Victor LaValle and Mat Johnson recommendations
By Freebird Books
By Freebird Books
For our virtual event on September 30, 2020, to discuss the books The Ballad of Black Tom and Pym (part of our ongoing campaign to raise awareness for NYC Books Through Bars), we asked authors Victor LaValle and Mat Johnson for recommended related reading.
Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of a comic book Victor LaValle's DESTROYER.
Mat Johnson is the author of the novels Loving Day, Pym, Drop, and Hunting in Harlem, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the comic books Incognegro and Dark Rain. He is a recipient of the American Book Award, the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.
Flight to Canada
Ishmael Reed
$17.00 $15.81Recommended by Mat; Ishmael Reed has created a sharp, wildly funny slave's-eye view of the Civil War.
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
Zora Neale Hurston
$15.99 $14.87Recommended by Victor; Based on acclaimed author Zora Neale Hurston's personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica--where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer during her visits in the 1930s--Tell My Horse is a fascinating firsthand account of the mysteries of Voodoo.
Middle Passage
Charles Johnson
$17.00 $15.81Recommended by Mat; Charles Johnson's National Book Award-winning masterpiece--"a novel in the tradition of Billy Budd and Moby-Dick...heroic in proportion...fiction that hooks the mind" (The New York Times Book Review)
Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas
Henry Dumas
$19.95 $18.55Recommended by Victor; Gothic romance, ghost story, parable, psychological thriller, inner-space fiction--Henry Dumas's stories form a vivid, expansive portrait of Black life in America.
Erasure
Percival Everett
$16.00 $14.88Recommended by Mat; "With equal measures of sympathy and satire, [Erasure] craftily addresses the highly charged issue of being 'black enough' in America." --Jenifer Berman, The New York Times Book Review
Different Seasons: Four Novellas
Stephen King
$19.99 $18.59Recommended by Victor; Includes the stories "The Body" and "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption"--set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine
Oreo
Fran Ross
$14.95 $13.90Recommended by Mat; A playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Deluxe)
Shirley Jackson and Thomas Ott
$17.00 $15.81Recommended by Victor; Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret
The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (Rev)
Olaudah Equiano
$15.00 $13.95Recommended by Mat; Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative recounts his kidnapping in Africa at the age of ten, his service as the slave of an officer in the British Navy, his ten years of labor on slave ships until he was able to purchase his freedom in 1766, and his life afterward as a leading and respected figure in the antislavery movement in England.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harriet Jacobs
$7.77Recommended by Mat; The voice of a black female slave, written in her own hand, as she struggles for identity and freedom.
