The Message

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of the Number One New York Times bestseller, Between the World and Me, winner of the National Book Award, and of the acclaimed essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power. A MacArthur Fellow, Coates has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story ''The Case for Reparations''. He lives in New York with his wife and son.>

Auteur

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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With his bestseller, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates established himself as a unique voice in his generation of American authors; a brilliant writer and thinker in the tradition of James Baldwin.

In his keenly anticipated new book, The Message, he explores the urgent question of how our stories - our reporting, imaginative narratives and mythmaking - both expose and distort our realities. Travelling to three resonant sites of conflict, he illuminates how the stories we tell - as well as the ones we don't - work to shape us.

The first of the book's three main parts finds Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa - a journey to Dakar, where he finds himself in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and the ghost-haunted country of his imagination. He then takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on the banning of his own work and the deep roots of a false and fiercely protected American mythology - visibly on display in this capital of the confederacy, with statues of segregationists still looming over its public squares. Finally in Palestine, Coates sees with devastating clarity the tragedy that grows in the clash between the stories we tell and reality on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country's most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world - and our own souls - and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

Résumé
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys . . . Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual Kirkus (starred review)