Stranger Faces

Stranger Faces is a collection of speculative essays by Namwali Serpell that explores our contemporary mythology of the face, challenging the ideal face and exploring the perverse pleasures we take in the mutability of faces.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 196 pages
Publication date: 05 November 2020
Publisher: Transit Books

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist


A New Yorker


Best Book of 2020


Wise, warm, witty, and dizzyingly wide-ranging.


- The New York Times


Serpell's vital treatise is one readers will find themselves returning to again and again.


- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review


If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the basis for what we call humanity.




The face is considered the source of identity, truth, beauty, authenticity, and empathy. It underlies our ideas about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. But all of this rests on a specific image of the face. We might call it the ideal face.




What about the strange face, the stranger's face, the face that thwarts recognition? What do we make of the face that rides the line of legibility? In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces—the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead—Namwali Serpell probes our contemporary mythology of the face.


Stranger Faces


imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces.

Weight: 192g
Dimension: 126 x 177 x 14 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781945492433