To study American history is often an exercise in learning partial truths and patriotic fables. Textbooks and curricula throughout the country continue to center the white experience, with Black people often quarantined to a short section about slavery and quotes by Martin Luther King Jr. Many walk away from their high school history class — and through the world — with a severe lack of understanding of the history and perspective of Black people in America. 

Last summer, the New York Times’s 1619 Project burst open a long-overdue conversation about how stories of Black Americans need to be told through the lens of Black Americans themselves. In this tradition, and in celebration of Black History Month, Vox has asked six Black scholars and historians about myths that perpetuate about Black history. Ultimately, understanding Black history is more than learning about the brutality and oppression Black people have endured — it’s about the ways they have fought to survive and thrive in America.

Myth 1: That enslaved people didn’t have money

Enslaved people were money. Their bodies and labor were the capital that fueled the country’s founding and wealth. 

But many also had money. Enslaved people actively participated in the informal and formal market economy. They saved money earned from overwork, from hiring themselves out, and through independent economic activities with banks, local merchants, and their enslavers. Elizabeth Keckley, a skilled seamstress whose dresses for Abraham Lincoln’s wife are displayed in Smithsonian museums, supported her enslaver’s entire family and still earned enough to pay for her freedom.

Free and enslaved market women dominated local marketplaces, including in Savannah and Charleston, controlling networks that crisscrossed the countryside. They ensured fresh supplies of fruits, vegetables, and eggs for the markets, as well as a steady flow of cash to enslaved people. Whites described these women as “loose” and “disorderly” to criticize their actions as unacceptable behavior for women, but white people of all classes depended on them for survival.

In fact, enslaved people also created financial institutions, especially mutual aid societies. Eliza Allen helped form at least three secret societies for women on her own and nearby plantations in Petersburg, Virginia. One of her societies, Sisters of Usefulness, could have had as many as two to three dozen members. Cities like Baltimore even passed laws against these societies — a sure sign of their popularity. Other cities reluctantly tolerated them, requiring that a white person be present at meetings. Enslaved people, however, found creative ways to conduct their societies under white people’s noses. Often, the treasurer’s ledger listed members by numbers so that, in case of discovery, members’ identities remained protected. 

During the tumult of the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of Black people sought refuge behind Union lines. Most were impoverished, but a few managed to bring with them wealth they had stashed under beds, in private chests, and in other hiding places. After the war, Black people fought through the Southern Claims Commission for the return of the wealth Union and Confederate soldiers impounded or outright stole.

Given the resurgence of attention on reparations for slavery and the racial wealth gap, it is important to recall the long history of black people’s engagement with the US economy — not just as property, but as savers, spenders, and small businesspeople.

Shennette Garrett-Scott is an associate professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi and the author of Banking on Freedom: Black Women in US Finance Before the New Deal.

Myth 2: That Black revolutionary soldiers were patriots

Much is made about how colonial Black Americans — some free, some enslaved — fought during the American Revolution. Black revolutionary soldiers are usually called Black Patriots. But the term Patriot is reserved within revolutionary discourse to refer to the men of the 13 colonies who believed in the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence: that America should be an independent country, free from Britain. These persons were willing to fight for this cause, join the Continental Army, and, for their sacrifice, are forever considered Patriots. That’s why the term Black Patriot is a myth — it infers that Black and white revolutionary soldiers fought for the same reasons. 

First off, Black revolutionary soldiers did not fight out of love for a country that enslaved and oppressed them. Black revolutionary soldiers were fighting for freedom — not for America, but for themselves and the race as a whole. In fact, the American Revolution is a case study of interest convergence. Interest convergence denotes that within racial states such as the 13 colonies, any progress made for Black people can only be made if that progress also benefits the dominant culture — in this case the liberation of the white colonists of America. In other words, colonists’ enlistment of Black people was not out of some moral mandate, but based on manpower needs to win the war. 

In 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia who wanted to quickly end the war, issued a proclamation to free enslaved Black people if they defected from the colonies and fought for the British army. In response, George Washington revised the policy that restricted Black persons (free or enslaved) from joining his Continental Army. His reversal was based in a convergence of his interests: competing with a growing British military, securing the slave economy, and increasing labor needs for the Continental Army. When enslaved persons left the plantation, this caused serious social and economic unrest in the colonies. These defections were encouragement for many white plantation owners to join the Patriotic cause even if they previously held reservations. 

Washington also saw other benefits in Black enlistment: White revolutionary soldiers only fought in three- to four-month increments and returned to their farms or plantation, but many Black soldiers could serve longer terms. The need for the Black soldier was essential for the war effort, and the need to win the war became greater than racial or racist ideology. 

Interests converged with those of Black revolutionary soldiers as well. Once the American colonies promised freedom, about a quarter of the Continental Army became Black; before that, more Black people defected to the British military for a chance to be free. Black revolutionary soldiers understood the stakes of the war and realized that they could also benefit and leave bondage. As historian Gary Nash has said, the Black revolutionary soldier “can best be understood by realizing that his major loyalty was not to a place, not to a people, but to a principle.” 

Black people played a dual role — service with the American forces and fleeing to the British — both for freedom. The notion of the Black Patriot is a misused term. In many ways, while the majority of the whites were fighting in the American Revolution, Black revolutionary soldiers were fighting the “African Americans’ Revolution.”

LaGarrett King is an education professor at the University of Missouri Columbia and the founding director of the Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education.

Myth 3: That Black men were injected with syphilis in the Tuskegee experiment

A dangerous myth that continues to haunt Black Americans is the belief that the government infected 600 Black men in Macon County, Alabama, with syphilis. This myth has created generations of African Americans with a healthy distrust of the American medical profession. While these men weren’t injected with syphilis, their story does illuminate an important truth: America’s medical past is steeped in racialized terror and the exploitation of Black bodies.

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male emerged from a study group formed in 1932 connected with the venereal disease section of the US Public Health Service. The purpose of the experiment was to test the impact of syphilis untreated and was conducted at what is now Tuskegee University, a historically Black university in Macon County, Alabama.

The 600 Black men in the experiment were not given syphilis. Instead, 399 men already had stages of the disease, and the 201 who did not served as a control group. Both groups were withheld from treatment of any kind for the 40 years they were observed. The men were subjected to humiliating and often painfully invasive tests and experiments including spinal taps.

Deemed uneducated and impoverished sharecroppers, these men were lured by free medical examinations, hot meals, free treatment for minor injuries, rides to and from the hospital, and guaranteed burial stipends (up to $50) to be paid to their survivors. The study also did not occur in total secret, and several African American health workers and educators associated with the Tuskegee Institute assisted in the study.

By the end of the study in the summer of 1972, after a whistleblower exposed the story in national headlines, only 74 of the test subjects were still alive. From the original 399 infected men, 28 had died of syphilis, 100 others from related complications. Forty of the men’s wives had been infected, and an estimated 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.

As a result of the case, the US Department of Health and Human Services established the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) in 1974 to oversee clinical trials. The case also solidified the idea of African Americans being cast and used as medical guinea pigs.

An unfortunate side effect of both the truth of medical racism and the myth of syphilis injection, however, is it tangibly reinforces the inability to place trust in the medical system for some African Americans who may not choose to seek out assistance, and as a result put themselves in danger.

