Black In America: 25 Books To Celebrate Black History Month

For Black History Month this year, we've put together a list of recently released titles that speak just as much to the present — and future — as they do the past.

1. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“A thrilling and risky piece of writing that takes on taboos, shatters pieties, and combines forthright prose, subversive humor, and a ripping good story....Americanah feels ruthlessly of this moment....[It] homes in on and complicates the single story of the immigrant.” Tin House

2. The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson

"I was touched by characters whose lives were often as real for me as my memories of growing up. The language invented to tell their stories engages, challenges, clarifies the American language, claiming it, enlarging it." John Edgar Wideman, author of Fanon, Philadelphia Fire, and Brothers and Keepers

3. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

"Claudia Rankine's Citizen comes at you like doom. It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. Its various realities — 'mistaken' identity, social racism, the whole fabric of urban and suburban life — are almost too much to bear, but you bear them, because it's the truth. Citizen is Rankine's Spoon River Anthology, an epic as large and frightening and beautiful as the country and various emotional states that produced it." Hilton Als

4. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

"[Woodson's] memoir in verse is a marvel, as it turns deeply felt remembrances of Woodson's preadolescent life into art....Her mother cautions her not to write about her family but, happily, many years later, she has and the result is both elegant and eloquent, a haunting book about memory that is itself altogether memorable." Booklist

5. White Girls by Hilton Als

“I read Als not only because he is utterly extraordinary, which he is, but for the reason one is often drawn to the best writers — because one has a sense that one's life might depend on them. White Girls is a book, a dream, an enemy, a friend, and, yes, the read of the year.” Junot Díaz

6. An Untamed State by Roxane Gay

“[Roxane Gay] has written one of the most unsettling books of the year. And she's just getting started....Dark, gripping....It's a compelling and at times painful read that addresses the issues of economic privilege, immigration, and sexual assault.” Chicago Magazine

7. The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League by Jeff Hobbs

"This could be a Hallmark-movie tearjerker of a book, but Hobbs is far too talented and self-aware for that. What he delivers instead is a harrowing elegy and an eye-opening examination of inner-city boyhood and the troubling, much too simplistic way we equate success with escape." Rhianna Walton, Powells.com

8. March: Book One by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell

"An astonishingly accomplished graphic memoir that brings to life a vivid portrait of the civil rights era, Lewis' extraordinary history and accomplishments, and the movement he helped lead...its power, accessibility and artistry destine it for awards, and a well-deserved place at the pinnacle of the comics canon." NPR

9. March: Book Two by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell

"A must-read monument....As Rep. Lewis continues to carry the civil-rights flame, this graphic achievement is a firsthand beacon that burns ever relevant today." The Washington Post

10. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

“This book reveals a dirty secret about American business, and how commerce first boomed before the Civil War. Baptist unearths a big, nasty story: in the North and the South, slavery was the tainted fuel that kindled the fires of U.S. capitalism and made the country grow.” Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family

11. Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy

"Jill Leovy has written a gripping and powerful account of urban homicide investigation in the United States. Through the superbly told story of an L.A. detective who is determined to solve the case of yet another young, quickly forgotten murder victim, Leovy exposes the underbelly of race and crime in twenty-first-century America. Ghettoside is a provocative examination of how and why murder happens and a fast-paced crime narrative in the vein of David Simon's Homicide." Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove

12. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad by Eric Foner

"With remarkable new research and keen insight, Eric Foner vividly narrates stories of courage and resourcefulness by the men and women who helped antebellum slaves escape to freedom. Foner deftly illuminates the importance of the underground railroad in provoking southern leaders into issuing ultimatums that would culminate in civil war." Alan Taylor, author of The Internal Enemy

13. Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor

"In Piskor's comics, the ... lyrics breakdance off the page... the print version is beautiful, with faux-yellowed pages, a muted color palette and an oversized 'treasury' format recalling its subject's era. Piskor's art falls somewhere between R. Crumb's blues portraits and Joe Sacco's journalism comics." Chicago Tribune

14. Who We Be: The Colorization of America by Jeff Chang

"Who We Be ought to be required reading for racial justice advocates and everyone else trying to make their way through the rapidly changing, increasing globalized American social, political, and cultural landscape." Scot Nakagawa, Powells.com

15. Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year by Tavis Smiley

"This book by PBS host Smiley shows a very different world for King....He is, in this book, not a plaster saint, but a multi-dimensional man....The writing technique succeeds in making the story more immediate, King more approachable." Alan Rosenberg, Providence Journal

16. Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow

"Fire Shut Up in My Bones is a luminous memoir that digs deep into territory I've longed to read about in black men's writing: into the horror of being submerged in a vast drowning swirl of racial, spiritual, and sexual complexity, only to somehow find one's self afloat, though gasping for breath, and then, at long last and at great cost, swimming. I believe both Ancestors and Descendants will cheer." Alice Walker

17. Home by Toni Morrison

"Profound...Morrison's portrayal of Frank is vivid and intimate, her portraits of the women in his life equally masterful. Its brevity, stark prose, and small cast of characters notwithstanding, this story of a man struggling to reclaim his roots and his manhood is enormously powerful." Stephan Lee, O, The Oprah Magazine

18. On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman

"Alice Goffman's On the Run is the best treatment I know of the wretched underside of neo-liberal capitalist America. Despite the social misery and fragmented relations, she gives us a subtle analysis and poignant portrait of our fellow citizens who struggle to preserve their sanity and dignity." Cornel West

19. Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward

"[Ward] chronicles our American story in language that is raw, beautiful and dangerous.…[Her] singular voice and her full embrace of her anger and sorrow set this work apart from those that have trodden similar ground." The New York Times Book Review

20. The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae

"I loved this book. Issa Rae is brilliant, funny and loveably awkward." Mindy Kaling, author of Is Everyone Hanging Out without Me?

21. The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami

"Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth." Salman Rushdie

22. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon

"[How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America] is not intended to serve as 'a woe-is-we narrative' about the difficulties of being black in America or the South...or even an attempt to illuminate the taboo-amongst-black-folk subject of mental health — although both serve as narrative threads in Laymon's writing. Rather, it's an exercise in recalling memories." Jackson Free Press

23. X: A Novel by Ilyasah Shabazz

"Powerful and charming — makes you see things in a whole new way. One of the best books I've read in quite some time." Chris Rock

24. Black Prophetic Fire by Cornel West

"A fascinating exploration of the black prophetic genius and fire of Douglass, Du Bois, King, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells, this book reminds us what true leadership, sacrifice, and courageous, inspirational truth-telling looks like and why it is so urgently needed in the quest for justice today." Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

25. Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker by Patricia Hruby Powell

"Patricia Hruby Powell tells the tale in sparse prose with a rhythm of its own, with sections divided into pivotal times in Josephine’s life. The illustrations by Christian Robinson capture the determined, free spirit Josephine had. Together they bring to life the story of a truly remarkable woman who broke barriers of all kinds following her passion." Mother Daughter Book Club, Powells.com