The Bern Book is a travelogue, a memoir, a “diary of an isolated soul” (Darryl Pinckney), and a meditation on the myth and reality of race in midcentury Europe and America.In 1953, having left the US and settled in Bern, Switzerland, Vincent O. Carter, a struggling writer, set about composing a “record of a voyage of the mind.” The voyage begins with Carter’s furiously good-humored description of how, every time he leaves the house, he must face the possib...

Addresses the political and aesthetic evolution of African American literature and its authors during the Cold War, an era McCarthy calls "the Blue Period."In the years after World War II, to be a black writer was to face a stark predicament. The contest between the Soviet Union and the United States was a global one—an ideological battle that dominated almost every aspect of the cultural agenda. On the one hand was the Soviet Union, espousing revolutionary communis...

**2022 Whiting Award Winner for NonfictionFinalist • National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism)Best Books of the Year: TIME, Kirkus Reviews"This is a very smart and soulful book. Jesse McCarthy is a terrific essayist." —Zadie SmithA supremely talented young critic’s essays on race and culture, from Toni Morrison to trap, herald the arrival of a major new voice in American letters.**Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparatio...

“For those of us who are used to handling manuscripts — sometimes to examine them line by line, more often to flip through the pages — it’s a privileged moment indeed when we realize that we are dealing with a text destined for that small shelf of memorable literature certain to be printed and reprinted over the years. The telltale signs, for me, are trembling hands, eyeglasses clouding over — the psychological equivalent of a thunderclap. The book you have in hand now provided all of thes...

**The first volume in an anthology series that amplifies the voices of unsung Black poets to paint a more robust picture of our national past, and of the Black literary imagination, with a foreword by Tracy K. SmithA Penguin Classic**Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of...

A singular and powerful debut novel about a young black American learning the difficulties of forming your own identity when society has already assigned you one.Like most recent college graduates, Jonah Winters is unsure of what’s next. A young black American raised in France and living in New York City, he tries on a couple of careers only to find that nothing feels right. And as Jonah struggles toenvision his future, he feels pressured by his friends and family to put the...

Even as our world has suffered through successive upheavals, Jesse McCarthy contends, "something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of black art making." Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis.McCarthy reinvigorates the essay form as a space not only for argument but for experime...

**The first volume in an anthology series that amplifies the voices of unsung Black poets to paint a more robust picture of our national past, and of the Black literary imagination, with a foreword by Tracy K. SmithA Penguin Classic**Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of...

A New York Times Book Review Summer Reading Selection“Delves into not only what we eat around the world, but what we once ate and what we have lost since then.”—The New York Times Book ReviewTwo centuries ago, nearly half the North American diet was foraged, hunted, or caught in the wild. Today, so-called “wild foods” are becoming expensive luxuries, served to the wealthy in top restaurants. Meanwhile, peo...

**"A novel of bewitching ingenuity, one whose darkling, melodic mind conceives a world of ruin and awe..." --New York Times Book ReviewA vivid, brutal, razor-sharp debut about a woman who carves out her share of the American Dream by living as a man**1946: At the apogee of the American Century, the confidence inspired by victory in World War II has spawned a culture of suffocating conformity in thrall to the cult of masculine privilege.In the hardscrabble in...

Four young men struggle to liberate themselves from the burden of being black and male in America in an assured debut "as up-to the-minute as a Kendrick Lamar track and as ruefully steeped in eternal truths as a Gogol tale" (Kirkus, starred review).Bound together by shared experience but pulled apart by their changing fortunes, four young friends coming of age in the postindustrial enclave of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, struggle to liberate themselves from th...

**VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD FINALISTCENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE LONGLIST“A debut novel as impressive as they come. Tough, wily, dreamlike.” —Seattle TimesA decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love.**In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading...