Black Experience Book Club

The Black Experience Book Club was created to bring light to works created by Black Authors in America in an attempt to understand the Black Experience in America. What are the pitfalls, the high points, the commonalities, the differences in what it means to be Black in America throughout history and today. Books tell us so many things, stories, and experiences that they serve as the perfect vehicle to spark conversation. The book club holds space for people to be able to come and share their experiences and foster community and scholarship.

Book: Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

In Hell of a Book, an African-American author sets out on a cross-country book tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Jason Mott's novel and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: since his novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

Throughout, these characters' stories build and build and as they converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art, and money, there always is the tragic story of a police shooting playing over and over on the news.

Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably powerful, an electrifying high-wire act, ideal for book clubs, and the book Mott says he has been writing in his head for ten years, Hell of a Book in its final twists truly becomes its title.