Sowande Mustakeem is an associate professor of History and African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Myth 4: That Black people in early Jim Crow America didn’t fight back

It is well-known that African Americans faced the constant threat of ritualistic public executions by white mobs, unpunished attacks by individuals, and police brutality in Jim Crow America. But how they responded to this is a myth that persists. In an effort to find lawful ways to address such events, some Black people made legalistic appeals to convince police and civic leaders their rights and lives should be protected. Yet the crushing weight of a hostile criminal justice system and the rigidity of the color line often muted those petitions, leaving Black people vulnerable to more mistreatment and murder. 

In the face of this violence, some African Americans prepared themselves physically and psychologically for the abuse they expected — and they fought back. Distressed by public racial violence and unwilling to accept it, many adhered to emerging ideologies of outright rebellion, particularly after the turn of the 20th century and the emergence of the “New Negro.” Urban, more educated than their parents, and often trained militarily, a generation coming of age following World War I sought to secure themselves in the only ways left. Many believed, as Marcus Garvey once told a Harlem audience, that Black folks would never gain freedom “by praying for it.” 

For New Negroes, the comparatively tame efforts of groups like the NAACP were not urgent enough. Most notably, they defended themselves fiercely nationwide during the bloodshed of the Red Summer of 1919 when whites attacked African Americans in multiple cities across the country. Whites may have initiated most race riots in the early Jim Crow era, but some also happened as Black people rejected the limitations placed on their life, leisure, and labor, and when they refused to fold under the weight of white supremacy. The magnitude of racial and state violence often came down upon Black people who defended themselves from police and citizens, but that did not stop some from sparking personal and collective insurrections.

Douglas J. Flowe is an assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Myth 5: That crack in the “ghetto” was the largest drug crisis of the 1980s

The bodies of people of color have a pernicious history of total exploitation and criminalization in the US. Like total war, total exploitation enlists and mobilizes the resources of mainstream society to obliterate the resources and infrastructure of the vulnerable. This has been done to Black people through a robust prison industrial complex that feeds on their vilification, incarceration, disenfranchisement, and erasure. And the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and ’90s is a clear example of this cycle.

Even though more white people reported using crack more than Black people in a 1991 National Institute on Drug Abuse survey, Black people were sentenced for crack offenses eight times more than whites. Meanwhile, there was a corresponding cocaine epidemic in white suburbs and college campuses that compelled the US to install harsher penalties for crack than for cocaine. For example, in 1986, before the enactment of federal mandatory minimum sentencing for crack cocaine offenses, the average federal drug sentence for African Americans was 11 percent higher than for whites. Four years later, the average federal drug sentence for African Americans was 49 percent higher. 

Even through the ’90s and beyond, the media and supposed liberal allies, like Hillary Clinton, designated Black children and teens as drug-dealing “superpredators” to mostly white audiences. The criminalization of people of color during the crack epidemic made mainstream white Americans comfortable knowing that this was a contained black-on-black problem. 

It also left white America unprepared to deal with the approach of the opioid epidemic, which is often a white-on-white crime whose dealers will evade prison (see: the Sacklers, the billionaire family behind Oxycontin who has served no jail time; and Johnson & Johnson, which got a $107 million break in fines when it was found liable for marketing practices that led to thousands of overdose deaths). Unlike Black Americans who are sent to prison, these white dealers retain their right to vote, lobby, and hold on to their wealth.

Jason Allen is a public historian and facilitator at xCHANGEs, a cultural diversity and inclusion training consultancy.

Myth 6: That all Black people were enslaved until emancipation

One of the biggest myths about the history of Black people in America is that all were enslaved until the Emancipation Proclamation, or Juneteenth Day. 

In reality, free Black and Black-white biracial communities existed in states such as Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia, and Ohio well before abolition. For example, Anthony Johnson, named Antonio the Negro on the 1625 census, was listed on this document as a servant. By 1640, he and his wife owned and managed a large plot of land in Virginia. 

Some enslaved Africans were able to sell their labor or craftsmanship to others, thereby earning enough money to purchase their freedom. Such was the case for Richard Allen, who paid for his freedom in 1786 and co-founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church less than a decade later. After the American Revolutionary War, Robert Carter III committed the largest manumission — or freeing of slaves — before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, freeing his 100 enslaved Africans.

Not all emancipations were large. Individuals or families were sometimes freed upon the death of their enslaver and his family. And many escaped and lived free in the North or in Canada. Finally, there were generations of children born in free Black and biracial communities, many who never knew slavery.

Eventually, slave states established expulsion laws making residency there for free Black people illegal. Some filed petitions to remain near enslaved family members, while others moved West or North. And in the Northeast, many free Blacks formed benevolent organizations such as the Free African Union Society for support and in some cases repatriation.

The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 — and the announcement of emancipation in Texas two years later — allowed millions of enslaved people to join the ranks of already free Black Americans.

Dale Allender is an associate professor at California State University Sacramento.

For much of January, it’s been impossible to turn on the news without seeing bright red images from Australia of trees engulfed in flames, families being evacuated, and people in face masks braving thick walls of smoke. Videos of kangaroos looking for refuge on neighborhood lawns have gone viral, while images of koalas drinking out of rescue workers’ water bottles (perhaps dangerously) have tugged at heartstrings far and wide.

Yet even as the Australian wildfires continue to be vast and devastating, it remains difficult to comprehend their full impact.

Since the fires started in September, at least 27 million acres in the country have burned, 29 people have died, and an estimated 1.25 billion animals have been lost. On Thursday, several dangerous fires were still burning in New South Wales state and on the outskirts of Canberra, Australia’s capital city.

Across Australia, communities have been formed and torched, shifted and brought closer together in the midst of danger and the unknown. But what has it been like to live through one of the most extreme fire disasters of our time? Six Australians shared their experiences with Vox.

“A crowd of us watched in a numbed silence as houses exploded”

On December 30, our family of four — my partner and our kids aged 14 and 12 — had just arrived in the small beachside town of Mallacoota, a popular holiday vacation spot. We knew bushfires were affecting other communities about 60 kilometers away, but we believed we were fine.

While out fishing, a couple of hours from shore, a work colleague also holidaying in Mallacoota called. “Mate, this is serious,” he said. “That fire is heading here and we’re getting out now.” With a single road into and out of town through heavily wooded terrain, we realized our window of opportunity to get out was closing.

It was a painfully slow trip back to Mallacoota on the hired fishing boat. Our discussions about options grew a little heated. The likelihood of being cut off and trapped in Mallacoota was high, but the consequences of being caught in a firestorm while driving out were more significant.

When we got back to our Airbnb, we packed up everything. We believed the safest option was to move swiftly to the town’s wharf. We found an ideal spot by the water’s edge with a low rock wall and parked the car. To protect ourselves from hot embers flying through the air, we wrapped ourselves in woolen blankets. Others nearby did the same. In the event of a firestorm, our final escape option was to jump in the water, shielding ourselves behind the rock wall.

We waited on the water’s edge all night. The smoke was dense. Even though we were wearing swimming goggles, our eyes stung. Our throats were raw. To help us breathe, we used medical masks and a torn-up sarong wrapped around our faces.

The next morning, a Mordor-like darkness settled over us. Hours later, it was replaced by red light, the firestorm hitting the outskirts of town. We heard loud, sharp explosions in the distance and realized they were gas bottles exploding. As they started to increase, we knew more houses were being hit. Across the water, we saw 30-meter flames jump from one section of bushland to others. A crowd of us, both locals and tourists, watched in a numbed silence as houses exploded. Many of those who had lost homes and animals were middle-aged sea changers who, just a day before, were enjoying their near-retirement. Now they were watching their hopes disappear.

