Eight books that 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:

The Still Point of the Turning World, Emily Rapp (2013)

In her best-selling memoir, Rapp turns the story of losing a son to Tay-Sachs disease into a thoughtful and philosophical look at parenting. The no-holds barred depiction of what it is like to have a child with a disability is distinguished not only by Rapp’s literary intelligence but also by her own disability experience, which she previously wrote about in Poster Child (2007). By employing the writings of C. S. Lewis, Sylvia Plath, and Hegel and drawing on works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Rapp opens up what otherwise could be a claustrophobic and deservedly myopic story of her son Ronan’s life.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue