Where to Start with Ta-Nehisi Coates: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Ta-Nehisi Coates — whether to begin with Between the World and Me, We Were Eight Years in Power, or The Water Dancer. A complete reading guide.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) is the American journalist, author, and essayist whose work for The Atlantic — particularly ‘The Case for Reparations’ (2014) — and whose book Between the World and Me (2015) made him one of the most important and most discussed voices in American public life in the 2010s. Between the World and Me won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction; his Atlantic essay ‘My President Was Black’ is widely considered one of the finest pieces of political journalism of the Obama era. Coates was also the writer of Marvel’s Black Panther comic series (2016–2018), which received extraordinary critical attention. His work addresses the history and current reality of anti-Black racism in America with a combination of lyrical precision and unflinching historical analysis.
Where to Start: Between the World and Me (2015)
The essential Coates — and one of the most important works of American non-fiction of the past decade. Written as a letter to his fifteen-year-old son Samori, Between the World and Me addresses what it means to inhabit a Black body in America: the specific history of the destruction of Black bodies as a political and economic act (slavery, lynching, mass incarceration), the present-day terror of police violence, and Coates’s own journey from the streets of Baltimore through Howard University to The Atlantic.
Coates writes in conscious dialogue with James Baldwin — the letter form, the son as addressee, the moral urgency, and the specific combination of love and dread that structures the argument all echo The Fire Next Time (1963). The influence is acknowledged and the conversation genuine: Coates’s America is Baldwin’s America, transformed by fifty years of particular history that makes some things better and others, he argues, structurally unchanged.
The central argument: that American prosperity has historically been built on the destruction of Black bodies, that this is not incidental but structural, and that the ‘Dream’ that white Americans imagine they are living — the suburban home, the safety, the accumulation — is built on a foundation that continues to require Black sacrifice. The argument is made with evidence, with personal testimony, and with literary force.
We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)
Coates’s collection of his major Atlantic essays from 2008 to 2016, each introduced with a new essay reflecting on its context and reception. The centrepiece is ‘The Case for Reparations’ — an 18,000-word argument for federal reparations for slavery and its aftermath, drawing on the specific history of Clyde Ross in Chicago to make concrete what is usually discussed in abstract. The other essays address Obama’s presidency, the Cosby controversy, the specific culture of Howard University, and the roots of the Trump presidency. The best introduction to Coates as a political journalist.
The Water Dancer (2019)
Coates’s debut novel — historical fantasy set in the antebellum South, following Hiram Walker, whose supernatural power of ‘Conduction’ (the ability to teleport through memory and water) makes him invaluable to the Underground Railroad. The novel is the most accessible of Coates’s books for readers who prefer narrative; the fantasy element is used to make the cultural and psychological reality of slavery visceral rather than to escape it. An Oprah’s Book Club selection; his most broadly commercially successful work.
Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates
Begin with Between the World and Me — it is Coates’s most fully realised work and the book most likely to make you want to read everything else he has written. We Were Eight Years in Power is the essential second read for the full range of his political journalism. The Water Dancer is the best option for readers who want Coates in narrative form.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Ta-Nehisi Coates?
Between the World and Me (2015) is the essential starting point — Coates's National Book Award-winning letter to his teenage son about what it means to be a Black man in America: the constant threat of physical violence from the state, the history of the destruction of the Black body as a political act, and Coates's own experience growing up in Baltimore. Written in the tradition of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, the book is simultaneously memoir, history, and moral argument. It sold over two million copies and became one of the most discussed works of American non-fiction of the decade.
What is We Were Eight Years in Power about?
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017) collects Coates's major Atlantic essays from the Obama era — including 'The Case for Reparations' (his most cited piece of journalism) and 'My President Was Black' — with new introductions for each essay reflecting on what it was like to write it and what has happened since. The collection is the best introduction to Coates's political journalism and to the range of his analysis: from reparations policy to the specific cultural meaning of Barack Obama's presidency.
What is The Water Dancer about?
The Water Dancer (2019) is Coates's debut novel — a historical fantasy set in antebellum Virginia, following Hiram Walker, the son of an enslaved woman and her enslaver, who discovers he has a supernatural power connected to memory and uses it in service of the Underground Railroad. The novel was an Oprah's Book Club selection and a New York Times bestseller; it is notable for using the conventions of fantasy (specifically a magic rooted in cultural memory) to address the historical reality of slavery. His most accessible book for readers who prefer narrative to essay.
How does Coates's non-fiction compare to his fiction?
Coates's non-fiction — particularly Between the World and Me and the Atlantic essays — is his most influential and most praised work; the directness of his argument and the force of his prose are most evident in the essay form. The Water Dancer is well-received as fiction but is generally considered less technically accomplished than his non-fiction; the fantasy elements are integrated but the novel is working harder to be a novel than his essays work to be essays. Between the World and Me remains the essential Coates; the essays in We Were Eight Years in Power are the best introduction to the full range of his political analysis.
