NYT 100 Notable Books of 2024 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 2024 list.
2 Notable Books Found for 2024
Colored Television
A brilliant dark comedy about love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia.
Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Janes sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novela centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her mulatto War and Peace. Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.
But things dont work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a real writer, and together they begin to develop the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies. Things finally seem to be going right for Janeuntil they go terribly wrong.
Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Sennas most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.
Bluff: Poems
Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smiths powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.
Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to "anti poetica" and "ars america" to implicate poetrys collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of Americas acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poempart map, part annotation, part visual argumentoffers the history of Saint Pauls vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.
Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most lovethose given and madeare burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.
