Negroland

Praise

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award • A New York Times Notable Book

“Brave. . . . Revelatory. . . . Recall[s] a number of America’s greatest thinkers on race . . . James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Powerful. . . . Margo Jefferson identifies and deftly explores the tensions that come with being party of America’s black elite.” —Roxane Gay, O, The Oprah Magazine

“Jefferson is a national treasure and her memoir should be required reading across the country.” —Vanity Fair

“Intricate and moving. . . . Powerful.” —The New York Times

“Enlightening. . . . Poetic and bracing.” —The Washington Post

“[A] masterpiece. . . . A phenomenal study-cum-memoir about the black bourgeoisie.” —Hilton Als, author of White Girls

“A veritable library of African-American letters and a sumptious compendium of elegant style. . . . [Jefferson] paints her rich inner and outer landscape with deft, impressionistic strokes.” —The Boston Globe

“Provocative and insightful. . . . Melancholic and hopeful, raw and disarming. . . . A moving memoir that is an act of courage in its vulnerability.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns

“Poignant. . . . Harrowing. . . . In Negroland, Jefferson is simultaneously looking in and looking out at her blackness, elusive in her terse, evocative reconnaissance, leaving us yearning to know more.” —Los Angeles Times

“Jefferson combines memoir with cultural critique in a series of unsparing vignettes.” —The New Yorker

“Provocative and extraordinary. . . . Haunting.” —Time 

“Lyrical. . . . Vibrant and damning. . . . Dares to throw a wrench—class—into our tortured debates about race.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Razor sharp, self-lacerating and singular.” —More

“A candid observer, Jefferson articulates the complicated and calculated performance of upper-class black life.” —New York

“Brilliantly written. . . . Not reading this remarkable, indeed unique book, would be an immense mistake. . . . One of the great books published this year.” —Buffalo News

“Truly indispensable.” —Flavorwire

“A nuanced meditation from a life lived in the upper echelons of Chicago’s black bourgeoisie, beginning before the civil-rights era and trailing off in our still-conflicted present.” —Vulture

“Beautiful. . . . Artfully self-aware. . . . Jefferson succeeds at something remarkable: she tells her story while at the same time not only evocatively capturing her era but situating her experiences into a centuries-long cultural tradition.” —Bookslut

“Shines a spotlight on a fascinating slice of the American experience of which many people are barely aware.” —Tampa Bay Times

“Filled with incisive commentary and unexpected observations, all of it delivered with a sly wit and in crystalline prose.” —PopMatters

“Marvelous, complex, stimulating and thought-provoking.” —Geoff Dyer, author of White Sands

“A beautiful scorcher of a book, essential reading.” —Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist’s Daughter

“Elegantly pithy and violent. In the fissures between and among items, she revolts. Her words are ascetic. She doesn’t want me to envy her life, the fullness of which is only hinted at. She wants me to leave her alone to live within this sentence of her mother’s: ‘Sometimes I almost forget I’m a Negro.’” —David Shields, author of Salinger

“A great book, destined to be read for a century.” —Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Life

“Reads with the blast force of a prose poem.” —BookPage