Here are 100 books that Jubilee fans have personally recommended if you like
Jubilee.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I’m Kai Storm, author of reality-based urban fiction and erotica, erotica blogger, YouTuber, and Podcaster. I love reading books that feel real, that make you feel, and that teach you something as they entertain you.
This book scared the hell out of me when I was a teenager because its vivid descriptions stayed in my dreams yet it never stopped me from reading and loving the entire book.
It taught me a lot about following your intuition and/or gut feelings. Although it has been a long time since I read it, the main thing I remember is that your intuition is your protector, and listening to that inner voice helps a lot along the way.
Cover design by Harlem renaissance artist Lois Mailou Jones
When Janie, at sixteen, is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie endures two stifling marriages before meeting the man of her dreams, who offers not diamonds, but a packet of flowering seeds ...
'For me, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD is one of the very greatest American novels of the 20th century. It is so lyrical it should be sentimental; it is so passionate it should be overwrought, but it is instead a rigorous, convincing and dazzling piece…
Philosophical novels challenge rather than appease. They subvert. They obscure. As a former acquisitions editor at major publishing houses, I am confounded by the scarcity of chances taken on books that don’t fit the status quo or, are "difficult." I am most interested in how books—even when they meander and cavort—lead to surprising and unsettling revelations. Or how they don’t lead to revelations at all but keep the reader guessing as to when some semblance of grace will be achieved. I don’t wish to sound pessimistic; if anything, I wish to be realistic. Philosophical novels are reflections of life, which is often confusing, contradictory, and, yes, difficult. With a touch of grace for good measure.
Perhaps the most “realistic” novel of this bunch, Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award-winning novel follows an unnamed black narrator’s life in a small southern town, as detailed through his memories, dreams, and desires.
Ellison didn’t intend to write a “protest novel,” apparently, but it has become exactly that: a protestation of the inequities of an American system designed to keep Black people in the shadows. The novel’s voice, though singular, is representative of an entire social movement. A perfect novel.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
He describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood," before retreating amid violence and confusion.
Originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author, it remained on the bestseller list for…
I am an award-winning author of two five-star rated memoirs: “My Whorizontal Life: An Escort’s Tale” and “A Someday Courtesan,” and the creator/performer of the 90-minute solo show: “My Whorizontal Life: The Show!” I co-host the podcast My Index to Sex. and I am a Juilliard Drama Graduate and the former #1 escort in the country. Thinking about how I grew up in a safe, typical suburb in the middle of America made me wonder if the things that happened to me with men as a girl happened to many women as we came of age in the 70s.
We all know the incomparable poet, writer, and speaker she became, but before that was her coming-of-age story. Raw and painful yet written with Maya Angelou's lyrical and insightful eye, this too was a book I started and could not put down.
Drawn into her world as a girl feeling imprisoned inside herself for terrible reasons, she finds that self-love and kindness and the world of words, books, poetry, and writing unlock the cage she was in.
As a woman, as a girl, I would never know the cruel racism she experienced, but her journey into art and its ability to heal and set one free was something I felt kin to.
Maya Angelou's seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy,achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother's lover.
I am a writer who loves to read. In fact when aspiring writers ask me for advice about getting started, I tell them to read widely, and more importantly, to fall in love with reading. So much about craft can be learned from deconstructing good books to see how they work. Each of the five books I’ve selected have influenced the way I tell my stories. They have taught me to examine past works for inspiration and compelling beginnings.
This book demonstrates that prose doesn’t have to be lyrical to leave an indelible impact on readers.
Lutie Johnson is a single mother living in a rundown building on the street. Her desires are simply articulated as are the barriers keeping her from achieving them. Lutie spends most of the novel dodging the clutches of men who think they deserve her just because they desire her, and a neighborhood snake-eyed madam who wants to exploit Lutie’s beauty.
Petry begins the book describing a cold November wind and continues with an icy precision that will entrance the reader until the very last page.
