#RunTheCulture

Today on The Feat. we are featuring a truly unique and mind-bending black-lead novel , We Love You Charlie Freeman.

We Love You Charlie Freeman is the debut work from rising literary star and creator for The Culture Kaitlyn Greenidge and is the story of a black family (The Freemans) that, through their knowledge of sign language, become part of a research study tasked with teaching sign language to a chimpanzee (Charlie) who lives with them as a family member at the research institute’s mansion.

Of course things aren’t as they seem, the institute has a questionable history of conducting Tuskegee-like experiments on black people for starters and things start to go awry for the Freemans and Charlie in a myriad of unexpected, surprising, and frightening ways. Through it’s twists and turns the novel finds new ways to talk about the sneaky racism that pervades the black experience in America and society’s failure to find a language to talk about it even in modern times.

Dark yet witty, satirical while providing frighteningly accurate commentary about race, We Love You Charlie Freeman is a best-seller and was one of the New York Times Critics’ Top Books of 2016. The novel has been compared to Jordan Peele’s film Get Out because of its tackling of race and it’s storytelling sleight of hand. High praise for author Kaitlyn Greenidge who again, made her literary debut with this novel. Kaitlyn Greenidge is also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and numerous other places. She is the recipient of several fellowships, including from the Whiting Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and is currently doing a fellowship at Harvard University and working on her second novel. Certainly a black author and creator for The Culture to keep an eye on.

Check out more of our book related content:

• 13 Must-read Hip-Hop Autobiographies
• Lupita Nyong’o Writes A Children’s Book
• Interview – Comic Book Writer Great Anderson Elysee

Written by @TalentedMrFord

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