Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on “Friday Black”

Matt Haig was already several books into his career as a writer by the time he published “The Midnight Library” in 2020. One of those books, the 2015 memoir “Reasons to Stay Alive,” had even been a best seller in England, his home nation. Yet, “The Midnight Library” was a true br ...  Show more

“Angel Down,” a grisly novel about World War I told in a single, almost 300-page-long sentence, was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In a review for The New York Times, Ben H. Winters described it as a “thunderous gallop” that captures the “cruel and self-perpetuat ...  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