On Morrison, by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth). This collection of essays, by a novelist and literary scholar, considers the writer Toni Morrison’s varied body of work. Serpell homes in on its challenging qualities—including its unique orchestration of voice, unconventional chronologies, and layered metaphors—unearthing fresh insights about Morrison’s themes and craft. In a close reading of Morrison’s famed story “Recitatif,” for example, Serpell examines the ways that “race, often relegated to a visual regime, fundamentally works through language.” Enriching her research with letters, draft manuscripts, and other sources, Serpell captures Morrison’s “masterful difficulty” without sanding down its edges.
Scale Boy, by Patrice Nganang (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this unhurried, lyrical memoir, a novelist remembers his youth in Cameroon in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Anchored by Nganang’s years as a “scale boy”—weighing people and products for a small fee—the narrative wends through anecdotes that depict a young man discovering his artistic and intellectual powers along with his nation’s colonial history. Reflecting on the meaning of the scale as an object, Nganang draws an ominous historical line from the present to the past, noting that “the scale was the very last instrument Black people stepped onto before boarding the slave ships, before entering the soul-wrenching and dreaded institution of their despair.”