NYT 100 Notable Books of 2012 by Authors of African Descent
Each year, The New York Times releases its “100 Notable Books” list, featuring standout works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. Below are the books by—and about—people of African descent that made the 2012 list.
9 Notable Books Found for 2012
American Tapestry
A remarkable history of First Lady Michelle Obamas mixed ancestry, American Tapestry by Rachel L. Swarns is nothing less than a breathtaking and expansive portrait of America itself.In this extraordinary feat of genealogical researchin the tradition of The Hemmingses of Monticello and Slaves in the Familyauthor Swarns, a respected Washington-based reporter for the New York Times, tells the fascinating and hitherto untold story of Ms. Obamas black, white, and multiracial ancestors; a history that the First Lady herself did not know.At once epic, provocative, and inspiring, American Tapestry is more than a true family saga; it is an illuminating mirror in which we may all see ourselves.
Three Strong Women: A novel
A New York Times Notable BookA San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012Longlisted for The 2014 International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary AwardFrom Marie NDiaye, the first black woman to win the Prix Goncourt, a harrowing and beautiful novel of the travails of West African immigrants in France.The story of three women who say no: Norah, a French-born lawyer who finds herself in Senegal, summoned by her estranged father to save another victim of his paternity; Fanta, who leaves a contented life as a teacher in Dakar to follow her boyfriend back to France, where his depression and dislocation poison everything; and Khady, a penniless widow put out by her husbands family with nothing but the name of a distant cousin in France. As these three lives intertwine, each woman manages an astonishing feat of self-preservation against those who have made themselves the fastest-growing and most-reviled people in Europe. In Marie NDiayes stunning narration we see the progress by which ordinary women discover unimagined reserves of strength.
Sometimes There Is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
"Moving, funny Here is a man looking back on his life and country with joy and sorrow."John Freeman, The Boston Globe
The most acclaimed South African writer of his generation, Zakes Mda eight novels venture far beyond the conventional narratives of a peoples struggle against apartheid. In this memoir, he tells of a life that intersects with the politics of his countrya story that is, at its heart, the classic adventure of an artist, lover, and bon vivant. Living in exile with his father in Basutoland (now Lesotho) during the first pangs of his countrys independence, a series of brutal and poignant initiations ushered him toward the life of a writerand that of a perpetual outsider. Through the indignity of Boer racism, the turmoil of the Soweto uprisings, not to mention three marriages and his eventual immigration to America, Mda struggled to remain his own man. With Sometimes There Is a Void, he shows that independence opened the way for the stories of individual South Africans in all their variety.
Gathering of Waters
Selected as a Go On Girl! Book Pick
100 Notable Books of 2012 New York Times
50 Best Books of 2012 Washington Post
"McFadden works a kind of miracle not only do [her characters] retain their appealing humanity; their story eclipses the bonds of history to offer continuous surprises Beautiful and evocative, Gathering of Waters brings three generations to life The real power of the narrative lies in the richness and complexity of the characters. While they inhabit these pages they live, and they do so gloriously and messily and magically, so that we are at last sorry to see them go, and we sit with those small moments we had with them and worry over them, enchanted, until they become something like our own memories, dimmed by time, but alive with the ghosts of the past, and burning with spirits."
New York Times Book Review
"Read it aloud. Hire a chorus to chant it to you and anyone else interested in hearing about civil rights and uncivil desires, about the dark heat of hate, about the force of forgiveness."
Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered, NPR
"McFadden combines events of Biblical proportionsfrom flooding to resurrectionwith history to create a cautionary, redemptive tale that spans the early twentieth century to the start of Hurricane Katrina. She compellingly invites readers to consider the distinctions between truth or fantasy In McFaddens boldly spun yarn, consequences extend across time and place. This is an arresting historical portrait of Southern life with reimagined outcomes, suggesting that hope in the enduring power of memory can offer healing where justice does not suffice."
Publishers Weekly
"The rich text is shaped by the African American storytelling tradition and layered with significant American histories. Recalling the woven spirituality of Toni Morrisons Beloved, this work will appeal to readers of mystic literature."
Library Journal
"McFadden makes powerful use of imagery in this fantastical novel of ever-flowing waters and troubled spirits."
Booklist
"In this fierce reimagining, the actual town of Money, MS narrates the story about the ghost of Emmett Till and his from-the-other-side reunification with the girl he loved as a child in Gathering of Waters by Bernice L. McFadden."
Ebony Magazine
Gathering of Waters is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippia site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families.
Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit.
Forty years later, after the death of her husband, Tass returns to Money and fantasy takes flesh when Emmett Tills spirit is finally released from the dank, dark waters of the Tallahatchie River. The two lovers are reunited, bringing the story to an enchanting and profound conclusion.
Gathering of Waters mines the truth about Money, Mississippi, as well as the towns families, and threads their history over decades. The bare-bones realismboth disturbing and rivetingcombined with a magical realm in which ghosts have the final say, is reminiscent of Toni Morrisons Beloved.
Home
Americas most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison extends her profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of redemption: a taut and tortured story about one mans desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war. Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that hes hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood and the war that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhoodand his home.
The Devil In Silver: A Novel
New Hyde Hospitals psychiatric ward has a new resident. It also has a very, very old one.
Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. Hes not mentally ill, but that doesnt seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he cant quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, hes visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. Its no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic whos been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the groups enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster thats stalking them. But can the Devil die?
The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValles radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, its a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons.
This Is How You Lose Her
Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Dazs first book, Drown, established him as a major new writer with the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet (Newsweek). His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was named #1 Fiction Book of the Year by Time magazine and spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, establishing itself with more than a million copies in print as a modern classic. In addition to the Pulitzer, Daz has won a host of major awards and prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award.Now Daz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lovers washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessnessand by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in the New York Times-BestsellingThis Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that the half-life of love is forever.
Salvage the Bones
A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Eschs father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesnt show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isnt much to save. Lately, Esch cant keep down what food she gets; shes fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbulls new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on childs play and short on parenting.
As the twelve days that make up the novels framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family-motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
The Grey Album: On The Blackness Of Blackness
Selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012 by the New York Times
*Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism**A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Criticism and Essays Pick for Spring 2012*The Grey Album, the first work of prose by the brilliant poet Kevin Young, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeTaking its title from Danger Mouses pioneering mashup of Jay-Zs The Black Album and the Beatles The White Album, Kevin Youngs encyclopedic book combines essay, cultural criticism, and lyrical choruses to illustrate the African American tradition of lyingstorytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, "jazzing." What emerges is a persuasive argument for the many ways that African American culture is American culture, and for the centrality of artand artfulnessto our daily life. Moving from gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.
