Talking about race is fraught these days, so it took guts for Paul Beatty to write his novel "The Sellout." It's a satire about a young black man who winds up on trial at the Supreme Court. And along the way, he enslaves an old friend and re-segregates the local high school.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Literature
Yuval Noah Harari's sweeping and provocative "Sapiens" retells the history of our species from an entirely new perspective.
The future belongs to a cultured dairy product, in science fiction writer John Scalzi's short story "The Day the Yogurt Took Over." Read by Adam Hirsch.
At the height of the Vietnam War, on the night of the full moon, a baby girl is born along the Song Ma River in her mother's grave. Her name is Rabbit, and she can hear the dead. In a luminous debut novel, "She Weeps Each Time You're Born," Wisconsin poet and writer Quan Barry explores wartime Vietnam through the eyes of a little girl with an uncommon gift.
The celebrated poet Edward Hirsch says the history of poetry is the history of poetic forms. And to prove it he wrote a 700-page compendium about all things poetry.
Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk offers his take on why he writes.
Until more recently, African fiction, like Africa itself, has historically been divided by the polarizing logic of colonialism. But the next generation is taking on genre fiction, including sci-fi. In "Lagoon," written by Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor, aliens land in Lagos.
In her book "Citizen: An American Lyric," poet Claudia Rankine challenges readers to explore their underlying assumptions about race. She tells Charles Monroe-Kane what compelled her to write the book, and about visiting Ferguson, Missouri.
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