From the Stanford Report:

Stanford's "Three Books" program usually focuses on works of contemporary literature—so this summer's selections offer an interesting variation on the traditional theme with a work of fiction, a memoir and a non-fiction analysis of success.

The books—Lan Samantha Chang's Hunger, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and Abraham Verghese's My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS—will be mailed to incoming Stanford freshmen. Verghese, a specialist in infectious diseases, is a professor of medicine at Stanford. Chang, a former Stegner Fellow, is director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Gladwell is a writer for The New Yorker.

All three books, and more, are available at the Stanford libraries:

• Hunger: a novella and stories by Lan Samantha Chang
• More books/stories by Lan Samantha Chang




• Outliers: the story of success by Malcolm Gladwell
• More books by Malcolm Gladwell




• My own country: a doctor's story of a town and its people in the age of AIDS by Abraham Verghese
• More books by Abraham Verghese