Here are 100 books that Homie fans have personally recommended if you like
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I love hip hop. It’s basically poetry with a beat. I'm always thinking of literature in terms of rhythm and delivery. Creatively, my inspirations come from lyricists. I look at poets the same way. They accomplish wonderful feats with words. From years of listening to classic albums, I can feel the aliveness of a good verse. It’s also an element I try to tap into as a fiction writer. I'm a recipient of the 2023 Whiting Award and was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. My work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.
I first came across this poet at a conference in Tennessee. You know you're legit when even the fiction writers are like, you need to read this guy.
The poem “Mexican Heaven” is about what heaven would be like if it were inhabited by all Mexicans. It’s hilarious and wise. He has this other poem about being disciplined by his dad, which captures the immigrant experience–how your dad beats you, but in the punishment is a strange form of love.
Olivarez is nice with it. His poems have rhythm and prowess, but they are also palatable in a way that doesn't sacrifice craft.
In this stunning debut, poet Jose Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Combining wry humour with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender,class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in. Olivarez has a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch.
I love hip hop. It’s basically poetry with a beat. I'm always thinking of literature in terms of rhythm and delivery. Creatively, my inspirations come from lyricists. I look at poets the same way. They accomplish wonderful feats with words. From years of listening to classic albums, I can feel the aliveness of a good verse. It’s also an element I try to tap into as a fiction writer. I'm a recipient of the 2023 Whiting Award and was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. My work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.
Eve wrote a separate poem to incarcerated youth encouraging them to embrace their emotionality.
She said their tears were rain that they showed existed. It is a powerful poem, an incredible gesture to those working to overcome personal battles. Electric Arches, similarly, is everything you’d hope that a millennial would write. It updates the culture.
She has this poem about Emmett Till as an old man grocery shopping. The normalcy of this imagined life is the sadness of the piece. It basically said that if this man were alive, he'd be a regular guy going about his errands.
Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances - Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. Electric Arches invites conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.
I love hip hop. It’s basically poetry with a beat. I'm always thinking of literature in terms of rhythm and delivery. Creatively, my inspirations come from lyricists. I look at poets the same way. They accomplish wonderful feats with words. From years of listening to classic albums, I can feel the aliveness of a good verse. It’s also an element I try to tap into as a fiction writer. I'm a recipient of the 2023 Whiting Award and was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. My work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.
If you want a mix tape full of vibrant poets, this anthology has everybody and their mother.
Some of the cats I mentioned in the entries above plus Mahogany Browne, Fatima Ashgar, and so on. Word smiths respected by the literary scene and those hailed by the spoken word movement. If you're interested in the postmodern Hip-hop canon, this is the book for you.
Just as blues influenced the Harlem Renaissance and jazz influenced the Black Arts Movement, hip-hop's musical and cultural force has shaped the aesthetics of and given rise to a new generation of American poets. Edited by poets Kevin Coval, Nate Marshall, and Quraysh Ali Lansana, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop is the first anthology of poetry from the hip-hop generation. The Breakbeat Poets are multigenerational and multiracial, employing traditional and wild style poetics to narrate a new landscape.
I love hip hop. It’s basically poetry with a beat. I'm always thinking of literature in terms of rhythm and delivery. Creatively, my inspirations come from lyricists. I look at poets the same way. They accomplish wonderful feats with words. From years of listening to classic albums, I can feel the aliveness of a good verse. It’s also an element I try to tap into as a fiction writer. I'm a recipient of the 2023 Whiting Award and was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. My work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.
God bless Neruda, old school favorite of all time. Everybody knows his love poems, but this dude's other poems were equally off the wall.
I guess the social activists would love “El Pueblo” which describes one working man and every working man all the same, how they are invisible but steadfast with their hammers on the coal, laboring day to day making the world go round. It’s the most wonderful memorial.
I also love his odes – “Ode to Criticism” the first one which is like, critics suck and then the second version which is like, well, maybe critics have some worth. There’s “Ode to the Dictionary”, too. We need to resurrect this man, for real.
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda offers the most comprehensive English-language collection ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel García Márquez).
"In his work a continent awakens to consciousness." So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet."
This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores of them in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many…
My writing background started in the newsroom where, as a reporter, my job was to interview and tell the stories of others. At one point in my career, my editors assigned me a bi-monthly column, and while I used this space to write about a variety of issues happening in the community, I also used it occasionally to write personal essays. I love this form because the personal story helps us drill down on an issue and, in essence, make deeper connections with the collective. When I left the newsroom, I continued to study and write in essay and memoir form. In my MFA program, I was able to focus on this form exclusively for two years, and I have spent many years crafting my first book-length memoir into form.
I have not read a book like Melissa Valentine's The Names of All the Flowers, which is a beautiful, painful, and exquisitely written narrative about her brother Junior, who was gunned down on the streets of Oakland when he was 19. "Say his name, say her name," we chant when yet another one of our brothers or sisters is killed. In this memoir, Valentine gives us not only Junior's name but an intimate look into his head, his heart, his fears, his dreams, his joy.
Set in rapidly gentrifying 1990s Oakland, this memoir—"poignant, painful, and gorgeous" (Alicia Garza)—explores siblinghood, adolescence, and grief in a family shattered by loss.
Melissa and her older brother Junior grow up running around the disparate neighborhoods of 1990s Oakland, two of six children to a white Quaker father and a black Southern mother. But as Junior approaches adolescence, a bullying incident and later a violent attack in school leave him searching for power and a sense of self in all the wrong places; he develops a hard front and falls into drug dealing. Right before Junior’s twentieth birthday, the family…
I learned how to write poetry by reading. Books have always been my main teachers. I try to read all kinds of work because there are so many different kinds of minds to learn from. When I discovered poetry as a teenager, it fascinated me on the level of the line. I spent a lot of time just looking at poems, without necessarily even reading them—let alone understanding them—because the form on the page was a revelation. It amazed me that people were allowed to do that! That I could choose to do that with words—to explode a sentence across the white space or smash all the words together.
