Rank

Title

% of Total

41

Roots: The Saga of an American Family

This "bold . . . extraordinary . . . blockbuster . . ". (Newsweek) begins with a birth in 1750, in an African village; it ends seven generations later at the Arkansas funeral of a black professor whose children are a teacher, a Navy architect, an assistant director of the U.S. Information Agency, and an author. The author is Alex Haley.

0.69%

42

The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1968-1995)

One of America's hottest and most controversial poets since the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni has been a teacher, mother, activist, and the unflagging poet of more than 13 poetry collections. This volume of her impeccably chosen, truth-telling poems is a celebration of her remarkable career and the changes she has endured as an African-American woman, lover, and feminist.

0.69%

43

The Street

As much a historical document as it is a novel, this 1946 winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship is the poignant and unblinkingly honest story of a young black woman's struggle to live and raise her son by herself amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s.

0.69%

44

Cane

The book by which we remember this writer is as hard to classify as is its author. At first glance it appears to consist of assorted sketches, stories, and a novelette, all interspersed with poems. Some of the prose is poetic, and often Toomer slips from one form into the other almost imperceptibly. The novelette is constructed like a play.

His characters, always evoked with effortless strength, are as recognizable as they are unexpected in the fiction of that period. Fern is a "creamy brown" beauty so complicated men take her "but get no joy from it." Becky is a white outcast beside a Georgia road who bears two Negro children. Kabnis is a languishing idealist finally redeemed from cynicism and dissipation by the discovery of underlying strength in his people. Is he Jean Toomer in fictional disguise? One wonders.

It does not take long to discover that Cane is not without design, however. A world of black peasantry in Georgia appears in the first section. The scene shifts, with almost prophetic insight, to the black ghetto of Washington, D. C. in the second. Rural Georgia comes up again in the third. Changes in the concerns of Toomer's folk are noted as the setting changes.

A young poet-observer moves through the book. Drugged by beauty "perfect as dusk when the sun goes down," lifted and swayed by folk song, arrested by eyes that "desired nothing that you could give," silenced by "corn leaves swaying, rustv with talk," he recognized that "the Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa." A native richness is here, he concluded, and the poet embraced it with the passion of love.

0.64%

45

How Stella Got Her Groove Back

"How Stella Got Her Groove Back" is the sexy tale of a fortysomething single mother who falls in love with a 20 year old man while on vacation in Jamaica. Simultaneous release with the Signet movie tie-in paperback and the Twentieth Century Fox movie starring Angela Bassett, Taye Diggs, Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover. Abridged.

0.64%

46

Tar Baby

Winner of the 1978 National Book Critic's Circle Award for fiction. "Beautiful and satisfying . . . an unusually wise and large-spirited book . . . consistently picturesque, charged with startling images".--Baltimore Sun

0.64%

47

The Souls of Black Folk (Modern Library Series)

First published in 1903, this extraordinary work not only recorded and explained history, it helped to alter its course. Written after Du Bois had earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and studied in Berlin, these 14 essays contain both the academic language of sociology and the rich lyrics of African spirituals, which Du Bois called "sorrow songs." New introduction by Randall Kenan. Major school adoption title.

0.64%

48

Ugly Ways

The new novel by the highly acclaimed author of Baby of the Family. A mother's death provides a time of reckoning for her three daughters. As they prepare for the funeral, members of the Lovejoy family must come to grips with their relationships with their mother.

0.64%

49

Another Country

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the early 1970s.

0.59%

50

Black Gold

Based on a true story, this compelling saga of two African-American families, whose lives are entwined in a web of greed, obsession, and revenge when oil is discovered on their land, is brought vividly to life in an "exciting, entertaining, and intensely personal novel" (Dan Rather, CBS News). Author signings. (Historical Fiction)

0.59%

51

Caught up in the Rapture

In this impressive debut, 25-year-old Sheneska Jackson transports readers to South Central L.A. in a gritty, glamorous, and very real love story. Jazmine's ready to step out from under the influence of her preacher father, get discovered, and have a little fun with her outgoing friend Dakota, with whom she shares her righteous anger at men, girlfriend to girlfriend. "A dazzling kickoff novel."--Rita Mae Brown. First serial to Essence.

0.59%

52

Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven

In 1975 young Tempestt Saville and her family are chosen by lottery to "move on up" to Lakeland: one square mile of rich black soil carved out of a Chicago ghetto, cradling sparkling apartment towers where the elite of black professionals live behind a ten-foot-high, ivy-covered fence. But 11-year-old Temmy is drawn to the world outside the fence, to 35th Street, a place of colorful, often dangerous characters. 320 pp. National author tour. Local author promo. National print ads. 30,000 print.

