Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
10 best books like Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Patricia Smith): The Fire Next Time, The Ring of the Nibelung, Heavy: An American Memoir, The Tradition, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, Notes of a Native Son, What Belongs to You, Don't Call Us Dead, What Is Amazing
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice,...
| Author | Richard Wagner |
| ISBN | 0393008673 |
Richard Wagner's vast Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle comprises four full-length operas (Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung) and is arguably the most extraordinary achievement in the history of opera. His own libretto to the operas, translated by Andrew Porter, is an intricate...
Heavy: An American Memoir
| Author | Kiese Laymon |
| ISBN | 1501125656 |
In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse.
Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In...
| Author | Jericho Brown |
| ISBN | 1556594860 |
Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation?...
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
| Author | Ibram X. Kendi |
| ISBN | 1568584636 |
Americans like to insist that they are living in a post-racial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, racist ideas in America have...
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
| Author | Carol Anderson |
| ISBN | 1632864126 |
From the Civil War to our combustible present, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America.
As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the...
| Author | James Baldwin |
| ISBN | 0807064319 |
“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.” - James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin was a fascinating and eloquent man, one who I would have loved to have had a conversation with....
| Author | Garth Greenwell |
| ISBN | 0374288224 |
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk,...
| Author | Danez Smith |
| ISBN | 1555977855 |
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten...
| Author | Heather Christle |
| ISBN | 0819572772 |
Inspired by a voracious curiosity about humans and other subjects, the poems in Heather Christle's What Is Amazing describe and invent worlds in an attempt to understand through participation. The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the...
| Author | Denise Duhamel |
| ISBN | 0914061615 |
I'd buy this book just for the cover, but the poems are even twice as wonderful. Denise Duhamel has apparently obsessed for months about the Barbie doll phenomenon: all the poems have to do with the "what if " of Barbie attempting to fit into the real world. For example, what if Barbie were codependent?...
Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns
| Author | Andrea Gibson |
| ISBN | 0981521304 |
Andrea Gibson's dynamic and energetic first book, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns, challenges us to not only read, but to react. Hauntingly vivid, the poems march through a soldier's lingering psychological wounds, tackle the curious questions of school children on the meaning of "hate," and tangle...
| Author | Jeannie Vanasco |
| ISBN | 1941040772 |
The night before her father dies, eighteen-year-old Jeannie Vanasco promises she will write a book for him. But this isn't the book she imagined. The Glass Eye is Jeannie's struggle to honor her father, her larger-than-life hero but also the man who named her after his daughter from a previous marriage,...
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
| Author | Claudia Rankine |
| ISBN | 1555974074 |
In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century.
I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the...
Transmetropolitan, Vol. 6: Gouge Away
| Author | Warren Ellis |
| ISBN | 1563897962 |
Witness.
Here I am: Spider Jerusalem, media element, TV celebrity, quotable, that wild and crazy guy who does that controversial muckraking column that no one really reads... lost in mix.
Another face in the crowd.
Spider is having a bad time in his city. His column was silenced...
