A new nonfiction book by Ta-Nehisi Coates is coming later this year.
One World will publish Coates’ The Message this fall, the press announced in a news release. In the book, it says, Coates “travels the world to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.”
Coates worked as a journalist before publishing his first nonfiction book, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, in 2008. He followed that up seven years later with Between the World and Me: Notes on the First 150 Years in America, which became a bestseller and won both the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award.
Since then, he has published several comic books; another nonfiction book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy; and a novel, The Water Dancer.
The Message is composed of three essays, set in Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine. One World says that while working on a book about writing, Coates “found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.”
“Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths,” the press says.
The Message is scheduled for publication on Oct. 1.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
