced, are part of me, and they keep pushing me to search for people and their stories that help us see the complexity of human life and individual choices.
It is a memoir about a father and a father-daughter relationship written by a daughter. But it is also a story about how history written with capital H can affect family relationships, about surprising ways children interpret their parents while searching for space for themselves in their parent’s lives. Jane Lazarre seems to live in the shadow of her extraordinary father, who left Eastern Europe in 1902 for the USA and dedicated his life to fighting for economic equality and racial justice.
He believed in a more just world, but he also struggled with depression and cracking cohesion of the communist movement that he was a member of. The book is as much about him as about his daughter’s attempts to live up to some of his dreams: it’s about love, search for answers, and reconciliation.
In a letter to his baby grandson, Bill Lazarre wrote that "unfortunately, despite the attempts by your grandpa and many others to present you with a better world, we were not very successful." Born in 1902 amid the pogroms in Eastern Europe, Lazarre dedicated his life to working for economic equality, racial justice, workers' rights, and a more just world. He was also dedicated to his family, especially his daughters, whom he raised as a single father following his wife's death. In The Communist and the Communist's Daughter Jane Lazarre weaves memories of her father with documentary materials-such as his…
The executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg seem so distant that it is jarring for me to contemplate that I was born in 1960, only seven years after their deaths. Growing up Jewish, I often heard the Rosenberg case invoked as an example of anti-Semitism. But it was not until I was an undergraduate history major that I read the scholarly literature about the Rosenbergs and subscribed to the newsletter of the Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case. My ongoing interest in the case helps me remind students about two crucial points: ongoing historical scholarship gets us closer to the “truth” but we may never know what “actually” happened. Which is OK.
This 2021 book, the latest in the Rosenberg oeuvre, not only recounts the history of what happened to the Rosenbergs but chronicles past historical accounts. One of the most important legacies of this literature is to remind us how all events are historically grounded. The Schneirs wrote that the Rosenberg trial “was a product of its times, displaying in microcosm many of the prevalent sociopolitical assumptions and preoccupations of the day.” The same could be said of the books by the Schneirs, the Meeropols, and Doctorow, which viewed the Rosenbergs through the sympathetic prism of American progressivism of the 1960s and 1970s.
Sebba also explores the enduring mystery of the “single-minded” Ethel Rosenberg, a “tragic figure” who herself committed no espionage but orphaned her sons rather than naming names or implicating her husband.
'A heart-piercingly brilliant book about a woman whose personal life put her in the cross-hairs of history' HADLEY FREEMAN 'Totally riveting. I couldn't put it down' VICTORIA HISLOP 'Ethel sings out for all women who have been misunderstood and wronged, and refuse to bow down' NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE 'A shocking tale of betrayal, naivety, misogyny and judicial failure' SONIA PURNELL 'A historic miscarriage of justice laid bare for our times' PHILIPPE SANDS
Ethel Rosenberg was a supportive wife, loving mother to two small children and courageous idealist who grew up during the Depression with aspirations to become an opera singer.
My passion for Central American politics and history derived quite directly from the conflicts in the region from the late 1970s onwards. Previously I had worked in Bolivia, where I had studied as a doctoral student, and although many people still view Latin American countries as pretty homogenous, I quickly discovered that they are very far from being so. I had to unlearn quite a bit and acquire new skills, although luckily, indigenous languages are really only dominant in Guatemala. Now we can be rather less partisan although many injustices remain.
Dalton was a wonderful poet and radical activist tragically executed by his Salvadorean comrades in 1975 when they erroneously believed him to be working for the CIA. The Salvadorean left has a poor record in devouring its own in bouts of paranoia that attended the civil war of the 1980s. Marmol, who survived deep into old age, was a ringleader of an uprising in 1932 that briefly promised a peasant overthrow of a state controlled by an oligarchy of a dozen families. The uprising was repressed with such force that the military was able to retain political power for the next four decades. This book is beautifully written and translated wonderfully well by Richard Schaaf and Kathleen Ross.
Miguel Mármol is the testimony of a revolutionary, as recorded by Salvadoran writer, Roque Dalton, which documents the historical and political events of El Salvador through the first decades of the 20th century. This Latin American classic describes the growth and development of the workers' movement and the communist party in El Salvador and Guatemala, and contains Mármol's impressions of post-revolutionary Russia in the twenties, describing in vivid detail the brutality and repression of the Martínez dictatorship and the reemergence of the workers' movement after Martínez was ousted. It also gives a broad and clear picture of the lives of…
The defining event in my parents’ lives, World War II has always been in my blood. When I was growing up, it would surface now and again when old comrades came to visit or when we came across souvenirs from the war. My favorite was a carefully etched German map showing sea lanes in the Caribbean, exotic and somehow menacing at the same time. My curiosity piqued, I knew I wanted to be in the thick of history—which meant reading and writing about the war, getting my PhD in history, and becoming a Marine and an intelligence officer.
Biography, especially this riveting biography, is a great way to learn about intelligence in World War II. Bradley looks into dark corners to uncover the almost unbelievable truth about a Soviet spy in the front office of American spy chief William J. Donovan. Like James Grafton Rogers, Bradley tells us what it was like to live and work in Washington during World War II—but with another layer of intrigue and, yes, treachery. 75 years after the fact we tend to forget that a group of privileged Americans like Lee—a Rhodes Scholar and Wall Street lawyer distantly related to Robert E. Leen—once thought that communism might be a viable alternative to capitalism and the economic misery of the depression.
Duncan Chaplin Lee was a Rhodes Scholar, patriot, and descendent of one of America's most distinguished families,and possibly the best-placed mole ever to infiltrate U.S. intelligence operations. In A Very Principled Boy intelligence expert and former CIA officer Mark A. Bradley traces the tangled roots of Lee's betrayal and reveals his harrowing struggle to stay one step ahead of America's spy hunters during and after World War II.Exposed to leftist politics while studying at Oxford, Lee became a committed, albeit covert, member of the Communist Party. After following William Wild Bill" Donovan to the newly formed Office of Strategic Services,…
