Fire Shut Up in My Bones

One of the most powerful American memoirs of the past decade, and the fact that it was adapted into the first opera by a Black composer to open the Metropolitan Opera's season tells you everything about how the culture has received it. Blow's prose is lyrical and precise, his personal testimony is ferociously honest, and the portrait of race, poverty, and Black boyhood in rural Louisiana illuminates things that most American writing leaves in the dark. This is not an easy read — the sexual abuse at its center is graphically rendered and the emotional weight is sustained throughout — but it demands and rewards serious adult readers.