Jonathan Escoffery: ‘Langston Hughes shifted my worldview’
My earliest reading memoryArnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Together,in the back of my parents’ car at the age of four or five. We had just come from a bookstore and were setting off on a long drive, possibly down to the Florida Keys from Miami.
My favourite book growing upIt might have been Goblins in the Castleby Bruce Coville because I loved the idea of heading off toward adventure through hidden passageways. Retrospectively, I like that it provides witty criticism of xenophobia and our prison systems. I also loved There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom by Louis Sachar, which I would have read when I was eight or nine. Bradley gains a reputation for being a troublemaker, and tries to improve his behaviour, but finds it’s an uphill battle. It is one of the first books I can remember reading that features a bit of an antihero; a protagonist with a faulty moral compass, but who is still worthy of our empathy.
The book that changed me as a teenagerAt 13, I read Brian Stableford’s vampire epic, The Empire of Fear, which presents an alternative history, with vampire aristocracies ruling in Europe and Africa. I’d never read such graphic sex and violence before (and possibly since), but, perhaps ironically, I’d also never read a novel that talked explicitly about race and gender and sexuality up to that point, which is to say a book that grappled with realworld questions of identity and how it affects how we move through the world.
The writer who changed my mindLangston Hughes’s essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain shifted my worldview and my approach to writ
ing fiction in my early 20s. It helped me see that engaging with all aspects of my identity, and specifically my race as a Black man, would expand the boundaries of my writing and imagination, rather than limit them.
The book that made me want to be a writerGoblins in the Castle made me want to create adventures of my own to send readers on. Nella Larsen’s Quicksandreignited my certainty that I would one day publish a book of my own. I was in my mid-20s when I first read it. It was the work that pushed me to write with nuance and bravery about race and gender.
The book I could never read againFlannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find.Apart from all the antiBlack racism, and a lot of other isms, I question whether it engages with human experience with any seriousness. I was assigned the collection several times in college and like it less every time I read it.
The book I discovered later in lifeI wish I’d read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time sooner. It succinctly explains the insidious nature of American racism. I was in my late 30s when I finally read it.
The book I am currently readingElaine Castillo’s How to Read Now, an essay collection that asks us to read the world through an antiracist lens.
•If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, shortlisted for the Booker prize, is published by 4th Estate (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.