Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaung. I remember being pretty young as a kid,

and finding out that the family soap we were using, which we brought home in bulk from a recent

trip to Indonesia, supposedly contained skin lightening ingredients. Its whole shtick was that

if you used it enough, your skin would become less dark.

Probably a spurious claim, but that was its intention.

Which is to say, I learned that despite my maybe well-meaning teachers being like,

the color of your skin doesn't matter, it obviously does to a lot of people in a lot of different ways. Today, we've got two books

that take wildly different approaches to skin color. In a bit, we'll hear from a poet who is

surprisingly blunt about what she sees in the color of her skin. But first, the last white man

is a speculative fiction book written by Mosin Hamid about a white guy who turns not white.

And he tells NPR Scott Simon about how widespread and global our baggage about skin color is.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors. On our new show,

Sources and Methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,

helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR

app or wherever you get your podcasts.

When morning Anders, who is a white man, wakes up and finds his skin has turned brown.

His girlfriend, Una, will eventually follow and much of the rest of his unnamed town and society.

Let's ask Mosin Hamid to read from his new work, The Last White Man, Mr. Hamid.

People who knew him no longer knew him. He passed them in his car or on the sidewalk,

where sometimes they gave him extra room, and where sometimes, unthinkingly, he did the same.

No one hit him or knifed him or shot him.

...