The Meaning of Anxiety

Rollo May

Rollo May refutes the assertion that mental health is living without anxiety, proposing instead that anxiety is a necessary condition for creativity, intellect, and freedom.

Orbital

Samantha Harvey

Six people—four astronauts and two cosmonauts—may be among the last to circle the Earth.

We

Yevgeny Zamyatin

In a glass-walled city ruled by the totalitarian One State, citizens have no privacy, no identity, no freedom, and no names: they each bear only a number.

The Salt Eaters

Toni Cade Bambara

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”

The Waves

Virginia Woolf

Six children—three girls and three boys—play in a garden by the sea.

A Strategy for Labor

André Gorz

“A system that makes people work like zombies to produce useless, destructive, or self-destructive things has outlived its usefulness.”

The Cancer Journals

Audre Lorde

Between 1978 and 1980, Audre Lorde wrote about her experience with breast cancer and mastectomy, connecting her trials and treatment to her own work and to the collective effort of liberation for all women.

Burnout

Hannah Proctor

Hannah Proctor visits the concept of burnout as the experience of political defeat—the disappointment, despair, and grief that emerges when one becomes aware that the political project they have committed themselves to may not succeed.

Sisters of the Yam

bell hooks

bell hooks approaches notions of self-care among communities of Black women, locating it within the work of grief, testimony, and reconciliation.

Annals of the Western Shore

Ursula K. Le Guin

In these three short novels, Le Guin takes us to the Western Shore, where people of magic and people of war and people of books all try to make their lives together.

Searoad

Ursula K. Le Guin

This collection of interlocking stories tells of the people who live in a small town on the Oregon coast.