1320 Books Published by Penguin Random House on Our Site — Book Cover Mosaic

Lisa Munroe is a successful, single young black attorney, branded from childhood with the nickname, ’Bad Girl.’ Embracing her title, she has managed to live up to every bit of it— At first glance, Lisa would appear to have it all—a promising career, a committed relationship with her beau Darnel Harvin, and the prospect of more to come. But underneath it all, the realization that this could be a ’long-term relationship,’ which she’d never planned, and scares the hell out of her— Then enters the flashy New York lawyer Mike Wilson, whose forceful nature could destroy it all— Like a top spinning out of control, crashing into everyone around her—with the love of one man and the lust of another—she finds herself back into a corner and forced to reveal everything. During this downward spiral, Lisa begins to look within herself to confront some truths that could forever change her, even shatter the lives around her—Sometimes, we have to go to the brink of self destruction to finally come to rest at a place of happiness. But, for Lisa, is it ten minutes past too late?

The first edition of Joel Augustus Rogers’s now legendary 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, published in 1957, was billed as “A Negro ‘Believe It or Not.’” Rogers’s little book was priceless because he was delivering enlightenment and pride, steeped in historical research, to a people too long starved on the lie that they were worth nothing. For African Americans of the Jim Crow era, Rogers’s was their first black history teacher. But Rogers was not always shy about embellishing the “facts” and minimizing ambiguity; neither was he above shock journalism now and then.
 
With élan and erudition—and with winning enthusiasm—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Roger’s work. Relying on the latest scholarship, Gates leads us on a romp through African, diasporic, and African-American history in question-and-answer format. Among the one hundred questions: Who were Africa’s first ambassadors to Europe? Who was the first black president in North America? Did Lincoln really free the slaves? Who was history’s wealthiest person? What percentage of white Americans have recent African ancestry? Why did free black people living in the South before the end of the Civil War stay there? Who was the first black head of state in modern Western history? Where was the first Underground Railroad? Who was the first black American woman to be a self-made millionaire? Which black man made many of our favorite household products better?
 
Here is a surprising, inspiring, sometimes boldly mischievous—all the while highly instructive and entertaining—compendium of historical curiosities intended to illuminate the sheer complexity and diversity of being “Negro” in the world.

(With full-color illustrations throughout.)

As a young man, Earvin “Magic” Johnson admired his father and other small-town entrepreneurs who created jobs and served as leaders in his Midwestern community. He worked for them, watched them, and his interest in building communities through economic development grew even while his basketball career flourished. His fame as an NBA star gave him access to some of the most successful business leaders in the country. It was Earvin’s own entrepreneurial spirit that inspired them to serve as his mentors.

Earvin made the transition from great athlete to greater entrepreneur through hard work and by avidly pursuing opportunities. He recognized that densely populated urban communities were ripe for commercial and residential development. He partnered with major brands like Starbucks, 24 Hour Fitness, and T.G.I. Friday’s to lead a major economic push in these communities. The success of his businesses proved that ethnically diverse urban residents would welcome and support major brands if given the opportunity. Earvin continues to be a leader of urban economic development that provides jobs, goods, and a new spirit of community.

32 Ways to Be a Champion in Business will inspire and enlighten readers who wish to make a similar impact with their careers and business endeavors.

In this novel of family and redemption, a mother struggles to save her eighteen-year-old daughter from the devastating consequences of mental illness by forcing her to deal with her bipolar disorder. New York Times best-selling author Bebe Moore Campbell draws on her own powerful emotions and African-American roots, showcasing her best writing yet.

Trina suffers from bipolar disorder, making her paranoid, wild, and violent. Watching her child turn into a bizarre stranger, Keri searches for assistance through normal channels. She quickly learns that a seventy-two hour hold is the only help you can get when an adult child starts to spiral out of control. After three days, Trina can sign herself out of any program.

Fed up with the bureaucracy of the mental health community and determined to save her daughter by any means necessary, Keri signs on for an illegal intervention. The Program is a group of radicals who eschew the psychiatric system and model themselves after the Underground Railroad. When Keri puts her daughter’s fate in their hands, she begins a journey that has her calling on the spirit of Harriet Tubman for courage. In the upheaval that follows, she is forced to confront a past that refuses to stay buried, even as she battles to secure a future for her child.

