UPDATED: Our Favorite Books by Black Authors

We’ll be updating this post regularly with more favorite books by Black authors, along with their Bookshop links. Happy reading!

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Our Favorite Books By Black Authors

Recently the #publishingpaidme hashtag highlighted on Twitter just how absurd the discrepancies between advances for Black authors and non-Black authors are in publishing. For example, NK Jemisin’s famous Broken Earth Trilogy? She got $25K advance for each book. Jesmyn Ward had to fight to get a six-figure advance (a number frequently bestowed upon White debut authors with no track record) after winning the National Book Award.

If you’re White (or non-Black) and you’re anything like us, this hashtag (and the recent uprising against police brutality and racism in general) may have made you redouble your commitment to reading works by Black voices. Anyway, here are some of our favorites, old and new. Some of them we’ve written about before, some we somehow haven’t mentioned yet. Check it out, and follow the links to purchase from Bookshop, which supports independent bookstores with each purchase!*

*We’re not grown-up bloggers, so we don’t get any money ourselves… we just want to stick it to Jeff Bezos.

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Links We Loved This Week — 7/1/16

The British Library this week takes a look at WH Auden’s poems.

At We Minored in Film, Kelly Konda ponders the role of the thematically relevant backstory in survival stories.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote a delicious piece of what is essentially Virginia-Woolf-inspired fanfiction about Melania Trump for the NYT.

Happy Fourth of July! 12 authors, including Teju Cole and Jay McInerney, picked their essential American books for Time. What would you pick?