I need to select a few books for my Summer AP English work.
I need nonfiction, fiction, and an autobiography.

Suggestions? I really need help on the autobiograpy part. Someone intresting would be great.

Assata by Assata Shakur is one of my favorite autobiographies ever. She's a fascinating woman and she should be far more known than she is. HIGHLY recommended.

For fiction, I would suggest something by Toni Morrison or Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God). I read both of these authors for my Women in American Literature course last semester and they are fantastic. Their work is really serious--if you are looking for something more light-hearted, you might like Michelle Tea. She's published several books that are largely memoir, but also fictionalized and they are sold as fiction. You can read about all her books on amazon.com. Her new novel is called Rose of No Man's Land and it's a really fun book.

For nonfiction, I don't know if this would count or not, but I purchased this really neat collection of short stories from Borders. It's called "Couldn't Keep it to Myself" and it was edited by Wally Lamb. He did a writing workshop in a women's prison and some of the stories written by the women involved are in the book. It's really touching and interesting.

Hope that helps!

Clive James' three part autobiography is good.

The first two books of Doris Lessing's autobiography are amazing, even for those who haven't read her novels, especially the first of the two, Under My Skin.

I haven't read this book myself, but I want to. It's called My Dark Places (ahahaha, but seriousy) by James Ellroy, the guy who wrote LA Confidential and lots of other good books.

It supposedly deals with his mother's murder and growing up poor and fucked up in LA. It might be more of a memoir than autobiography though. Is there much of a difference?

Anyway, here's a Publishers Weekly description so you can decide if it interests you or not:

Crime novelist Ellroy (American Tabloid) was 10 in 1958 when his mother, a divorced nurse and closet alcoholic, was found strangled to death in a deserted schoolyard in California's San Gabriel Valley. The case was still unsolved in 1994, when Ellroy hired retired L.A. homicide detective Bill Stoner to investigate. In this emotionally raw, hypnotic memoir, Ellroy ventures into the murky, Oedipal depths of his lifelong obsession with sex crimes and police work, setting his mother's murder against a grisly backdrop of similar L.A. homicides, from the 1947 Black Dahlia case (the subject of Ellroy's 1987 novel The Black Dahlia) to the indictment of O.J. Simpson. Ellroy recounts his troubled coming-of-age: in the wake of his mother's death, he immersed himself in the Nazi literature, petty theft, voyeurism, pornography and crime fiction that pollinated his flowering "tabloid sensibility." Eventually bottoming out on booze and drugs, he sobered up in AA and moved to the East Coast to write fiction. Returning to L.A., Ellroy culls LAPD archives to reconstruct the 1958 investigation of his mother's murder. While he fails to figure out who killed her, he unravels her secretive life, exploring the dalliances and weekend binges she hid from her son and ex-husband. If Baudelaire had produced an episode of Dragnet, it might have resembled the feverish, staccato way Ellroy confronts his mother's ghost, re-staging her murder with creepy meticulousness and addressing her repeatedly in the second person. Ellroy's degraded tough-guy shtick at times sounds disingenuously novelistic, and it occasionally gets mired in lists of sex crimes amassed from police archives. That the book lacks the closure or catharsis it sets out to achieve, however, is just one of the hard-won lessons of this deeply disquieting glimpse into Ellroy's heart of darkness and his ongoing battle with the past. Photos not seen by PW. 75,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB selections.