Great book. Was supposed to speak with Hanif on the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, but it fell through, so now I'll likely have to wait until his new book comes out to have a chance to celebrate this book and others.

A brilliant look at some of the most brilliant, artistic and fascinating black artists of the 20th century and beyond. Fans of Abdurraqib’s previous work will find plenty to love here as his writing continues to evolve, making this one of the most must-read books of 2020. This is the kind of book you want to re-read, re-visit and memorize. It’s the kind of work you want to keep beside your bed.

Why did I take so long to read this? Don’t be like me - go read this now! The writing! The sentences and topics and interesting and so smart and complex. I learned so much and think everyone should read. Go! What are you waiting for?

In these essays, Hanif Abdurraqib writes with wit, clarity, and powerful insight about Black performance and its far-reaching impacts on American culture. From punk concerts to dancehalls to games of spades, Abdurraqib draws fascinating parallels that cast new light on what we understand as performance. It's brilliantly written and expansive in examining even the smallest moments. This book deserves every ounce of praise it's received!

This book was every "best of" list and up for all the major awards and deservedly so. In a year of uncertainty and sorrow Abdurraqib writes with much needed joy.

I need to read more Hanif Abdurraqib immediately.

With this book he's become one of my favorite essayists and cultural commentators, able to be moving movingly personal, backward and forward looking, intellectually insightful, emotionally open, and able to make connections I'd never imagined, all within several paragraphs and all wrapped in electrifying prose.

The essays on Blackface, Wu Tang, and Whitney Houston were my favorites, but everything here was amazing and thought provoking.

It took me a long time to settle into this book of essays by the recent winner of the Macarthur Foundation Grant, but I'm glad I stayed with it. I was a fan of his book about A Tribe Called Quest. Would recommend.

A perfect collection of essays exploring the incredible and rich history of Black performance in America. This book treats the personal as both political and poetic — Hanif creates a lens through which music, pop culture, and Blackness look sharper, fresher, and more nuanced. This is a must read for any performing arts professional or student.

Hanif Abdurraqib is such an incredible modern writer. I loved his essay collection, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us and was really looking forward to his newest book. I was not disappointed!

Phenomenal work by Hanif Abdurraqib, a poetic genius. One of the modern authors to look out for in African American literature. Abdurraqib is so intelligent; his intellect shines in this work. I would recommend this to anyone interested in current events and the complexities surrounding news on musicians and celebrities, social media and the falsification of our everyday performances.

*I received this book free in exchange for a fair & honest review *

Wow. What a beautiful, heartbreaking, but ultimately joyful explosion of writing. No one, and I mean NO ONE, writes as lovingly, tenderly, and gracefully about music and its impact than Hanif Abdurraqib. Every essay is a rare gem that takes a song you think you know (like the essay about Merry Clayton & “Gimme Shelter”) and makes sure that you will never listen to that song quite the same way again (and that's a GOOD thing.) And it's so important to note that the book focuses as much on Black joy as it does on Black grief, which is part of why Abdurraqib's writing about music is so powerful -- where else but music are joy and grief so inextricably intertwined, in a way that is accessible and provides a common ground for people who are different to understand one another? Because I think that the core of all these essays is how music is part of what you use when words don't suffice, that allows the suffering a way to come out, and that lassos moments of joy in a way that they can always be revisited, at least for the 3 minutes of playtime. These essays are a love letter to music and identity, because the personal is political and the political becomes poetry when Abdurraqib writes about music. For Black readers, I imagine these essays will feel like a homecoming. For white readers, perhaps this is an introduction, and it's one that we need, and that though hard to read at times, is a necessary part of doing the work. But most of all, above all else, this is a glorious collection of essays that show that music is the tool of memory, joy, loss, grief, and hope. If you loved They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, what a gift you have waiting for you in A Little Devil In America.

Easily my favorite nonfiction of the year so far. Hanif Abdurraqib is a masterful writer and I can’t wait to read more of his works. Thank you, Random House for this gifted copy.

A stunning, poetic movement through time, memory, culture, and history--all grounded in memoir from the author. I love the close examination of why and for whom performance exists. This touches so many topics that carry their own books, but are illuminated by their inclusion in this context.

