Leila Mottley Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Leila Mottley

Hartman reinvented nonfiction. She goes into the archive, finds these small moments, and then builds them out to this beautiful blur between fiction and nonfiction ... I don’t know how she does it, but it has definitely changed the way I look at history and nonfiction as an art form.

Leila Mottley

It’s hard to choose a Toni Morrison book because they’re all uniquely life-changing ... But, I think that Sula is special in its construction around these two girls and what it means to love someone platonically. It does this beautiful thing about Black girlhood and friendship.

Leila Mottley

Ocean Vuong, one of my favourite contemporary poets, expanded his body of work beautifully in Time Is a Mother (Jonathan Cape), contemplating similar themes of grief as Jones in a vastly different and nonetheless beautiful and heartbreaking manner.

Leila Mottley

Very honored that NIGHTCRAWLING is nominated for the 2023 PEN/Hemingway prize for debut novel from @PENamerica alongside @jessaminechan @SequoiaN @OscarHokeah and the rest of this wonderful group 🧡🧡https://t.co/x13MRfZ38p https://t.co/cBiC3z9bZ7

Leila Mottley

There There by Tommy Orange captures Oakland as a site of community and a place with many different pockets of people and lives and neighborhoods.

Leila Mottley

I was engrossed by this story, and it was a perfect thing to fall into on planes, trains, and hotel rooms. Jones is incredibly talented at telling a story through multiple voices and points of view and making each perspective unique.

Leila Mottley

I love this book so much. It contains, I think, one of the most iconic ways to structure a text ... It’s just beautiful and sets the environment in an incredible way, really making us feel where they are, set on the Mississippi Delta. It’s beautiful.

Leila Mottley

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson as a collection is a vivid, meticulously rendered collage of stories I’m in complete awe of...It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before and deserves to be dissected again and again.

Leila Mottley

Every time I read this book, I catch new references, images, and lines that remind me again and again that writing a brilliant book is about constructing layers, and nobody does that better than Toni Morrison.

Leila Mottley

This book should be grouped with Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Toni Morrison’s Jazz as masterpieces by and about Black women. It’s a classic and should be regarded as such.