🐻 Cornell English unofficial reading list, fall 2026
← Back to Fields of Study
Freshman level
Writing Across Cultures: Modern Fantasy Media ENGL 1111-104
- ✔️ The Hobbit, or There & Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien (my highlights)
- ✔️ Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
Writing the Environment: Enchanting Nature ENGL 1130-101
- ✔️ A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Writing the Environment: Climates of Resistance ENGL 1130-102
- Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko
True Stories ENGL 1134
- Assata by Assata Shakur
- Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
- ✔️ They Called Us Enemy by George Takei
American Voices: Lost in the City: The Great Migration & Imagining the Urban Space through Black Art ENGL 1158-102
- Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks
- ✔️ The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (my highlights)
- Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
- The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Intersections: Race, Writing & Power ENGL 1160
- Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black by bell hooks
- Thinking Through Writing by Susan R. Horton
Cultural Studies: Black Politics & Writing Towards Liberation ENGL 1168-101
- Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
- Assata by Assata Shakur
- A Short Walk by Alice Childress
Short Stories ENGL 1170-105
- Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner
- ✔️ The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (my highlights)
- Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
- The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future by Brodsky & Nalebuff
- Collected Stories of Carson McCullers
- Eudora Welty : Stories, Essays & Memoir
Word & Image ENGL 1183-107
- Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
- American Journal: 50 Poems for Our Time by Tracy K. Smith
British Literature: Oscar Wilde ENGL 1191-102
- The Portable Oscar Wilde
- A Pocket Style Manual with Exercises by Hacker & Sommers
Sophomore level
Shakespeare ENGL 2270
- The Norton Shakespeare
The Novels of Toni Morrison ENGL 2603
- Paradise by Toni Morrison
Watching Literature and Reading Film ENGL 2765
- Crush by Richard Siken
Creative Writing ENGL 2800
- Write Moves: A Creative Writing Guide & Anthology by Nancy Pagh
Junior level
American Theatre Stage & Screen I ENGL 3360
- The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
- Waiting for Lefty & Other Plays by Clifford Odets
- Machinal by Sophie Treadwell
- The American Dream, The Sandbox, The Death of Bessie Smith, FAM and YAM by Edward Albee
- The Crucible by Arthur Miller
- A Raisin in the Sun & The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window by Lorraine Hansberry
- At Home at the Zoo by Edward Albee
Zora Neale Hurston & Langston Hughes ENGL 3505
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
- Mules & Men by Zora Neale Hurston
- The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
- Mule Bone by Hurston & Hughes
- Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston
- Recyclopedia by Harryette Mullen
Diasporas, Disasters & Dissent: Re-Thinking Puerto Rican Studies in the 20th & 21st Centuries ENGL 3678
- Bodega Dreams by Ernesto Quiñonez
- The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer
Advanced Writing: Audiences, Genres, Media ENGL 3801
- Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg
The Personal Voice: Nonfiction Writing ENGL 3890
- The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present by Phillip Lopate
- The Situation & the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick
- The Best American Essays 2025 by Jia Tolentino
- The Next American Essay by John D’Agata
Remembering Socialism: Literature & Film After the End of History ENGL 3903
- Free: A Child & a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi
- Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin
- The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskay
- Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
- The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic
Senior level
The Harlem Renaissance, 1919-1937 ENGL 4505/6515
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- Passing by Nella Larsen
- The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance by Alain Locke
- The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes
- Cane by Jean Toomer
- Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay
- Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral by Jessi Redmon Fauset
- Black No More by George S. Schuyler
- Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman
Reading Joyce’s Ulysses ENGL 4700/6700
- James Joyce by Richard Ellmann
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses by Harry Blamires
- Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Gifford & Seidman