Reading Detroit.

These streets inspire stories, both true and imagined. What follows is a semi-comprehensive list of books that feature Detroit, or are authored by Detroit writers — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, and books for young people. May it be a map for your readerly explorations.

Fiction:

Megan Abbott

• The Fever
• Dare Me
• The End of Everything
• Queenpin

Harriette Simpson Arnow

• The Dollmaker
• Hunter’s Horn
• The Weedkiller’s Daughter

Toby Barlow

• Sharp Teeth
• Babayaga

Charles Baxter

• A Relative Stranger

Matt Bell

• Scrapper

Lauren Beukes

• Broken Monsters

NoViolet Bulwayo

• We Need New Names

Pearl Cleage

• Just Wanna Testify
• What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
• I Wish I Had a Red Dress
• Babylon Sisters
• Til You Hear From Me
• Some Things I Never Thought I’d Do
• Seen it All and Done the Rest
• Brass Bed and Other Stories

Desiree Cooper

• Know the Mother

Joseph Coulson

• Of Song and Water

Bridgett M. Davis

• Into the Go-Slow

Stephen Dobyns

• The House on Alexandrine

Loren D. Estleman

• The Amos Walker books, including Motor City Blue, Retro, Angel Eyes, Sweet Women Lie, and Lady Yesterday
• The Detroit series, including Thunder City, Jitterbug, King of the Corner, and Motown

Jeffrey Eugenides

• Middlesex  (Winner, Pulitzer Prize)
• The Marriage Plot
• The Virgin Suicides

Angela Flournoy

• The Turner House  (Finalist, National Book Award)

Kelly Fordon

• Garden for the Blind

Donald Goines

• Dopefiend
• Whoreson
• Black Girl Lost
• Street Players
• Black Gangster
• White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief
• Daddy Cool
• Cry Revenge
• Swamp Man

Judith Guest

• Ordinary People
• Second Heaven
• Killing Time in St. Cloud (with Rebecca Hill)
• Errands
• The Tarnished Eye

Arthur Hailey

• Wheels

Steve Hamilton

• Let it Burn

Lolita Hernandez

• Making Callaloo in Detroit

Alexander Irvine

• The Narrows

D.E. Johnson

• Detroit Breakdown
• The Detroit Electric Scheme
• Detroit Shuffle
• Motor City Shakedown

Scott Lasser

• Say Nice Things About Detroit

Allen Learst

• Dancing at the Gold Monkey

Brad Leithauser

• A Few Corrections
• The Art Student’s War

Elmore Leonard

• City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit
• Maximum Bob
• Swag Up in Honey’s Room
• Pagan Babies
• Split Images
• Unknown Man No. 89

Ross MacDonald

• Trouble Follows Me

Peter Markus

• Bob, or Man on Boat
• Good, Brother
• The Singing Fish
• We Make Mud

Susan Messer

• Grand River and Joy

Bill Morris

• Motor City Burning

Joyce Carol Oates

• With Shuddering Fall
• By the North Gate
• Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories (includes “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction”)
• A Garden of Earthly Delights
• Expensive People
• them
• The Wheel of Love and Other Stories
• Wonderland
• Marriages and Infidelities
• Do With Me What You Will
• The Goddess and Other Women
• The Assassins
• The Hungry Ghost
• Seven Allusive Comedies
• Crossing the Border
• Night-Sides

Alice Randall

• The Wind Done Gone
• Pushkin and the Queen of Spades
• Rebel Yell

Upton Sinclair

• The Flivver-King: A Story of Ford-America

David Small

• Stitches

Jeff Vande Zande

• Detroit Muscle

Michael Zadoorian

• The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit
• Second Hand

Detroit Noir (anthology; eds. E.J. Olsen and John C. Hocking)

Nonfiction:

William M. Adler

• Land of Opportunity: One Family’s Quest for the American Dream in the Age of Crack

Eddie B. Allen

• Low Road: The Life and Legacy of Donald Goines

Daniell Aubert, Lana Cavar & Natasha Chandani

• Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park, Detroit

Dan Austin

• Forgotten Landmarks of Detroit
• Lost Detroit: Stories Behind the Motor City’s Majestic Ruins