Hanif Abdurraqib's A Little Devil in America is a book in five movements. These movements recall most immediately the discrete units of a musical composition. But "movement" is held in suspension here, taking on the contortions of a dancing body, the bolt of a voice you didn't know that you knew, the choreography and affects of social movements, the way Abdurraqib's language extends and contracts, the text's transitions between poetry, reporting, memoir, and something else--like a kind of exploratory theorizing. These movements are also arcs braced by essays beneath them, and these essays braided sections like coordinated steps, sometimes coinciding and sometimes flitting past each other. There is a destination for the body in each essay and air under each section with plenty of improvisation between.

This is another way of saying that A Little Devil in America is not any one thing (it is not, for example, an academic study of the development of black American dance forms and it is not a memoir and it is not the latest book that will explain race and black people to white people, though it flirts with all of these and more). Abdurraqib understands the peril of putting something out there is that you cannot control what people will do with it when it leaves your hands. Rather than overdetermining its direction, the book's segmentation works as cover, an escape hatch for generative messiness against the morality tale or manifesto.

For the black artists whose stories serve as the book's anchors, performance is always a tension between their own ambitions and how their art is received by racializing audiences, and Abdurraqib grapples with this tension deliberately. Not every section in this book adds up to something within an essay that adds up to something within a movement that adds up to something for the reader to take and put in their pocket and walk away with. The spirit of movement that Abdurraqib puts forth is not the heedless march of progress. It is not just the stage performance but also its negative--withdrawal and a particularly black refusal. A Little Devil closes its fifth and final movement with a frozen moment, revealing stillness as a kind of moving too.

I have no useful words for the genius of this work. I love Hanif Abdurraqib, I love to watch him read or just hold forth on one of the many, many topics that he seems to have endless knowledge. Reading this book feels like playing witness to him in real-time. Watching him unspool a narrative about Whitney Houston and the way her Blackness was capitalized upon, and torn away from her, or learning us about the backstories of Black performers - tap dancers and singers and magicians - long before I was born. It’s one of those books where I already have a half dozen snapshots of paragraphs that made me stop in my tracks, and one of those books that I had to put down and write something of my own, not once but twice, as I made my way through these deeply enmeshed, braided, bountiful essays. Read this book..

Sometimes I read a book that's written so well that it makes a review seem kind of irrelevant. "A Little Devil in America" was like that for me. I honestly feel like there's not much I can add to the conversation about this book except to say that it's fantastic. By focusing on Black performance in America, the subjects range from minstrel shows to Whitney Houston and centers on how Black entertainers have shaped our culture. The information is presented in a captivating way (which is sometimes lacking in nonfiction books), but it's Abdurraqib's personal reflections that make this book really sing. His frank honesty and the way he views the world made me feel privileged just to read it.

Anyone who wants insight into the lives of Blacks in America should check this out. It reminded me of a cross between Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste" and Kiese Laymon's "Heavy" - educational content with a stirring memoir feel. Since I can't do much more than recommend this book, I'll just end this with a thank you to the writer for crafting such an insightful and moving book.

A Little Devil in America is a wonderful follow-up to Abdurraqib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Set up in a similar structure to the aforementioned text, Abdurraqib does a deep dive into the histories of Black Americans that America has long forgotten. He weaves his personal histories in a way that allows all audiences to engage with the text in a meaningful and impactful way.

What an incredible book! The writing is absolutely fantastic! And the stories are incredible. What an honor it was to experience this book and learn more about Black performance. I highly highly recommend this title!

This one is so good. Essay collections can be hit or miss for me, but this book stands out for every single essay just being so powerful and insightful. More than that, as a collection they make a very cohesive and strong narrative that just hits on so many things but centers on Black performance in American culture and history. It caused me to consider, learn, and rethink throughout and I think this will be a non-fiction title that gets talked about a lot like this year. Highly recommend!

A Little Devil in America is an exhilarating work of cultural criticism by a multifaceted and original talent. In prose poetry and essay Hanif Abdurraqib addresses an impressive range of topics related to culture and identity. Some of these could have become cliché in lesser hands—the life-giving necessity of Black joy, problematic presentations of Black pain, the limitations of representation— but even those he makes new, offering new language, and more importantly, new insight.