Yaa Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, opens with a family tree tracing seven generations descended from two half sisters born in Ghana around 1750. They share the same mother, but their fathers are ...

“How easy it was for a life to go one way instead of another,” says H, a former slave in Yaa Gyasi’s debut “Homegoing.” In many respects the sentiment sums up the very essence of this linked short ...

Picture a globe glowing with places of particular misery, pain or evil: Auschwitz, Nanking, Hiroshima, Wounded Knee. Burning white hot would be a singular landmark in west Africa: Cape Coast Castle, a ...

One of the peculiar aspects of American slavery is how much we know and how much we willfully forget. Despite the vast body of historical research, works of fiction still inform most of what we ...