Richard Bak & Neal Rubin

• Detroitland: A History of Movers, Shakers, Lost Souls and History Makers from Detroit’s Past

Nancy W. Barr

• Motor City Muse: Detroit Photographs, Then and Now

Beth Tompkins Bates

• The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

Suzanne Bilek

• Great Female Artists of Detroit

Mark Binelli

• Detroit City is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

Peter H. Blum

• Brewed in Detroit: Breweries and Beers Since 1830

James Boggs

• American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook

Grace Lee Boggs

• Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (with James Boggs)
• Conversations in Maine: Exploring or Nations Future (with James Boggs, Freddy Paine and Lyman Paine)
• Living for Change: An Autobiography

Nathan Bomey

• Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back

Melba Joyce Boyd

• Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press

Kevin Boyle

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (Winner, Pulitzer Prize)

Amy Elliott Bragg

• Hidden History of Detroit

Brett Callwood

• MC5: Sonically Speaking The Stooges: Head On (forward by Alice Cooper)

David A. Carson

• Grit, Noise, and Revolution: The Birth of Detroit Rock ‘n’ Roll

Anna Clark

• A Detroit Anthology (editor)
• Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden

Pearl Cleage

• Things I Should Have Told My Daughter: Lies, Lessons, and Love Affairs
• Deals With the Devil: And Other Reasons to Riot; Mad at Miles: A Black Woman’s Guide to Truth

Paul Clemons

• Made in Detroit

Ken Coleman

• Forever Young: The Coleman Reader

Maria O. Collum, Barbara E. Krueger & Dorothy Kostuch

• Detroit’s Historic Places of Worship

Toi Derricotte

• The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey

Bob Dombrowski

• 38 Years: A Detroit Firefighter’s Story

Brian Lee Dunnigan

• Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701-1838

Aaron Foley

• How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass

Bradford Frost

• Reveal Your Detroit: An Intimate Look at a Great American City

John G. Fuller

• We Almost Lost Detroit

John Gallagher

• Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City
• Revolution Detroit: Strategies of Urban Reinvention
• Yamasaki in Detroit

George Galster

• Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City

Peter Gavrilovich & Bill McGraw

• The Detroit Almanac: 300 Years of Life in the Motor City

Cheri Y. Gay

• Detroit: Then & Now

Ernie Goodman

• The Color of Law

Amy Haimerl

• Detroit Hustle: A Memoir of Love, Life, and Home

Laurie Lanzen Harris with Paul Ganson

• The Detroit Symphony Orchestra: Grace, Grit, and Glory

Robert Hayden

• Collected Prose (ed. Frederick Glaysher)

Charles K. Hyde

• Images From the Arsenal of Democracy
• Arsenal of Democracy: The American Automobile Industry in World War II

Oneita Jackson

• Nappy-Headed Negro Syndrome

Charlie LeDuff

• Detroit: An American Autopsy

Andy Linn, Emily Linn & Rob Linn

• Belle Isle to 8 Mile: An Insider’s Guide to Detroit

Bill Loomis

• Detroit Food: Coney Dogs to Farmers Markets

Steve Luxenberg

• Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret

Paul Kersey

• Escape from Detroit: The Collapse of the Black Metropolis

David Maraniss

• Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

Scott Martelle

• Detroit: A Biography

Tracie McMillan

• The American Way of Eating

Steve Miller

• Detroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in America’s Loudest City

Jayne Morris-Crowther

• The Political Activities of Detroit Clubwoman in the 1920s

Andrew Moore & Phillip Levine

• Detroit Disassembled

Julia R. Myers

• Energy: Charles McGee at Eight-Five

Charles Novacek

• Border Crossings: Coming of Age in the Czech Resistance

Julie Pincus and Nichole Christian

• Canvas Detroit

Gerald Posner

• Motown: Music, Money, Sex & Power

J. Gordan Rodwan

• Detroit Is (w/ John G. Rodwan, Jr.)

John G. Rodwan, Jr.

