Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me checks in at a trim 152 pages but lands like a major work, a book destined to remain on store shelves, bedside tables, and high school and college syllabi long after its author or any of us have left this Earth. In recent years, Coates has staked his claim as one of the premier American essayists of his generation, a prize-winning correspondent for the Atlantic whose 2014 cover story “The Case for Reparations” was the most widely discussed piece of American magazine writing in recent memory.

Between the World and Me was originally slated for an October release but was recently bumped up to July 14 in the wake of last month’s white supremacist terror attack in Charleston. The timeliness is grim, but a book like this will always be timely—not merely because its concerns are shamefully perennial, but because it is a work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty. Between the World and Me unfolds as a six-chapter letter from Coates to his 15-year-old son Samori, prompted by his son’s stunned and heartbroken reaction to last November’s announcement that no charges would be brought against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. The framing device is an explicit homage to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, a similarly compact volume published in 1963 that begins with a prefatory essay titled “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”

Baldwin’s “Letter” runs just a few pages and is a work of ferocious urgency, words of anguished wisdom imparted from an elder (“I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times,” he writes in the opening line). Between the World and Me, in contrast, is not so much a work of counsel as a lovingly, painstakingly crafted inheritance, a reflection on fatherhood that often feels like a spiritual sequel to Coates’ first book, The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir of his childhood in Baltimore that focused heavily on his own father. If The Beautiful Struggle was Coates explaining his father to himself, Between the World and Me is Coates explaining himself to his son, and, in doing so, explaining as best he can what it means to be black in America.

Much of this happens through snapshots of Coates’ life, both prior to fatherhood and during it. Some of these moments are immense and tragic, such as the murder of Coates’ college friend Prince Jones at the hands of police, an event that, Coates writes, “took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.” Others are more quotidian if still wrenching, such as a brief and heated confrontation with a middle-aged white woman who shoves a 4-year-old Samori at a movie theater. Still others are warm and joyful: every description of Samori’s mother, for instance, or a fantastic meal shared with a new friend on Coates’ first trip to Paris.