Ten Academics Share Novels That Reshaped Their Thinking

Across disciplines and decades, ten scholars have found in fiction what theory alone could not provide: the felt experience of a different life, a different set of assumptions, a different world. From a boy with a kestrel to a woman who loves her convenience store, these novels arrived at the right moment and did what the best stories do — not argue, but inhabit. They remind us that literature has always been one of civilization's most honest tools for examining what we believe, what we owe each other, and what we might yet become.