Huntington Public Library Adult Reading Challenge

  Alabama, 1900. Regina Hubbard Giddens, passed over in money and power, attempts to make her fortune when her family strikes a deal to bring a cotton mill to the south. But when her brothers and husband try to cheat her, she does everything necessary to take them down, even if it means losing her daughter.

  A Pakistani-American lawyer who has given up his faith finds himself losing everything he has worked after he is quoted in the NY Times following the hearing of an arrested imam. And when he and his wife host colleagues for dinner, the conversation goes in directions no one is able to recover from.

It's a classic for a reason. The staying power of this story, a witch hunt of historical witches reflecting the search for communists in the government contemporaneously, can still certainly reflect political struggles we see today. The story itself is deceptively simple: are the women in the tiny 17th century village of Salem witches casting spells on other townsfolk? But the undercurrents echo today, too, and the interpersonal dynamics at play -- gender, race, poverty -- are written deftly.

  After a playground altercation involving two young boys, the parents meet up to try and reconcile peacefully. But the quiet civility turns into passionate anger as the two couples fail to see eye to eye.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning play about two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, who share an apartment. One is a former hustler who dresses like Honest Abe at a shooting arcade, and the other is trying to become a 3 Card Monte hustler like his brother used to be. Struggling with sibling rivalry and living in squalor, the brothers are forced to deal with their haunted past and the reality of their future.