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Best literature from female and/or african american authors?


Mormont'sRaven

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Pretty straightforward, really.



I looked at my bookshelf and realized it was embarrassingly white and male!



Even worse, I don't know many female writers outside of like Virgina Wolfe and Emily Dickinson. And I don't think I can name a single African American female author not named Roxanne Gay.



So, can you give me some recommendations.



They don't have to all be black and female. Some can be female. Some can be just black.



Thanks!


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Well for female African American authors the obvious name is Toni Morrison.



For other female authors try, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Louise Erdrich, Elfriede Jelinek, Arundhati Roy, Deborah Levy, Herta Muller, Christa Wolf, Laura Restrepo, Angela Carter, Simone De Beauvoir...



For black authors there's Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston (also female), Ben Okri, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (also female), Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe, Nuruddin Farah...


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Nnedi Okorafor. Who Fears Death is absolutely superb, one of my favourite books of the last few years. And she's both black and female!

Lauren Beukes is white but she is from South Africa and consequently her first two books (Moxyland and Zoo City) give a distinctly non-American take on SF and urban fantasy, respectively. Both are great. Her more recent two are based in America and are on the face of it more standard supernatural-serial-killer stuff, but Broken Monsters in particular is also excellent.

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Regarding Leicht, isn't Nightshade back in business though? I thought they still had the rights to everything they had before the resurrection.

Not sure of the legalities, but I definitely got the impression from somewhere, could have been Leicht's blog, that the series was unlikely to be finished. We live in hope, however.

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I don't think she's been mentioned yet, Ursula K Le Guin just won the national book award.

That we are this far in before a mention of Le Guin is a bit startling to me. For more classic literature by a woman try Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), especially Middlemarch, the Bronte sisters, and such.

For an African American author within the genre, try Samuel Delaney:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Samuel_R._Delany

For another African - American woman author, how about the poet Nikki Giovanni? She can be quite witty, I should note: consider her "Kidnap Poem": "Have you ever been Kidnapped by a Poet?". (Okay, I'll.post that to the poetry thread :)

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Ursula Le Guin, Elizabeth Moon, C.L. Moore, Lois McMaster Bujold, James Tiptree Jr, CJ Cherryh, Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, Mary Stewart, Connie Willis, Mary Renault are all female writers who have made huge impact on the genre.



Hugo awards, Nebula awards, they have won them all and had awards named after them, and your local library and bookstore will definitely be stocked with most of these authors' works.



Ursula K. Le Guin



Elizabeth Moon



C. L. Moore



Lois McMaster Bujold



James Tiptree, Jr.



C. J. Cherryh



Andre Norton



Leigh Brackett



Mary Stewart



Connie Willis



Mary Renault


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