This novel is both the stories of twelve women and a sweeping history of the Black British experience. With poetic prose, dazzling characters, and intricate details, it is impossible not to get lost in Evaristo's work.
This is a must read. Abdurraqib combines the experience of music and culture through such an engaging lens, it's hard to put it down. He can talk about Carly Rae Jepsen, Fall Out Boy, Bruce Springsteen, being black, being Muslim, living in contemporary America all in one breath with such ease and such a command for language. Seriously, even his Instagram captions are well-written (you should follow him).
This novella is a moving and necessary addition to every bookshelf. Not only is it a brief and captivating aquatic fantasy (well-suited for a first time dip into the genre), but it's an artistic collaboration; a poignant song that gets stuck in your head and shifts your attention. Within the significant and beautifully dangerous ocean, Solomon shines a light on the joint horror and growth that comes from remembering the people and actions of the past. Only through this is the necessity of moving towards the future as a community realized. (Make sure to listen to the Clipping album of the same name for the full experience).
Whitehead lined up the plot of this novel as meticulously as dominos and then with a flick tore everything down in moments.
I sobbed at the end. Read it read it read it.
GET A LIFE, CHLOE BROWN is a hate-to-love romantic comedy with more depth than the adorable cover suggests. Strong, smart-mouthed Chloe challenges herself to live more fully after a near-death experience breaks the monotony of managing severe fibromyalgia. She has made a list, of course, but struggles to check off more than the first item: move out of parent's house. Enter Red, her new (rather grouchy) apartment caretaker. They strike a deal to help Chloe with items on her list in exchange for an artist website. Adventures commence: motorbike rides, a drunken night out, camping in the woods. Not on the list? Falling in love.
A hilarious and charming romance with wickedly sexy scenes and believable emotional stakes grounded in familiar anxieties and traumas.
One of the best books I read this year. Brinkley can illuminate and expose seemingly any corner of humanity, with equal compassion and precision. His writing is so powerful and graceful at once that it feels balletic, with a dancer's way of making an incredible feat seem simple and easy.
The epigraph of Edwidge Danticat's new story collection generously claims that everyone experiences diaspora, as we are exiled from our mother's body as soon as we are born. What follows are stories that strive to prove its' universality with equal attention to tenderness and brutality. In this collection that lingers on family and death, she has tapped directly into the core of human experience. This book will make you cry, probably in public, so prepare accordingly.
Many of us hope that we would not end up on the wrong side of the potent conversations in this electrifying play. But there are so many wrong sides. The lines Rankine draws here are blurry and moving fast - the discomfort is the point. Rankine does here what all great dramatists do - distills the complex noise of our time into a clear mirror. When we catch a glimpse of ourselves we are forced to try to do better.
In 2016, Albert Woodfox was released from prison after years of campaigning by activists, judges, politicians, and members of the Angola Three support network. Framed for the murder of a prison guard along with two other Black Panther Party members, he'd been kept in solitary confinement for over 40 years due to a system of falsified accusations and sabotaged appeals involving collusion at high levels of government and judiciary. Radicalized in prison, Woodfox drew immense strength and determination from the principles of the Black Panther Party; in every cell block, he worked to eradicate violence, materially improve conditions, practice liberation, and call for change. In these pages, his goal is not just to tell his incredible story, but to educate us about the many ways mass incarceration and police brutality are used as a weapon against Black communities.
The stories in Friday Black are volatile, unpredictable concoctions. While reading them, I imagined author Nana Kwame Adeji-Brenyah as a mad scientist, mixing beakers with wild abandon: some societal critique here, a little gallows humor there, a dose of dystopian sci-fi just for kicks. The resulting stories feel just as likely to combust as they do to end. Adjei-Brenyah is among the most exciting new voices in fiction I've encountered all year, the heir apparent to Vonnegut and Saunders's tradition of dark, socially incisive postmodernism.
