As vacationers pack their bags with summer reading, we asked 12 writers to answer the question: “What book by an American author should everyone read?”

The list they gave us spans classics and brand-new releases, poetry and fiction, canon writers and up-and-comers.

See more of TIME’s Reasons to Celebrate America Right Now here

Love Medicine By Louise Erdrich Harpers Collins Publishing Sherman Alexie Love Medicine

By Louise Erdrich Because she writes so powerfully about indigenous and immigrant lives in the United States, and because she will eventually win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Alexie’s most recent book is Thunder Boy Jr.

Birds of America By Lorrie Moore Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Julian Barnes Birds of America

By Lorrie Moore The best book (so far) by your greatest living short-story writer. Barnes’ most recent novel is The Noise of Time.

Geography III By Elizabeth Bishop Macmillan Publishers Teju Cole Geography III

By Elizabeth Bishop This slim, difficult book of poems, Bishop’s last, seems to me a compressed masterpiece of irony, patience and wisdom, all virtues that can either console or help us today. Cole’s forthcoming book is Known and Strange Things.

A Lesson Before Dying By Ernest J. Gaines Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Anne Korkeakivi A Lesson Before Dying

By Ernest J. Gaines This story of a young black man awaiting execution for a crime he didn’t commit bears a fundamental message: no one can take away the freedom to conduct oneself with love and dignity. Korkeakivi’s forthcoming novel is Shining Sea .

Open City By Teju Cole Penguin Random House Amitava Kumar Open City

By Teju Cole For its sense of the tragic, not least when he describes, at the novel’s end, the fate of the migrating birds as they fly past the Statue of Liberty at night. Kumar’s most recent book is Lunch With a Bigot .

Humboldt’s Gift By Saul Bellow Viking Press Karan Mahajan Humboldt’s Gift

By Saul Bellow Bellow’s comic megaphone of a novel amplifies the life and early death of a half-mad poet into a meditation on the “big operation” of American life. Mahajan’s most recent novel is The Association of Small Bombs .

Penguin Random House Jay McInerney The Day of the Locust

By Nathanael West Every American should read this fierce, apocalyptic novel about Hollywood and the American Dream that seems newly relevant in this era of an angry and volatile electorate. McInerney’s forthcoming novel is Bright, Precious Days .

Harcourt/Harvest Jon Meacham All the King’s Men

By Robert Penn Warren This is the ultimate novel of power and its discontents in American life and politics—a sprawling, knowing journey into the human heart. Meacham’s most recent book is Destiny and Power .

Mulholland Books Ann Patchett Underground Airlines

By Ben Winters As a bookseller, I like to promote books that are brand-new. This one kept me up at night and changed the way I saw the world once I was finished. Patchett’s forthcoming novel is Commonwealth .

St. Martin's Press Curtis Sittenfeld Make Your Home Among Strangers

By Jennine Capó Crucet A recent debut novel, it is funny and painful and wise, and vividly shows how the immigrant experience and the American experience are one and the same. Sittenfeld’s most recent novel is Eligible.

Grand Central Publishing Jesmyn Ward Parable of the Sower

By Octavia E. Butler Right now we seem dangerously close to Butler’s ruined, near future society, to residing in an America fractured along class, racial, ethnic and ideological lines. Ward is the editor of the forthcoming book The Fire This Time.