By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
Victor LaValle’s third book belongs on your shelf if you enjoy fine literary work from African-American writers. Or if you like to kick back on a wild ride with a fast read. Or if you dig genre fiction.

By Ellen Feldman
In March, 1931, as the Depression was deepening and 200,000 young people under the age of twenty-one were hoboing the country in search of an odd job, or a few scraps of food, or the little bit of fun that was supposed to be the birthright of youth, a group of young black and white men got into a fight on a freight train going from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee, by way of northern Alabama.

No crime in America, let alone a crime never committed, has resulted in as many trials, convictions, reversals, retrials, and Supreme Court decisions, including a seminal 1935 ruling. Collectively, the nine young men spent more than a hundred years in some of the worst jails and prisons in Depression-era America. Only one of them lived to be pardoned.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
Anna In-Between, the seventh book from acclaimed author Elizabeth Nunez, is one of the finest novels published this year. Nunez has made each word choice with the economy of a poet. The result is elegant prose: substantive, meaningful, but never wordy or clunky, just beautifully satisfying and thought-provoking.

By Paula L. Woods
“Young people read comics,” Mandela said in a 2005 speech that launched the autobiographical series on his life. “The hope is that the elementary reading of comics will lead them to the joy of reading good books….If the comic reaches new readers, then the project will have been worthwhile.”

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
In many ways, James Gavin’s book tells the story of black America from the last lights of the Harlem Renaissance to the shining star that is the nation’s first black president. By focusing on Lena Horne, the trailblazer / activist / singer / actor/ dancer / icon, her rough road from the indignities of the segregated Cotton Club to an Upper East Side home is made clear.

By Lee A. Daniels
Writing with an easy command of a mountain of material that encompasses six decades of enormous changes in America, Sullivan shows how critical the NAACP, now celebrating its centennial, was to the Civil Rights Movement’s ultimate legal and legislative victories that made the United States a democracy in fact not just in rhetoric.

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen
In 1998, Ron Kavanaugh founded Mosaic, a literary magazine that celebrates the work of contemporary African-American and Latino writers. Ten years later, Mosaic still publishes reviews of literary work, interviews with important writers, and art that folk can dig. Recent covers include first time novelist Marlon James, Dark Room Collective Co- Founder Thomas Sayers Ellis, and author of The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

By Pamela Newkirk
Senna’s characters are not the stuff of fiction, but are drawn from her real life. From shards of truths, half-truths, legend, and a searing search into her personal history, Senna reveals a larger truth of America’s character of racial mixing, undue pride and shame, and unreconciled identities.

By Jay Mathews
This year, David Levin and his friend Mike Feinberg are close to becoming the most famous teachers in the country. They have founded the nation’s most successful network of public charter schools, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP).

By Imani Perry
Sag Harbor is the first-person narrative of teenaged Benji Cooper and his relationship to the place and people of his summers: Sag Harbor, New York.