Here are 100 books that Notes from No Man's Land fans have personally recommended if you like
Notes from No Man's Land.
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I embody the “American Dream” mythology: I came to the United States as a child who did not speak English and had few means. And now I am the Chair of the English Department at Harvard. But I am the exception, not the rule. So many migrants die on perilous journeys or survive only to live marginal lives under surveillance. Yet we don’t always ask why people risk their lives and those of their children to migrate. And when we do, we don’t often go beyond the first layer of answers. The list of books I recommend allows us to think deeply about the roots of forced migration.
By most accounts, immigrant literature deals primarily with how immigrants struggle to adapt to their adopted countries.
Its readers have come to expect stories of identity formation, of how immigrants create ethnic communities and maintain ties to countries of origin. Yet such narratives can center exceptional stories of individual success or obscure the political forces that uproot millions of people the world over.
This novel simulates the intimacy of immigrant memoir by seemingly giving readers access to his narrator’s interiority; it seems to cater to readerly expectation. And yet this is ultimately a ruse to obtain readerly investment, which Cole then redirects to the global history of forced migration and dispossession.
I love the combination of erudition and subtlety in a novel that, while ranging across three continents, allows readers to think simultaneously about dislocation across history and in our contemporary world.
The bestselling debut novel from a writer heralded as the twenty-first-century W. G. Sebald.
A haunting novel about national identity, race, liberty, loss and surrender, Open City follows a young Nigerian doctor as he wanders aimlessly along the streets of Manhattan. For Julius the walks are a release from the tight regulations of work, from the emotional fallout of a failed relationship, from lives past and present on either side of the Atlantic.
Isolated amid crowds of bustling strangers, Julius criss-crosses not just physical landscapes but social boundaries too, encountering people whose otherness sheds light on his own remarkable journey…
I’ve been writing and publishing novels across speculative genres for almost two decades now. In my most recent book, The City Inside, the city of Delhi was perhaps the second most important character, and it was quite a struggle attempting to capture its challenges and delights, its people across its many divides, and the experience of living in this constantly turbulent megapolis. So I’ve spent the last few years thinking a lot about reimagining real megacities, capturing their essences without exotifying or demonising them, and about where the borders of speculation and reality lie in a world where it’s already difficult to trust any single point of view or even source of data.
What better way to start talking about some of the world’s greatest cities explored in SFF than with a book that’s the origin story of a city avatar, the first of a series called The Great Cities? New York and London are probably the most explored cities in English literature—for anyone who’s grown up reading books in English, there are versions of these cities that exist in your imagination, layered over the years by generations of talented authors. But despite seeing NY in several hundred films, shows, comics, and books, The City We Became delved deeper into the hearts of the city’s people, and the spirit that makes them who they are, than any other speculative novel I’ve read. I was thinking of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 to represent it because of all the impressive futurist research that went into it—but in the end, people have to come…
'A glorious fantasy, set in that most imaginary of cities, New York' Neil Gaiman on THE CITY WE BECAME
'The most celebrated science fiction and fantasy writer of her generation. . .Jemisin seems able to do just about everything' NEW YORK TIMES
'Jemisin is now a pillar of speculative fiction, breathtakingly imaginative and narratively bold' ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
Five New Yorkers must band together to defend their city in the first book of a stunning new series by Hugo award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.
Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and…
In March 2020, in the middle of a pandemic that had all but crippled New York City, my husband and I became homeless advocates. For months, we woke up each morning, made dozens of sandwiches, and walked the deserted city streets trying to feed the homeless, who were struggling to survive. Deserted streets meant no panhandling, which in turn, meant no food. In doing so, we became friends with many of the homeless men and women in our neighborhood. Fear and suspicion were replaced by trust and love, and our eyes and hearts were forever opened to people who had once been objects to be avoided.
This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Hometells the story of the difficulty of finding acceptable housing for the poor in New York City. Sandler follows the story of a young, poor, unwed mother, Camila, for one year as she struggles to find safe and affordable housing for herself and her newborn son. Against all odds, red tape, and never-ending bureaucracy, Camila never gives up. I found this story inspiring as well as educational about the homelessness crisis in New York City, a new found passion after my experience trying to feed the homeless during the first year of the pandemic.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • From an award-winning journalist, a poignant and gripping immersion in the life of a young, homeless single mother amid her quest to find stability and shelter in the richest city in America
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD • “Riveting . . . a remarkable feat of reporting.”—The New York Times
Camila is twenty-two years old and a new mother. She has no family to rely on, no partner, and no home. Despite her intelligence and determination, the odds are firmly stacked against her. In this extraordinary work of literary reportage, Lauren…
I am a science journalist and former scientist who focuses on human-wildlife interactions, especially when those interactions turn sour. I’ve been fascinated by the animals people hate for years now, especially since I got to write on the earliest origins of the house mouse. To gain expertise, I was a 2019-2020 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, and have spent the past three years immersing myself in all things pest—from reaching into a coyote’s stomach to taking a whiff of elephant repellant. My freelance work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Science News, Sierra, and many other outlets.
