When Coates begins to make fiction, Marvel rubs its hands at having scripts for its best-known superheroes. But when Coates becomes more serious, we find a narrator turned chronicler of his time. Essays and novels that are coming out little by little to convince critics of the unsuspected duality of him as a writer of such disparate proposals.
Of course, everything is better contextualized if the sources of these two creative fields are known. Because, on the one hand, Coates works as a columnist for press of all kinds, from consolidated magazines of sociological journalism and opinion to newspapers with a worldwide circulation.
His second creative derivative, which links him to Marvel, was born from the Black Panther party in which his father was a member and from whose imagination the Black Panther character of the famous comics and film series was created. Nobody like him to characterize a superhero with that "demanding" cut to put it in some way.
The thing is, Coates performs perfectly on any of his pitches. And I suspect that prose beyond superheroes will end up establishing him as one of the most representative American writers of his generation, already heir to Colson Whitehead.
Top Recommended Books by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Between the world and me
The abyss. The insurmountable distance between general patterns and identity. Even more depending on origin, ethnicity, beliefs... A stark testimony in the form of an essay, a combination of very personal sensations, testimonials and social references that contextualize everything that this world towards which each one moves from your position on the board.
A work that led to the National Book Award in 2015 and that starts as a letter from a father to his son. A profound reflection on the social reality of present-day North America that includes great universal themes such as discrimination, inequality, and the activism necessary to combat them.
The idea of ​​the father who prepares the son for this hostility disguised as confusion, as a carnival of interests that drag or move away. «This is your country, your world, your body, and you must find a way to live with it all.«. «What I want for you is for you to be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.«.
With this essay, Ta-Nehisi Coates managed to position himself on the New York Times bestseller list since its publication, also appearing on the lists of the 10 best books of the year from the most prestigious publications.
the water dance
There are those for whom the river waters are always the same where they can bathe. Perhaps not so much as a blessing but as an anomaly that links him with his past, with the aroma of everything, with the images of childhood and the waters that rocked the days that must have been the most tender and kind...
Young Hiram Walker has grown up on a slave plantation. When her mother was sold, all of her memories of her were stolen, but in exchange for her, she received a mysterious gift. Years later, when Hiram nearly drowns in the river, that same power will save his life. This experience with death generates in him a need: to escape from the only home he has ever known.
Thus begins an unexpected journey that will take him from the corrupt greatness of the proud Virginia plantations to the desperate guerrilla cells in the desert, from the Deep South to the black freedom movements in the North. Even as he enlists in the underground war between slaveholders and enslaved, Hiram's determination to rescue the family he left behind endures.
This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make a living with the people they loved. Written by one of the most relevant African-American writers of today, it is a work that gains even more strength in current times and that seeks to return humanity to those from whom it was stolen.
