Literary fiction · Similar reads

Books like James

James by Percival Everett is about race and power, language and freedom, identity and performance. If that's what drew you in, here are 6 books that share its DNA — each summarized on Superbook, and ready to chat with in the app.

  1. Beloved
    Beloved

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    Beloved

    Toni Morrison · Literary fiction

    Beloved is set in post-Civil War Ohio, where Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, lives with her daughter Denver in a house shadowed by the ghost of a baby she killed rather than let be taken back into slavery.

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  2. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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    Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

    Mark Twain · Literary fiction

    Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins where Tom Sawyer left off — Huck Finn, the outcast son of the town drunk, has been taken in and given a respectable life he doesn't want.

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  3. Twelve Years a Slave
    Twelve Years a Slave

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    Twelve Years a Slave

    Solomon Northup · Memoir

    Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853, is the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped in 1841, sold into slavery in Louisiana, and held for twelve years before recovering his freedom.

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  4. Their Eyes Were Watching God
    Their Eyes Were Watching God

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    Their Eyes Were Watching God

    Zora Neale Hurston · Literary fiction

    Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel follows Janie Crawford across three marriages and several decades of life in the American South, from her grandmother's home in West Florida through the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, to the Everglades and back.

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  5. Between the World and Me
    Between the World and Me

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    Between the World and Me

    Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

    Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

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  6. A Farewell to Arms
    A Farewell to Arms

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    A Farewell to Arms

    Ernest Hemingway · Literary fiction

    A Farewell to Arms is set during the First World War in northern Italy and follows Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps, who falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse.

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