I engage with all types of literature, not just Black literature. I understand that for many, it's what they prefer to read and also an intentional way of circumventing the oppressive whiteness of the publishing industry and, well, the world. But now we’re in the midst of an alleged nonfiction crisis, spurred even more by the 2024 election: “People were so emotionally walloped by the outcome that they flocked to genres that clearly offered pleasure and distraction. But despite the critical hit, some branches of the tree continue to thrive.”
The publishing industry is as much to blame for this, of course. The Walrus explains that “Publishers tend to buy nonfiction based on an author’s platform—their expertise and built-in audience. This means any “carefully orchestrated publicity event” relies more on people already caring about the author (or topic) rather than positioning the writer as a must-read wunderkind who bursts out of nowhere.” Obviously, this was positive for me in 2021 when I sold my book Pure Innocent Fun. However, only two years later, despite hitting the bestseller list, Random House passed on my second nonfiction proposal. Another positive: it led me to return to my love of fiction and to work on a new novel that I’m nearly finished with (I had a reading of the novel-in-progress two weeks ago at a friend’s apartment with friends who are writers and avid readers).
However, I’ve become so immersed in fiction that maybe I’m part of the problem! I love talking about shit at parties, but everyone hasn’t read the same books, and sometimes you need to know facts about things like you’re a Jeopardy contestant. Listening to podcasts is nice and all (don’t get your info from TikTok, I beg), but sometimes you need to sit down and READ.
I’ve been thinking of Zadie Smith’s tribute to Philip Roth after his death, where she discussed his love of simply wanting to know things. In 2018, Smith wrote in The New Yorker, “By the time I met Roth, he wasn’t writing anymore; he was reading. Almost exclusively American history, and the subject that seemed to concern him above all was slavery. His coffee table was piled high with books on the subject—canonical, specialist, and obscure—and many slave narratives, some famous and known to me, others I’d never come across before, and which I sometimes borrowed, to bring back a month or two later and discuss. Whenever I mentioned this scholarly reading jag of Roth’s to anybody, they always seemed amazed, but to me it was all of a piece with the man and his work. Roth was an unusually patriotic writer, but his love for his country never outweighed or obscured his curiosity about it. He always wanted to know America, in its beauty and its utter brutality, and to see it in the round: the noble ideals, the bloody reality. A thing did not have to be perfect to engage him, and that went double for people, which, in Roth’s world, always really meant characters.”
If humans are characters too, then why shouldn’t I want to engage with nonfiction more, and particularly nonfiction by Black authors who know intimately about the “beauty and utter brutality” of life? So, for Nonfiction November, I’ve created a reading list of nonfiction by Black writers. It includes memoir, cultural criticism, and queer history.