4 Books To Broaden Your Pride Month Reading List

There are a lot of Pride Month reading lists out there right now — and yes, you should absolutely read Giovanni's Room if you haven't already — but we wanted to go beyond the classics, and maybe find some new classics.

So we invited author Akwaeke Emezi to tell us about a few books they love that showcase voices you might not have heard before. But first, we asked them about their new book, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir.

"It's a story of a, you know, I thought, what would I like to teach if I did teach? And it wasn't, oh, this is how you structure a story or this is how you structure a novel. It was things like, this is how you finish a novel. It's not as simple as saying, you know, oh, you just force time every day and you sit down and do it. There's a lot more that comes up emotionally and psychologically to be able to finish a book. And so I try to create a balance with that in the memoir, and show while my career looks lovely and shiny on the surface, that these were the things I was dealing with behind the scenes. These were the real costs of being visible and being shiny and being prolific. And it was brutal."