What is an American, and how is an American identity created? What is the American Dream, and to what extent is it achievable to all?

Junior English at Gilman primarily focuses on the American Experience, attempting to define what is American and how we can come to know such a thing through our literature. For your summer reading assignment, please select one text from the following list of works that delve deeply into the questions above. Your reading choice will help launch our discussions at the start of the year.

**Gilman English 11 Choice Reading**
(Book descriptions from Ms. Carper)
*Interpreter of Maladies* by Jhumpa Lahiri This stunning debut collection flawlessly charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants, expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide. A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. An Indian American girl recognizes her cultural identity during a Halloween celebration while the Pakastani civil war rages on television in the background. A latchkey kid with a single working mother finds affinity with a woman from Calcutta. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, these stories speak with passion and wisdom to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story, Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and a baffling new world.	The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans The award-winning author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self brings her signature voice and insight to the subjects of race, grief, apology, and American history. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief—all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history—about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight. In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes viral. In “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain,” a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend’s unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a black scholar from Washington, DC, is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.	*Promises of Gold* by Jose Olivarez “How many bad lovers have gotten poems? How many crushes? No disrespect to romantic love―but what about our friends ? Those homies who are there all along―cheering for us and reminding us that love is abundant.” In this groundbreaking collection of poems, José Olivarez explores every kind of love―self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural. Grappling with the contradictions of the American Dream with unflinching humanity, he lays bare the ways in which “love is complicated by forces larger than our hearts.” Whether readers enter this collection in English or via the Spanish translation by poet David Ruano, these extraordinary poems are sure to become beloved for their illuminations of life―and love.
*Stay True* by Hua Hsu A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu. In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.	The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.	Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

Choice Reading - ALL Rising 11th Graders

In addition to the grade-level book, each Upper School student will read two additional books of their choosing.

Students taking English at the Bryn Mawr School (BMS) will read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (ISBN 978-0544309760).

Students taking English at Roland Park Country School (RPCS) will read:

The Prince of Los Cocuyos by Richard Blanco (Reading Guide for The Prince of Los Cocuyos)

OR

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch (Reading Guide for The Last Lecture)

Modern Language Summer Reading Assignments*

*Students enrolled in Modern Language classes at Bryn Mawr School or Roland Park Country School should check that school’s website for summer reading requirements.

Students taking French or Spanish at Gilman will have summer reading assignments. Please check the “Summer Reading” Canvas page for information.

Elisabeth Woolsey Gilman Prize (optional)

Additionally, we encourage students to read the assigned books for the Elisabeth Woolsey Gilman Prize, one of Gilman’s oldest and most honored awards. This essay competition gives students the opportunity to further develop their reading and practice their skills in literary analysis. An essay examination will be held in April, allowing students to use Spring Break to brush up on the books. A prize will be awarded for the best paper written by a member of the 11th or 12th grades, and a second prize will be awarded to a member of the 9th or 10th grades.

The 2025-2026 Elisabeth Woolsey Gilman Book is 1984 by George Orwell