Richard Wright, the pioneering black American author of Native Son is having several of his works republished.

They say never judge a book by it’s cover. Well good for you, but that’s precisely how must of us, who only encounter books in airport lounges, go about buying them anyway.

Each year the editors of the Believer generate a short list of the novels they thought were the strongest and, in their opinion, the most undervalued of the year. The 2007 list, published this month, appears below, along with several writers’ citations.