Books like 'Coffee Will Make You Black'
Readers who enjoyed Coffee Will Make You Black by April Sinclair also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical 20th century historical-fiction lgbtq coming-of-age poc-mc wlw realistic humor social-commentary
-
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsWoman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction realistic social-commentary wlw -
Boy Underground by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsDuring WWII, a teenage boy finds his voice, the courage of his convictions, and friends for life in an emotional and uplifting novel by the New York Times and #1 Amazon Charts bestselling author.1941. Steven Katz is the son of prosperous landowners in rural California. Although his parents don’t approve, he’s found true friends in Nick, Suki, and Ollie, sons of field workers...Categorized as:
coming-of-age friendship historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction realistic 20th-century audiobook -
Collected Poems by Federico García Lorca
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA revised edition of this major writer's complete poetical work"And I who was walkingwith the earth at my waist,saw two snowy eaglesand a naked girl.The one was the otherand the girl was neither."--from "Qasida of the Dark Doves"Federico García Lorca is the greatest poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world's most influential modernist writers... -
The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes
Rated: 4.44 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsOne of his best-known works, Hughes wrote The Ways of White Folks while living in Carmel, California. In it, he shares acrid and poignant stories of blacks colliding--sometimes humorously, but often tragically--with whites throughout the 1920s and 1930s...Categorized as:
black-mc classics historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc social-commentary 20th-century adult -
-
Recitatif by Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA beautiful, arresting short story by Toni Morrison--the only one she ever wrote--about race and the relationships that shape us through life, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in the St. Bonaventure shelter...Categorized as:
black-mc classics coming-of-age friendship historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc realistic -
The Spoon Stealer by Lesley Crewe
Rated: 4.39 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsBorn into a basket of clean sheets—ruining a perfectly good load of laundry—Emmeline never quite fit in on her family's rural Nova Scotian farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic humor friendship fiction historical family -
Life With Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIt is old Bertie Wooster's habit to land in the soup from time to time. To get into a spot of bother. Circumstances, aided and abetted by Aunt Agatha, Aunt Dahlia, Bingo Little, Tuppy, Sippy and others, seem to conspire against him, and a frightful muddle ensues.Enter Jeeves, the source of all solace. Jeeves of the infinite sagacity...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction realistic 20th-century adult anthologies -
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 31 ratingsIn this honest and stunning novel, James Baldwin has given America a moving story of love in the face of injustice. Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned...Categorized as:
black-mc classics coming-of-age historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction poc-mc realistic -
The Selected Poems by Federico García Lorca
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThe Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca has introduced generations of readers to mesmerizing poetry since 1955. Lorca (1898-1937) is admired all over the world for the lyricism, immediacy and clarity of his poetry, as well as for his ability to encompass techniques of the symbolist movement with deeper psychological shadings. But Lorca's poems are, most of all, admired for their beauty... -
A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFirst published in 1956, this much sought-after autobiographical recollection of Truman Capote's rural Alabama boyhood has become a modern-day classic. We are proud to be reprinting this warm and delicately illustrated edition of A Christmas Memory--"a tiny gem of a holiday story" (School Library Journal, starred review)...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age friendship historical-fiction humor lgbtq literary-fiction realistic -
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAt the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage...Categorized as:
black-mc classics coming-of-age historical-fiction humor lgbtq literary-fiction poc-mc -
Body and Soul by Frank Conroy
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn the dim light of a basement apartment, six-year-old Claude Rawlings sits at an old white piano, picking out the sounds he has heard on the radio and shutting out the reality of his lonely world.The setting is 1940s New York, a city that is "long gone, replaced by another city of the same name...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic 20th-century book drama -
Run with the Horsemen by Ferrol Sams
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsPorter Osborne Jr. is a precocious, sensitive, and rambunctious boy trying to make it through adolescence during the depression years. On a red-clay farm in Georgia he learns all there is to know about cotton chopping, hog killing, watermelon thumping, and mule handling. School provides a quick course in practical joking, schoolboy crushes, athletic glory, and clandestine sex...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century animals anthologies -
