Eight top books to move disability from the margins to the center

Kenny Fries received the prestigious Creative Capital literature grant for In the Province of the Gods. He is the author of Body, Remember: A Memoir and The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, winner of the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. He is the editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and the author of the libretto for The Memory Stone, an opera commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera. His books of poems include Anesthesia, Desert Walking, and In the Gardens of Japan. At LitHub he tagged eight books that "move disability from the margins to the center, where they provide a critical lens to look at how we—disabled and nondisabled alike—live, or might live, our lives," including:

Good Kings Bad Kings, Susan R. Nussbaum (2013)

Playwright Nussbaum’s fiction debut, recipient of the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, is told in the voices of seven diverse characters, patients or employees of an institution for adolescents with disabilities. 15-year-old Yessenia describes the situation succinctly: “I do not know why they send us all to the same place but that’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it looks like it will always be because I am in tenth grade and I been in cripple this or cripple that my whole sweet, succulent Puerto Rican life.” Nussbaum gives voice to every character with an unsentimental vitality rarely matched in fiction.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue