Literary merit has, for generations, been viewed as synonymous with gravitas, solemnity, and not smiling in your author photo. This especially holds true for books that tackle the topic of race (because it’s always a “tackling”), which readers often crack open expecting to be educated or to cry. (In a very funny 2006 guest essay for the New York Times, Paul Beatty describes reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and “growing more oppressed with each maudlin passage.”)
Of course, there have always been “serious” writers who approach the topic of race satirically, Booker Prize-winning Beatty amongst them. These are the authors whose work has always called to me and who I credit (and/or blame) for making me want to become a writer myself. There is something so absurd about race—this thing that is simultaneously a complete fabrication and also one of the most socially, politically, and materially real aspects of our lives—that only satire (in my unbiased opinion as a satirist) can capture.
Each of the books on the list below captures the absurdity of race in its own funny, probing, and heartfelt way. Some of the books include speculative elements, some are darkly comedic, some are laugh-out-loud funny. Some focus on the Black American experience, others on Asian American, Mexican American, mixed-race, and white American experiences.
My debut short story collection We’re Gonna Get Through This Together builds off of the satirical (and also, at times, earnest) sensibility of these books. In several stories, I look at the well-meaning and also harmful ways that white people (especially those on the left) are engaging with race in our contemporary moment. In one of my stories, a white antiracist coach tries to keep her practice afloat after her Mexican-American business partner breaks up with her. In another, an aging white man sends an array of letters to a childhood friend, fundraising her to support Black lives. My hope is that my book—like the seven listed below—can create space for readers to look at race in new/funny/heartfelt ways.
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
In Colored Television, Danzy Senna tells the story of Jane Gibson, a biracial novelist living in LA who finally finishes working on her 450-page novel about mixed-race people called Nusu Nusu (Swahili for “partly-partly”). When she receives word from her agent that the book—a decade in the making—isn’t fit for print, Jane shifts gears and tries to pitch “a Mulatto sitcom” to a slippery television producer. Senna’s book is full of edgy (and deeply funny) banter about identity alongside earnest insights into racial dynamics in the U.S., such as Jane’s father telling her, “Black people didn’t want to be white […] They only wanted to have what white people had.”
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
Interior Chinatown playfully (and, at times, poignantly) satirizes Hollywood’s reliance on racist tropes about Asians and Asian Americans. Charles Yu takes his readers through a metafictional maze as he tells the story of Willis Wu, a second-generation background actor playing “Generic Asian Man” on a police procedural called Black and White that is perpetually being filmed. It is impossible to know what in the novel is happening on or off set, Yu’s way of communicating that Asian stereotypes are staples of both fictive worlds and our own. Amidst the tongue-in-cheek humor in this novel there are also many sincere moments, such as when a character calls out the painful contradiction of Asians being seen as “perpetual foreigners” in the U.S. despite a two-hundred-year presence in this country.
Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, in her debut short story collection Heads of the Colored People, directs her unflinching gaze onto the lives of middle-class Black Americans, who navigate passive-aggressive white colleagues, suicidality, reality television cameras, and, in the haunting titular story, police violence. Thompson-Spires’s approach to satire is darkly comedic, with irony and agony sitting side by side. The funniest story in the bunch is “Belles Lettres,” a tense epistolary exchange between Dr. Lucinda Johnston, PsyD, and Monica Willis, PhD, two middle class Black mothers who argue in academic prose over the fraught relationship between their nine-year-old daughters.
My Name is Iris by Brando Skyhorse
My Name is Iris is a dystopian satirical novel that imagines a United States in which private citizens are required to wear technological ID bands (à la Apple watches) in order to enter their workplaces, go to the grocery store, and more. The hitch: in order to access one, you must be able to prove that at least one of your parents was born in the U.S. Iris Prince (born Inés Soto), Brando Skyhorse’s conservative second-generation Mexican-American protagonist, has to reckon with her politics, her challenging family dynamics, and her identity as she tries to procure a band, all while watching an ominous (and possibly imaginary) wall grow around her house. Skyhorse’s novel asks if it is possible to ignore or hide your racial identity when the state corporate nexus does not.
Loving Day by Mat Johnson
In Mat Johnson’s laugh-out-loud novel Loving Day, biracial comic book artist Warren Duffy returns home to Philadelphia to sell his recently-deceased father’s house and meets a rude Jewish teen named Tal who turns out to be his daughter. As the two try to build a relationship, they find their way to a mixed-race community called the “Mélange Center,” where people who identify more with their white side (like Tal) are forced to take courses about Blackness and people more identified with their Blackness (like Warren) must attend classes about the importance of embracing their white culture and ancestry. In this novel, Johnson packs endless punches about the absurdity of rigid racial categories and the lengths people will go to find a sense of belonging.
Your Face in Mine by Jess Row
Jess Row’s Your Face in Mine is centered on a satirical premise—a white Jewish Baltimorean named Martin receives racial reassignment surgery to become Black—and, while it has its funny moments, the book approaches the topic of racial identity in a serious, almost philosophical way. The novel is narrated by a white reporter named Kelly who was friends with Martin in high school (when he was white) and meets him again as a Black adult, agreeing to help Martin tell his story of navigating “Racial Identity Dysphoria Syndrome.” (At one point Martin attributes his life-long struggles with depression, agoraphobia, and “involvement in illegal activities” as “the result of being born in the wrong physical body.”) In addition to commenting on the commodification of Blackness, Row touches on the fetishization of Asian identities in this novel as well.
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut short story collection Friday Black, published a few years before his blockbuster 2023 novel Chain-Gang All-Stars, features his trademark satirical and speculative style. Using both humor and horror, Adjei-Brenyah spotlights the layers of violence that Black Americans are forced to navigate. In “Zimmer Land,” a Black employee at a theme park must feign both aggression and pain as white parkgoers “protect” their neighborhood from him. In “The Finkelstein 5,” a white man is found not guilty after using a chainsaw to decapitate five Black children who were standing outside of a library. Friday Black is ultimately an absurdist text pushing readers to consider the many-tentacled nature of white supremacy.
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