• Fighter & Writers
• Holidays and Other Disasters
• Detroit Is (w/ J. Gordan Rodwan)

Tony Rettman & Tesco Vee

• Why Be Something You’re Not: Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985

Chris Rhomberg

• The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor

Wilbur Rich

• Coleman Young & Detroit Politics: From Social Activist to Power Broker

Jenny Risher

• Heart Soul Detroit: Conversations on the Motor City

Mitch Ryder

• Devils and Blue Dresses

Shaka Senghor

• Writing My Wrongs
• Live in Peace

Robert Sharoff and William Zbaren

• American City: Detroit Architecture 1845-2005

Dan Sicko

• Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk

Suzanne E. Smith

• Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit

John Sobczak

• A Motor City Year

Thomas J. Sugrue

• The Algiers Motel Incident (with John Hersey)
• The Origins of an Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

Marvin Surkin & Dan Georgakas

• Detroit: I Do Mind Dying

Julie Manning Thomas

• Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit

Barrett Watten

• The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography

Doug Wilson

• The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych

Malcolm X

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X (with Alex Haley)

Helen Zia

• Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People My Country Versus Me (with Wen Ho Lee)

Poetry:

Terry Blackhawk

• The Dropped Hand
• The Light Between

D. Blair

• Moonwalking

Pearl Cleage

• Blues for an Alabama Sky
• Flyin’ West
• A Song for Cornetta
• Bourbon at the Border

Jim Daniels

• In Line for the Exterminator

Toi Derricotte

• Captivity
• Natural Birth
• Tender Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of African-American Poetry (ed.)

Tarfia Faizullah

• Seam

Vievee Francis

• Blue-Tail Fly
• Horse in the Dark
• Forest Primeval

Bill Harris

• Booker T and Them

francine j. harris

• allegiance

Robert Hayden

• Selected Poems
• Words in the Mourning Time
• Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems
• American Journal
• Collected Poems (ed. Frederick Glaysher)

Kim D. Hunter

• On the Edge of the Time Zone

Murray Jackson

• Bobweaving Detroit

Phillip Levine

• News of the World
• Breath
• The Mercy
• The Simple Truth
• What Work Is
• A Walk with Tom Jefferson
• They Feed They Lion
• Not This Pig

Naomi Long Madgett

• Connected Islands: New and Selected Poems
• Pilgrim Journey

Ken Meisel

• Beautiful Rust
• Scrap Metal
• Mantra Poems

Ken Mikolowski

• Big Enigmas
• Little Mysteries
• This That

Joyce Carol Oates

• Women In Love and Other Poems
• Anonymous
• Sins & Other Poems
• Love and Its Derangements
• Angel Fire
• The Fabulous Beasts

Matthew Olzmann

• Mezzanines

Jamaal May

• Hum

Marge Piercy

• Made in Detroit
• The Crooked Inheritance
• To Be of Use
• Stone, Paper, Knife
• Hard-Loving

Dudley Randall (founder of Broadside Press)

• Poem Counterpoem (with Margaret Danner)
• Cities Burning
• After the Killing
• A Litany of Friends: New and Selected Poems
• Roses and Revolutions (introduction by Melba Joyce Boyd)

Chris Tysh

• Cleavage
• Coat of Arms
• Continuity Girl
• The Flip Side
• In the Name Molloy

Plays:

Ron Allen

• Aboriginal Treatment Center
• Dreaming the Reality Room
• Yellow Eye Mouth
• Graffitti Body Shop
• The Heidelberg Project: Squatting in the Circle of the Elder Mind
• The Hieroglyph of the Cockatoo
• Last Church of the Twentieth Century
• My Eyes Are in the Cage in My Head
• Relative Energy
• Sack Museum
• The Tibetan Book of the Dead
• Twenty Plays in Twenty Minutes
• Swallow the Sun
• WHAM!

Lisa D’Amour

• Detroit: A Play

Ron Milner

• Who’s Got His Own
• The Monster
• The Warning—A Theme for Linda M(ego) and the Green Ball of Freedom
• What the Wine Sellers Buy
• These Three Season’s Reasons
• Checkmates
• Don’t Get God Started
• Defending the Light;
• Urban Transition: Loose Blossoms

Dominique Morisseau

• Detroit ’67

Jonathan Reynolds

• Yanks 3, Detroit 0: Top of the Seventh

Chris Tysh

• Car Men: A Play in D Night Scales

Books for Young People:

Jean Alicia Elster

• The Colored Card Who’s Jim Hines?