Ten Washington D.C. titles that aren’t about politicians

Charlotte Taylor Fryar is a writer, historian, educator, and herbalist. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in Glen Echo, Maryland, less than seven hundred feet from the banks of the Potomac River.

Her first book, Potomac Fever: Reflections on the Nation’s River, is an essay collection exploring the natural history & racial history of Washington, D.C.’s waterways.

At Lit Hub Fryar tagged ten Washington D.C. books that aren’t about politicians. One entry on the list:

Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

The New York Times Book Review heralded Dinaw Mengestu’s debut as “a great African novel, a great Washington novel, and a great American novel.” Nearly twenty years after its publication, it’s fair to say that The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and Mengestu’s more recent novel Someone Like Us (2024) are two of the century’s greatest D.C. novels.

Set primarily in Logan Circle in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the novel captures the gentrification of the neighborhood alongside the personal dislocation of Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian shopkeeper haunted by exile and yearning for connection.

The book is at its most poignant in its descriptions of a city whitening under the shadow of the federal government. In one particularly melancholy scene, reminiscent of Jones’ compass-like sense of the city, Stephanos leaves his store, walking west to the corner of 16th and P Streets. From here, he remarks, “You can see the White House…the street unfurls from its gate like a massive concrete carpet….I used to think that there was some great metaphor in this.”

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue