Roxane Gay Recommends 10 Books to Bring You Out of the Dark

By Bookshop.org

As I write this, the 2020 election has finally been decided. We found out because suddenly, cheering broke out in Chelsea, where my wife and I live half of the time. Cow bells rang. People screamed. Music blared. We turned on the news and MSNBC confirmed that our long wait had finally ended. It is supposed to be a hopeful time, light at the end of four very dark years. And if we are lucky, it will be. Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States alongside Kamala Harris, the first woman Vice President, the first black woman Vice President, the first South Asian woman Vice President.

But as of yet, Trump has refused to concede and Republican politicians are enabling his arrogance, venality, and massive yet fragile ego. We are not quite yet out of the dark. This has been a terrible year in every way: family stuff, work stuff, pandemic stuff. But reading, thankfully, has provided me with escape and glimmers of light.

Here are ten books that will, I hope, bring some light into your world.

—Roxane Gay

Run Me to Earth

Paul Yoon

$26.00 $24.18

A novel about how people maintain their humanity even when they are treated like animals. I admire the structural elegance and exquisite details—a tender father-son moment, a girl remembering the weight of a doctor's coat around her shoulders. Haunting, memorable.

Slave Play

Jeremy O. Harris

$15.95 $14.83

I saw Slave Play on Broadway and it staggered me, so I had to read the script, try to make sense of the experience. It's irreverent, blasphemous really, and deeply intelligent. It “goes there,” over and over again, boldly and slyly.

The Last Emperox

John Scalzi

$26.99 $25.10

Sometimes, you want a fun escapist read. This novel, the third in a trilogy including The Collapsing Empire and The Consuming Fire, is an irreverent, soapy space opera with intrigue, high drama, humor and swashbuckling that absolutely hits that sweet spot.

Finna: Poems

Nate Marshall

$17.00 $15.81

Readers might say these poems are raw but they aren’t. They are elegantly and precisely crafted, frank, and full of realness about blackness, masculinity, family, Chicago. Powerful poetry you won’t soon forget.

These Women

Ivy Pochoda

$27.99 $26.03

This is a gritty crime novel told in an unexpected way. You never quite get the whole story, but the offered pieces tell an evocative, painful story about the ways women are forgotten when their lives are stolen.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Deesha Philyaw

$18.99 $17.66

These intricately crafted short stories open up exactly what the title suggests— the secret lives of church ladies. It is all too rare to see black women as the center of gravity in a collection, but this book does exactly that.

Un-American

Hafizah Augustus Geter

$15.95 $14.83

Another poetry collection, a book of testimony. Incisive, devastating poems about what it means to be American, and who gets to be American and who doesn’t.

The New Wilderness

Diane Cook

$27.99 $26.03

Fleeing drastically diminished air quality, a family and others become a tribe, traversing their new wilderness according to the whims of elusive rangers. A gripping, fierce, terrifying examination of what people are capable of when they want to survive.

The Bride Test

Helen Hoang

$17.00 $15.81

A romance novel that happens to be about neuroatypical people. This shouldn’t be remarkable but it is. Helen Hoang is a great storyteller. She creates characters with depth. This is such a satisfying read and I love going back to it.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger: A Memoir of My Body. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel and the editor of Best American Short Stories 2018. She is currently at work on film and television projects, a book of writing advice, an essay collection about television and culture, and a YA novel entitled The Year I Learned Everything.