Once Mallacoota’s firestorm had passed, we looked around the town. Small fires were still burning. Many houses were completely flattened but some stayed intact. Strangely, there never seemed to be a half-burnt house — it was either completely destroyed or still standing. Our lovely little weatherboard Airbnb holiday home had also burnt to the ground.

Over the coming days, we became accustomed to a war-zone-like atmosphere. Volunteer firefighting trucks continued to race around town suppressing spot fires. But there was an easygoing selflessness between people marooned in Mallacoota. Despite their personal tragedies, local workers and shop owners focused on the needs of others. The local IGA grocery store kept open, running their generator, feeding the community, and restocking their shelves as soon as the immediate danger passed. The pizza and coffee shop kept going right through, stabilizing community morale. The staff of the Mallacoota’s only hotel cooked meals for teams of firefighters, provided accommodations for many in need, and kept the bar open to help many settle their nerves.

Over those dark, smoky hours on the shorefront, we had made a little community built out of small kindnesses. When you’re cold and you haven’t eaten in a day, it means a lot when a complete stranger hands you a warm coffee or cold pizza. And when you can do that for someone else, that generosity quickly becomes infectious.

Three days later, the Royal Australian Navy evacuated our family from Mallacoota. The evacuation was calm and well-planned. Though the ship was cramped, basic, and cold, the Australian Defence Force staff did their absolute best to make things as comfortable as possible for everyone, especially the pets. We felt lucky to be out of the elements. We knew families were still out there in other towns, sheltering on beaches in the open. Others inland were facing even greater uncertainty.

Stepping off the vessel in Melbourne, we felt grimy, tired, and stunk of smoke. Lines of service buses and support welcomed us. We were truly grateful.

—Jonathan Vea, environmental planner, Darwin, Northern Territory

“We had no idea what to expect on our journey, but we knew we had to help”

When our team, Sikh Volunteers Australia, found out that the bushfires were getting out of control in East Gippsland, we headed out in a van fully loaded with groceries, utensils, and cooking appliances. We had no idea what to expect on our journey, but we knew we had to help.

On the way down, team members tried calling phone numbers on the websites of local councils and VicEmergency. We eventually got in contact with Neighbourhood House Bairnsdale and were informed that a major relief center was being set up at Bairnsdale City Oval for the people evacuated from the affected region.

It was there that Sikh Volunteers Australia parked and ran our free food van from December 30 to January 14. For 16 days, we woke up at 4:30 am to prepare and serve breakfast by 6:30. While one team was serving at the relief center, a second team would start preparation of lunch and dinner. The food distribution would go on like this until 9:30 pm or even 11. We often got to bed around midnight.

Help from locals, the Sikh community, and many others was abundant. People donated groceries and fresh veggies from their gardens so we could make stuffed potato bread with masala tea, veggie sandwiches, vegetable curries, pasta, and soups.

During these 16 days of volunteering, our service team also came across a lot of heart-touching stories. There was a family living in the East Gippsland area since 1798 that had lost their home. There was a nurse who came by just to thank us without knowing that her own family was struck with disaster and staying at the relief center. Every day, our team met people who had lost their livestock and valuables, who were completely grief-stricken.

But in those 16 days, we were also overwhelmed with the love, affection, and gratitude of the brave people in the community. We witnessed the strong will of Australians, the united spirit of Australian culture. In order to support people in bushfire-affected areas, we hope people visit these areas even after the relief work is finished. Let the people know in these areas that we haven’t forgotten about them. They are not isolated or left by themselves to restructure their hometowns. All of Australia supports them, shoulder to shoulder, and with God’s grace, we will construct again from the ashes.

—Sikh Volunteers Australia, Devon Meadows, Victoria

“We received a text message from our neighbor that her house, along with ours and many others, were gone”

Our Mallacoota holiday was broken the moment when our neighbor informed us that the impending fire could not be stopped. With our only firefighting resource being three garden hoses supplied by town water (which historically fails in a crisis) and a house full of guests not used to this type of situation, we decided to follow government recommendations and evacuate early.

We sent four of our guests into a hired vehicle toward Melbourne first. With four remaining adults and three dogs, and only a small pickup truck to get to our farm 500 kilometers away, we loaded only our essential traveling bags. We didn’t take any family possessions because, in our hearts, we truly didn’t think our house — built by my father with the help of my grandfather in the early 1970s — would burn.

By 8 am, we were heading out of a town humming with anxious people and fire engines. As we left, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was it the right decision? Should we be staying to defend our property, or was that as foolish an option as the authorities would have us believe? Could I help others? Would I be putting the lives of my partner and friends at risk by leaving or staying? Was I acting cowardly?

Throughout my career in natural resource management, I have attended quite a few large fires, saved houses, and have even been stranded in front of a fire, but never had I felt such confusion as trying to resolve what seemed the sensible thing to do when my gut feeling was to stay and defend. Now I live with the knowledge that while all of my family and crew were evacuated safely, and we avoided being stranded on the beach with thousands of other tourists and residents, some people who stayed not only saved their homes but were instrumental in saving others.

That night and the next morning saw the weather acting savagely and heard constant warnings of the fire approaching Mallacoota. We sat helplessly glued to the Emergency+ app, watching the fire’s progress. First reports came in of an individual house burning in the town, then another, and another. Then it seemed the fire front swept in on both the northern part of town and the far southwestern corner, where our house was located. We waited and hoped. There wasn’t much else. Around 2:30 pm, we received a text message from our neighbor who had reliable news that her house, along with ours and many others in the same street, was gone. The hope evaporated.

With a weird numbness, we phoned our boys and told them the sad news. The rest of the afternoon and evening, which was New Year’s Eve, vanished in an avalanche of phone calls and text messages regarding the fate of our house, neighbors, and friends. The depth of concern and commiserations were a tangible reminder of how important that house had been for so many of our friends and family, as a place of escape and sanctuary, laughter, warmth, revitalization and relaxation, an almost spiritual-like home base. Gone.

Three weeks later, despite multiple road closures and long detours, police checkpoints and traffic controls, we have been able to return to Mallacoota. As we made the journey through hundreds of kilometers of blackened bushland, we were immersed in the reality of the extreme weather associated with a warming and changing climate. Between the mountains and the coast, from endless burnt forest to emerald green pastures and back to ash-covered moonscapes, we experienced temperatures of 37°C accompanied by howling hot winds that filled the sky with ash, burnt leaves, and bark. Smoke from nearby bushfires mixed with dust blown off overgrazed paddocks. Then further down the road, it was back to green fields and fruit still on the trees.

What we had witnessed on our journey was a good preparation for what we knew would be a difficult visit. Yet our breath was still taken away at the sight of the destruction to our neighborhood. A scene that we generally associate with bomb attacks or the worst cyclone was laid before us. At our driveway, the sight of our truck completely gutted and distorted, and with its chassis laying on the ground, was immediate proof of the finality of the destruction. At first glance, all that remained where our house once stood was the iron roof, split and awkwardly draped and twisted over bent steel uprights. The walls and contents were completely swallowed by the fire.

After a moment or two, we gathered ourselves and began to recognize the remains of our family home. Among the ash and debris, we found the most unlikely assortment of distorted household items: melted window glass laying in puddles stuck to tiles, forks and spoons welded together, delicate feathers of ash that were once books, light fittings hollow and black, rocks in the garden split and singed from the heat, and nothing that would adorn a table or serve a useful purpose again.

