Here are 100 books that True to the Game fans have personally recommended if you like
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I live by the Atlantic Ocean, so the thoughts of floods are never far away, especially as the seas are warming through human-caused climate change. I wrote about storms and floods in my novel Float and, more recently, in my new novel listed below. I did a lot of research on flooding for both, and I am constantly amazed by the power of the natural world, particularly one out of balance as it is now. My passion and purpose is to bring the dangers of this imbalance to my readers. Even if you have never been in a flood before, fiction allows you to know what it feels like.
Everyone should read this book right now which features hurricanes and flooding in Florida. The flood scene in this book still stays with me, years after I read it. The waters are not just terrifying, but contain horrors such as a rabid dog clinging to a piece of debris.
That scene still keeps me up at night, and I think about it often now with all the flooding in the south. Itās not just the water, itās whatās in the water.
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 pieceā¦
Iām 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 was given to me as a gift, and the lessons it taught me as I read those ancient pages.
It had me clutching my pearls, and it disgusted me at other parts, but at the same time, I wanted/needed to read that book in order to write a book in that style.
The classic French erotic bestseller that preceded Fifty Shades of Grey
A beautiful young French woman, known only as 'O', is taken by her lover Rene to a splendid mansion near Paris. Here, she is initiated into an elite secret society, where she must learn to serve the sexual fantasies of Rene and his fellow members. But she must also explore the nature of her own darkest desires - and confront just how far she is willing to go for love...
Iām 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.
Another great read of my teens that had me looking for real versions of the people described in this book, aka I wished I lived in this book!
It was like an action-packed movie; all the details of the story came to life in my head at the time I read it. Books like this one made me wish I could tell stories like this.
In a stunning first novel, renowned hip-hop artist, writer and activist Sister Souljah brings the streets of New York to life with a powerful and utterly unforgettable tale. Ghetto-born, Winter is the young, wealthy daughter of a prominent Brooklyn drug-dealing family. Quick-witted, sexy, business minded and fashionable, Winter knows no restrictions. No one can control her. She's nobody's victim. Winter knows the Brooklyn streets like she knows the curves of her own body. She manoeuvres skilfully, applying all she has learned to come out on top, no matter how dramatically the scenes change. But a cold winter wind is aboutā¦
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: āAre his love songs closer to heaven than dying?ā Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard itā¦
Iām 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.
I loved this bookās story flow; the realism and the grit of it gave me chills. I absolutely love books that make me feel something, that give me something to walk away with.
The characters in this book make you see the story being told in your mind, and with every twist, you feel them all.
I studied French language and literature from the time I was 13 until I graduated from college. Alongside that work, I also became more interested in African American literary and artistic histories, so I studied that as well. I realized there was a lot of overlap as many Black American artists would flee to Europe to āescapeā American racism. Learning more about these historical writers throughout my graduate school journey made me very interested in researching further and writing my own take on the subject for young people.
I love this book because it gives you all the juicy stories and details about Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance. Their relationships with each other were all so messy and complicated, and I love learning about my favorite artists and writers who have inspired me as people who were deeply imperfect rather than untouchable, saint-like literary figures who could not be critiqued. It helped me see this as more human.
"A major study...one that thorougly interweaves the philosophies and fads, the people and movements that combined to give a small segment of Afro America a brief place in the sun."ĀThe New York Times Book Review.
Father-daughter relationships have always fascinated me. I wrote my first book to explore what it might be like for a girl to have a father with whom communication is, if not easy, possible. Although my own father was around when I was growing up, he was a distant figure. A mechanical engineer, he lost himself in ruminations on machines and mathematics and was made still more distant by his alcoholism. As a kid, I tried to glean from books what having a āregularā father might be like. I still havenāt figured it out, but I love seeing other authors capture the formative effects of this particular parental relationship.
It can be difficult for kids to see their parents as real people, and thatās why I loveSome Places More Than Others. When Amara finally convinces her parents she should get to go on a trip with her dad to New York Cityās Harlem to meet the grandfather sheās only spoken to on the phone, she uncovers the fact that her dad and her grandfather havenāt spoken in twelve years. I love the depiction of Amaraās father as a person in his own right, someone with a history and his own problems and how, as Amara slowly unravels the mysteries of her fatherās past, she begins to understand herself better too.
