Keynote
A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just Us
Book Title
Triage
Cover Image
“Claudia Rankine is fearless. . . . We need her.”—Los Angeles Times, “20 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2026”
Body
Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.
Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.
Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. “No matter our posture,” Rankine writes, “we are all among the rubble.” This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.
Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.
Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. “No matter our posture,” Rankine writes, “we are all among the rubble.” This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.
List Price
$28.00
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About the Author
Credit: Andrew Zuckerman / The Slowdown
Praise
“Rankine is a literary icon, so it’s no surprise that she’s found ways to blend genres and formats into her next book. . . . Rankine explores the backdrop of violence that has only intensified in recent years, as well as the love that keeps us together in emotionally numbing times.”—Harper’s Bazaar, “The 25 Most Highly Anticipated Books of 2026”
“The ever genre-fluid Rankine braids criticism, memoir and more in this illustrated story of two women whose lives diverge and reconverge over decades.”—The New York Times Book Review, “The Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026”
“Claudia Rankine’s remarkable, outstanding odyssey—an account of our present, which is also our past, which is always our future—is beautifully rendered in a kaleidoscope of images and sensations. Triage is exquisite.”—Jamaica Kincaid
“At the center of Triage is a ritual of collapse and tentative recovery, of giving way and getting back up. In Claudia Rankine’s writing, we feel traditional genres buckle under the catastrophes of the present—and then she shows us how new possibilities of form and feeling might emerge.”—Ben Lerner
