Between the World and Me

Coates was inspired to write Between the World and Me following a 2013 meeting with sitting United States President Barack Obama. Coates, a writer for The Atlantic, had been reading James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time and was determined to make his second meeting with the president less deferential than his first. As he left for Washington, D.C., his wife encouraged him to think like Baldwin, and Coates recalled an unofficial, fiery meeting between Baldwin, Black activists, and Robert F. Kennedy in 1963. When it was his turn, Coates debated with Obama whether his policy sufficiently addressed racial disparities in the universal health care rollout. After the event, Obama and Coates spoke privately about a blog post Coates had written criticizing the president's call for more personal responsibility among African Americans. Obama disagreed with the criticism and told Coates not to despair. As Coates walked to the train station, he thought about how Baldwin would not have shared Obama's optimism, the same optimism that supported many Civil Rights Movement activists' belief that justice was inevitable. Instead, Coates saw Baldwin as being fundamentally "cold", without "sentiment and melodrama" in his acknowledgment that the movement could fail and that requital was not guaranteed. Coates found this idea "freeing" and called his book editor, Christopher Jackson, to ask "why no one wrote like Baldwin anymore." Jackson proposed that Coates try. Between the World and Me is Coates's second book, following his 2008 memoir The Beautiful Struggle. Since then, and especially in the 18 months including the Ferguson unrest preceding his new book's release, Coates somberly believed less in the soul and its aspirational sense of eventual justice. Coates felt that he had become more radicalized. ==Title==

The book's title comes from Richard Wright's poem "Between the World and Me", originally published in the July/August 1935 issue of Partisan Review. Wright's poem is about a Black man discovering the site of a lynching and becoming incapacitated with fear, creating a barrier between himself and the world. Despite Between the World and Me undergoing many changes as the book was revised, Coates always planned to end with the story of Mabel Jones. The only endorsement Coates sought was that of novelist Toni Morrison, which he received. Between the World and Me was published by Spiegel & Grau in 2015. ==Summary==

Between the World and Me takes the form of a book-length letter from the author to his son, adopting the structure of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time; the latter is directed, in part, towards Baldwin's nephew, while the former addresses Coates's 15-year-old son. ==Reception==

After reading Between the World and Me, novelist Toni Morrison wrote that Coates fills "the intellectual void" left by James Baldwin's death 28 years prior. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that the phrasing of his comments on 9/11 could be easily misread. Between the World and Me functioned as a sequel to Coates's 2008 memoir, which displayed Coates's talents as an emotional and lyrical writer. NPR's Colin Dwyer had considered it the favorite to win the prize, given the book's reception. The book topped The New York Times Best Seller list for nonfiction on August 2, 2015, and remained number 1 for three weeks. It topped the same list again during the week of January 24, 2016. The book was selected by Washington University in St. Louis and Augustana College in 2016, as the book for all first-year students to read and discuss in the fall 2016 semester. In the same year, the book was ranked 7th on The Guardians list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. In September 2020, Mercer County public schools pulled the book from class. In February 2023, an AP English teacher in South Carolina's Lexington & Richland County School District Five was forced to halt a lesson on the book by school administrators, who claimed that the lesson violated state budget provisions. South Carolina law prohibits the use of state funds for lessons that teach that "an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his race or sex" or "an individual, by virtue of his race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously." Coates attended the school board meeting about the incident. He wrote about it in his book, The Message. ==Editions and translations==

• Hardcover, English. Spiegel & Grau; 1st edition (July 14, 2015), • E-book, English. Spiegel & Grau; 1st edition (July 14, 2015), ASIN: B00SEFAIRI • Hardcover, French. "Une colère noire : Lettre à mon fils". AUTREMENT (January 27, 2016), • E-book, French. "Une colère noire : Lettre à mon fils". AUTREMENT (January 27, 2016) ASIN: B01A91OE0G • Hardcover, German. Miriam Mandelkow (translator), "Zwischen mir und der Welt". Hanser Berlin (February 1, 2016), • E-book, German. Miriam Mandelkow (translator), "Zwischen mir und der Welt". Hanser Berlin (February 1, 2016) ASIN: B018VATBL4 • Paperback, Spanish. Javier Calvo Perales (translator), "Entre el mundo y yo" (nd), • E-book, Spanish. Javier Calvo Perales (translator), "Entre el mundo y yo." Seix Barral (October 18, 2016) ASIN: B01IPXTMS4 • Paperback, Catalan. Josefina Caball Guerrero (translator). "Entre el món i jo" (nd), • E-book, Catalan. Josefina Caball Guerrero (translator). "Entre el món i jo" (October 19, 2016), ASIN: B01JB6TWY8 • Hardcover, Norwegian. Bodil Engen (Translator). "Mellom verden og meg", Heinesen forl. (2016), • Hardcover, Korean. 오은숙 (translator). "세상과 나 사이". 열린책들 (September 5, 2016), • Hardcover, Polish. Dariusz Żukowski (translator). "Między światem a mną". Agora S.A. (May 26, 2021), • Hardcover, Dutch. Rutger H. Cornets de Groot (translator), "Tussen de wereld en mij", Amsterdam University Press (November 1, 2015), • Paperback, Portuguese. Paulo Geiger (translator), "Entre o Mundo e Eu". Objetiva (November 1, 2015), • Paperback, Turkish. Pınar Umman (translator), "Dünyayla Benim Aramda" Monokl (January 1, 2016), • Paperback, Romanian. Elena Marcu (translator), Adi Păun (translator), "Între lume și mine", Black Button Books (January 1, 2017), • Paperback, Chinese. 塔-奈希西·科茨, 宋瑛堂 (translator) "在世界與我之間" 衛城出版 (October 5, 2016), • Paperback, Hebrew. טא-נהסי קואטס, זהר אלמקייס (translator), בין העולם וביני" הקיבוץ המאוחד" (January 1, 2018) • Hardcover, Italian. Chiara Stangalino (translator), "Tra me e il mondo" Codice (May 19, 2016), • Hardcover, Slovenian. Petra Meterc (translator and foreword), "Med svetom in mano" Cankarjeva založba (November 1, 2021), • Paperback, Arabic. تا نيهيسي كوتس, محمد فتحي خضر (translator), بين العالم وبيني" دار التنوير" (February 1, 2021), ==Television adaptation==

On September 30, 2020, HBO announced that it had adapted Between the World and Me as an 80-minute-long television special, which premiered on November 21, 2020. Between the World and Me was initially adapted and staged in 2018 by the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York. The HBO adaptation of Between the World and Me combines elements of the 2018 production at the Apollo Theater, readings from the book, and documentary footage from the actors’ home lives. Both the Apollo and HBO versions are directed by Kamilah Forbes. The HBO special included appearances by around 20 celebrities and civil rights activists including Oprah Winfrey, Phylicia Rashad, Angela Davis, Mahershala Ali, Joe Morton, Yara Shahidi and Angela Bassett. The production used Baltimore street scene photographs by John Clark Mayden, which the Baltimore Sun called "powerful images". The book appears in the movie The Equalizer 2, with the protagonist Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) reading it during the train scene in Turkey. ==References==