With a new introduction by TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage
'This is a wonderful novel - the prose is clear, the plot is page-turning, the characters are utterly believable' CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
'Ann Petry's first novel, The Street, was a literary event in 1946, praised and translated around the world - the first book by a black woman to sell more than a million copies . . . Her work endures not merely because of the strength of its message but its artistry' NEW YORK TIMES
'My favorite type of novel, literary with an astonishing plot . .…
I began writing speculative fiction because I was fascinated by its potential as a laboratory to imagine the world that could be. It’s a narrative form that allows us to play with revolutionary changes in society without any real people getting hurt. And it compels the author to do the hard work of imagining how others experience life in the real world as well as the imaginary one. The best SF novels balance their speculations with a grounding in the observed world, entertaining us with propulsive wonder while filling our minds with new ideas and fresh perspectives that linger long after we put the book down.
The Civil War in this short novel by Bisson, who sadly died in early 2024, is part of the book's backstory. It is set in a 1950s America in which our 1860s Civil War never happened.
In Bisson’s mirror America, Harriet Tubman joined John Brown in his raid on Harper’s Ferry, resulting in a victory for the abolitionists that led to a massive slave uprising in the South, aided by radical Europeans and Mexicans seeking to reclaim territory and ultimately the formation of a new socialist utopia from the former states of the Deep South.
With this bold and radical counterfactual as the backdrop, Bisson uses a chorus of compelling narrations to imagine the more just America that could be—and the struggles it would take to realize it.
Presenting an alternative version of African American history, this novel explores what might have happened if John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry had been successful. Chronicling life in a thriving black nation founded by Brown in the former southeastern United States, this dramatic story opens 100 years later, just as Nova Africa is poised to celebrate its first landing of a spacecraft on Mars. The prosperous black state will soon be tested when the granddaughter of John Brown returns from Africa to reunite with her daughter and share with her a secret that will alter their lives forever.
Fiction has a way of capturing people, places, and phenomena that often elude source-bound historians. As I say in my book, you feel the weight of all the terrible things Colonel Kurtz has done in central Africa far more by his whispering “the horror, the horror” than I, as a historian, could possibly convey by listing them out and analyzing them. That feel–especially what contingency feels like–is something historians should seek out and try to pull into their craft of writing. Getting used to and using fiction to help historians see and feel the past is a worthwhile endeavor.
The American Civil War is everywhere, yet nowhere in William Faulkner’s fiction. This book explores the history of Yoknapatawpha County and the fiction of William Faulkner’s Civil War. It is a fascinating exploration of historical memory, race-making, narrative construction, and the South during and after Sherman.
Like The Dawn Watch, I especially loved it because it was neither a history book nor a work of literary analysis. If you have read Faulkner, this is an essential book that helps you understand how all of this is really about the Civil War, even though you’ll find very little gunfire in those pages. The pain is nowhere because it is everywhere.
Michael Gorra asks provocative questions in this historic portrait of William Faulkner and his world. He explores whether William Faulkner should still be read in this new century and asks what his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the American Civil War, the central quarrel in America's history.
Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works' echo of "Lost Cause"…
As a kid I loved visiting the local history museum, wandering through the dusty displays of taxidermy buffalo and medieval helmets. I enjoyed the creepy feeling I’d get when I stood next to the wax figures and looked at their frozen faces and not-quite-right hair. As I grew older, I became more interested in seeking out weird and unusual history, and it became a passion throughout my teenage years and into adulthood. Now, I’m able to combine my love of the creepy and occult with historical research. I teach U.S. history at SUNY Brockport, I co-produced Dig: A History Podcast, and I am the co-author of my new book (below).
I really love this book because I have been known to go on a “haunted” history tour now and again and I love a good ghost story. However, I realize that sometimes the true stories from our past are more scary than the fantastic ones.
This book particularly hit home because it covers quite a few ghost stories from New Orleans that I am very familiar with. However, those “spooky” ghost stories become truly frightening when contextualized by Miles.
