A Rage in Harlem
1957 · 159 pages
Jackson, a pious Harlem hearse driver, loses his savings to a con man promising to turn tens into hundreds. Himes wrote the funniest and most violent Harlem in American crime fiction.
★ 4.9
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Dreams From My Father
1995 · 453 pages
Written at thirty-three, Obama's account of being the son of a Kenyan he met once runs from Hawaii to Jakarta to a Chicago organizing job, and ends at that father's grave.
★ 5.0
Americanah
2013 · 588 pages
The defining novel of African immigration to America. Ifemelu leaves Lagos for university, discovers there that she is black, and turns the discovery into a blog that flays the country's racial pieties.
★ 5.2
Blues People
1963 · 244 pages
Baraka wrote the first full-length history of blues and jazz by a Black American, hearing in the move from work song to blues to bebop the record of what happened to a people.
★ 6.4
Up From Slavery
1901 · 156 pages
Born enslaved in Virginia, Washington built Tuskegee from nothing and wrote it up as a parable of self-help. His bargain with white America, separate as the fingers, split Black politics.
★ 6.5
Go Tell It On The Mountain
1953 · 272 pages
John Grimes turns fourteen in Harlem in 1935 and spends the night on a storefront church floor, fighting for salvation. Baldwin pours the sins of three adults into that one boy's conversion.
★ 6.6
The Black Jacobins
1938 · 448 pages
Enslaved people in the French colony that became Haiti rose in 1791 and defeated Napoleon's army. James wrote their revolution as world history, with Toussaint Louverture, born a slave, at its center.
★ 7.0
Light in August
1932 · 512 pages
Pregnant and walking from Alabama, Lena Grove looks for the man who left her. Nearby a man who cannot say whether he is black or white is running out of room.
★ 7.2
The Souls of Black Folk
1903 · 165 pages
Du Bois named the double consciousness of seeing yourself through white eyes and called the color line the problem of the twentieth century. The chapter on his firstborn son's death is unbearable.
★ 8.2