I was lucky enough to pick this up when Amazon offered it for free and I feel very fortunate. I don’t expect that Twelve Years a Slave: Plus Five American Slave Narratives, Including Life of Frederick Douglass, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Life of Josiah Henson, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Up From Slavery will be an easy read, but I believe it will be worth the effort:

This exciting new release includes the complete text of “Twelve Years a Slave.” Read the amazing story of Solomon Northup before (or after) you see the critically-acclaimed movie of 2013. But this collection doesn’t stop there. It also includes:

• Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
• The Life of Josiah Henson is a slave narrative written by Josiah Henson, who would later become famous for being the basis of the character of Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs, which addresses the struggles and sexual abuse that young women slaves faced on the plantations, and how these struggles were harsher than what men suffered as slaves
• Up from Slavery, the 1901 autobiography of Booker T. Washington