As the rain stopped, we ended up with a handful of items salvaged that could help remind us of what was lost. A long walk along the empty beach and a nude swim in the beautiful green ocean began the process of washing away the ash, dust, and tears — of mending our hearts and helping us to begin the rebuilding of our new family home.

—Neil Ward, natural resources and conservation manager, Chiltern and Mallacoota, Victoria

“My kids are destined to spend another day indoors going stir-crazy”

When you wake, even before you’re properly awake, the first thing you smell is the smoke. This is despite the fact the vents in the house are closed; the smoke still gets inside.

In my living room, my three sons — ages 4, 2, and 5 months — are playing on the rug. They are destined to spend another day indoors going stir-crazy. We can’t let them go outside — with Air Quality Index (AQI) readings of 5,000, the air is 25 times what is considered hazardous (AQI 200).

We live in Canberra, Australia’s capital city, which for weeks now has had the undesirable distinction of being the city with the world’s worst air. Positioned about 100 miles inland, Canberra is cursed to be in a valley that naturally traps smoke. The winds do the rest, with westerlies during the day tending to bring clearer air, while shore winds in the evenings blow smoke from east coast firegrounds into the city. Like a noxious tide going in and out, it’s a perfect atmospheric storm that has left Canberrans on edge.

My mom, who lost her husband in 2016, continues to live in her own home of 60 years and is fiercely proud to do so. But she is also 89 years old and struggling, her lungs the most vulnerable of all. I go to check on her and take our air purifier. She tells me she’s been unable to sleep again, her eyes red and stinging, her throat burning, her voice hoarse. Department stores across the city have sold all their purifiers, while hardware stores have sold out of filter masks that offer protection from the ultra-fine bushfire particles in the air that lodge in the lungs and make breathing difficult.

It’s stressful for all involved and has put a strain on our small city. The streets are deserted. Public pools and major tourist attractions closed. Sporting events have been postponed. Businesses and government departments sent their workers home. The national airline stopped all flights. The postal service halted all deliveries. Petrol stations sold out of fuel, supermarkets sold out of bottled water, and bank ATMs were emptied of cash. It’s the stuff of the apocalypse. Only time will tell how our long-term health is impacted.

When I return home from my mother’s house one morning, my kids are enjoying their breakfast. They do not understand the climate emergency that is currently unfolding, the doom that lies ahead. But they will one day. Hopefully by then, it’s not too late for them to have a future.

—Peter Papathanasiou, author of Little One and Son of Mine, Canberra

“As a climate activist, I am not surprised. As a wife of a volunteer firefighter, I worry.”

As a climate scientist, I’m not surprised by the bushfires. What I am is exhausted. I am tired of repeating again and again about how climate change is already here and that we are to blame. What will it take for everyone to finally realize this, and by then will it be too late? 

As a wife of a volunteer firefighter, I worry. When is the next call? How long will he be gone? Is he safe? This season he has only been out once, for which I feel grateful yet selfish. Many of his peers have been battling fires tirelessly for months. Away from their families, away from their income, trying to control the untamable. They are running on the smell of an oily rag, doing all they can to save life, property, and our precious bushland. Their resources are already so scarce; some firefighters have crowdsourced their own equipment. What will be required to protect us from the bushfires of the future?

As a mom of two young girls, I’m also in despair. This is not the world I wanted for my kids, nor for their peers. Wearing masks because of poor air quality thanks to smoke from wildfires will be normal for them. They won’t be able to enjoy the great outdoors as much as we do now — it will just be too hot to leave the house in summer. I shudder to think about the impacts bushfires under 2°C or even 3°C of warming, which is expected by the end of this century, will have on their lives. They are too little to understand all this now, but I’m not looking forward to future conversations, where I’ll have to explain why we left them a world in poorer condition than what we inherited.

As an Australian, I’m shattered. The fires have changed Australia forever. The wrath of climate change is no longer on the horizon. It’s here.

—Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, climate scientist and senior lecturer at the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney

“I was determined to find a displaced family nearby who could stay at my lodge”

Over the past four months, we Sydneysiders have slowly gotten used to the blanket of smoke we’ve been living under. We’re used to seeing people walking around with masks, of fire footage dominating the news. We’re used to seeing politicians point fingers and shift blame. But one thing I could never get used to is how this has devastated individuals and communities — and how it has also brought us together.

Volunteering at a Christmas party for the homeless, I encountered a man crying in the corner of the room. I sat and listened to the raw emotion as he described how the fires have robbed him of his life’s work. How has a man like this found himself homeless? I couldn’t get him out of my mind. Watching the news suddenly felt different. I imagined his fear, others’ fear, their loss. I was flooded with empathy yet felt powerless at the same time.

I have a vineyard with a lodge in the Hunter Valley. I no longer cared about the grapes we lost due to a combination of drought and smoke taint. I was determined to find a displaced family nearby who could stay at my lodge. I posted the offer on social media, and soon friends flooded the post, wanting to offer their homes to victims of the fires too. Before I knew it, I had a list of accommodation options and began organizing those in need with a place to stay. It makes me feel proud to be part of a community that bands together in times of need. Everyone wants to help, but they just can’t always figure out how.

Last week, I met with a man whom I placed in one of the homes. He told me how the surrounding fires felt like they’re closing in. The smoke made it near impossible to breathe, forcing him and his family to evacuate and flee. At the time, he had his mother staying with him and his two sons. I can’t even begin to imagine the fear and anxiety that gripped this family. Sadly, he will not be the last person to tell such a story.

Fire season is far from over. Let’s keep helping. Let’s donate generously. Let’s offer support to these families, the rescue workers, and the hardworking organizations trying to save countless animals in distress. Let’s spread the links, stories, and social media posts that highlight those in need. I urge you to become part of the army of helpers in our community. You’ll really enjoy the experience.

 —Richie Harkham, winemaker, speaker, and philanthropist, Hunter Valley, New South Wales

Every year, the National Book Foundation nominates 25 books — five fiction, five nonfiction, five poetry, five translated, five young adult — for the National Book Award, which celebrates the best of American literature. And every year (well, every year since 2014), we here at Vox read them all to help smart, busy people like you figure out which ones you’re interested in. Here are our thoughts on the class of 2019. The winners, which were announced November 20, are marked at the top of each category.

Fiction

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi — WINNER

Trust Exercise is a viciously elegant novel with a structure so sharp it cuts. It concerns a group of young teenagers at a performing arts high school, a bunch of high-achieving theater kids always trembling on the edge of hormonal overload. Two of them, David and Sarah, are enmeshed in a torrid will-they-won’t-they affair; their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley, forces them to mine that relationship for stage material repeatedly in front of their classmates.

That’s the first section of Trust Exercise, and as compelling as it is — Choi renders the insular world of a theater kid’s high school with claustrophobic intensity — it’s mostly setup. The real story comes in the second two acts, in a twist I won’t reveal here. But what ensues is an extended meditation on trust: trust between lovers, between student and teacher, between actor and director — and the trust that is implicit and unspoken in novels themselves, that lies between the author who writes the novel, the characters who enact the novel, and the readers who read the novel.

Choi plays with our trust, dancing right up on the edge of betraying it, again and again throughout Trust Exercise. But she does it so skillfully, with such intelligence, that all you can feel as you read is delight at having been fooled so well.

