★ REVIEWS IN KIRKUS , PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY , BOOKLIST.
February 17, 2026
“In On Morrison, Namwali Serpell applies her prodigious intellect, vast literary archive, and her own calling as a novelist to magnificent effect in this breathtaking, provocative, and refreshing engagement with Morrison as a thinker as well as an artist. Filled with unique analyses, deep dives, and an intellectual playfulness that Morrison herself so valued, this book will stand as one of the most important twenty-first-century works on the great American writer.”
—IMANI PERRY, winner of the National Book Award
Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, “she is our only truly canonical black female writer—and her work is highly complex.” Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and a professor who teaches a course on Morrison to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form.
This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre—her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry—with contextual guidance and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artists is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence.
If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the basis for what we call “humanity.” The face is considered the source of identity, truth, beauty, authenticity, and empathy. It underlies our ideas about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. But all of this rests on a specific image of the face. We might call it the ideal face.
What about the strange face, the stranger’s face, the face that thwarts recognition? What do we make of the face that rides the line of legibility? This collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces—the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead— probes our mythology of the face. Namwali Serpell’s Stranger Faces imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces.
A New Yorker Best Book of 2020. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and for the Believer Book Award for Nonfiction.
“Wise, warm, witty and dizzyingly wide-ranging.” —The New York Times