THE MESSAGE, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates has returned to the fray. In 2017, after getting into a public dust-up with Cornel West, who accused him of being in thrall to a “neoliberal establishment,” Coates, declaring he “didn’t get in it for this,” summarily deleted his Twitter account. A year later, he left his longtime post as a staff writer at The Atlantic. He spent the next several years far from the combative world of intellectual celebrity and immersed in his own creative projects: writing comics, publishing a novel and working on Hollywood scripts.

In his new book, “The Message,” Coates likens his books to his children, better left to make their way through the world while he, the protective author, hung back: “My work is to set the table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it and then go.” Defending his books brought out the worst in him, he says; he was at his best when “making more of them.”

But after protests against police brutality erupted in 2020 and school boards started trying to ban Coates’s “Between the World and Me” (2015), he eventually decided that retreating “into my own private space of bookmaking” was no longer conscionable. Teachers and librarians were standing up for his work, often at great risk; to decide that his writing could speak for itself was a “privilege,” he says, one unavailable to his embattled defenders on the front lines.

“The Message” charts Coates’s re-entry as a public intellectual; it also marks a shift in his approach. Instead of focusing mainly on the American experience, most of the book takes place abroad. The rolling, elegiac cadences of much of his earlier work have yielded to a fury that’s harder edged. But a sense of shock also seems to have elicited in Coates a sense of possibility. He used to get criticized for being too fatalistic, too despairing, too insistent on presuming the world is what it is. Now, in “The Message,” he addresses himself to “young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”

The book is several things at once: a letter to his writing students at Howard University; a meditation on storytelling, and the power of stories to delineate what may or may not be politically possible; a travelogue of his trip to Senegal, where Coates visited a site of the slave trade; an account of meeting a high school instructor in South Carolina who was being pressured to stop teaching “Between the World and Me.”