—Constance Grady

Sabrina & Corina: Stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Sabrina & Corina is a world inhabited as much by personal and political history, and the dead, as it is by Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s stunningly realistic protagonists.

The 11 stories in her literary debut are, first and foremost, a beautiful testament to Denver, Colorado’s indigenous Latina women. Whether it’s Corina reckoning with the murder of her strangled cousin Sabrina, who in the titular story becomes “another face in a line of tragedies that stretched back generations,” or children loving addict parents too “caught in [their] own undercurrent” to be present, the notion of legacies is of utmost importance. And those legacies concern familial blood, yes, but the long history of racism, poverty, and violence, too.

It’s not so much that Fajardo-Anstine’s female leads are haunted by this. It’s more that navigating the events of the past is a central part of their stories. These are women persisting, and doing so with poise and power. They are figuring out what it means to be a woman — to have ties to Denver that run so much deeper than the white transplants who “came with the tech jobs and legalization of weed;” to reckon with mortality; and to try to love family, partners, and one’s self, even when that love is imperfect.

It’s a terrific debut, varied enough to be consumed all at once, but worth savoring.

—Caroline Houck

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is stunningly ambitious and epic. It’s also deliberately, and at times frustratingly, opaque.

The first in a planned trilogy, Black Leopard, Red Wolf takes place in a fantasy land rooted in pan-continental African folklore. There, a boy has gone missing, and a scrappy team of adventurers has assembled to find him.

The plan is that each volume of this trilogy will retell the story of the quest for the boy from a different point of view, Rashomon-style. In this first volume, we see it from the perspective of Tracker, who is basically a magical medieval African Philip Marlowe. Pointedly, Tracker has no emotional attachment at all to the missing boy; also pointedly, he tells us in the very first line that the boy is now dead.

This book is deliberately structured to thwart the reader’s desire for a traditional narrative arc. It’s also structured to thwart their desire for clarity. James withholds proper nouns from his sentences until the last possible moment, which means that as you read, you generally can’t tell who’s doing what at any given moment: you just get an impression of anonymous limbs tangled together in sex or battle. And that opacity seems to be key to James’s ambitions for this trilogy — but it also means that Black Wolf, Red Leopard can be a bit of a slog, because it is not interested in giving its readers anything solid to hold onto.

Still, James’s imagined landscape is lush with bloody and magical details, and the queer romances at the heart of the novel are immensely tender. If nothing else, this book is worth checking out for the sheer scale of the thing.

—Constance Grady

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans opens up with the protagonist, Nora, receiving the news that her father was killed in a hit and run. As she and her family grapple with this sudden loss, Nora finds herself on a mission to discover what actually happened to her father. But what she learns about her father’s life ends up disappointing her.

Even though Nora is the main character, each player has a chance to tell how her father’s death changed their life. And as their perspectives push up against Nora’s, Lalami begins to delve into the struggles of immigrant families. The chapters from Nora’s perspective juxtaposed with the ones from her mother’s show how both struggle with what it means to be Moroccan and American. Other chapters show readers how even an event as intimate as death can be inflected by your race, your ethnicity, and how safe you feel in the US.

And as Nora searches for answers, Lalami slowly reveals how the environment for Muslims, immigrants, and people of color in a post 9/11 US contributed to the chaos around the death of Nora’s father.

—Rajaa Elidrissi

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Julia Phillips’s riveting Disappearing Earth is technically a novel, but it reads more like a collection of short stories. The book is set in Kamchatka, a remote peninsula in Russia’s Far East that is inaccessible by land from the rest of the country, and starts with the disappearance of two young sisters, which nearly everyone across the small peninsula hears about. Each subsequent chapter, however, tells a new story from a new character’s perspective rather than following the missing girls’ story in a linear way.

Through these women’s stories, we get a glimpse of how the girls’ disappearance has rippled through the broader Kamchatka community, but we also hear more about how each of them struggle with the limitations they come up against in their everyday lives in Kamchatka. Some of the women are bored and trapped in unhappy relationships; others are frustrated by the lack of economic resources keeping them stuck in Kamchatka when they long to leave the peninsula and live in Europe; others grapple with the dynamics between white Russians and the indigenous Even people. The peninsula of Kamchatka is almost a character in and of itself, shaping how each of these women view the world and their opportunities within it. The stories seem disconnected at first, but the characters’ paths start to overlap toward the end of the book for a surprising ending that you won’t want to miss. It’s a breathtaking page-turner of a novel that covers some very 2019 themes, all while set against the beautiful backdrop of Kamchatka. 

—Nisha Chittal

Nonfiction

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom — WINNER

I still haven’t been to New Orleans. And everything I know about New Orleans comes from friends’ stories (“it’s very humid, you’d hate it”), travel shows spotlighting the food (shrimp etouffee, beignets, gumbo with a roux dark as cocoa powder), and articles about how Katrina and its annihilative waters drowned the city; stories of how, to this day, the trauma of Katrina fundamentally changed the soul of New Orleans.

What this knowledge amounts to is superficial stuff that would pass at a cocktail hour. Sarah Broom’s revelatory memoir, The Yellow House, is not that.

Broom’s story is about Katrina, but it isn’t just about the life-shattering chaos of the storm. The Yellow House is about her family, the non-French Quarter pockets of New Orleans that America forgot about or chose to forget, and the myths of prosperity perched atop the rot of corruption. Ultimately, The Yellow House is about the price the city’s black men and women have paid for it.

Broom grafts these narratives onto the bones of her family’s yellow house, purchased by Broom’s mother Ivory Mae in 1961. Its appearance on the outside was a facade for its structural disorder the inside. The house witnessed what Broom’s family — Broom has seven siblings — did not show to their friends, the interior anarchy that never slipped beyond the home’s raw walls and broken doors.

Katrina’s cataclysmic fury destroyed the house, like it did New Orleans. But that’s just the beginning of Broom’s powerful story.

—Alex Abad-Santos

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Thick: And Other Essays isn’t a conventional personal essay collection. But Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, who holds a PhD in and teaches sociology, makes it a point to bill it as an eight-piece “portrait of her own life.” She affirms that by focusing on contemporary black womanhood, digging into challenging concepts like the societal difference between “black blacks” and “black ethnics.” And with the title essay — about the size of her body in relation to white beauty standards — serving as table setting, Cottom’s intent becomes clear: She is defining the truth of her own existence, and deconstructing white Americans’ reactions to her doing so.

For the well-read black woman, Thick won’t be a consistently revelatory read. As Cottom herself notes in one of the later essays, there is a growing, if small, cohort of writers online and in print who do a great job covering the intersecting political and personal elements of black feminism. But Thick is nonetheless a significant — and very readable — academic exploration of topics like black girlhood, black intellectualism, and black aesthetics.

—Allegra Frank

What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché

Poets write the best memoirs, and Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard is True is no exception. It’s Forché’s chronicle of a life-altering encounter with Leonel Gómez Vides, an activist who opened her eyes to what was going on in his native El Salvador: poverty, unrest, injustice, and much unease.

It was the late 1970s, and Forché, who had just published her first book of poetry, was teaching. But at Gómez’s invitation, she traveled from her home in California to El Salvador and then embarked on a tour around the country with Gómez. The book is a lyrical and pristinely disturbing recounting of that time, and how it awoke within her a calling.

The subtitle of What You Have Heard Is True is “A Memoir of Witness and Resistance” — two things, it seems, that Forché learned from Gómez are closely intertwined. He is constantly asking her to not just see what is going on around her as she travels with him, but witness it, to understand it and then gather the courage to speak and write of it.

