Novels by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, T. Geronimo Johnson and Franny Choi, untold true stories exploring the Confederate Deep South by Stacey Patton, Connor Williams, and more Celeste Headlee, and more.
The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford
A Novel
by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Scribner, Oct.6
Set in 1920s Oklahoma in the aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the novel curves around the death of a notorious womanizer and moonshiner. Who did it? With humour and fast-moving prose, Thompson-Spires navigate race, class, gender, power, and the legacies of racial violence.
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Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children
by Stacey Patton
Beacon Press, Sept. 6
In an unsettling but deeply important text, one of America’s fiercest defenders of Black children chronicles an untold story: the history of White America’s lynching of Black children.
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Freedom’s Daughters: How a Generation of Black Women Resisted Oppression Through Literacy and Education
by Celeste Headlee
Flatiron Books, Oct. 6
Headlee narrates one of the most important intellectual crusades in U.S. history: those extraordinary Black women who promoted literacy and education in the South following the Civil War, including members of her own family.
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The Savage Mind: An American Legacy
by David Treuer
Little, Brown and Company, Oct. 6
Treuer wrote a powerful and hopeful letter to his Native children after the police murder of George Floyd, interlacing American history of genocide and dispossession with memoirist witnessing of current genocide and dispossession.
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The Occidental Book of the Dead
by T. Geronimo Johnson
William Morrow, Oct. 6
The novel follows a Black police officer in Atlanta whose carefully built life of White alliances begins to fall apart after he shoots a White teenager.
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We Radiant Things
Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg
by Franny Choi
Ecco, Oct.6
Choi combines lyric memoir and cultural criticism to examine cyborgs, science fiction, race, gender, sexuality, disability, labor, technology, and representations of Asian femmes.
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Fugitive Archives
My Family and The American Myth of Belonging
By Asale Angel – Ajani
Algonquin Books, Oct. 6
Angela-Ajani and her twin were the only Black children in her family of working-class White Americans. Desiring to understand her family more, she traveled into the archives and found a family of contradictions–of Klansmen and Black people resisting White supremacy–of the intertwined, messy U.S. history of White and Black people across color and class lines.
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The Confederacy Myth
How an Insurrection of Slaveholders Tried to Destroy the United States
by Conner William
St. Martian’s Press, Oct. 13
Williams pierces through enduring historical myths and narratives to present a fresh history of the enslavers who seceded from the United States, formed the Confederacy, launched the Civil War.
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Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging and Hope
by Zaina Arafat
Little, Brown and Company, Oct. 20
Arafat’s collection of moving essays muses on Palestinian identity, family, and the experience of maintaining a connection to a homeland that feels increasingly shrinking due to the Israeli occupation.