I believe Danez Smith is an important voice. I find Smith's poems powerful, poignant, and relevant. This collection has irreverence and reverence, humanity, fury, love, and a deep sense of urgency. It speaks to our country's history and present and demands we consider where we are headed.
Smith also has another stellar collection called Bluff, which was just released and promises to be a crucial contribution to contemporary poetry.
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
“[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”―The New Yorker
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality―the dangers…
I grew up on the high plains of eastern Montana. Like most rural folks, we lived close to the bone, even in the best of times. Then, when I was nine, my father died—and things got even harder. We finally had to put our acres up for lease, and I made a goal to leave that hard place. Though I worked hard for this new life I find myself leading—I studied, won scholarships, earned an MFA, and became a professor—ever since I left Montana, I’ve been trying to understand the distance between there and where I find myself now. I’ve been trying to understand rural America.
I don’t know of another book that so successfully explodes all our usual myths of rural America. Jesmyn Ward tells a story of community and tragedy as she chronicles the deaths of five young men across five years, including her younger brother, in her hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi, a rural, primarily African American community on the Gulf Coast.
This memoir is deeply sad and troubling, but I found the power of Ward’s language, wisdom, and resilience simply stunning.
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'A brutal, moving memoir ... Anyone who emerges from America's black working-class youth with words as fine as Ward's deserves a hearing' - Guardian
'Raw, beautiful and dangerous' - New York Times Book Review
'Lavishly endowed with literary craft and hard-earned wisdom' - Time
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The beautiful, haunting memoir from Jesmyn Ward, the first woman to win the National Book Award twice
'And then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped' - Harriet Tubman
Jesmyn Ward's acclaimed memoir shines…
I’m a scholar of gender and state violence, and I live and work at the US-Mexico border. For the past several years, I’ve worked collaboratively with large teams of Latinx-identified students to study the impacts of US immigration policies on migrants from Mexico and Central America. We realized that even though about half of immigrants are women, around 95% of deportees are men. So, we started to think about how US policies criminalize immigrant men. I became especially interested in how immigration enforcement (at the border and beyond) intersects with mass incarceration. In the list, I pick up books that trace the multinational reach of the carceral apparatus that comes to treat migrants as criminals.
This is Albert Woodfox’s shocking and amazing life history of spending most of his life in Angola, the most brutal prison in Louisiana.
It’s an exposé of prison brutality and dehumanization. But it’s also a stunning account of his own courage and spirit. On top, the writing is sparse, stark, and beautiful.
FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION Named One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2019 Winner of the Stowe Prize Named the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Publishers Weekly, BookBrowse, and Literary Hub Winner of the BookBrowse Award for Best Debut of 2019 A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“An uncommonly powerful memoir about four decades in confinement . . . A profound book about…
I started writing about golf years ago… I went from freelancing to working for Golfweek and pretty soon had a career! I thought I had a brilliant idea: a series of mysteries with a golf theme! Then I learned there were about 267 other golf mysteries already out there, starting with Dame Agatha’s Murder on the Links! Oops. I eventually wrote seven Hacker novels, finally getting my golf-writer-turned-sleuth through all four majors. I also published a historical novel set in Scotland (sorry, no golf) and just launched the new Swamp Yankee Mystery series, set in a small Rhode Island town remarkably similar to the one I live in!
I suspect more people saw the movie (starring Will Smith, Matt Damon, Charlize Theron and Jack Lemmon in his final role) than read the book by Steven Pressfield. Too bad, because the book’s pretty good.
It tells the entirely fictional tale of a 36-hole showdown match during the Depression between Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, and a local hero named Rannulph Junuh and his caddie, Bagger Vance. Grantland Rice and O.B. Keeler are there (famous sportswriters in the 1920s), and, of course, there is a femme fatale. But there is an underlying respect and honor for the game, which makes this novel a keeper.
'A marvellous, life-affirming book' Mark McCormack
'Golf and mysticism...a dazzler and a thought-provoker' Los Angeles Times
'Good stuff...a philosophical fantasy imagined on a golf course, heavy with fog, storm, fireworks and the howling winds of supernatural forces' New York Times Book Review ___________________
In the Depression year of 1931, on the golf links at Krewe Island off Savannah's windswept shore, two legends of the game - Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen - meet for a mesmerizing thirty-six hole showdown.
They are joined by another player, a troubled war hero called Rannulph Junah. But the key to the outcome lies…
My parents split up when I was six. I escaped from my sadness by reading stories about love and relationships and exploring how others went about the business of living and coping. I married young for security and to have a big family of my own. I succeeded. I have four amazing kids, but after years of wedded chaos, I too was divorced. As a single mom, I set out in search of my own identity and went back to novels to help me find myself. Though I’ve since been fortunate to find my happily ever after, I still enjoy characters that feel like friends who offer warmth, hope, and comfort.
As a white Jewish woman, I know I’m not the authority on the systemic issues inherent in romantic relationships in Black culture, but the good news is, this novel doesn’t require me to be. Bernadine, Savannah, Gloria, and Robin, four Black, thirty-something women navigating their way through love in the nineties, is a story that transcends race.
As I read about their hopes and dreams, their disappointments and pain, I recognized myself. Through McMillan’s clear voice, I was able to step into each character’s shoes and feel my way through their experiences. I also learned that a cheating guy’s car is an easy target- memorable!
The story of four vibrant black women in their thirties. They draw on each other for support as they struggle with careers, divorce, motherhood and their relationships with men.
