Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on “Friday Black”

Dilara, the heroine of Kenan Orhan’s debut novel, is a Turkish exile living in Italy and undergoing a routine bathroom renovation that turns out to be not so routine: When the contractors leave, she steps into the refurbished space and finds herself somehow transported to an actu ...  Show more

How is it that a seven-book series written in Danish about a single day repeating over and over has become something of a sensation among the literary set? Since the English translations of Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume” series were first published in the United St ...  Show more

Back in June 2020, during a summer of protests for racial justice, the New Yorker republished 'Letter from a Region in my Mind," a seminal James Baldwin essay calling out the ignorance of liberal white Americans. In the following months, writer Jelani Cobb put together a collecti ...  Show more

Today on “The Sunday Read,” listen to Claudia Rankine reflect on the precariousness of being black in America. Her words were written five years ago after avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine black people at a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina. We are revis ...

Novelist David Wright Falade learned about the life of Richard Etheridge in the 90s and has been enthralled by him ever since. Born into slavery in North Carolina, he became a sergeant of an all-Black brigade when the Civil War broke out. Black Cloud Rising is a fictionalized ver ...  Show more

The American writer Toni Morrison once said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” It was an urge which in her case yielded a rich array of novels, children’s books, plays and essays. Toni Morrison stands tall, as the f ...  Show more