"A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of start

This memoir is about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a neglected New Orleans neighborhood. In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother, Ivory Mae, a fiercely determined and recently widowed nineteen-year-old, invested her life savings in a shotgun house in then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East. It was the height of the Space Race and the area was home to a major NASA plant. The optimism of postwar America seemed endless. In the Yellow House, Ivory Mae and her second husband, Simon Broom, who would be Sarah's father, built domestic tranquility one wobbly renovation at a time, their dreams perpetually under construction. The family would eventually number twelve children. When Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House became Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child. A brilliant interweaving of reporting, archival research, and gorgeously rendered family lore, The Yellow House tells the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that o

A collection of the New Yorker's writing on race in America--including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more. The book addresses everything from the arts to civil rights, matters of justice, and politics. The result is a startling and nuanced portrait of this country's complex relationship with race.

A collection of the New Yorker's writing on race in America--including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more. The book addresses everything from the arts to civil rights, matters of justice, and politics. The result is a startling and nuanced portrait of this country's complex relationship with race.

Bringing together reporting, profiles, memoir and criticism from The New Yorker to present a bold and complex portrait of black life in America, told through stories of private triumphs and national tragedies, political vision, and artistic inspiration throughout history.