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Honorée Fanonne Jeffer’s first novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is extensive and demanding: The family history of the African American Ailey Pearl Garfield is traced back over several generations and reveals complicated family entanglements that are consequences of settler colonialism and enslavement.
more...Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts takes readers into the near future of the USA. A world of oppression is countered by a certain gentleness, warmth and creativity.
more...Recitatif is a writerly experiment that sees the acclaimed Toni Morrison toying with her reader as she frames an insightful commentary on racial categorizations. First published in 1983, it is famously the only short story the Nobel-laureate ever wrote.
more...Between the world and me is a letter from a father to his son about living in the United States of America in a Black man’s body. There are moments in this book where the beauty of Coates’ prose is quite breath-taking, and the whole is sustained by an intellectual rigour that allows it to shine all the better
more...Friday Black is the acclaimed first collection of short stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. He has a knack for locating the horror already existing in the everyday and drawing it to chilling yet strangely logical conclusions.
more...Breaking with the much-needed, but often painful plunges into US history of the author’s previous novels, the portrayal of the Harlem Shuffle, and the reading experience as a whole are – as intended by the author – predominantly light-hearted and entertaining. It is a heist novel set in 1960s Harlem.
more...When I start reading very thick books – The Nightwatchman with its nearly 500 pages is one of those – I’m often skeptical whether such bulk is really necessary. But I simply devoured this book in two days.
more...Sister Outsider by African-American, lesbian, feminist poet and activist Audre Lorde is a foundational text for anyone interested in intersectionality and reflecting on their own social positions.
more...In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman presents a careful meditation on histories of slavery and complicity.
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