All Amara wants for her birthday is to visit her father's family in New York City--Harlem, to be exact. She can't wait to finally meet her Grandpa Earl and cousins in person, and to stay in the brownstone where her father grew up. Maybe this will help her understand her family--and herself--in new way.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan. The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced, it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run theā¦
We grew up in predominantly white communities and came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. As academics, we focused on issues of race in our research and teaching. Yet, despite our reading and writing about race, we still hadnāt made a connection to our own lives and how our white privilege shielded us and made us complicit in perpetuating racial inequities. We didnāt fully see our role in white supremacy until we adopted our sons. Becoming an interracial family and parenting Black sons taught us about white privilege and the myriad ways that Blacks confront racism in education, criminal justice, health care, and simply living day-to-day.
Although presented as a novel, this book is a memoir of Brownās life growing up as a Black boy in Harlem in the 1940s and 50s amid poverty, violence, and addiction.
Marlene was in Paris in the summer of 1969 when a young white American man gave her a book to read. Brownās story smacked me in the face. He lived in an America that was foreign to meāpoverty, addiction, violence, incarceration. His experiences growing up on the streets of Harlem were so different from mine in suburban New Jersey.
What I remember most is my wonder at Brownās description of āconkingā his hairāstraightening it with chemical relaxers that damaged his hair and burned his scalp. His description has stayed with me for all these years as a reminder of how little I knew and know about the lives of Blacks and their position in a white world.
This thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem of everyday life for the first generation African American raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s.
While one-off stories are fantastic, I love that children's series lets readers return to trusted characters. Series allow children to see a wider arc of character development and decision-makingāoften imperfect and in transitionāwhen they are trying to figure out how to identify and connect with the world themselves. That shared experience over time is why I only write series myselfāto let kids evolve alongside their favorite characters.
Five siblings work and grow together to confront one catastrophe after another and keep their way family and community together.
The siblingsāIsa, Jessie, Oliver, Hyacinth, and Laneyāare written with winning characterization that makes readers feel like they are one of the family. The heart is enormous in this one!
The Vanderbeekers have always lived in the brownstone on 141st Street. It's practically another member of the family. So when their reclusive, curmudgeonly landlord decides not to renew their lease, the five siblings have eleven days to do whatever it takes to stay in their beloved home and convince the dreaded Beiderman just how wonderful they are. And all is fair in love and war when it comes to keeping their home.
Thomasās memoir is a seminal text of Nuyorican Literature (a sub-genre of Diasporican Literature) and the Latinx canon. It also belongs to the urban literature genre that emerged in the 1960s. His, however, was the first Latinx version of a narrative that depicts, some would say sensationalizes and exploits, the gritty, raw life of the inner city. As such, it had a tremendous impact on developing Latinx writers who had few role models at the time. His work, along with others of that genre, still holds influence stylistically and thematically with some Latinx authors. Written in the traditional Augustinian autobiographical model, Mean Streets tracks Piriās fall into crime and drugs and final transformation and redemption. More significantly, this memoir introduces the issue of Latinx black identity and the complication of it within the American black-white paradigm.
A modern classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendenceāand a lyrical memoir of coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem.
"A report from the guts and heart of a submerged population group ... It claims our attention and emotional response." āThe New York Times Book Review
Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating memoir. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations ofā¦
Youāre grieving, youāre falling in love and youāre skint. On top of it all, Europeās going to Hell in a handcart. Things canāt get any worse, can they?
London, 1938. William is grieving over his former teacher and mentor, killed fighting for the Republicans in Spain. As Europe slides towardsā¦
If there's a throughline in all my books, it occurs to me I've always been writing about the dangers of extremism, the times when we get sucked too deeply into ideologies that lead to dangerous action. So this most recent novel felt like an ideal time to take that head-on: to see what would happen within a sect of Kabbalists, led by a self-proclaimed prophet, when things went bad. With that in mind... here's a bunch of books focused around prophecy!
This novel may be my favorite book of the 1970s and a woefully underappreciated deep satire not just of its moment, but of ours as well. I think about the mere fact of museums being renamed "centers of art detention" once a day or so, and I haven't reread the book in a decade.
New in 2023, the 50th anniversary edition of the classic, freewheeling novel by one of the most iconic satirists of our timeānow with a new introduction by the author.
āPart vision, part satire, part farceā¦ A wholly original, unholy cross between the craft of fiction and witchcraft.ā āThe New York Times
It is the 1920s in New York City and an epidemic known as Jes Grew is sweeping the nationāa dancing plague, irresistible, joyful, and undeniably Black. Naturally, the powers-that-be are having none of it. A repressive conspiracy is operating in the shadows, and it is dead set on squelchingā¦