5 Books Published by Pegasus Books on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about An Ordinary Wonder by Buki Papillon An Ordinary Wonder

by Buki Papillon
Pegasus Books (Sep 07, 2021)
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**WINNER OF THE MAYA ANGELOU AWARD**
A Massachusetts Book Award "Fiction Honor"

An extraordinary literary debut about a Nigerian boy’s secret intersex identity and his desire to live as a girl.
Oto leaves for boarding school with one plan: excel and escape his cruel home. Falling in love with his roommate was certainly not on the agenda, but fear and shame force him to hide his love and true self.

Back home, weighed down by the expectations of their wealthy and powerful family, the love of Oto’s twin sister wavers and, as their world begins to crumble around them, Oto must make drastic choices that will alter the family’s lives for ever.
Richly imagined with art, proverbs and folk tales, this moving and modern novel follows Oto through life at home and at boarding school in Nigeria, through the heartbreak of living as a boy despite their profound belief they are a girl, and through a hunger for freedom that only a new life in the United States can offer.

An Ordinary Wonder is a powerful coming-of-age story that explores complex desires as well as challenges of family, identity, gender, and culture, and what it means to feel whole.


Click for more detail about The Be-Bop Barbarians: Comic Book Bohemians to a 1950s Jazz Beat by Gary Phillips The Be-Bop Barbarians: Comic Book Bohemians to a 1950s Jazz Beat

by Gary Phillips
Pegasus Books (Feb 05, 2019)
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In the turbulent era of late 1950s Manhattan?with jazz, the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, and the Red Scare as the volatile ingredients?three groundbreaking black cartoonists defy convention and pay the price. Cliff Murphy is matinee handsome, a light-skinned, straight-haired black man and a comics artist known for his glamour girl art. He’s black uptown and white downtown, and he has an eye for the ladies, and they for him?including his boss’ wife, who knows Cliff’s creation, the Phantom Avenger, is about to be stolen from him.

Stephaney “Stef” Rawls has her own romance-adventure strip for the largest black newspaper, but she still has to work brutal hours as a maid to make ends meet. But when she gets a lucrative offer to write and draw a “Negroes must reject agitation” flyer for the FBI, can she pass up the opportunity?

Then there’s Oliver “Ollie” Jefferson, a decorated Korean War vet who writes and draws editorial cartoons under the pseudonym Attucks, for the daily Red newspaper The Struggle. But when a cop beats him down while walking his pregnant Korean wife-to-be home one night, Ollie becomes a symbol of oppression and the streets threaten to explode.

These three friends will be tested and tried, will work in solidarity, and, just maybe, betray each other, in this explosive graphic novel?with prose by crime fiction author Gary Phillips and images by acclaimed artist-writer Dale Berry.


Click for more detail about Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction by African-American Writers by Otto Penzler Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction by African-American Writers

by Otto Penzler
Pegasus Books (Mar 03, 2009)
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Some of the best-known and most influential pieces of crime fiction have been from African American writers. Be it Walter Mosley’s great detective Easy Rawlins, or the mean streets of Harlem at the hands of Chester Himes, the stories and characters in this anthology have shaped the mystery genre with their own unique viewpoints and styles. Contributors to the collection include Robert Greer, Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Cary Phillips, Frankie Bailey, and Richard Wright.


Click for more detail about Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction by African-American Writers by Otto Penzler Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction by African-American Writers

by Otto Penzler
Pegasus Books (Mar 03, 2009)
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The best mystery and crime fiction ever produced by African-American writers.


Click for more detail about The Big Gold Dream: The Classic Crime Thriller (Pegasus Classic Crime) by Chester Himes The Big Gold Dream: The Classic Crime Thriller (Pegasus Classic Crime)

by Chester Himes
Pegasus Books (Sep 17, 2008)
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“Himes is a writer with an enormous capacity to record sensuous life as it is experienced from one moment to the next.” ? New York Times After arriving on the American literary scene with novels of scathing social protest like If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Lonely Crusade, Chester Himes created a pioneering pair of dangerously effective African-American sleuths, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, Harlem’s toughest detective duo, who must carry the day against an absurdist world of racism and class warfare.

The Big Gold Dream is the explosive and shocking hardboiled classic that explores the shadowy underbelly of New York as an urban civil war erupts on the side streets of Harlem, pitting murderers and prostitutes against corrupt politicians and racist white detectives. Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson attempt to maintain some kind of order?in the neighborhood they have sworn to protect?in a world gone mad around them.