12 Books Published by Northeastern on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Northeastern Library of Black Literature

Trey Ellis’s uproariously funny debut novel Platitudes, first published in 1988, takes on conflicts within the African American literary community. Dewayne Wellington, a failing black experimental novelist, and Isshee Ayam, a radical feminist author, collaborate on Dewayne’s latest sexist comedy. Alternately telling the story about the coming of age of Earle and Dorothy-two black middle-class teenagers, sex-starved in New York City-the battling writers sneak ever, and dangerously, closer to reconciling their literary disputes.

This edition of Platitudes also includes "The New Black Aesthetic," a groundbreaking essay by Ellis that appeared in the journal Callaloo.

Originally serialized in McGirt’s Magazine between 1907 and 1909, The Black Sleuth is one of the earliest African American fictional works to depict a black detective and thus a forerunner of novels by writers such as Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, Walter Mosely, Barbara Neely, and Valerie Wilson Wesley. Now published for the first time in book form, this fascinating yet idiosyncratic mystery centers on West African protagonist Sadipe Okukenu, who comes to the United States to pursue his education in Maine and the American South. The tale follows Sadipe’s student years, his successful career as a brilliant sleuth in England and on the European mainland, and his investigation of the theft of a large, flawless diamond. But The Black Sleuth is much more than a detective story. John Edward Bruce employs conventions from popular fiction and an extended "African abroad" plot to boldly attack and ridicule white prejudice and racial injustice in the United States and elsewhere. His narrative not only counters the dominant Eurocentric view of the world with a Black Atlantic perspective, but also educates his black readers about Africa, Western imperialism, and, perhaps most importantly, themselves. Notable in the novel is Bruce’s technique of placing white American characters in distant locations, namely Africa and England, to underscore by contrast their prejudiced beliefs and language. Similarly, through his African hero’s experiences in the United States, particularly his encounters with white Southerners, Bruce voices a call to blacks to fight racial intolerance and unleashes a potent condemnation of the accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Institute. This edition of The Black Sleuth will intrigue both scholars and general readers, and it will restore a remarkable yet neglected writer to his rightful place in African American history and literature.

A first-person narrative restored to full text shares the story of Eli Bolton as he drops out of college and attempts to grow up in a hostile world.

Now available in a new edition. Set in a small town in Mississippi, The Long Dream is a novel rich in characterization and plot that dramatizes Richard Wright’s themes of oppression, exploitation, corruption, and flight. It is the story of Fishbelly (called Fish), the son of Tyree Tucker, a prominent black mortician and owner of a brothel whose wealth and power were attained by forging business arrangements with corrupt white police officers and politicians. The riveting narrative centers on the explosive and tragic events that shape and alter the relationship between Fish and his father.

Originally published in 1969, this parable of racial intrigue centers on the killing of an unarmed black youth by Sergeant Carrigan, a white policeman. The murder prompts Eugene Browning, second in command at the Institute for Racial Justice, a civil rights organization, to seek revenge by hiring a professional killer to assassinate Carrigan. Browning enlists the help of an aging Mafia don, who passes the hit to a former terrorist from Israel. This single act of retribution sets in motion a crisis of unprecedented proportions as a band of black militants proceed to launch a violent plan of their own. As the dramatic events unfold, Browning struggles to put his troubled personal and professional life back in order.

These two recently recovered novellas by the influential Harlem Renaissance author feature the thrilling and suspenseful adventures of African Americans involved in the Italo-Ethiopian war of the 1930s.

“Imagine W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver and Marcus Garvey rolled into one fascist superman, and there you have Dr. Henry Belsidus…[The novels] are an Afrocentrist’s dream.”Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York Times Book Review

“…Black Empire, where this Black doctor raises money by pimping and killing white women and selling dope, uses it to finance an Army by which he drives the colonial powers out of Africa and then uses biological warfare to exterminate the Italians, among others.” (more)

This roman clef centers on Niggeratti Manor, fashioned after the Harlem rooming house in which Wallace Thurman once lived with other black artists and writers. Thurman’s second novel is one of the most potent satires of the Harlem Renaissance and a retort to the idealized vision of Harlem’s artistic community between World War I and the Depression.

African-American expatriate Bill Demby narrates his attempts to write a novel about his friend Doris, a black actor currently working in Europe. Utterly dependent upon Doris for the development of his novel, he is both a participant in and observer of her life as she enters into an affair with an Italian count. Bill Demby’s growing emotional and artistic involvement in the tumultuous affair of his character/friend leads him on an existential quest for the meaning of truth and fiction, both lived and created, in a world torn by the social upheaval of the early sixties.

Black No More (Northeastern Library Of Black Literature), George S. Schuyler’s satiric romp, is the story of Max Disher, a dapper black rogue of an insurance man who, through a scientific transformation process, becomes Matthew Fisher, a white man. Matt dreams up a scam that allows him to become the leader of the Knights of Nordica, a white supremacist group, as well as to marry the white woman who rejected him when he was black. Black No More is a hysterical exploration of race and all its self-serving definitions.

Ishmael Reed, one of today’s top black satirists and the author of Mumbo Jumbo and Japanese by Spring, provides a spirited introduction.

Set in Philadelphia some 60 years ago, There Is Confusion traces the lives of Joanna Mitchell and Peter Bye, whose families must come to terms with an inheritance of prejudice and discrimination as they struggle for legitimacy and respect.