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For publishers, books on race and racism have been a surprising success

from The Washington Post

For publishers, books on race and racism have been a surprising success The Washington Post Erroll McDonald, the executive editor of the Knopf Doubleday division of Random House and one of the savviest black veterans in the book business, traces the current moment in publishing back to five years ago, when the sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” was about to come out. The entire book world had geared up to make it one of the biggest events in publishing history, only to discover that Harper Lee’s long-rumored second novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” showed her beloved protagonist, Atticus Finch, to have been a genteel Southern racist. Concerned about how celebrating Lee’s book would look in the atmosphere of racial outrage over police violence that had given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, booksellers searched for another, more contemporary take on race that they could promote. READ MORE

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