The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison

Providing a much-needed polemic on the current climate, Toni Morrison’s collection of writings and speeches focus around the themes of responsibility, fascism and globalization. The Pulitzer prize winner is particularly concerned about the way rights are currently seen as privileges; how borders become weapons of the state and how race is used to erase the poor. The book also features critical pieces on black artists and fiction, stimulating and challenging the reader in the same way her novels do.

Black History Month: the seven must-see art exhibitions Read more

Negrophobia by Darius James

There really couldn’t be a better time to reissue this novel by Darius James, transgressive in both content and form. Taking the form of a screenplay, Negrophobia takes its protagonist Bubbles, a young white woman, through a series of changes as she makes her way through a world constructed around black fear. It’s about white supremacy and patriarchy and uses irony to portray the hypocrisy that the state was built on. Its understandably loved by Ishmael Reed, whose work has also been focused on skewering similar targets.

Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary by Kathleen Collins

Kathleen Collins, a pioneering black writer and film-maker, is seeing her work undergo a sort of renaissance. In 2015, her film Losing Ground was shown at Lincoln Center’s retrospective of New York black independent film directors, and the next year her short stories were published by Granta in a book called Whatever Happened to Interracial Love. This new collection of screenplays (including that of Losing Ground), fiction and journal entries is sure to bring her even further attention. Collins’ fragmentary, poetic explorations of life are unique for the way they explore black interiority or as she puts it in her story Scapegoat Child. “What hopeless feelings underpin the already cruel family landscape who can say but all these folk are Negroes.”

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Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Booker Prize winning author Marlon James’s first book in his new series has been referred to as the “African Game of Thrones”. It commences with the story of Tracker, a hunter hired to find a boy “who became air three years ago”, a search that leads him to brutality and shape-changing characters. What marks James’s tale as his own is the wonder evoked through descriptive, unrelenting prose along with a focus on a distinct mythology cobbled from history and folk tale. The propulsive narrative has already been optioned by Michael B Jordan, so expect to see this one coming to screens fairly soon.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Though the original Hugo-winning novella came out in 2015, this month the full trilogy will be released. Nnedi Okorafor’s book tracks the story of Binti as she goes from precocious neophyte to survivor of calamity – after being accepted into an intergalactic study to study math, her ship is attacked by Medusae, strange, horrific creatures that resemble jellyfish. Utilizing her prodigious intelligence, Binti is able to conquer situations of extreme danger. Her strength lies in her obstinance to find her own path – a strength she realizes herself in the second book of the trilogy entitled Home.

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

Lauren Wilkinson’s new novel concerns an FBI agent, Marie Mitchell, who is sent to Burkina Faso to monitor the revolutionary president Thomas Sankara for the CIA. When she gets there, she realizes that the lies that her bosses have told her are being used to subvert a government that is providing healthcare to the poor, and equal rights to women. Conversely, within the FBI, she finds herself subject to sexism that prevents her from moving up in the ranks. As she finds herself intimately involved with Sankara, she begins to question what she has been told about her nation and her self.

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib

Part memoir, part biography, this book by Hanif Abdurraqib focuses on how A Tribe Called Quest influenced the author and hip-hop. Blending his experiences of the history of black music with a close examination of each member of the group’s contributions, Abdurraqib shows how the messages of the Tribe were directly related to the punishing conditions of the era in which their sounds were made. “The Low End Theory isn’t only about that which cannot be heard,” he writes, “but it is also about society’s unseen, the people who exist but may be able to navigate an entire landscape as invisible, until some violence or some tragedy deems them less so.”