Namara Smith Books editor

On November 10, 1898, armed white supremacists took over the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, killing an unknown number of Black townspeople and ousting the multiracial, democratically elected municipal government—an act that is thought to be the only successful coup on American soil. The massacre devastated Wilmington’s flourishing Black middle class and sent a message of impunity to white vigilantes nationwide. Lauren Collins, a staff writer who grew up in Wilmington, writes about that day and its aftermath in her new book, “They Stole a City” (excerpted in The New Yorker), a multigenerational history that follows four families with members who were present at the massacre. I recently asked Collins which books she would recommend, from among those that she drew on to write hers. Her answers are below.

“The Warmth of Other Suns,” by Isabel Wilkerson
I read Wilkerson’s game-changing chronicle of the Great Migration—which follows three Black Southerners on their journeys to Chicago, Harlem, and Los Angeles—over and over again while I was working on “They Stole a City.” I had to know how she did it. Then I found an interview with Wilkerson in which she compared her book’s overlapping structure to Robert Altman’s kaleidoscopic films. Like him, she wove the individual stories of each protagonist together. I did the same for the Wilmington families—two white families who perpetrated the violence of 1898, two Black families who came through it—whom I write about in my book.

“How the Word Is Passed,” by Clint Smith
Smith’s history, a brilliant study of the way that the legacy of slavery is expressed through its physical sites, reminded me to pay attention to the places that shaped the Wilmington coup and massacre. I examine, for example, the Bellamy Mansion, a ten-thousand-square-foot Greek Revival and Italianate residence finished in 1861 by the socially ambitious, politically extremist John Dillard Bellamy. From its origins as a “secesh house”—a house for slavery and by slavery, its fourteen Corinthian columns shouting Southern nationalism—to its later incarnations as a mini-mall and a museum, the mansion articulates the ideals and fortunes of the family as clearly as any document. In my book, I write about how, in the nineteen-thirties, an octogenarian Ellen Bellamy—a literal Confederate in an attic, navigating a few upper-floor rooms in a high-backed wicker wheelchair—used it as a sort of Pompeii of the Lost Cause.

“Built from the Fire,” by Victor Luckerson
Luckerson’s epic exploration of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—encompassing but not limited to the 1921 massacre in which white supremacists murdered hundreds of Black people and incinerated America’s “Black Wall Street”—is important for many reasons, but I’m particularly grateful for its sweeping perspective. The book examines the long lead-up to the violence, continuing all the way through to the event’s reverberations in the present, as a few living survivors and many descendants battle for the reparations they so clearly are due. I took a similar longitudinal, multigenerational approach in “They Stole a City,” expanding the timeline from 1898 into the past and the future, and focussing on families rather than on individual players. November 10, 1898, I argue, is a centuries-long day that isn’t over yet.

Daylight Come

By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Penguin Press)

This biography of Harry Belafonte, who died in 2023, paints the singer and civil-rights activist as “our first post-racial pop star.” In his music, Belafonte sought to honor his Caribbean heritage—he was born in Harlem to Jamaican parents in 1927—without being reduced to a mere exotic persona. Throughout his career, he merged his work as an entertainer with his political convictions (he refused to perform in segregated venues, for instance), a pursuit that required him to square his fame “with his anger at the society that gave it to him.” Jelly-Schapiro draws on a range of sources, including conversations with Belafonte, presenting a portrait of a formidable figure who, as Belafonte’s son puts it, “was serving two families: us and the family of Man.”

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Scavenging Beauty

By Angelica Glass (Riverhead)

Memories of a childhood marked by economic hardship and abuse intertwine with the natural world in this graceful début memoir, which is structured around the author’s seven-year project of walking every street in Santa Cruz County, in California. Glass, a former child-welfare social worker, writes with quiet precision about growing up as one of eight children with a mother whose love often turned into violence, and a father whose failures cast an equally enduring shadow. Encounters with shifting coastlines, towering redwoods, and mycelial networks spark meditations on inheritance, resilience, and the work of remaking a life.

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Dooneen

By Keith Ridgway (New Directions)

This strange, ambitious novel is set in a version of Dublin where cars have been banned and people enter the country by teleportation. Bartholomew Port, an Irish writer living in London, returns to his homeland to participate in a literary festival, and arrives on the eve of a populist uprising. Dublin, he observes, has become a machine “for enriching the rich” and “impoverishing the poor,” a place where “life is not as important as money.” As Port falls in with a group of conspirators preparing for the insurrection, the book takes on a hallucinatory, digressive quality, blurring the lines between life and death, reality and illusion. Ultimately, Ridgway asks what responsibility bystanders must take for the injustices around them.

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Queen Mab

By Emily McBride (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Madeleine is a “promising” twenty-three-year-old graduate student who decides, to the shock of other academic women in her life, to have a baby. (“They all say congrats, by the way, and better you than them,” one colleague says.) The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale horror of early motherhood, which McBride, a translator based in Barcelona, strews with literary Easter eggs from folktales and Victorian poetry. Is the baby really a baby, or has it been replaced by a changeling? Is Madeleine still herself, or has she been stolen away, too? Can her husband be trusted? The result is an agile, unsettling novel about the unwinding of a mind, set in a world of women who view motherhood as a curious affectation.

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Coming soon:

• Chang-rae Lee’s “A Tender Age,” about a young Korean American boy growing up in Westchester County in the nineteen-seventies, is publishing on August 11th.
• Also out on the 11th is Richard Russo’s “Under the Falls,” which tells the story of a musician returning to his tight-knit hometown after eighteen years away.

Everybody’s talking about:

• With the new Anthony Bourdain biopic, “Tony,” coming on Friday, now is the perfect time to pick up “Kitchen Confidential,” which grew from a story published in The New Yorker in 1999.
• “Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent,” by Eve Babitz, is making the book-club rounds. Her 1979 novel, “Sex and Rage,” appeared in our Briefly Noted section that year.
• Cat Marnell has announced her next book: a novel called “The Bored and the Beautiful.” It will be out in early February. In the meantime, read Naomi Fry’s review of her memoir, “How to Murder Your Life.”

P.S. Check out Namara’s three favorite books of the year so far. 📚