It’s Lit
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Here’s an Exclusive Excerpt of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Newest Fiction (You’re Welcome!)
For Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie fans, it’s been a long seven years since Americanah, her last novel, and winner of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. She’s been active on Instagram and it’s always a joy to revisit her catalog of beautiful writing—Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, The Thing Around Your…
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'We Can't Do This Thing by Ourselves': The Root Presents: It's Lit! Talks Justice With Claudia Rankine
There is the multiverse, and then, there are the multi-versed; award-winning poet, playwright, author, editor, and artist Claudia Rankine, is undoubtedly one of the latter. With seven books, several plays, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts, Rankine, the Frederick…
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Your Library Needs These 5 Books by and About Powerful Black Women
There are books that make you feel great admiration for a woman’s work, books that spark the impetus to tackle an issue, and books that do both. This is a list of those books, written by women who have used their careers, voices and lives to elevate the greater good of all of us. Reclaiming…
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Perfect Pairings: Ava DuVernay to Direct Adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste for Netflix
Ava DuVernay is back in the director’s chair once again, this time for a feature film adaptation based on Isabel Wilkerson’s New York Times bestseller, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The film will use a multiple-story structure to depict how racial hierarchies have shaped life for generations of Americans. It also marks her first…
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A Love Letter to Used Books (and Tips on How to Shop for Them)
Every other month, I go to the Books for International Goodwill sale in Annapolis, Md. It starts at 8 am and I’m an early riser anyway, so I drive the 40 minutes from southeast Washington, DC on a virtually trafficless highway to get there when the only other people are a few solo shoppers and…
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'Our Ancestors Cannot Be Flattened': The Root Presents: It's Lit! Wanders in Strange Lands With Morgan Jerkins
Her first book may have been her “undoing,” but journalist and author Morgan Jerkins’ second offering, Wandering in Strange Lands (HarperCollins), is a homecoming. Taking a detour from the “hot-takes” upon which she built her career and the provocative personal essays that comprised her bestselling debut, This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins retraced the steps…
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Mariah Carey's Latest No. 1? Her Bestselling Memoir
She’s the songbird with the voice that gives us butterflies, but Mariah Carey’s latest hit is of the literary variety: Her recently released and much-buzzed-about memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, is No. 1 for nonfiction on the New York’s Times Bestsellers Print Hardcover list. The news broke on Wednesday night (when many of us…
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Black Authors Stand Out on the National Book Awards’ Shortlist of Finalists
Black talent got a prestigious shout-out when the 2020 finalists for the National Book Awards were announced on Tuesday. The 25 honorees and their titles, considered the best literature in America by the National Book Foundation, join previous winners like Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jesmyn Ward in a diverse pool of talent and topics…
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Did You Know Reading Black Books Is Also a Form of Resistance?
Pages worth of protest may be sitting right on your bookshelves. This October kicked off during Banned Books Week, traditionally observed annually in the last week of September; but the history behind the censorship of books is worth revisiting any day of the year. In 1982, just a year into the escalating conservatism of the…
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'We Can't Be Afraid to Challenge Our Own People': The Root Presents: It's Lit! Gets Crunk With Brittney Cooper
“There is no Black Freedom Project if you don’t care about Black women.” If there’s one belief upon which “crunk feminist,” author, scholar and educator Brittney Cooper has based her life’s work, it’s this core tenet of Black feminism, as previously maintained by brilliant minds from the Combahee River Collective to 19th-century pioneers like Maria…