Books like Invisible Man
A nameless Black narrator, living underground in a hole lit by stolen electricity, tells how he went from a Southern college to Harlem and a political brotherhood, and came to see himself as invisible.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Invisible Man
Passing
Irene Redfield, a doctor's wife in Harlem, runs into her childhood friend Clare Kendry in a Chicago hotel and learns that Clare has been passing as white, married to a white man who knows nothing of her past.
The Human Stain
A classics professor in late-1990s New England takes a young mistress and watches his carefully constructed life collapse under the weight of a secret he's kept for fifty years.
Song of Solomon
Milkman Dead, the son of the richest Black family in a Michigan town, travels south in search of hidden gold and finds instead the story of his family and of an ancestor who could fly.
Hell of a Book
A Black author on a book tour and a boy fleeing violence alternate chapters in a novel about race, storytelling, and whose pain gets to be seen.
Erasure
Thelonious Ellison, a Black experimental novelist told his work is not Black enough, writes a grotesque parody of a ghetto novel under a pseudonym, and it becomes a bestseller.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier
A young Black man named Not Sidney Poitier, raised with a fortune and Ted Turner as guardian, stumbles through a life that keeps replaying the plots of Sidney Poitier's films.
Black No More
When a Black doctor invents a treatment that turns Black people white, Max Disher, a Harlem insurance clerk, is among the first to take it, and heads south to win the white woman who once snubbed him.
Light in August
A pregnant woman, a disgraced minister, and an outsider collide in a Mississippi town, and Faulkner uses their intersecting stories to expose the violence of Southern racial and religious codes.
The Bluest Eye
A young Black girl in 1940s Ohio prays for blue eyes, and her wish exposes the way American beauty standards destroy the people they exclude.
V.
A drifter named Benny Profane falls in with a bohemian crowd in 1950s New York while Herbert Stencil hunts across decades of colonial history for a woman, or an idea, known only as V.
Minor Feelings
Hong writes about Asian-American shame, Richard Pryor, friendship, and why the minor feelings of a model-minority life refuse to stay put.
Boy, Snow, Bird
In 1953 Boy Novak flees her father in New York for a small Massachusetts town and marries a widower with a lovely daughter, Snow, until the birth of her own daughter reveals what his family has been passing as.