0.59%

53

The Heart of a Woman

In this fourth volume of her highly acclaimed autobiographical series, the esteemed poet and author continues the story of her remarkable and sometimes turbulent life, beginning with her days as a singer-dancer in New York City, when her love for writing blossomed at the Harlem Writers Guild. Then there were fiery times as the northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest and more impassioned moments when she promised her heart to one man only to have it stolen, virtually on her wedding day, by an African freedom fighter. Through her eloquent prose, Angelou shares her fondest dreams, her heartfelt disappointments, and her loving relationship with her teenaged son. Filled with unforgettable vignettes of famous figures, from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X.

0.59%

54

A Do Right Man

Tyree (Flyy Girl, 1996) returns, this time, fortunately, focusing less on Afrocentric theorizing and more on character- -resulting in a good deal more engaging read. The first-person story centers on Bobby Dallas (the ``do right man''), who, despite the weight he's obliged to shoulder as a prototypical Good Black Man, manages to come off as likable, complex, and utterly confused. Bobby has always wanted to be ``in'' radio. And so at Howard University he interns at a couple of stations and makes contacts that ought to be useful in the future. Just before graduation, though, the campus babe and slick New Yorker Pearl Davis takes a shine to Bobby, leading him to throw over best friend Faye Butler, who's been expressing romantic interest in him for years, and follow Pearl to Manhattan, where the talk-radio scene is as cut-throat as the city streets. Sure enough, once Pearl's modeling career takes off, she dumps him fast, and Bobby moves back to Washington to make a real run for his dream job. But while he hooks up there with lots of smart and beautiful women, he finds he can't stop thinking about Faye. After finding professional success, with women of all kinds banging down his door, Bobby is all the more convinced that Faye, his soulmate, was the one he let get away. It will take a coincidence and an act of bravery to gather all the ragged threads of Bobby's life together into a cohesive strand. Tyree in a new, more subtle mode. -Kirkus

0.54%

55

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Quote From Sacred Fire:
Go Tell It on the Mountain is considered to be James Baldwin's greatest novel. Like much of Baldwin's writing, it draws heavily on his own intense childhood experiences with religious doubt, racism, sexual ambivalence, and a complex relationship with a difficult father. The entire book takes place on the fourteenth birthday of John Grimes, the son of a fire-and-brimstone revivalist preacher, who finds himself increasingly alienated from his bitter, authoritarian father, his religious faith, and his community. Baldwin treats the young man's battle with Manichaean choices—flesh or spirit, community or individualism, conversion or heresy—with masterful sensitivity and insight.

0.54%

56

The Between

A features writer and columnist for the Miami Herald electrifies the literary world with her brilliant first novel. Hilton's grandmother drowned trying to save his life. Thirty years later, he's beginning to suspect that he was never meant to survive the accident--and that dark forces are working to rectify that mistake.

0.54%

57

The Hand I Fan With

Three sexy, screwed-up Southern sisters come home to Mulberry to put their totally self-centered mother, Mudear, in her grave. We meet the Lovejoy women as they gather in their mother's house to lay her and the demons she has dumped on them to rest.

0.54%

58

The Piano Lesson

Set in 1936, The Piano Lesson is a powerful new play from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. A sister and brother fight over a piano that has been in the family for three generations, creating a remarkable drama that embodies the painful past and expectant future of black Americans.

0.54%

59

The Spook Who Sat by the Door

Quote From Sacred Fire:
The Spook Who Sat by the Door was originally brought into print by a small publisher, Richard Baron Press, and quickly became an underground favorite. Published in the near aftermath of the Black Power movement, The Spook fictionalized the urban- based war for liberation that never quite manifested.

0.54%

60

Naomi Jefferson was born into a comfortable world only occasionally marred by racism - even when she is called a nigger after wandering into the wrong neighborhood, she learns not to let it touch her too deeply. As a teenager in the 1960s, her biggest concerns are when she'll give up her virginity and if you really can't get pregnant the first time, like her friends tell her. But when her adored older brother, Joshua, seemingly the family's chosen one who is destined for greatness, is killed in a tragic car accident on his way to a civil rights demonstration, the rift between black and white America suddenly becomes personal. In an attempt to live up to Joshua's example, Naomi immerses herself in 1970s campus politics. But instead of finding herself, she loses her sense of who she is. She's unsure how to negotiate her way through a world where brothers die for no good reason and the one man she depends on most betrays her with another woman. Slapped in the face with such harsh realities, Naomi makes a decision: Politics are useless, romance is hopeless, and what she really needs is a career. But work and success in the 1980s aren't all they're cracked up to be, particularly since the promotions keep going to the white guys. Just when Naomi starts to think that the only person she can depend on is herself, two people walk into her life who make her believe once again that anything worth having is worth fighting for.

Titles 61 - 80