All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor
Rated: 4.23 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsIt's the turn of the century in New York's Lower East Side and a sense of adventure and excitement abounds for five young sisters - Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte and Gertie. Follow along as they search for hidden buttons while dusting Mama's front parlor, or explore the basement warehouse of Papa's peddler's shop on rainy days...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age historical-fiction humor literary-fiction poc-mc realistic urban -
-
A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, & The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsTaking its place next to Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood on the Modern Library bookshelf is this new and original edition of Capote's most famous short stories: "A Christmas Memory, " "One Christmas, " and "The Thanksgiving Visitor." All three stories are distinguished by Capote's delicate interplay of childhood sensibility and recollective vision, evoking a strong sense of place...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age friendship historical-fiction humor lgbtq literary-fiction 20th-century -
Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain / Giovanni’s Room / Another Country / Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
Rated: 4.40 of 5 stars · 10 ratings“The civil rights struggle,” said The New York Times Book Review, “found eloquent expression in [Baldwin’s] novels. His historical importance is indisputable.” Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence... -
Collected Short Stories: Volume 2 by W. Somerset Maugham
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis final classic collection reveals Somerset Maugham's unique talent for exposing and exploring the bitter realities of human relationships in tales of love, infidelity, passion and prejudice. The stories range from "The Lotus Eater" where a man envisions a life of bliss in the Mediterranean, to the astringent tales of "The Outstation" and "The Back of Beyond" in Malaya and South East Asia...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies fiction historical -
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA timeless classic of sleazy London life in the 1930s, a world of streets full of cruelty and kindness, comedy and pathos, where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars... -
Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsFortress Besieged is a classic of world literature, a masterpiece of parodic fiction that plays with Western literary traditions, philosophy and middle class Chinese society in the Republican era. The title is taken from an old French proverb, "Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out"... -
A Foreign Woman by Sergei Dovlatov, Antonina W. Bouis
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAfter leaving the Soviet Union following a series of unsatisfying relationships, Marusya Tatarovich quickly becomes the center of the Russian community in Queens, New York, but finds that it mirrors in many ways the community she left...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction urban 20th-century adult audiobook -
The Garden of the Departed Cats by Bilge Karasu
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsIn an ancient Mediterranean city, a tradition is maintained: every ten years an archaic game of human chess is staged, the players (visitors versus locals) bearing weapons. This archaic game, the central event of The Garden of the Departed Cats, may prove as fatal as the deadly attraction our narrator feels for the local man who is the Vizier, or Captain, of the home team...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction 20th-century adult book fiction historical -
The Lies They Told by Ellen Marie Wiseman
Rated: 4.39 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn rural 1930s Virginia, a young immigrant mother fights for her dignity and those she loves against America’s rising eugenics movement – when widespread support for policies of prejudice drove imprisonment and forced sterilizations based on class, race, disability, education, and country of origin – in this tragic and uplifting novel of social injustice, survival, and hope for readers of Susan... -
When You Call My Name by Tucker Shaw
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsTucker Shaw’s When You Call My Name is a heartrending novel about two gay teens coming of age in New York City in 1990 at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Named "this summer's most powerful LGBTQ+ novel" by GAY TIMES, this book is perfect for fans of Adam Silvera and Mary H. K. Choi.Film fanatic Adam is seventeen and being asked out on his first date—and the guy is cute...Categorized as:
lgbtq historical-fiction coming-of-age realistic friendship romance young-adult historical -
Madame by Antoni Libera
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe comic "sentimental education" of a schoolboy who falls in love with his French teacher. Madame is an unexpected gem: a novel about Poland during the grim years of Soviet-controlled mediocrity, which nonetheless sparkles with light and warmth...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book -
-
Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn a poor town in Kansas, an African American family struggles. At its centre sits Sandy Rodgers - a young boy attempting to find purpose amid the chaos, meagreness and music of his surroundings...Categorized as:
black-mc classics coming-of-age historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction poc-mc social-commentary -
