Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books by Esther Karin Mngodo, Serubiri Moses, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Christopher John Farley.
The Witness of Nina Mvungi by Esther Karin Mngodo
Publisher: Hanging Loose Press
Date: December 1, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English (translated from Kiswahili)
Where to find it: Itasca Books
Esther Karin Mngodo
Esther Karin Mngodo was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1986. Bilingual in Swahili and English, she works across genres and languages as a fiction writer, poet, translator, journalist, editor and feminist publisher. In 2014, Mngodo was the winner of the inaugural Ebrahim Hussein Poetry Prize, one of Tanzania’s major literary awards. Her prose writing has been featured in The Goddess of Mtwara and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2017, Imbiza Journal, The Citizen, The Chanzo and other publications. She is the author of the poetry collection Jinsi ya Kurudi Nyumbani (How to Return Home), and the founder and publisher of UMBU, an online literary journal for women who write in Swahili. Esther is also an Open Society Fellow. She lives in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with her daughter, Jasmine.
Jay Boss Rubin
Jay Boss Rubin is the winner of the 2024 Loose Translation Award, a collaboration between CUNY Queens and Hanging Loose Press. An award-winning translator from the Swahili, Rubin has been a Swahili instructor at Hofstra University and Union College; freelance Swahili interpreter working with Queens Criminal Court, U.S. District Court (Eastern District of New York), UN Commission on the Status of Women; Label Head, Voodoo Doughnut Recordings; event organizer. His other translations inclue the novel Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi (Yale University Press, 2025) and he was a contributing translator to No Edges: Swahili Stories (Two Lines Press, 2023).
The Witness of Nina Mvungi
The Witness of Nina Mvungi is a collection of seven stories by writer Esther Karin Mngodo, translated by the award-winning Translator from Kiswahili, Jay Boss Rubin. It is the first full-length book of fiction by award-winning contemporary Tanzanian author Esther Karin Mngodo. Its seven stories, translated from Swahili, range in style from lyrical realism to speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. The stories all share a distinct voice and focus on the feminine, and some are linked not just thematically but in terms of plot. Whether depicting a world of spirits behind the proverbial curtain, a dystopian future in which the sun is about to expire, or a sweltering-hot present-day fish market, Mngodo’s tantalizing fiction pushes beyond allegory and didacticism into the rich ambiguity of lived experience. She portrays intimate encounters between a wide variety of characters with compassion and wit, paying particular attention to class and gender dynamics. Some of her stories appear to turn on secrets suddenly revealed—but more than plot resolution, they rely on mutual entanglement.
You Who Suffer Because You Love, Love Still More by Serubiri Moses
Publisher: Pântano Books
Publication Date: December 1, 2025
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: Pântano Books
Serubiri Moses
Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and author based in New York City. He currently serves as a faculty member in Art History at Hunter College and as a visiting faculty member at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held positions at New York University and the New Centre for Research and Practice, and delivered lectures at Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, basis voor aktuelle kunst, and University of the Arts Helsinki. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, New York; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth; received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College; and is an alumnus of the Àsìkò International Art Programme. He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal. He has published poetry in the online journals Jalada and Badilisha Poetry Exchange, as well as in print in journals Kwani? 7, Kwani? 8, and READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation (2022). His poetry has been reviewed online in The New Inquiry. His debut poetry collection The Moon Is Reading Us A Book, launched in 2023.
You Who Suffer Because You Love, Love Still More
In You Who Suffer, Because You Love, Love Still More, Serubiri Moses offers an intimate and personal study of the lives and loves of pop star Freddy Mercury, combining a detailed epigraphy on the duplicitous nature of Mercury’s origins, sexuality, and artistic talent with his own delicate memoir as a poet. Through this series of interlocked poems, yet again Moses lures us into an atmosphere both sensual and scholarly that echoes well past its last verse.
