National Book Award Finalist

“A masterpiece” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), a “devastating” (The New York Times) meditation on Black performance in America from the MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and best-selling author of Go Ahead in the Rain 

One of the 10 Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Dallas Morning News, Publishers Weekly • One of yhe Best Books of The Year: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Rolling Stone, Esquire, BuzzFeed, Thrillist, She Reads, BookRiot, BookPage, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, LitHub, Library Journal, Booklist

“Gorgeous essays that reveal the resilience, heartbreak, and joy within Black performance.” (Brit Bennett, number one New York Times best-selling author of The Vanishing Half)

“I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.” Inspired by these few words, spoken by Josephine Baker at the 1963 March on Washington, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and best-selling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines - whether it’s the 27 seconds in “Gimme Shelter” in which Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder”, a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt - has layers of resonance in Black and White cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance.

Touching on Michael Jackson, Patti LaBelle, Billy Dee Williams, the Wu-Tan Clan, Dave Chappelle, and more, Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space - from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.