It seems like a bit of a long title for a New York Times Bestseller but I promise this book is educational, entertaining, and worth every second. Sullivan spent a year observing a rat-infested alley, and came away with a better understanding of our least-favorite rodents, as well as the many people who spend their lives trying to keep rats and humans apart. At first it might seem weird to sit outside and watch the rats every night, but by the end, you can’t imagine doing anything else.
New York Public Library Book for the Teenager New York Public Library Book to Remember PSLA Young Adult Top 40 Nonfiction Titles of the Year
"Engaging...a lively, informative compendium of facts, theories, and musings."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Behold the rat, dirty and disgusting! Robert Sullivan turns the lowly rat into the star of this most perversely intriguing, remarkable, and unexpectedly elegant New York Times bestseller.
Love them or loathe them, rats are here to stay-they are city dwellers as much as (or more than) we are, surviving on the effluvia of our society. In Rats, the critically acclaimed bestseller,…
We grew up in predominantly white communities and came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. As academics, we focused on issues of race in our research and teaching. Yet, despite our reading and writing about race, we still hadn’t made a connection to our own lives and how our white privilege shielded us and made us complicit in perpetuating racial inequities. We didn’t fully see our role in white supremacy until we adopted our sons. Becoming an interracial family and parenting Black sons taught us about white privilege and the myriad ways that Blacks confront racism in education, criminal justice, health care, and simply living day-to-day.
We love this memoir that reads like a mystery story.
E. Dolores Johnson is the daughter of a Black father and white mother who fell in love in Indianapolis in the 1940s, when Indiana still enforced anti-miscegenation laws. Her mother “disappeared” so that she could flee to NY with the African American man she loved and marry there. Dolores’s birth certificate listed her as Black (the “one drop” of Black blood rule); she grew up in a Black family and lived in a Black neighborhood. Her mother never spoke of her white family.
The book resonated with us for both its graphic details about the racism Dolores and her African husband endured as highly educated corporate executives, including a cross-burning on their front lawn, and poignant description of her journey to find her white family and understand her biracial identity. Her mother’s response when Dolores says she is going to…
"With unflinching honesty, E. Dolores Johnson shares an enthralling story of identity, independence, family, and love. This timely and beautifully written memoir ends on a complicated yet hopeful note, something we need in this time of racial strife." -De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills
Say I'm Dead is the true story of family secrets, separation, courage, and transformation through five generations of interracial relationships. Fearful of prison time-or lynching-for violating Indiana's antimiscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's Black father and White mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo, New York.
I am an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. I’ve spent most of my career thinking about the role children have played in American culture. Adults, past and present, often overlook the intelligence and resilience of children who have managed to change both their immediate circumstances, and the world around them. I seek out these children and do my best to honor their stories. I’ve written or edited four other books on race and childhood, and have a podcast on children in history.
The history of colonial and antebellum New York, in Harris’s hands, becomes a map of Black activism. This book moves beyond a history of slavery and abolition to offer a sweeping historical narrative of Black life in New York City,starting with the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1626 and culminating in the brutally violent draft riots of 1863. Harris works creatively with little-studied sources to chronicle how, even in the direst of circumstances, Black New Yorkers created vibrant communities. While Harris certainly depicts the obstacles that Black New Yorkers faced in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, she also showcases individual lives, marked by sharp ambition and myriad achievements. In this narrative, talented political operatives create national movements, argue with white abolitionists, and create institutions and traditions that influence racial politics to the present day.
"The black experience in the antebellum South has been thoroughly documented. But histories set in the North are few. In the Shadow of Slavery, then, is a big and ambitious book, one in which insights about race and class in New York City abound. Leslie Harris has masterfully brought more than two centuries of African American history back to life in this illuminating new work."-David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness
In 1991 in lower Manhattan, a team of construction workers made an astonishing discovery. Just two blocks from City Hall, under twenty feet of asphalt, concrete, and rubble,…
I taught American, European, and World History at the University of British Columbia for over 30 years. I was constantly reminded of the dynamics and consequences of slavery and how a history of black America should be more prevalent in understanding the development of American culture, institutions, and identity over time. In writing two books on colonial America and the American Revolution, the roots of America’s racial divide became clearer and the logic of permanence seemed irresistible. My Shaping the New World was inspired by a course I taught for years on slavery in the Americas. Compiling the bibliography and writing the chapters on slave women and families helped to refine my understanding of the “peculiar institution” in all its both common and varied characteristics throughout the Americas.