In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of ""ghost tours,"" frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. ""Dark tourism"" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and…
During college, I attended an inner-city black church during the years of the civil rights movement—and it changed the course of my life. My husband and I have lived in diverse neighborhoods and attended multicultural churches for most of our 56 years of marriage, realizing we have much to learn from our brothers and sisters of color. But the biggest influence that caused me to write theYada Yada Prayer Group novels was/is the prayer group of sisters of color that I’ve been part of for over 25 years. As we spent time together every week for years (!), these sisters helped turn my life and my faith upside down—or maybe “right side up.”
Two people who worked for Wendell Berry’s family when he was a child had a profound effect on his life—“Aunt Georgie” Ashby and Nick Watkins. With the simplicity of their lives birthing profound wisdom, Berry credits them for helping to expose the hidden wound of racism and putting his feet on a path to reject the deeply ingrained racism of his youth. The result is a deeply thoughtful book of reflections and wisdom on the cancer that infects our society and what we must do to lance and heal it—if we will. A “must read” on your bookshelf.
An impassioned, thoughtful, and fearless essay on the effects of racism on the American identity by one of our country’s most humane literary voices.
Acclaimed as “one of the most humane, honest, liberating works of our time” (The Village Voice), The Hidden Wound is a book-length essay about racism and the damage it has done to the identity of our country. Through Berry’s personal experience, he explains how remaining passive in the face of the struggle of racism further corrodes America’s great potential. In a quiet and observant manner, Berry opens up about how his attempt to discuss racism is…
My family’s farm was lost due to a dishonest lawyer that my great-grandmother entrusted. Because of that, I have devoted the past 20 years of my career to providing low-cost legal services to aging rural farmers around estate planning and civil rights. As an attorney, I have worked for the US Department of Agriculture and the Office of Civil Rights in Washington DC. I also founded the non-profit organization F.A.R.M.S., which provides services to aging rural farmers such as preventing farm foreclosures, executing wills, and securing purchase contracts. After drafting Systematic Land Theft over the span of several years, I am happy to release this historic synopsis documenting the land theft of Indigenous and Black communities. I have written extensively on the topics of agriculture, environmental, and land injustice in a variety of legal, trade, and other publications.
This book uses census data and other historical facts to highlight the 250,000 free blacks who were in the south post-Civil War. It shows the struggles black people faced in regards to their community, liberty, education, and economic independence inside an oppressive society. Berlin does a good job at depicting the interaction between Blacks and Whites both free and enslaved. He offers a better understanding of the complex race relations that existed in the south. He gives one of the best accounts on record, of the wealth black people accumulated during slavery and 20 years after despite the pushback they faced.
The prize-winning classic volume by acclaimed historian Ira Berlin is now available in a handsome new edition, with a new preface by the author. It is a moving portrait of the quarter of a million free black men and women who lived in the South before the Civil War and describes the social and economic struggles that were part of life within this oppressive society. It is an essential work for both educators and general readers. Berlin's books have won many prizes and he is widely recognized as one of the leading scholars on slavery and African American life.
I'm a lifelong reader and wanted to study literature from an early age. I grew up in Indianapolis, one of the cities reshaped by the Great Black Migration. I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago and found myself once again in the urban Midwest. My research for Conjuring the Folkled me to discover a trove of short stories by George Wylie Henderson, a Black writer from Alabama who migrated to Harlem. I edited the stories and published them as Harlem Calling: The Collected Stories of George Wylie Henderson. I'm a contributor toAfrican American Review, the Journal of Modern Literature, and the Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration.
Caneis an experimental, modernist work combining poetry, fictional vignettes, and dramatic dialogue as it portrays Black life in the sugar cane fields of the South and in the urban neighborhoods of recent migrants. I first read Canewhile I was living in an apartment on the south side of Chicago, a destination for hundreds of thousands of Black migrants in the mid-twentieth century; the tracks of the Illinois Central railroad, their main transit route from the South, were just steps away from my home. The book drew my attention to the forces shaping my neighborhood, while it also led me to begin thinking about the connections between art and migration. It is a very lyrical and powerful book—and the subject of the second chapter of my book.
First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work-part drama, part poetry, part fiction-powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer's impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This iconic work of American literature is published with a new afterword by Rudolph Byrd of Emory University and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, who provide groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer, place his writing within the context of American…
