Books like The Fire Next Time
Two essays on race in America, a letter to Baldwin's nephew and a reflection on religion and the Nation of Islam, that remain as urgent and incandescent as when they were written.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Fire Next Time
Notes of a Native Son
Baldwin returns from Paris to America to bury his father, and in ten essays lays out what the country's racial lie has cost a son, a church, and a prose style.
Between the World and Me
A letter from a father to his fifteen-year-old son about what it means to live in a Black body in America, written in the shadow of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Prince Jones.
Just Us: An American Conversation
A hybrid of poems, essays, and images documenting Rankine's attempts to hold everyday conversations about whiteness with friends, strangers, and herself.
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.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
A year at a Virginia creek, watched by Dillard in essays that move from muskrat to praying mantis to the theology of a world that keeps eating itself.
Negroland
The Pulitzer-winning critic remembers growing up in the Black upper middle class of mid-century Chicago, with its manners, its pressures and its uneasy sense of belonging.
Men We Reaped
Jesmyn Ward remembers five young Black men from her Mississippi Gulf Coast town, her brother among them, who died in the space of four years, and asks what the country takes from them.
Heavy
Kiese Laymon writes a memoir to his mother about growing up Black in Mississippi, about weight, gambling, abuse and love, and the lies they told to survive.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Angelou's Stamps, Arkansas childhood under Jim Crow, the pastor-grandmother's store, the trauma that silenced her, and the teacher who taught her back into language.
The Empathy Exams
Essays that start from Jamison's work as a medical actor, paid to perform symptoms for students, and move through Morgellons, ultramarathons and her own body to ask what empathy is for.
The Collected Schizophrenias
Thirteen essays on living with schizoaffective disorder, the diagnosis, the institutions and Wang's own experience of a high-functioning illness, written with a clinician's precision.
On Photography
Six essays on what it means to see the world through photographs, and what the camera consumes, numbs and moralises away.