What are some good african american books?

Question

fiction, non-fiction, romance, street lit, classics

Answer 1

"The Color Purple"-Alice Walker *Classic
"The Souls of Black Folk"-W.E.B. Dubois *Classic
"The Bluest Eye"-Toni Morrison. I know "Beloved" is the touted book, but this one was the only thing I've been able to read all the way through by Toni and it was wonderful.
"The Covenant with Black America" edited by Tavis Smiley
"Invisible Man"-Ralph Ellison *Classic
"Native Son"-Richard Wright *Classic
"Their Eyes Were Watching God"-Zora Neale Hurston-The Oprah mini-series has nothing on the book. She is fabulous! *Classic

I don't read street lit, but I've heard Sister Souljah helped the genre break through with "The Coldest Winter Ever" so I'd start there.

Anything by Langston Hughes, Jamaica Kincaid, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson. The first 3 are mostly fiction writers and the last are mostly non-fiction.

Anything by Bebe Moore Campbell (r.i.p) and Virginia Hamilton.

Also, I'd like to recommend a genre that doesn't get noticed much in the african american lit field but has outstanding african americans writing in it and that is SF/Fantasy and horror. Anything by Octavia Butler (r.i.p) is fantastic (she's my favorite author), but for someone weary to jump into SF, I'd recommend her more fantasy-tinged book, "Kindred", in which the main character is transported back to the antebellum south.

Also, writer Tananarive Due is fantastic in the horror field and her husband, Stephen Barnes, wrote a fabulous alternate history series with the books "Lion's Blood" and "Zulu Heart".

The anthology "Dark Matter", and it's companion "Dark Matter: Reading the Bones" edited by Sheree Thomas, is fabulous for a collection of science fiction work by a series of people of African Descent. The first anthology collection is the best one and it also has essays in the back that deal with African Americans in the field. Brandon Massey also is a horror writer and has some horror collections out featuring african american writers.

Nalo Hopkinson is a black canadian but her science fiction is also great. She incorporates her Caribbean upbringing in a bunch of her work.

A lot of people like E. Lynn Harris and Eric Jerome Dickey. Terri McMillian can be good.

My favorite kind of underground writers are Percival Everett and Z.Z. Packer. They write exceptional literary fiction.

Answer 2

Any slave narratives you can find. They're really very interesting and shatter alot of notions people have about slavery.

The Easy Rawlins series(Walter Mosley) and Tamara Hayle(Valerie Wilson Wesley) series are good if you like mysteries.

If you like supernatural or sci fi books then Tina McElroy Ansa, Octavia Butler, and L.A. Banks are all good.

Answer 3

Anything by E. Lynn Harris is good. I was a part of a book club "Black Expressions" and all of there books were excellent. You may want to check it out. You can google it to get the website address if you are interested.

Answer 4

I just finished reading The Known World by Edward P Jones. It was amazing the way he wove together so many tiny story line and differeny characters. Brilliant.

Answer 5

"Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl" - Harriet Jacobs

It is non-fiction and you will be emotionally moved by her experience as a slave.

Answer 6

"Kindred" or anything else by Octavia Butler.
Really original science fiction.