Understanding AIDS

A selections of books about the AIDS crisis, including both fiction and nonfiction.
Updated September 19, 2022
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And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
Randy Shilts
Paper Book
Upon its first publication more than twenty years ago, And the Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting. An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed...
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Parts 1 & 2
Tony Kushner
Ebook
A revised edition of one of the most influential plays of our time, published with a new foreword by the author.
The Blackwater Lightship
Colm Tóibín
Paper Book
Under a crumbling roof in 1990s Ireland, Helen and five other friends and loved ones wait impatiently as her brother, Declan, dies of AIDS. The Blackwater Lightship is a novel about morals and manners and the clashes of culture and personality. Yet most of all, it's a novel about stories and their...
Dream of Ding Village
Yan Lianke
Paper Book
Officially censored upon its Chinese publication, and the subject of a bitter lawsuit between author and publisher, Dream of Ding Village is Chinese novelist Yan Lianke's most important novel to date. Set in a poor village in Henan province, it is a deeply moving and beautifully written...
The Great Believers
Rebecca Makkai
Paper Book
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER ALA CARNEGIE MEDAL WINNER THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD WINNER Soon to Be a Major Television Event, optioned by...
Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors
Susan Sontag
Paper Book
Susan Sontag's celebrated essays on cancer and AIDS now available in one volume. In 1978, Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the...
The Hours
Michael Cunningham
Paper Book
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel becomes a motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, directed by Stephen Daldry from a screenplay by David Hare The Hours tells the story of three women: Virginia Woolf, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway as...
Tell the Wolves I'm Home
Carol Rifka Brunt
Paper Book
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Wall Street Journal * O: The Oprah Magazine * BookPage * Kirkus Reviews * Booklist * School Library Journal   In this striking literary debut, Carol Rifka Brunt unfolds a moving story of love,...
Pedro & Me: Friendship, Loss and What I Learned
Judd Winick
Paper Book
Pedro and Me, now with a new foreword, is a ground-breaking, inspiring graphic novel from Judd Winick, first published in 2000. Pedro Zamora changed lives. When the HIV-positive AIDS educator appeared on MTV's The Real World: San Francisco, he taught...
The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst
Paper Book
Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the NBCC award. From Alan Hollinghurst, the acclaimed author of The Sparsholt Affair, The Line of Beauty is a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and...
Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World
Tracy Kidder
Paper Book
Tracy Kidder's critically acclaimed adult nonfiction work, Mountains Beyond Mountains has been adapted for young people by Michael French. In this young adult edition, readers are introduced to Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard-educated doctor with a self-proclaimed mission to transform...
At Risk
Alice Hoffman
Paper Book
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Rules of Magic comes a "memorable...striking"(Village Voice) novel that vividly portrays an American family shattered by tragedy. Ivan and Polly Farrell have two bright and talented children. Eight-year-old...
How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS
David France
Paper Book
One of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the Decade A definitive history of the successful battle to halt the AIDS epidemic, here is the incredible story of the grassroots activists whose work turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable...
Veronica
Mary Gaitskill
Paper Book
A finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, here is an evocative novel about female friendship in the glittering 1980s. One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century * One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels...

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