Nonfiction With Gorgeous and Immersive Prose

Saidiya Hartman writes incredibly beautiful prose. She tells the story of the Black women she read about who were mentioned in passing or who appeared unnamed in photographs. She investigates their lives, researches their pasts, and invites readers to bear witness to these women all too often lost from history. These women come alive on the page in such a beautiful way. This book is incredibly captivating and intricately crafted.

Lalami’s essays examine her experience moving to the U.S. from Morocco in hopes of pursuing the American Dream. She’d heard so much about the success one could achieve in America. But when she finally arrives in America and as she follows her path to U.S. citizenship, she begins to rethink her initial assumptions. She starts to think that the American Dream is really only available for certain kinds of immigrants. Lalami is an incredible prose stylist with such sharp observational skills. I love how she crafts each essay to be its own unique gem, but they all add to the overarching theme of the collection.

Ward serves as editor in this collection of essays responding to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. It includes pieces by incredible writers including Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Young, Claudia Rankine, and Honorée Jeffers. Each selection looks at a different aspect of Black identity—whether that be in the past, present, or future—and often includes the writer’s personal experience engaging with Baldwin’s work. These essays range in their styles but all feature incredible prose, making The Fire This Time a book to be treasured, annotated, underlined, and studied.