The decades since are evidence that Forché took that charge seriously; since that time, she’s called herself a “poet of witness.” But though it’s prose, What You Have Heard is True is no less stunning than her poetry — sharp, unsparing, and never looking away.

—Alissa Wilkinson

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer

Five hundred years after Columbus “sailed the ocean blue,” it’s impossible to buy into the white colonialist lore of America, land of the free. We are well aware of the slavery, slaughter, and rape of American Indians and the stripping away of their land and resources, which are the tenets of their spirituality. In The Heartbeat at Wounded Knee, however, David Treuer pushes the reader beyond this narrative of sadness, defeat, and cultures ruined. After the brutal massacre of 150 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, there was not simply “an Indian past” and “only an American future.” The story of American Indians is a testament of insistent, persistent survival.

Treuer weaves in written history, reportage, and personal stories to complete this record of who Indians are post-1890 and who they always have been; he is not content to let Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, a white man, be the last, defining word on the Indian. While some of the historical passages on legislative bills and treaties come across a little stiff compared to the intimate portraits — like a cousin learning to channel his rage through MMA fighting or the young Indian who is finding community online — these legal and congressional battles remain vital to understanding how Indians have endured.

To be clear, Treuer is not interested in happy, shiny anecdotes of Indians returning to old ways on the reservation or making successes away from it; he portrays the nuance: what it is like to carry your peoples’ history of fighting literal wars, anger, the bottle. The everyday living of raising kids, making mistakes, working rodeos, foraging for pinecones, selling weed. Being downright, utterly scrappy. The reality of the American Indian is very much the reality of America.

—Jessica Machado

Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement, My Story of Transformation and Hope by Albert Woodfox with Leslie George

Robert King, Herman Wallace, and Albert Woodfox were the Angola Three — three inmates of the notoriously harsh Louisiana State Penitentiary who each spent decades in solitary confinement. Woodfox, the last of the three to be freed, spent 42 years in solitary before his conviction was overturned in 2016. Solitary, his memoir of surviving the longest sustained period of solitary confinement in US history, is a vital first-hand account of carceral brutality, told with astonishing aplomb.

Woodfox and his cowriter Leslie George always use the same measured, even tone, whether they’re describing Woodfox’s childhood in the Treme, New Orleans brutal Sixth Ward, or long-ago crimes — knocking a girl out with a chair or borrowing buggy horses to ride them, desperate for any release he can get. That understatement becomes a strategy when Woodfox is sentenced to Angola — a prison erected on a former slave plantation — for robbery and abruptly enters a nightmare; it’s a scene that, like many others, makes use of the N-word to underline its generally unsparing view of violent racism.

Woodfox rattles off detail after detail of the hellscape he’s thrust into — a bogglingly complex ecosystem of violence and corruption. “It’s painful to remember how violent Angola was in those days,” he says at one point. “I don’t like to go into it.” But he does, with prose that shocks because it is so readable, plainspoken, and awful; by the time he’s recounting his experience of a claustrophobic panic attack while doing his first stretch in the 6-by-9 solitary confinement cell, a reader might feel claustrophobic, too.

It seems unthinkable that anything can be uplifting in such a place, but the collective spirit and sense of brotherhood among the Angola Three sustains and animates their long, grueling fight for freedom, even through the agony of Woodfox having his conviction finally overturned only for the state to retry and re-convict him. The laborious nature of court proceedings in this context is mainly a reminder that the system can dehumanize its victims in even the most trivial ways; Woodfox is never more passionate than when he’s tearing apart the unsourced and fabricated claims made about him in legal affidavits.

Such callous details, juxtaposed against the larger-than-life horrors of Angola, make Solitary a must-read look at the justice system, and of humanity struggling to endure in the most abject and frustrating conditions. “Don’t turn away from what happens in American prisons,” he writes, simply, in the end. After reading Solitary, you never will again.

—Aja Romano

Poetry

Sight Lines by Arthur Sze — WINNER

Sze’s tenth volume of poetry is a kaleidoscope of juxtaposition, layered stacks of images from across time and space, presenting a deeply interconnected feel of the universe. Let me give you a taste:

“in the desert, a crater of radioactive glass—
assembling shards, he starts to repair a gray bowl with gold lacquer—
they ate psilocybin mushrooms, gazed at the pond, undressed—
hunting a turkey in the brush, he stops—”

Awash in nature and unafraid of science, Sze’s poems use languages’ sounds in a lovely way, while addressing the world’s horrors.

In some poems, he writes from the perspective of a voiceless, lowly natural thing — lichens, or in this example salt:

“… in Egypt I scrubbed the bodies of kings and
queens   in Pakistan I zigzag upward through twenty-six miles
of tunnels before drawing my first breath in sunlight   if you
heat a kiln to 2380 degrees and scatter me inside   I vaporize
and bond with clay   in this unseen moment a potter prays
because my pattern is out of his hands …”

—Susannah Locke

The Tradition by Jericho Brown

It’s always tricky for me, picking up a new book of poetry. I wonder, will it speak to me? Will it reward whatever work I have to put in to understand it? Fortunately, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition pays off on the first page (which opens with “Ganymede,” in which he reimagines the Greek myth: “I mean, don’t you want God/ to want you?”) and just keeps on giving.

The writing is clear and precise throughout; the topics are modern and rooted in the writer’s culture, but they’re still universal enough to speak to a reader outside that culture. It can be considered slander to call poems “accessible” — as though the only way poems can mean is through the hard work of unlocking all the doors and opening all the windows of a poem’s secret house. Brown’s poems are accessible the way your friends are accessible: They invite you in, sit you down, talk to you about things that matter in words that revel in their beauty. Please, let’s celebrate the radical accessibility of these poems.

Also, I am a sucker for form. Sonnets? Villanelles? Yes, please. When I read the first Duplex in the book (a form invented by Brown), I thought, “Ooh, nice trick, well executed.” But there were four more in the collection, each cleverer than the last, and as I read, I became a Jericho Brown fan for life. Writing is good words in good order; poetry is the best words in the best order. Brown’s words are in the best order possible. 

—Elizabeth Crane

“I”: New and Selected Poems by Toi Derricotte

In this 298-page book, containing selections from 40 years of work plus more than 30 new poems, Toi Derricotte invites the reader into an intimate portrayal of trauma, struggle, and triumph. Many of the poems take the shape of stories, feeling like autobiography, a mix of musing and memories.

Derricote’s writing can be beautiful, horrific, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, as she explores identity, race, gender, and everyday delights. In one section, harrowing first-person accounts of child abuse live next to touching odes to a pet fish (“Joy is an act of resistance,” she writes). Another provides an unflinching perspective of giving birth without drugs.

Some of Derricotte’s most moving work addresses personal and collective trauma, like this section from the new poem “Pantoum for the Broken”:

Some forget but their bodies do inexplicable things.
We don’t know when or why or who broke in.
Sleepwalking, we go back to where it happens.
Not wanting to go back, we make it happen.
If we escaped, will we escape again?
I leapt from my body like a burning thing.
Not wanting to go back, I make it happen
until I hold the broken one, hold her and sing.

In another new poem, she writes, “I see what a great gift it is if a writer just truthfully records the way her mind moves.” Derricotte gives us that gift, too.

