Robert Jones Jr.

Lastly, I just finished reading a book called These Ghosts Are Family by Maisie Card, which tells the story of Jamaican immigrants to America.

And it does this wonderful thing with language and time where it goes back and forth between what we consider standard English or the Queen's English.

and Jamaican patois, as well as moving us from the antebellum period in Jamaica to modern day New York City.

And it's just a fabulous cast of characters and it's written so exquisitely and I loved it.

Yes, that was the part of it that really resonated with me.

Yes.

Okay.

So I really encourage people to read Luster by Raven Leilani.

It's just so unabashedly sexy.

It's just so full of lust and oh, it's just so luscious and almost a little illicit.

And I just I just love that she wrote so freely about that.

So that's one that I love.

Another is Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James.

It's a mythological story about ancient African peoples, and it moves within queerness and out of queerness and this brilliant imagination and deeply complex storylines with deeply complex characters.

It's almost like an African version of Game of Thrones.

It's just astounding.

I just really, really love that.

And then the last book, I would say, is actually not a work of fiction.

It's a nonfiction collection of essays by Kiese Lehman called How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, which talks about the difficulties of being a black person in a society that despises you

and yet finding a space for yourself to flourish.