James McBride

Writing Style

McBride writes with energy and humor that most literary fiction refuses to allow itself. The Good Lord Bird is loud, funny, historically devastating, and formally surprising, sometimes in the same paragraph. Readers who come to him through the Toni Morrison or Percival Everett pipeline are often caught off guard by how much fun his fiction is — and how much it costs them anyway. He's listed alongside Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Ta-Nehisi Coates as a contemporary Black author whose work is already canonical, and the National Book Award for The Good Lord Bird confirmed what readers had been saying.

Where to Start

The Good Lord Bird is the place — John Brown's abolitionist crusade filtered through a young enslaved boy who everyone mistakes for a girl, written with reckless energy and more genuine historical intelligence than most serious novels manage. The Color of Water is his memoir about his white Jewish mother and is a completely different register — quiet, personal, essential — and the two books together show his full range. Deacon King Kong is the option for readers who want the ensemble energy of The Good Lord Bird applied to 1960s Brooklyn.

Similar Authors

Percival Everett is the direct comparison for voice, formal confidence, and the willingness to be funny about things that aren't funny. For the memoir angle, Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me shares the same seriousness under the surface. Toni Morrison is the gravity that anchors all these writers; McBride is the one who makes you laugh before he breaks your heart.