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4.0 

The Fire This Time

By Jesmyn Ward
The Fire This Time by Jesmyn Ward digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

The New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race—collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation—are “thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify” (USA TODAY).

In this bestselling, widely lauded collection, Jesmyn Ward gathers our most original thinkers and writers to speak on contemporary racism and race, including Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Young, Claudia Rankine, and Honoree Jeffers. “An absolutely indispensable anthology” (Booklist, starred review), The Fire This Time shines a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestles with our current predicament, and imagines a better future.

Envisioned as a response to The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin’s groundbreaking 1963 essay collection, these contemporary writers reflect on the past, present, and future of race in America. We’ve made significant progress in the fifty-odd years since Baldwin’s essays were published, but America is a long and painful distance away from a “post-racial society”—a truth we must confront if we are to continue to work towards change. Baldwin’s “fire next time” is now upon us, and it needs to be talked about; The Fire This Time “seeks to place the shock of our own times into historical context and, most importantly, to move these times forward” (Vogue).

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471 Reviews

4.0
“I’m new to essays, but I really enjoyed this book! Clint Smith and Isabel Wilkerson are two among other amazing voices in this book. Blacker Than You by Kevin Young is hilarious and thought provoking. Overall a great continuation of Baldwin’s novel. Jesmyn Ward and Imani Perry are speaking in MS later this month. I am so excited!!!!!”
“Essential reading.”
Thinking Face“Last year I read three of Ward’s novels and fell in love with her style of writing. This year, I made it a goal to read some of her non-fictional work as well. To start off with The Fire This Time was a wise choice and my experience was elevated by the fact that this is a collection of work from several authors in Black literature. The way the collection is constructed in three parts stuck out and helps demonstrate the collective identities. I would highly recommend this book.”

About Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the historic winner—first woman and first Black American—of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.

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