The Message | T-Nehisi Coates

256 pages | One World | Hardcover | 10.1.24 The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me travels the world to explore how the stories we tell--and the ones we don't--shape our realities. Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. The first of the book's three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist—and named for Nubian pharaoh—Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the "steampunk" city of "old traditions and new machinery," meeting with strangers and dining with local writers who quiz him in French about African American politics. But everywhere he goes he feels as if he's in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic ki