Do You Teach Comparative Literature?

It was a long wait before Gayl Jones broke her years of silence. When Toni Morrison first discovered her, she said “no novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this” upon reading the manuscript for Corregidora. It was published in 1975 when Jones was twenty-six. She followed up her debut novel with Eva’s

Thirty years ago, Carter addressed racism, colorism, classism, and sexism head on. Her books feel just as relevant today.   This essay by Caitlin Landuyt, editor, Vintage Books, was previously published on Crime Reads   Nanette Hayes, the Black jazz saxophonist/Francophile/reluctant crime solver of Charlotte Carter’s Rhode Island Red, Coq au Vin, and Drumsticks, blew into my life

William Melvin Kelley and illustrator Aiki Kelley are being awarded the American Book Award for Dunfords Travels Everywheres, a Joycean, Rabelaisian romp in which he brings back some of his most memorable characters in a novel of three intertwining stories.   “Among the most innovative and exciting novelists in the history of international literature, the

Richard Wright (1908–1960) is one of the most influential African American writers of the last century. But in the 1940s, at the height of his creative powers, he was unable to secure publication of perhaps his most important novel. Now, for the first time, by special arrangement with the author’s estate, Library of America is publishing

Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University Anthony Reed remembers William Melvin Kelley.   William Melvin Kelley is often described as a “lost” or “forgotten” author. Those who needed to know about him have always had a way of finding him. As a young writer, interested in fiction and poetry, I knew a lot about

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi’s stunning follow-up to her award-winning novel Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered story about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.   Transcendent Kingdom Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and

Founded in 1994, Riverhead Books publishes bestselling literary fiction and quality nonfiction. Throughout its history, Riverhead has been dedicated to publishing extraordinary groundbreaking, unique writers including Danielle Evans, Danzy Senna, and James McBride. Collected here are some works from Black writers published by Riverhead. Their stories articulate the Black experience in America and give voice

Because what you read matters. Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here. Black Lives Matter. Black Voices Matter. Black Stories Matter. This month we’re sharing a few of the works by Black authors we have been learning from lately. Let us know on social media the Black voices and stories you’re reading this month (we’re @PenguinClassics everywhere). Nonfiction—History: The

Because what you read matters. Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Presented here are some

Colson Whitehead has won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Nickel Boys. This is his second Pulitzer Prize (his novel The Underground Railroad won in 2017) and he is only the fourth writer—alongside Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike—to win two Pulitzer Prizes each in the Fiction category. Winner, ALA Alex Award Winner,

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad received glowing critical reception upon its publication, earning him the National Book Award and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His highly anticipated follow-up novel The Nickel Boys faced the threat of being overshadowed by its predecessor, but has quickly earned a spotlight of its own. We’ve put together a

Washington Black follows “Wash” Black, an eleven-year-old field slave on a sugar plantation in Barbados. When Wash’s old master dies, the plantation’s already dire living conditions immediately worsen. Wash is then selected to become a manservant to his new master’s brother, a man who, as it turns out, is not only an abolitionist, but an inventor,