—Susannah Locke

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

For protest art, you can look to the novelists and essayists, but the ones who leave you feeling socked in the gut are the poets, and Ilya Kaminsky is aiming his blows straight at our churning stomach. His first full-length collection, Dancing in Odessa, was released in 2004, which means expectations were at a fever pitch for Deaf Republic. And by my lights, it doesn’t disappoint.

Deaf Republic is the story of a town, told in a series of poems, in which a young deaf boy named Petya is killed by soldiers as they seek to break up a protest. In response, the townspeople begin to feign deafness in the face of the soldiers, fomenting a revolution of a kind. But Kaminsky, who lives with hearing impairment and whose family fled his native Odessa when he was 16, seeking political asylum in the US, knows deafness firsthand and how to make it into a metaphor. It’s a double-edged sword, this deafness: On the one hand, it’s a silent but powerful protest; on the other, it suggests that we can shut ourselves off from one another’s suffering.

The opening poem, “We Lived Happily During the War,” positions the story that follows as partly, but explicitly, the American story:

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we 

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

And the final poem, ironically titled “In a Time of Peace,” begins by reminding Americans that this story, of Petya and the deaf town, is ours:

Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement
for hours.
We see in his open mouth
the nakedness
of the whole nation.
We watch. Watch
others watch.

Deaf Republic is harrowing and damning, if we dare to listen.

—Alissa Wilkinson

Be Recorder by Carmen Giménez Smith

At first, it might seem like Be Recorder is looking for an argument. Some early poems almost take the form of tiny essays. They lay bare the oppression and dismissal of marginalized people, even in supposed safe spaces.

After being mistaken for another woman with “what you might call a brown name,” the narrator in “Origins” boldly asserts her selfhood through her poetry: “here I am with a name that’s at the front of this object, a name I’ve made singular, that I spent my whole life making.”

But Be Recorder is more than one origin story, and Carmen Giménez Smith shows resistance and resilience are not always rewarded. (One line of startling clarity in “Self as Deep as Coma”: “To end a conversation, tell a story of suicide with a girl in it.”)

Identity and argumentation soon break down. The titular poem is long and fragmented: “Poetry v prose” is the first in a long list of dichotomies that collapse onto each other, and the arbitrary hierarchy of the animal kingdom stands in for the arbitrary hierarchy of nations. Giménez Smith asks if the immigrant is doomed to be seen as an albatross, a mere symbol: “am I the mariner / and whose bird was it”

will I be reincarnated as elephant
as king as flea as barnacle
why am I the locus of your discontent
and not your president
your intimate the landlord
an aesthetic landlord
how do I hang from your neck
with such ease and when
will I be graced with immunity

—Tim Williams

Translated Literature

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet — WINNER

With Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, László Krasznahorkai closes out his gargantuan four-part literary quartet, begun with his first novel Sátántangó in 1985, and continued in The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War and War (1999), and finally Baron Wenckheim. (The first two books were turned into cinematic masterpieces by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr.) You thankfully don’t have to have read the earlier novels to get through this one, but when characters have cosmic visions of Satan dancing into eternity, it helps to understand that Krasznahorkai has woven certain motifs throughout his tapestry of vanishing Hungarian pastoral life. In Krasznahorkai’s writing, the banal and the quotidian are constant gateways to mystical revelations and Kafkaesque insights about our absurd postmodern world — or at least, they could be, if his characters, and we as ride-alongs, could only manage to catch them before they vanish into ephemera.

Baron Wenckheim concerns a retiring man who returns home to his tiny Hungarian village, only to be met with scheming and manipulation from many of its desperate and desolate inhabitants. Anyone focusing too much on the plot, though, will miss the trees for the woods, because the real draw of this shamelessly performative experimental fiction is the endless metaphysical abyss of Krasznahorkai’s prose: uninterrupted stream-of-consciousness passages that last for chapters with no breaks of any kind, ruminate simultaneously on the cosmic and the mundane, and fold endlessly onto themselves in a hopeless existential ouroboros, perpetually advancing and retreating before the impossibility of grasping the self and the universe. For example:

… because in reality the fear that existence will cease, and that always in a given case it will cease, is the most elemental force that we know — and if we can’t really enclose this fact in a nice, little box, if we were nonetheless to place all our most significant knowledge in a capsule and shoot it off to Mars — if we could finally make up our minds and leave behind this earth, which in general we don’t deserve (although who knows who’s in charge here?), well — and so here we are again, back with fear … because just think about what that means: fear, if we regard it as a creationary force, a general power center, from which the gods evaporate, and finally God emerges …

This approach predictably doesn’t add up to tidy narrative conclusions. But if such whirling philosophical exercises rejuvenate and invigorate you, then Krasznahorkai’s works are calling your name.

—Aja Romano

Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa, translated by Leri Price

In Khaled Khalifa’s version of Syria, death is the easy part. Living and finding meaning in a country wracked by civil war and mass atrocities proves much more difficult.

Three siblings, Bolbol, Hussein, and Fatima, navigate their broken worlds as they attempt to take the body of their father Abdel Latif for burial back in the hometown he fled many years before. Death Is Hard Work captures their frustration and dissociation with violence as they physically and metaphorically traverse the divides of their country. They are forced to face their own issues with each other, problems that lead them back to the frustrations with the dead man wrapped up in the back seat. War in this novel is messy in a way that goes beyond airstrikes and refugee flows.

At 180 pages divided into three parts, Khalifa oscillates between complexity and simplicity. We’ve all felt like Hussein, struggling to feel important, or like Bolbol, swinging back and forth between thinking of himself as a brave hero and thinking of himself as a cowardly outcast. But the numbness, the blasé nature of tragedy, grant this novel both its undercurrent of dark humor and the fog that lies over its happiness and places the reader deep in the throes of the conflict in Syria. Revolutionaries or rebels, like Abdel Latif, find vigor and life in the hope of breaking the chains of the regime, but those left behind by their seemingly inevitable deaths feel the weight of fear and suffering. 

The beautiful translation comes courtesy of Leri Price and holds on to the integrity of Khalifa’s purpose and compelling prose. Normally banal encounters of checkpoints and falling asleep depict the real cost of war. One recurring metaphor imagines the opportunity for love as a bouquet of flowers floating down a river. And the ignored, rotting corpse of the siblings’ father becomes a potent symbol of all that the siblings can’t bear to face, all of the greater tragedies they ignore so that they can focus on the surface-level injustices against them. After they bury their father, the siblings leave each other with little more than a wave goodbye, relishing their return to the hard work of waiting to die.

—Hannah Brown

The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Jordan Stump

The Barefoot Woman is an elegiac tribute by Scholastique Mukasonga both to her mother, Stefania — the focal point of the book — and to what life was like for Tutsi residents in Rwanda before the devastating 1994 genocide, when many members of her own family were killed.

Even as it captures the ever-present anxiety in a community racked by violence, The Barefoot Woman also centers heavily on the routine, day-to-day acts that families engage in as they try to build a home together. The book, which is translated from French to English, is as much about commemorating and remembering the sorghum harvest rituals Mukasonga participated in and her mother’s matchmaking prowess as it is about capturing the fear and anguish that her family experiences.

Ultimately, The Barefoot Woman is meant to serve as its own marker, not only of the atrocities that have been committed but also of the people these acts attempted to erase. Mukasonga writes to her mother, “I’m all alone with my feeble words, and on the pages of my notebook, over and over, my sentences weave a shroud for your missing body.”

The book is a testament to her memory and her life.

