Books like A Curtain of Green & Other Stories — picked by fans

I loved this novel in part because of three reasons: 1. A quote from the book: "Memory believes before knowledge remembers," 2. Faulkner's ability (in spite of a style many readers give up on) to put the reader in a particular complicated moral place as well in an emotional or psychological small piece of time. 3. Faukner's range from slap-stick to horror.

Once, a friend called me on the phone and said, "Clyde, I want to read you a quote from Light in August." Before he said another word, I said, "Memory believes before knowledge remembers." 

This book, about racism, among other matters, helped open my eyes to the humanity of all people and showed me, in particular, the ways that cruelty and racism exist in our cultures and subcultures. When I read this book, I was fresh out of five years in the Air Force (1971) and had just experienced the caste system of military life.

Prior to that, I'd lived, as a child and teenager, in a community in which racism and fundamentalist religion were taken for granted as givens of the universe. When I read this book, I realized the power of literature to open a person to meanings previously absent in their life.

I love this book because it contains one of my favorite stories of all time, "Sugar Among the Chickens." This and other of Nordan's stories make me fall on the floor laughing and also help me find thoughts and emotions, below the surface of words, that make me cry.

I was once asked to blurb a Lewis Nordan book. My blurb was: "I wish I could write like Lewis Nordan. I'd rather read his stories than win money." 

I love this book because it shows Southerners fighting against racial segregation for decades prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. John Egerton wanted to show the civil rights movement in the south from 1932 to 1954.

He wanted to name all the people he could who participated. He thought the book would take two years to finish, but it took him six. His research pulls back a veil that covers fights against racism in the American South prior to the 1954 Supreme Court Brown Decision. 

A restaurant where customers walked through a caricatured Black man’s mouth to enter? A fine dining establishment that advertised itself as a Slave Market? An eatery housed in a giant mammy that sells mammy-shaped lamps? This sounds like a racist dystopia, but it’s not–it is the reality documented in Naa Oyo A. Kwate’s book about racist restaurants, past and present. You may feel queasy about going out to eat after ingesting these sordid tales. 

Such a rule breaker. A complete disregard for the laws of nature. That can’t happen! I shouldn’t feel so for those characters! And yet, and yet! The characters that people these pages are real and convincing. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah takes us in and out of realities. His world is dark sibling to our everyday world, but even his most flawed characters resonate with dignity, and through skillful well-crafted revelation, the reader comes to understand why these characters struggle—often against societal forces larger/older/engrained—and even when his characters make bad decisions (lord knows a misbehaving character is what good fiction is about) a glimmer of the potential for human goodness is exposed. This a contemporary voice, fierce and fresh, and worth paying attention to.

In the introduction to the first edition of Black Boy, Richard Wright acknowledges that while inspired by his life the book is both a record of his life and an imagined autobiography of all the “black boys” he knew who like him came of age in the segregated south.

Wright’s book is an early example of the use of creative nonfiction techniques that make this memoir gripping, suspenseful, deeply psychological, and a testimony to the power of dreams and the will to prevail against adversity.

I became involved in anti-racist politics as a student. The first campaign I organized was a protest against a lecturer who had written an essay advocating the deportation of everyone in Britain who was not white. The lecturer presented his argument in terms of the need for cultural homogeneity, which meant he did not have to make easily discredited claims of racial superiority. While the racism was obvious to me, I was struck by how many people believed the lecturer’s cultural argument. To respond to it required understanding how racist arguments could change their form, as older racist ideas lost their plausibility. For a while, I struggled to make sense of this. Then I came across Martin Barker’s book and all my confusion was dispelled. Accessible even as it wrestles with complex ideas of culture and biology, The New Racism shows how, from Enoch Powell onwards, conservatism in Britain has… show more.

This is sort of a cheat of the assignment, because it’s not Anastasia Higginbotham’s actual lived experience, but it is not one unfamiliar to her, about growing up in a country in which white parents cover up racism even unintentionally. I’ve known Anastasia for 30 years and no less than six children’s books she’s published. Her book series, Ordinary Terrible Things, published by dottir press is among my favorites because the illustrations are collaged and stunning and she creates indelible characters. Her other kid’s books deal with divorce (Divorce is Stupid), sex (Talk to Me about Sex, Grandma), incest (You Ruined It), so you can see, she’s doesn’t pull punches. Book by book, Anastasia is building a more just and beautiful world. Like the others, on this list, she’s also hot.