8 Satire Novels by Authors of Color You Must Read

Satires by authors of color provide a different viewpoint on the society we live in. They share tales of hurt and repressed rage. Additionally, they represent the rebellious spirit that resides in everyone of us on a deep level. The 8 satire novels on this list make us confront our humanity and muse on how we unwittingly become oppressors ourselves.

Interior Chinatown

Charles Yu

A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?

Release Date: January 28, 2020

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Black No More

George S. Schuyler

“Black No More” is a clever and important satirical novel by George S. Schuyler which was written during the creative time of the Harlem Renaissance. This humorous and insightful work explores what would happen if blackness could be erased and black people could choose to become white. The novel begins with the central character Max Disher, a young, intelligent and ambitious black man, finding himself lonely and rejected on New Year’s Eve at a speakeasy in Harlem. He hears about a new scientific procedure called “Black-No-More” that can change black skin to white. Max decides to undergo the transformation and changes his name to Matthew Fisher. Life is not as easy as he has imagined it will be.

Release Date: January 16, 2020

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The Sellout

Paul Beatty

A biting satire about a young man’s isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant.

Born in the “agrarian ghetto” of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians.

Release Date: March 3, 2015

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Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison’s nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be.

As he journeys from the Deep South to the streets and basements of Harlem, from a horrifying “battle royal” where black men are reduced to fighting animals, to a Communist rally where they are elevated to the status of trophies.

Release Date: September 2, 2019

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Black Buck

Mateo Askaripour

An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals.

All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.

Release Date: January 5, 2021

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Dangerlok

Eunice De Souza

Rina Ferreira, middle-aged and single, lecturer in English literature, tentative poet, owner of two parrots and a flat in Queen’s Diamonds building. Daily she comes across some ‘dangerlok’: autorickshaw-walas who clog her lane; the neighbour who objects to the kept woman in the flat below hers; students who wonder if she has any friends; people who ask if she’s Indian.

Fortified with cigarettes and junglee tea, Rina observes them all, and dashes off letters brimming with the details of her Bombay-life to an old flame who calls up to talk about his girlfriends when sober and to profess his love for her when drunk.

Release Date: November 7, 2008

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Flight To Canada

Ishmael Reed

Some parodies are as necessary as the books they answer. Such is the case with Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed’s scathing, offbeat response to conventional anti-slavery novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Though Flight to Canada has been classified by some as a “post race” novel, the villains and the heroes are clear. Three slaves are on the run from the Swille plantation. Among them, the most hotly pursued is Raven Quickskill, a poet who seeks freedom in Canada, and ultimately hopes to return and liberate others. But this particular Civil War–era landscape is littered with modern elements.

Release Date: January 29, 2013

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Oreo

Fran Ross and Harryette Mullen

Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing.

Release Date: July 7, 2015

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Tags: Satire