—Li Zhou

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

Yoko Ogawa focuses on the materiality of life on a small, unnamed island in The Memory Police. That’s because the premise of her dystopian novel is that the objects that enrich life — books, perfume, roses, birds — are systematically disappeared along with the characters’ memories of them, enforced by a fascist regime. 

The horror of forgetting is baked deeply into this novel. The narrator is an unnamed novelist whose mother was murdered by this regime because she had the power that few on the island have: to remember. The novelist’s editor, named simply “R,” also has this power, so the narrator hides him in a bunker in her home. The novel they are writing appears in occasional passages as a mise en scene; it’s about a woman who loses her voice, an image that mirrors the novelist’s own fears of how she’ll continue to write while losing words. 

The narrator’s only other relationship is with an elderly man she colludes with to hide “R”; he was once the island’s ferry captain before ferries vanished. Whenever another beloved object disappears, the old man responds with empty maxims — “time is a great healer” — or reassurances — “maybe some other flower will grow in its place,” after roses disappear. His character represents the most haunting aspect of Ogawa’s book: the adaptation and quiet resignation that enables an oppressive regime.

—Laura Bult

Young People’s Literature

1919: The Year That Changed America by Martin W. Sandler — WINNER

Yes, this book exists mostly because 1919 was exactly a century ago. But 1919: The Year That Changed America makes a compelling case for both itself and its title.

This is a children’s history book that has the wit to open with a giant flood of molasses. But it doesn’t shy away from the more solemn tales of a revolutionary moment in US history: 1919 thoughtfully covers the women’s suffrage movement (and the racism it did not expel), the violent suppression of labor and African American civil rights movements, and the Red Scare that helped fuel these crackdowns.

I’m very sorry to note, then, that this very website has debunked the myths around Prohibition — the other big event of 1919 — and Martin W. Sandler’s history seems to miss the mark here. Despite careful inclusion of revisionist sources elsewhere in the book, the author does not cite any in this section.

The conventional story the book imparts is captured by the pull quotes (eye-catching with smart use of color, thoughtfully designed like the rest of the book). One from historical aphorism repository H.L. Mencken is so sweeping, it approaches parody: “There is not less drunkenness in the republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more.” But substantial evidence suggests Prohibition really did reduce problem drinking and didn’t increase crime overall, even if organized crime benefited from the legislation.

1919 does invite readers to weigh the costs and rewards of other public health interventions — including gun control. But, say, a debate over a higher alcohol tax? Maybe that will make it in in 3019.

—Tim Williams

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Jam thinks she lives in a utopia in Akwaeke Emezi’s bittersweet and unsettling YA novel Pet. The largely unspecified revolution happened before she was born, and she now lives in a world free of police violence, of domestic abuse, of injustices big and small. A trans girl, Jam received care that let her socially transition at 3 and physically transition in her teens. The point is: The monsters are gone and the world is better.

Or is it? A strange, lumbering beast crawls out of one of Jam’s mother’s paintings and makes itself known to Jam, who dubs it Pet. Pet says it is hunting a monster, right there in Jam’s supposed utopia, and the thrust of Pet involves Jam learning that monsters are not confined to history books.

This is a fable, more or less, but it’s a lovely and loving one, with genuine affection for every character who is even briefly introduced. The relationship between Pet and Jam has real heft, even if this is yet another tale of a normal girl and a magical creature. But the really thoughtful idea here is Emezi’s dissection of what justice means, even in a supposed utopia. It’s fleeting, and you have to fight for it — over and over and over again.

—Emily VanDerWerff

Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks by Jason Reynolds

This is YA author Jason Reynolds’ second National Book Award nomination. Like his previously nominated work, 2016’s Ghost, Look Both Ways channels his vivid voice and his deadpan but tender portraiture of kids growing up in the city, with all its excitement and complexity and cacophony.

In Look Both Ways, Reynolds turns that noise into a polyphonic character study of the city. Billed as a story told in 10 blocks, Look Both Ways channels Armistead Maupin’s Tales From the City, unfolding through the varied viewpoints of a class full of children as they walk home from school every day, navigating their respective city streets. Their lives bypass and occasionally intersect with each other, and as the book unfolds, the reader discovers the physical and human geography of the city.

These kids’ adventures are granular. They are formed moment by moment, block by block: from the ragtag gang who pools their resources to turn 90 cents into an unforgettable memory, to the boy fighting a panic attack when his daily route home is upended, to the kid who expresses a wealth of inarticulable emotions by grabbing a fistful of roses. It’s less a novel than a protracted tone poem, with striking imagery (“He watched his classmates tap-dance with tongues” … “For him, the hallway was a minefield, and there were hundreds of active mines dressed in T-shirts and jeans”) accented with subtle commentary on a host of social issues, from health care and poverty to homophobia and bullying. The prevailing takeaway, though, is a sense of indomitable wonder, girded by Reynolds’ underlying confidence in his city kids. They’re doing just fine.

—Aja Romano

Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay

Randy Ribay has packed a lot into this YA novel. It’s got the requisite messed-up family dynamics, the teen unsure of his path forward, and the love interest, but the real focus is a murder mystery pursued by a total amateur in a faraway country, a place where he doesn’t speak the language and doesn’t always know who to trust. Throw in more than a splash of misdirection and some pretty pointed opinions on the political situation in the Philippines, and you’ve got an out-of-the-ordinary story.

Jay, a Filipino American high school senior with no enthusiasm for college, travels to the country his parents left when he was a baby to solve the mystery behind his cousin Jun’s death. Jun is set up as a saint, an impossibly empathetic paragon who is wildly misunderstood by his authoritarian parent (who is an actual cop, as if we needed the emphasis). Jay rides to the rescue of his younger girl cousins and his whole sad family, but he gets so many things wrong and has to learn real truths instead of relying on his idealized version of events. It’s just like in life.

Some of the “kumbaya” family healing at the end feels forced, but Ribay deals well with the emotions and compromises tragedy forces on people. And the plot never gets lost in its march toward understanding, despite the silent family members, the college plans gone awry, and the crush who may or may not be actually interested. I found myself caring more for the flawed, dead Jun than for the Jay who still has his life ahead of him, but I couldn’t help rooting for Jay to figure himself out.

—Elizabeth Crane

Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All by Laura Ruby

Thirteen Doorways is a ghost story, told by the ghost.

Teenage Frankie, getting by in a World War II-era orphanage with her bratty sister Toni, is mostly unaware that she’s being haunted by the long-dead narrator Pearl. But she’s plenty conscious of the other spectral presences in her life: the missing humanity of cruel head nun Sister George; the absence of her very-much-alive father, who abandoned his children; the lack of joy or light or meatball sandwiches at the orphanage. And now, the list includes her brother Vito — her father reappears only to take Vito to Colorado with their new stepmother and step-siblings, leaving Toni and Frankie behind.

Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All is a story of female anger and pain — about how terrible it was to be a girl in the past, and the past before that, and the past before that. It’s a story about the fear and shame and determination that an unfair life instills in the women those girls become, or never get to become.

There are some familiar beats (orphans bond; teens have crushes; ghosts can’t quite comprehend their own deaths; women with spirit find that spirit violently quashed), but the language is moody and engaging (at one point, phantom Pearl describes herself as “ghostful”), and the truth of the central theme — that danger lurks around every corner — resonates. It’s a story about very real helplessness that manages a glimmer of hope.

—Meredith Haggerty