1.
Zone One by Colson Whitehead
A literary novel by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author about the zombie apocalypse, with eerie parallels to the current plague. From the book cover:
A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. After the worst of the plague is over, armed forces stationed in Chinatown’s Fort Wonton have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go terribly wrong…
This is a book that asks the question "what if civilization is only temporary." It's a view of American culture in a moment where suddenly none of it matters anymore. It's about trauma, New York City and finding yourself when life seems to no longer have a purpose...and zombies. Plus, an implacable hatred for the state of Connecticut, which is never mentioned without a negative adjective attached, starting with "abominable," "abhorrent," and "accursed."
It's also a book where in addition to plot, character and conflict, you can just enjoy the artistic craft of the writing, sentence by sentence.
2.
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
A debut short story collection with a tone from realistic to ironically satirical, and at once funny, sad, angry, and true (even in it's exaggerations and distortions). Here's the beginning of the first story:
THE FINKELSTEIN 5
Fela, the headless girl, walked toward Emmanuel. Her neck jagged with red savagery. She was silent, but he could feel her waiting for him to do something, anything.
Then his phone rang, and he woke up.
He took a deep breath and set the Blackness in his voice down to a 1.5 on a 10-point scale. “Hi there, how are you doing today? Yes, yes, I did recently inquire about the status of my application. Well, all right, okay. Great to hear. I’ll be there. Have a spectacular day.” Emmanuel rolled out of bed and brushed his teeth. The house was quiet. His parents had already left for work.
That morning, like every morning, the first decision he made regarded his Blackness. His skin was a deep, constant brown. In public, when people could actually see him, it was impossible to get his Blackness down to anywhere near a 1.5. If he wore a tie, wing-tipped shoes, smiled constantly, used his indoor voice, and kept his hands strapped and calm at his sides, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0.
Though Emmanuel was happy about scoring the interview, he also felt guilty about feeling happy about anything. Most people he knew were still mourning the Finkelstein verdict: after twenty-eight minutes of deliberation, a jury of his peers had acquitted George Wilson Dunn of any wrongdoing whatsoever. He had been indicted for allegedly using a chain saw to hack off the heads of five black children outside the Finkelstein Library in Valley Ridge, South Carolina. The court had ruled that because the children were basically loitering and not actually inside the library reading, as one might expect of productive members of society, it was reasonable that Dunn had felt threatened by these five black young people and, thus, he was well within his rights when he protected himself, his library-loaned DVDs, and his children by going into the back of his Ford F-150 and retrieving his
Hawtech PRO eighteen-inch 48cc chain saw.
The case had seized the country by the ear and heart, and was still, mostly, the only thing anyone was talking about. Finkelstein became the news cycle. On one side of the broadcast world, anchors openly wept for the children, who were saints in their eyes; on the opposite side were personalities like Brent Kogan, the ever gruff and opinionated host of What’s the Big Deal?, who had said during an online panel discussion, “Yes, yes, they were kids, but also, f*** n*****s.” Most news outlets fell somewhere in between.
I bought both books because I'm a patron of the arts like that, but I have unprotected pdfs I'm willing to share.
I’ve had regular zombie dreams since is was probably 9 or 10, even to this day.