The Parable of the Sower.
I’ve read a lot of science fiction authors, including at least one book by every winner of the Hugo for Best Novel, but had never read anything by Octavia Butler until I read The Parable of the Sower...
View ArticleMumbo Jumbo.
I can’t believe Ishmael Reed’s 1972 Mumbo Jumbo escaped my notice until just this year, when I grabbed it for $2 for the Kindle. It would have fit perfectly in the class I took in college called...
View ArticleMa Rainey’s Black Bottom.
The movie adaptation of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (on Netflix) has been overshadowed by the death of one of its two stars, Chadwick Boseman, last August, making this his final film...
View ArticleThe Vanishing Half.
Brit Bennett has popped up as a favorite to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, to be announced next Friday, June 11th, for her second novel, The Vanishing Half, which HBO is already planning to adapt...
View ArticleHarlem Shuffle.
Colson Whitehead’s last two novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, both won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making him the first Black author to win that prize twice. Both were serious...
View ArticleHomegoing.
My daughter had to read Yaa Gyasi’s acclaimed debut novel Homegoing for her 9th grade English class, reporting that she thought it was extremely well-written, just sad. I tend to enjoy post-colonial...
View ArticlePassing.
Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing had, somehow, never been adapted for the screen until this year, despite decades of acclaim – Penguin included it in their Classics series, and LitHub named it one...
View ArticleThe Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.
Honorée Fannone Jeffers’ debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the best 21st century books I’ve read, an epic work of historical and contemporary fiction full of three-dimensional...
View ArticleBlacktop Wasteland.
S.A. Cosby’s 2020 novel Blacktop Wasteland takes the one-last-job gimmick into the back woods of North Carolina, where Beauregard “Bug” Montage, a getaway driver of exceptional skill who has since...
View ArticleThe Trees.
Percival Everett has been publishing novels since the mid-1980s, but the 66-year-old author has come into much greater critical acclaim with his three most recent works, becoming a Pulitzer finalist...
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