5 Books Published by Ig Publishing on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

“What does periracial mean? It's a word I made up while casting about for a way to capture both the chronic nature of structural injustice and inequity of America and my own weariness. A way to label life under that particular tooth in the zipper of interlocking systems of oppression bell hooks called “imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.” (What a lot to resist. No wonder we're so tired!) To capture the endless cycle of progress and backlash which has shaped my one small life here in America during the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. To counter the idea—now largely abandoned but innocently believed for most of my adult life by white Americans on both ends of the political spectrum— that America has ever been post-racial. To suggest that I suspect, at this sad rate, we never will be.”—Kim McLarin, on the meaning of Periracial

With accumulated wisdom and sharp-eyed clarity, Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me And Has Failed addresses the joys and hardships of being an older Black woman in contemporary, “periracial” America. Award-winning author Kim McLarin utilizes deeply personal experiences to illuminate the pain and power of aging, Blackness and feminism, in the process capturing the endless cycle of progress and backlash that has long shaped race and gender.

Winner of the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction

Winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these idyllic images represent the so-called easy life in Caribbean nations such as Trinidad and Tobago. However, the reality is far different for those who live there—a society where poverty and patriarchy savagely rule, and where love and revenge often go hand in hand.

Written in a combination of English and Trinidad Creole, Pleasantview reveals the dark side of the Caribbean dream. In this novel-in-stories about a fictional town in Trinidad, we meet a political candidate who sets out to slaughter endangered turtles for fun, while his rival candidate beats his "outside woman" so badly she ends up losing their baby. On the night of a political rally, the abused woman exacts a very public revenge, the trajectory of which echoes through Pleasantview, ending with one boy introducing another boy to a gun and to an ideology which will help him aim the weapon.

"The residents of Pleasantview come to vivid light in this extraordinary debut from Celeste Mohammed. Each slice of life in this Trinidadian village cuts clean to the bone, revealing how people are both complicated and complicit in the way we break each other’s hearts and bodies. From the riveting opening to the aching end, Mohammed’s gift for giving voice to each character is glorious."—Tracey Baptiste

"Celeste Mohamed forces you to travel with her characters. You see their lives and their world as they do, on foot. You walk in her characters’ shoes. Mohamed is a skillful storyteller, so the journey educates and exhilarates you, Mohamed invents a clear, crackling town/district, Pleasantview, a bustling, hustling side of Trinidad, where few of us have ever been, or will ever go. Pleasantview forces us to look at how we behave when uncontained, when unconstrained, when our lack of morality unmoors us."—A.J. Verdelle

Womanish. (Opp. of "girlish," i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, "you acting womanish," i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior… Acting grown up. Being grown up… —From Alice Walker’s Definition of a "Womanist" from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose

Born in 1964, the last year of the Boomers or the first year of Generation X, depending upon who’s counting, Kim McLarin came of age as part of the first real "Brown vs. Board" generation, and that experience, of America first embracing and then rejecting a real and meaningful beloved racial community, has shaped everything in her life.

Searing in its emotional honesty, Womanish is an essay collection that explores what it means to be a black woman in today’s turbulent times. Writing with candor, wit and vulnerability on topics including dating after divorce, depression, parenting older children, the Obama’s, and the often fraught relations between white and black women, McLarin unveils herself at the crossroads of being black, female and middle-aged, and, ultimately, American. Powerful and timely, Womanishdraws upon a lifetime of experiences to paint a portrait of a black woman trying to come to terms with the world around her, and of a society trying to come to terms with black women.

A National Book Award nominee in 1975, Ludell is the first book in a groundbreaking trilogy about a young African American girl growing up during the 1950s in a small Georgia town. Ludell Wilson is a wisecracking bookworm and burgeoning writer who adores her best friend Ruthie Mae, her loving?but strict?grandmother, and everything about growing up. (Including her first pair of blue jeans, and her first boyfriend.)

But in the still-segregated South, Ludell?s warm community exists side-by-side with poverty and injustice. Wilkinson’s bold, funny narrator, whose story continues in Ludell and Willie and Ludell?s New York Time, shows us an America that is also changing?just not fast enough.

One morning, six-year old Sonny is awoken by his crying mother, who tells him that, come tomorrow morning, they are leaving to go to "Gran’mom’s" house—without Sonny’s father, Eddie. Later that morning, Sonny witnesses a fight between his parents, which revolves around his father having stayed out late the night before because his car had broken down. Eddie has apparently been neglecting his wife and son, devoting his free time instead to repairing his old car. In order to win back his wife, Eddie—with Sonny in tow—pays a visit to Madame Toussaint, an old lady knowledgeable in the ways of voodoo, who tells Eddie that the only way to save his marriage is by burning his car to the ground.This unforgettable story leads the reader through an eventful day on a Southern sugarcane plantation, and shows, through the eyes of a child, what life was like in the rural South of the 1940s. This new edition of A Long Day in November features Ernest J. Gaines’s original introduction, as well as the black-and-white illustrations that accompanied the first edition of the book.Ernest J. Gaines’s 1993 novel A Lesson Before Dying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and was an Oprah Book Club pick. Gaines has been a MacArthur Foundation fellow, awarded the National Humanities Medal, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and inducted into the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) as a Chevalier. He lives in Oscar, Louisiana.