This is a comparative short study of slave societies in the Americas with an emphasis on how the Brazilian system was more legally and morally fluid than the more rigid North American system. The importance of this book lies in its originality and influence as a model for generations of historians. Tannenbaum’s legalistic themes have been superseded by enriched data sources and social science theories and models. An additional characteristic of this comparative model was the introduction of the work of controversial Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, his thesis of miscegenation and its role in defining Brazilian national character. Tannenbaum’s optimistic closing prediction about racial harmony has not yet occurred.
I grew up in the American South during the Civil Rights Movement. The movement was nearly constant conversation, approached with cautious optimism, in my household. Years later, I met my wife, whose family lived in Birmingham, Alabama, and participated in various ways in the movement in that city. Soon after I began to study and write about the Civil Rights Movement, especially the Birmingham movement. I’ve published two books of fiction that reflect on the Movement and I’ve taught college courses and given many lectures in the States and abroad about literature and film set during the Civil Rights Movement.
Walker’s poems channel the voices of Myrlie Evers, widow of Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers, and of Byron De La Beckwith, Medgar’s assassin. The poems create warm, sometimes groovy narratives that evoke the music and voices of my childhood, thus humanizing the historical figures while still making palpable their fear, hatred, and defiance.
Around the void left by the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, the poems in this collection speak, unleashing the strong emotions both before and after the moment of assassination. Poems take on the voices of Evers's widow, Myrlie; his brother, Charles; his assassin, Byron De La Beckwith; and each of De La Beckwith's two wives. Except for the book's title, ""Turn me loose,"" which were his final words, Evers remains in this collection silent. Yet the poems accumulate facets of the love and hate with which others saw this man, unghosting him in a way that only imagination makes…
As a writer and a professor, I love sharing knowledge of my birth country (India) and the experiences of Indian immigrants in America. My first book, Arranged Marriage, is about the transformed lives of immigrant women and won an American Book Award. Mistress of Spices is about a spice-shop owner who knows magic, was a national bestseller, and became a film. One Amazing Thing is a multicultural novel about nine people trapped by an earthquake, was a Citywide Read in over 25 US cities. Recently, fascinated by the richness of Indian history, I have delved into it in novels like The Last Queen, set in the 1800s, and Independence, set in the 1940s.
Forster’s novel showed me the majesty and mystery of India at the height of British occupation. In delineating a complex friendship between an Englishman (Fielding) and an Indian (Aziz), it illustrated for me the difficulties of interracial relations at that time, even with the best of intentions. I love that the novel centers around a dramatic event in the Malabar Hills, a mystery that kept me guessing as to what really happened.
Set in British India in the 1920s, this book looks at racial conflict. The characters struggle to overcome their own differences and prejudices, but when the Indian Dr Aziz is tried for the alleged assault of Adela Quested even the strongest inter-racial friendships come under pressure.
I am an engaged scholar fighting racism. As a person of color, an Asian American raised in Chinatown and a low-income Black neighborhood, the fight is personal. My parents and those before them suffered from and struggled against discriminatory immigration laws that fractured and separated family members. My research and publications as a university professor are tools for exposing and redressing racial injustices, producing and sharing knowledge that leads to reconciliation and restorative justice.
In my opinion, this is the best and most comprehensive book covering the social construction of race and racism.
They argue convincingly that race is not biological but instead created through culture, institutions, and interest groups to manufacture a systematic hierarchy through oppression.
I particularly appreciate their attention to racial formation as being historically situated and contested, evolving but also persistent. The book is an essential foundation for understanding key elements of the structure and dynamics of racism.
Their sociological perspective enables me to see past the limitations of my economics training.
Twenty years since the publication of the Second Edition and more than thirty years since the publication of the original book, Racial Formation in the United States now arrives with each chapter radically revised and rewritten by authors Michael Omi and Howard Winant, but the overall purpose and vision of this classic remains the same: Omi and Winant provide an account of how concepts of race are created and transformed, how they become the focus of political conflict, and how they come to shape and permeate both identities and institutions. The steady journey of the U.S. toward a majority nonwhite…
