Fans pick 40 books like The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

The history of colonial and antebellum New York, in Harris’s hands, becomes a map of Black activism. This book moves beyond a history of slavery and abolition to offer a sweeping historical narrative of Black life in New York City, starting with the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1626 and culminating in the brutally violent draft riots of 1863. Harris works creatively with little-studied sources to chronicle how, even in the direst of circumstances, Black New Yorkers created vibrant communities. While Harris certainly depicts the obstacles that Black New Yorkers faced in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, she also showcases individual lives, marked by sharp ambition and myriad achievements. In this narrative, talented political operatives create national movements, argue with white abolitionists, and create institutions and traditions that influence racial politics to the present day. 

This middle-grade novel introduces us to a real place—the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York City—and invites us to imagine the historical children who lived there as freedom fighters. Those fights for freedom, it turns out, take place on the back of dinosaurs! While the surprising addition of dinosaur battles might seem like a diversion from the hard work of learning about slavery’s painful history, in Older’s hands, the dinos offer young readers a way to meditate on power and its abuses. Viewed in the context of a Black radical tradition that insists on alternate timescapes, Freedom Fire’s dinosaurs do not function as a bit of whimsical unreality that overwrites difficult historical truths. Instead, their discordant presence actually offers a space for readers—children and educators both—to better inhabit the surreal, disorienting history of enslavement and freedom in the United States.

You wouldn’t think anyone could unearth something new about New York City. But that’s what Carla Peterson did with this book. I first came across it while researching my own work. By focusing on her own family history, Peterson flipped the wagon on the perception that NYC’s African American population was mostly enslaved laborers. 

Reading this, I discovered an elite class of black entrepreneurs who worked tirelessly to end slavery in the state and gain the civil rights all other New Yorkers enjoyed. Thoroughly researched, the book reads with the ebbs and flows of a novel. Anyone writing future screenplays, novels, or streaming series about old New York must face Peterson’s stereotype-busting work. 

This beautifully written history focuses on another nineteenth-century Black New Yorker who defies expectations and deserves our attention. Like Educated for Freedom and Black Gotham, White’s story places us in historical moments surrounding the 1827 law ending slavery in New York State. White puts us on the vibrant, noisy, streets of the city, inviting us to see both hope and defiance in how Black people dressed, how they walked down the street, and what they did at the theater. At the center of this history emerges James Hewlett, a man whose life is worthy of at least one feature film, but has remained largely unknown outside of specialists in the field. Hewlett was a Black Shakespearean actor who insisted on his right to interpret Shakespeare for himself and for the community, even as white tastemakers sought to keep the bard’s words to themselves.

Salesses reminds us that “craft is a set of expectations,” and I love that he makes me question those expectations in fruitful ways. Jane Eyre does get to marry Rochester but at some cost. Salesses writes with warmth and wit about the western canon and about other literary traditions. I finished the book with a terrific reading list and new thoughts about my own writing and reading.

When I first came upon Sarah Shoemaker’s novel, I felt myself issuing a silent challenge: Can the author really inspire my sympathy for the gruff and tormented hero of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre? While I’d always loved the atmospheric moodiness of the novel and could empathize to a degree with Jane Eyre herself, Mr. Rochester’s dark, brooding, and secretive nature made me uneasy, and I wasn’t quick to find him as endearing as some other classic literary heroes. However, it was fascinating to be brought into the point of view of this particular Edward Fairfax Rochester! I appreciated experiencing the world of the novel as he might have perceived it and found the detailed background on his life to be an enjoyable addition.

This tale is the autobiographical account of a married man who, when his wife gets an especially nice promotion opportunity, agrees with her that it makes more sense for him to stay at home with their young girl child.

He takes his role and its responsibilities seriously. His story is mostly the story of what is involved being the domestic partner on a day-to-day basis, but braided into that is the specifically gendered experience of doing all that as a male person in this society.

The black-and-white images of Ralph Eugene Meatyard have long fascinated me and informed my visual work and writing. Meatyard was, by profession, an optician in Lexington, Kentucky, yet his personal passion was making photographs. His subjects were his wife, children, and family friends, who he often posed in murky settings as they wore masks and held dolls. These images are both disquieting and euphonious, tapping into something primal that hints at the secretive world of childhood.

This book unfolds in a compelling, nonlinear manner, and crosses genres. A combination of biography and family memoir and journalistic and scholarly research, it traces overlapping stories as the author sets out to discover why her great-grandmother traveled from India to America as a “coolie” at the start of the twentieth century and how this migration shaped future generations. Beautifully written, the book raises thorny issues around gender, race, and nationality, offering insight into the wider journeys of Indian contract laborers to the Caribbean and beyond.

After I quit my law firm and was trying to decide what (if anything) I wanted to write, I read Kushiel’s Dart. This book convinced me that whatever stories I wanted to tell, no matter how extreme, I could tell them within science fiction/fantasy. And it really puts the “alternate” in alternate history.

During the Roman Empire, angels came to earth and mated with mortals in the area of modern France, again producing a race like the biblical Nephilim, only sexier, and with one commandment: “Love as thou wilt.” In this Europe that never knew a dark age, the angels’ descendants pursue love, power, and intrigue, and at the center of their plots is Phèdre, a courtesan spy fighting to save her land from betrayal.

Shocking and wonderful stuff!