Racebook by Tochi Onyebuchi
Publisher: Roxane Gay Books
Date: October 21, 2025
Genre: Nonfiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Grove Atlantic
Tochi Onyebuchi
Tochi Onyebuchi is the Hugo and NAACP Image Award finalist and author of Goliath, Riot Baby, the Beasts Made of Night series, and the War Girls series. He was the writer on Marvel Comics’ “Captain America: Symbol of Truth” series (2022-2023) and the Black Panther Legends run (2021-2022). He was also part of the writing team behind Activision’s Call of Duty: Vanguard. His nonfiction includes the book (S)kinfolk and has appeared in the New York Times, NPR, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. He has earned degrees from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies. He currently resides in Connecticut.
Racebook
From the author of Hugo and NAACP Image Award finalist Riot Baby, an original memoir in essays that interrogates how identities are shaped and informed in online spaces and how the relationship between race and the Internet has changed in his three decades online.
When Tochi Onyebuchi realized that his acclaimed science fiction and fantasy storytelling career had been centrally preoccupied with race, it prompted him to consider his responsibilities as a Black writer in the Internet age. Excavating the Internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Racebook explores how the writer and public intellectual Onyebuchi is today, was formed in that crucible.
Beginning with the current moment when everything, including personal identity, is a matter of dispute, and tracing his online persona in reverse chronological order back to Web 1.0’s promises of greater equality and a bright digital future, Onyebuchi deftly examines the evolution of internet culture and the ways that culture has shifted in the ensuing decades. From the ever-changing nature of personal writing and free expression, to gaming, manga, fandom, and virtual reality—Onyebuchi examines the internet alongside works of literature both classic and new, and asks if our vision for what is possible has really broadened. And given the inequities Black people are still subject to, on and off the page, does the Internet only amplify our failures of imagination?
A new, compelling investigation of race through the lens of the modern Internet age, and a profound intellectual journey in pursuit of community online, Onyebuchi argues for a liberation of the individual behind the code, ultimately asking “Is this a race book or is it not? Is it either-or? Can it be both-and? Can I?”
Who Knows You by Heart by Christopher John Farley
Publisher: William Morrow
Publication Date: November 11, 2025
Genre: Fiction, Science Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Harper Collins
Christopher John Farley
C. J. Farley, born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in Brockport, New York, graduated from Harvard University and served as an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Farley’s novel Around Harvard Square won an NAACP Image Award, and the author’s biography Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Farley co-wrote and co-edited the book The Blues with Martin Scorsese and was consulting producer on the Peabody-winning HBO documentary Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown. Farley, a former senior editor for the Wall Street Journal and a former music critic for Time magazine, has interviewed some of the greatest musical artists in the world, including Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Lauryn Hill, Adele, Beyoncé, Jay Z, Radiohead and Taylor Swift. Farley also worked as an Executive Editor at Amazon Inc.’s Audible.
Who Knows You by Heart
Part social thriller, part modern love story, Who Knows You by Heart is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what’s real in an age of artificial intelligence.
Octavia Crenshaw, a Jamaican-American coder living in Manhattan, is broke, burned out, and haunted by her parents’ deaths. Desperate to pay off some debts, she ditches her nonprofit job for a high-paying gig at Eustachian Inc., a Big Tech company that specializes in audio entertainment. Language, communication, human connection—these are the markets Eustachian wants to revolutionize…and dominate.
Octavia finds herself swept up in the world of the Tech Titans, with its lure of instant riches and its seemingly limitless future. But as one of Eustachian’s very few Black employees, Octavia is uncomfortably aware of things that seem to escape her coworkers: unexplained tech glitches, cryptic remarks, a mysterious secret floor in the corporation’s gleaming headquarters.
But she sets her suspicions aside when she’s recruited by another Black coder—the infuriating but attractive Walcott—to collaborate on a secret project code-named Zion. Zion is a new kind of AI-powered storytelling, one that’s programmed to be free from the racist and sexist biases that plague other AI products. Zion could launch Eustachian into a bold new future and make its developers super rich while righting all kinds of injustices. Octavia and Walcott’s excitement over their creation sets off romantic sparks between the two of them, until they discover a toxic secret about their employer—something that they can’t unlearn, or overlook, but must overcome.
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