I would send them to read THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH. It’s among the oldest surviving works of Western civilization, from before literature was literature. It’s my go-to whenever loss and life have tumbled me (often). Amazingly, and perhaps depressingly (When will they ever learn?), “Gilgamesh” tackles all the issues we are dealing with today: a bad leader and how he becomes an enlightened one (here’s hoping), environmental degradation, class and race — i.e. who gets to be called human — lust and love; loss and death. The language is haunting, incantatory, at the border of song and silence. There are many translations, David Ferry’s being my favorite, though Stephen Mitchell and Herbert Mason (more of an adaptation) have both tackled the epic with excellent results. Adolescents are prime for poetry: its intensity, its hormonal rhythms, its power to unpack pretense and probe deeper are in sync with that time of life. Too bad that it is usually in high school when so many young people fall out with the genre. Let’s grab them while we still can. Heck, they can even do it as their high school play, using Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Gilgamesh: A Verse Play.” — Julia Alvarez, author of “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”

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Two years ago, I’d have had a different answer, but now I’d ask them to read Stanley Milgram’s electrifying OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY. When a startlingly docile population is succumbing to the often treacherous locutions of a so-called strongman, this study of our essential moral pliability takes on a fresh urgency. “Lord of the Flies,” which is already on many schools’ lists, narrates how easily children become savages, but “Obedience to Authority” relates how easily adults abdicate responsibility, and illuminates the horror that ensues when we placidly do as we are told. — Andrew Solomon, author of “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression”

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I really wish someone would have pointed me toward the criminally neglected but astonishingly brilliant and entirely original essay collection THE OMNI-AMERICANS, by the genuine Renaissance man, Albert Murray. In our current moment of identity politics and multicultural Balkanization, Murray offers a vision of America in all its grandeur and maddening complexity. I wish I had read him in high school because it took me entirely too long to understand so simple and irrefutable a truth: “But any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.” — Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of “Losing My Cool: Love, Literature and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd”

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I would love to see Nicola Yoon’s THE SUN IS ALSO A STAR added to a high school reading curriculum. This book is about immigration, isolation and family, wrapped up in the guise of a love story. As an immigrant myself, it would have meant the world to me to read about characters experiencing and surmounting the struggles that closely mirrored my own. — Sabaa Tahir, author of “An Ember in the Ashes”