🏷️ Social Commentary
15 entries tagged with this trope
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver · 2022
David Copperfield retold in Appalachian foster care during the opioid crisis. Pulitzer winner. Kingsolver gives voice to a community literature usually ignores.
Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid · 2019
A young Black babysitter is accused of kidnapping her white employer's child in a grocery store. What follows is a razor-sharp examination of performative allyship. Uncomfortable in the best way.
Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid · 2019
A young Black babysitter gets racially profiled at a grocery store. Her white employer tries to 'help.' The power dynamics are excruciating and perfectly observed.
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver · 2022
A David Copperfield retelling set in Appalachian meth country. Demon is smart, funny, and fighting a system designed to break him. Pulitzer winner. Absolutely wrecking.
James
Percival Everett · 2024
Huck Finn retold from Jim's perspective. Jim is brilliant, educated, and playing a dangerous game of survival in a world that refuses to see him. A masterwork of American fiction.
Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid · 2019
A white woman's Black babysitter gets racially profiled in a grocery store. What follows is a sharp, uncomfortable examination of performative allyship and good intentions gone wrong.
Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid · 2019
Emira is babysitting when she's accused of kidnapping her white charge. The aftermath entangles her with her employer's secrets. Smart, incisive, and deeply uncomfortable in the best way.
Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid · 2019
A young Black babysitter is accused of kidnapping her white charge at a grocery store. Her employer tries to 'help.' The cringe is intentional and surgical.
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver · 2022
David Copperfield retold in Appalachian America. A boy fights through foster care, addiction, and poverty with a voice that'll stay with you forever.
Yellowface
R.F. Kuang · 2023
June steals a dead friend's manuscript and publishes it as her own. A razor-sharp satire of publishing, race, and who gets to tell what stories.
The Power
Naomi Alderman · 2016
Women develop the ability to electrocute people. The world inverts. Written as history, it's a perfect mirror for every 'but what if women had power?' question.
The Women Could Fly
Megan Giddings · 2022
In a world where witches are real and surveillance is mandatory, Josephine searches for her missing mother. Grief and feminist rage dressed as speculative fiction.
Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid · 2019
Emira, a young Black babysitter, is falsely accused in a grocery store. Her employer's response makes everything worse. A novel about good intentions and whose story gets told.
The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen · 2015
A communist spy infiltrates the South Vietnamese army. The first-person narrator confesses everything. Pulitzer Prize winner — savage, funny, and utterly unlike anything else.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Cho Nam-joo · 2016
The story of an ordinary Korean woman, told as a clinical case study. The rage underneath the clinical prose is extraordinary. A feminist novel that sparked a national debate.