The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel by Isaac Babel
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFollowing the historic publication of Norton's The Complete Works of Isaac Babel in the fall of 2001, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel appears as the most authoritative and complete edition of his fiction ever published in paperback...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies fiction -
The Gift of the Magi and Other Short Stories by O. Henry
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsHere are sixteen of the best stories by one of America's most popular storytellers. For nearly a century, the work of O. Henry has delighted readers with its humor, irony and colorful, real-life settings. The writer's own life had more than a touch of color and irony...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century anthologies audiobook drama -
Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe central volume in Ivan Doig's acclaimed Montana trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is an authentic saga of the American experience at the turn of this century and a passionate, portrayal of the immigrants who dared to try new lives in the imposing Rocky Mountains...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age friendship historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook -
Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
Rated: 4.40 of 5 stars · 15 ratingsThe stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work...Categorized as:
black-mc classics friendship lgbtq literary-fiction poc-mc realistic social-commentary -
Where the Rivers Merge by Mary Alice Monroe
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 16 ratings"This is book club fiction at its finest!" —Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times bestselling author From New York Times bestselling author Mary Alice Monroe comes her highly anticipated Where the Rivers Merge, the first of two epic and triumphant novels celebrating one intrepid woman's life across multiple generations in the American South... -
Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThis landmark novella—one of the central texts of Mexican literature, is eerily relevant to our current dark times—offers a child’s-eye view of a society beset by dictators, disease, and natural disasters, set in “the year of polio, foot-and-mouth disease, floods...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction coming-of-age literary-fiction urban romance fiction 20th-century -
Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984 by Henri Michaux
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsHenri Michaux defies common critical definition. Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux “genius,” and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux’s work “is without equal in the literature of our time... -
Collected Stories by Frank O'Connor
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe definitive collection of short stories by a master of the form and one of Ireland's most celebrated authorsThis indispensable volume contains the best of Frank O’Connor's short fiction. From “Guests of the Nation” to “The Mad Lomasneys” to “First Confession” to “My Oedipus Complex,” these tales of Ireland have touched generations of readers the world over and placed O'Connor alongside W. B...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic 20th-century adult anthologies fiction -
Palinuro of Mexico by Fernando del Paso
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsLike those writers to whom he has been compared--Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, James Joyce, and Rabelais--del Paso draws upon myth, science, and world literature to expand his particular story to universal proportions... -
-
The Lost Sister of Fifth Avenue by Ella Carey
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsNew York, 1938: Martha pulled the door of her Fifth Avenue apartment closed, her heart thumping, re-reading the telegram she’d been dreading. Her beloved sister Charlotte needed her help. She was alone in Paris, and the threat of Nazi invasion grew ever stronger. The time had come for Martha to make the bravest decision of her life. She needed to bring Charlotte home...Categorized as:
historical-fiction urban friendship literary-fiction ww2 family female-mc historical -
Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether, Nellie Y. McKay
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis modern classic is “a tough, tender, bitter novel of a black girl struggling towards womanhood” in 1930s Harlem—with a foreword by James Baldwin ( Publishers Weekly ). Depression-era Harlem is home for twelve-year-old Francie Coffin and her family, and it’s both a place of refuge and the source of untold dangers for her and her poor, working class family...Categorized as:
historical-fiction classics coming-of-age literary-fiction social-commentary poc-mc realistic urban -
My Name Is Aram by William Saroyan
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsWilliam Saroyan's most celebrated work of short fiction- a boy's view of the American Dream. Aram Garoghlanian was a Californian, born in Fresno on the other side of the Southern Pacific tracks. But he was also part of a large, sprawling family of immigrant Armenians--a whole tribe of eccentric uncles, brawling cousins, and gentle women...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age humor literary-fiction 20th-century anthologies children children-books -
Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsSet in the American Deep South, each of the powerful novellas collected here concerns an aspect of the lives of black people in the postslavery era, exploring their resistance to white racism and oppression. Published in 1938, this was the first book from Wright, who would continue on to worldwide fame as the author of the novels Native Son and Black Boy... -
A World for Julius by Alfredo Bryce Echenique
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsJulius was born in a mansion on Salaverry Avenue, directly across from the old San Felipe Hippodrome. Life-size Disney characters and cowboy movie heroes romp across the walls of his nursery. Out in the carriage house, his great-grandfather’s ornate, moldering carriage takes him on imaginary adventures...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century adult book -
Audacity by Melanie Crowder
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe inspiring story of Clara Lemlich, whose fight for equal rights led to the largest strike by women in American history A gorgeously told novel in verse written with intimacy and power, Audacity is inspired by the real-life story of Clara Lemlich, a spirited young woman who emigrated from Russia to New York at the turn of the twentieth century and fought tenaciously for equal rights...Categorized as:
coming-of-age friendship historical-fiction poc-mc realistic social-commentary urban 20th-century -
The Short Stories by Langston Hughes
Rated: 4.40 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThis collection of forty-seven stories written between 1919 and 1963--the most comprehensive available--showcases Langston Hughes's literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns. Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and others never before collected...Categorized as:
classics literary-fiction black-mc poc-mc fiction anthologies 20th-century historical -
Memory Board by Jane Rule
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsFor forty years David Crown has kept his twin sister Diana a secret. Until his wife's death, not even his children -- Diana's nieces and nephews -- have known about Diana and her lifetime companion Constance. But now David seeks to bridge over those years and recapture the closeness of childhood, to become part of Diana's life, to have her be a major part of his... -
Buddies by Ethan Mordden
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratings"What unites us, all of us, surely is brotherhood, a sense that our friendships are historic, designed to hold Stonewall together," muses on character in Ethan Mordden's Buddies. This need for friendship, for nonerotic affection, for buddies, shines forth as an American obsession from Moby-Dick through Of Mice and Men to The Sting... -
Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life by Alice Childress
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsLike One of the Family, which provides historical context for Kathryn Stockett's novel, The Help, is comprised of a series of conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge. They create a vibrant picture of the life of a black working woman in New York in the 1950s...Categorized as:
historical-fiction classics social-commentary poc-mc friendship humor black-mc fiction -
-
The Casuarina Tree by W. Somerset Maugham
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsA collection of six stories—including the acclaimed “The Outstation”—by the renowned twentieth-century author of the classic Of Human Bondage. Set in the Federated Malay States during the 1920s, these stories portray the lives of the English living abroad and the clashes that occur with the native Malaysians—and among themselves...Categorized as:
classics literary-fiction romantic-love fiction 20th-century historical anthologies literary -
Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken by Nita Tyndall
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 9 ratingsBerlin, 1938It is the summer before World War II begins, but Charlotte Kraus doesn’t know it yet. All she knows is the zing of electricity she feels every time her best friend, Angelika Haas, grabs her hand...Categorized as:
historical-fiction wlw lgbtq friendship coming-of-age romance young-adult historical -
The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsO'Connor's 1956 account of big-city politics, inspired by the career of longtime Boston Mayor James M. Curley, portrays its Irish-American political boss as a demagogue and a rogue who nonetheless deeply understands his constituents. The book was later made into a John Ford film staring Spencer Tracy... -
La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc, Simone de Beauvoir
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsAn obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Batarde relates Violette Leduc's long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women... -
I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots by Susan Straight
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsBeginning in the late 1950s, this novel tells the story of Marietta Cook, a tall girl growing up in Pine Gardens, a Gullah-speaking village in South Carolina. When Marietta's mother dies, she heads to Charleston in search of her uncle - only to find a lover and return pregnant with twins two years later... -
The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecký
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThe Engineer of Human Souls is a labyrinthine comic novel that investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant to Canada. As the novel begins, he is a professor of American literature at a college in Toronto...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century adult book communism
Or - use our amazing romance book finder to get recommendations based on your favorite content tropes and themes. Mix and match at will.