Renowned music historian Ted Gioia pens the definitive account of how the blues—which grew out of the plantations, prisons, swampy marshes, and fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta—changed the course of American popular music. With original research and keen insights, Delta Blues evokes the legendary figures who shaped the Delta’s sound and ethos, from Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and Muddy Waters to John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King.

From visionary writer and director Jordan Peele (Get Out, Nope) comes this groundbreaking anthology of all-new stories of Black horror, exploring not only the terrors of the supernatural but the chilling reality of injustice that haunts our nation. Read by the author and a full cast, the collection includes stories from Maurice Broaddus, P. Djèlí Clark, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and more.

Sociology scholar Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo in Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System, which situates the practice against a changing America. Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between “old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo” and commercially marketed forms influenced and manufactured by outsiders, focusing on the system operating among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

The century between the abolition of slavery and the civil rights revolution poses a question: If emancipation meant freedom, why was it necessary to march? Henry Louis Gates, Jr. seeks to answer via a history that moves from Reconstruction through to the Harlem Renaissance, including the “nadir” of the African American experience under Jim Crow. Stony the Road reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how they reinforced a stark color line between white and Black Americans.

In Sinners, Hailee Steinfeld plays Mary, a white-passing woman whose mother was terrorized for being the child of mixed-race parents. Mary’s sense of disconnection and lack of community are markers of “passing,” a concept explored in Nella Larson’s classic novel about a light-skinned Black woman whose old childhood friend is now passing as white. The novel is performed by Tessa Thompson, who starred in the 2021 film adaptation.

At times, Sinners feels like a zombie movie, with the good guys barricading themselves against a horde of violent maniacs. Yet vampires are a perfect symbol of cultural appropriation, which sees white people feeding off the creativity and achievements of Black people for mainstream success, famously with the blues. In White Negroes, Lauren Michele Jackson reveals how this toxic dynamic persists across the culture, exacerbating economic, political, and social inequity in America.

Sinners’s biggest moment is a transcendent celebration in which Sammie’s blues performance connects past and present, with the crowd suddenly including partygoers from all different eras and scenes, from hip-hop to rock to tribal music. If you’ve ever been to a P-Funk concert, you know the vibe. Revolutionary funk icon George Clinton exemplifies the Afrofuturist tradition of using sci-fi to reimagine Black experiences. For another music memoir, folk icon Rhiannon Giddens—who collaborated on music for the film—narrates her powerful 2021 release To Balance on Bridges.

The success of Sinners boosts the timeliness of Kat Dunn’s buzzy Hungerstone, a feminist reworking of Carmilla, the queer novella that inspired Dracula. Reimagining vampires from the female gaze, Dunn subverts our expectations of the monster as a male predator. Instead, when unhappy wife Lenore meets mysterious Carmilla, their connection stirs up a terrible hunger that’s about much more than simple bloodlust.

The beings in this terrifyingly immersive multicast thriller are not the “haints” of Sinners but the Mbirwi, a vengeful entity born from centuries of colonial oppression. Starring Caleb McLaughlin of Stranger Things as a headphones-wearing, self-absorbed teen, Sacrilege: Curse of the Mbirwi follows his family's vacation to a luxury game reserve in Zimbabwe where ancient spirits collide with inner wounds, and family secrets are as deadly as the strange beasts that stalk the savanna.