Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning Science_Gift_Guide One of NPR’s Books We

One of NPR’s Books We Love for 2025

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon

as an aristocrat whose skin color and notorious family history have left her with few friends she can rely on is named as the prime suspect in a murder case…

Whether it’s playing guitar on records and film with the likes of Cash

and its non-linear style of abstract musings defies categorization

Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning Science_Gift_Guide One of NPR’s Books WeA poignant, unflinching study of black grief as a form of elegy found in visual art, music, literatureeverywhere, if you know how to see it. In Black Elegies, Kimberly Juanita Brown examines the form of the elegy and its unique capacity to convey the elongated grief borne of sustained racial violence. Structured around the sensorial, the book moves through sight, sound, and touch to reveal what Okwui Enwezor calls the national emergency of black