The Big Read-Along: Reconsidering the American Dream

A finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is a “deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight” (New York Times Book Review). Sarah Smarsh shares stories of her family in rural Kansas and her childhood in the 1980s and ’90s while offering “an unsentimental tribute to the working-class people Smarsh knows—the farmers, office clerks, trash collectors, waitresses—whose labor is often invisible or disdained” (NPR). “If you’re working toward a deeper understanding of our ruptured country, then Sarah Smarsh’s memoir and examination of poverty in the American heartland is an essential read” (Refinery29). “What this book offers is a tour through the messy and changed reality of the American Dream, and a love letter to the unruly but still beautiful place [Smarsh] called home (Boston Globe). It is “an important book for this moment” (EntertainmentWeekly.com).

In Infinite Country, award-winning author Patricia Engel tells the powerful tale of a family divided. Set in Colombia and the United States and told through the shifting perspectives of each family member, Engel examines the beauty and cruelty of life in the diaspora, crafting “a breathtaking story of the unimaginable prices paid for a better life” (Esquire). With “meticulously rendered descriptions of Andean landscapes and mythology” (New York Times Book Review), Infinite Country is “at once a sweeping love story and tragic drama” (Elle), “forcefully examin[ing] what unites a family beyond the divisions borders and policies forge” (Los Angeles Review of Books). Through the intimacies of one family’s story, Engel “challenges us to consider that the United States has always been a place of borders” (Harvard Review of Books). “Told by a chorus of voices and perspectives, this is as much an all-American story as it is a global one” (Booklist).