18 epic books starring magical Black characters

It’s an empirical fact that crowns, fairies, and Afros go together. These books — which draw on the countless mythologies and imaginative traditions of African and Black diaspora peoples — prove it.

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Little Labors by Rivka Galchen

Credit: @splitrockbks

My local used bookstore, Topos Bookstore & Cafe, recently opened for limited, distanced browsing and it has been a godsend. It's rare that I'm able to make time to read books that aren't brand spanking new, but every now and then there's nothing better than walking through a used bookstore looking for anything that catches your eye. When I spotted Rivka Galchen's pocket-sized book (just under 150 pages) full of brief observations about mothers and children in literature, mixed with her own experiences as a new mother, I knew there was no way I was leaving the store without it.

Galchen's descriptions of her early days with her daughter (whom she refers to as "the puma") are more relatable than anything I've read in the 19 months since my first child was born. She writes about her naïveté leading up to the birth, and beautifully encapsulates the contradictions of that first year — the experience of this new person as somehow equally foreign and innately knowable. "I had imagined that I was going to meet, at birth, a very sophisticated form of plant life," Galchen writes. "I would look forward to getting to know the life-form properly later, when she had moved into a sentient kingdom, maybe around age three. But instead, within hours of being born, the being [...] appeared to me not like a plant at all, but instead like something much more powerfully moving than just another human being, she had appeared as an animal, a previously undiscovered old-world monkey, but one with whom I could communicate deeply: It was an unsettling, intoxicating, against-nature feeling." And yet, she notes, this rich, complicated, fraught experience is largely absent in classic literature.

This is, thankfully, changing; in just the past five or so years I've been thrilled to read novels about new(ish) mothers like Lydia Kiesling's The Golden State, Ashley Audrain's The Push, Diane Cook's The New Wilderness, Helen Phillips' The Need, and Elisa Albert's After Birth — all of which tell brutally honest stories ranging from irreverent to ambivalent to disturbing, complicating the narrative of the blissful new mother experiencing a love unlike any other. Not to mention the recent spate of wonderful motherhood memoirs, of which Little Labors is now one of my favorites. I'm sure I'll be revisiting it. Get your copy. —Arianna Rebolini

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