Bebe Moore Campbell’s moving story is for anyone who has ever faced insurmountable obstacles and prayed for a happy ending, only to discover she’d have to reach deep within herself to fight for it.

"The rhythmic, onomatopoeic text dances across exuberant watercolors with lots of movement. This celebration of a child’s agency in choosing a means of artistic expression strikes just the right note." —Kirkus 


"A delightful offering for reading aloud, especially during music-themed storytimes."
—School Library Journal

From New York Times bestselling author Chris Barton and new illustrator Louis Thomas comes a fun, rhythmic picture book about finding the music that is perfect for you!
 
A boy who loves to make noise gets to pick only one instrument (at his parents urging) in a music store, but there is too much to choose from! There’s triangles and sousaphones! There’s guitars and harpsichords! Bagpipes and cellos and trombones! How can he find the one that is just right for him out of all those options?

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize

A recipient of the 2015 American Book Award

Named a best book of the year by:
The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Time, Newsweek, The Huffington Post, The Seattle Times, The Houston Chronicle, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Popsugar, BookPage, BuzzFeed Books, Salon, Kansas City Star, L Magazine.  

rom the acclaimed author of The Book of Night Women comes a “musical, electric, fantastically profane” (The New York Times) epic that explores the tumultuous world of Jamaica over the past three decades.

In A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James combines brilliant storytelling with his unrivaled skills of characterization and meticulous eye for detail to forge an enthralling novel of dazzling ambition and scope.

On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven gunmen stormed the singer’s house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but much has been whispered, gossiped and sung about in the streets of West Kingston. Rumors abound regarding the assassins’ fates, and there are suspicions  that the attack was politically motivated.

A Brief History of Seven Killings delves deep into that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica’s history and beyond. James deftly chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters – gunmen, drug dealers, one-night stands, CIA agents,  even ghosts – over the course of thirty years as they roam the streets of 1970s Kingston, dominate the crack houses of 1980s New York, and ultimately reemerge into the radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. Along the way, they learn that evil does indeed cast long shadows, that justice and retribution are inextricably linked, and that no one can truly escape his fate.

Gripping and inventive, shocking and irresistible, A Brief History of Seven Killings is a mesmerizing modern classic of power, mystery, and insight.

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to the selfishness and shortsightedness of the rich, the suffering and dignity of the poor and the uses and abuses of power. And in this powerfully written, profoundly felt book, he gives us an unstinting account of the disastrous consequences of the fateful, centuries-old encounter between Africa and the West.

French delineates the betrayal and greed of the West–often aided and abetted by Africa’s own leaders–that have given rise to the increasing exploitation of Africa’s natural resources and its human beings. Coarse self-interest and outright greed once generated a need for the continent’s rubber, cotton, gold and diamonds, not to mention slaves; now the attractions include offshore oil reserves and minerals like coltan, which powers cellular phones.

He takes us inside Nigeria, Liberia, Mali and the Congo, examining with unusual insight the legacy of colonization in the lives of contemporary Africans. He looks at the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, the Ebola outbreak and the genocide that resulted in millions of deaths in Rwanda and the Congo. He makes clear the systematic failure of Western political leaders–the nurturers of tyrants such as Mobuto Sese Seko and Laurent Kabila, whose stories are told here in full detail–and the brutal excesses of the CIA.

In helping us to better understand the continent, and indeed Africans themselves, French helps us see as well the hope and possibility that lie in the myriad cultural strengths of Africa.

A story of little ballerinas with big dreams.

Little ballerinas have big dreams. Dreams of pirouettes and grande jetes, dreams of attending the best ballet schools and of dancing starring roles on stage. But in Harlem in the 1950s, dreams don’t always come true—they take a lot of work and a lot of hope. And sometimes hope is hard to come by.
 
But the first African-American prima ballerina, Janet Collins, did make her dreams come true. And those dreams inspired ballerinas everywhere, showing them that the color of their skin couldn’t stop them from becoming a star.
 
In a lyrical tale as beautiful as a dance en pointe, Kristy Dempsey and Floyd Cooper tell the story of one little ballerina who was inspired by Janet Collins to make her own dreams come true.

Jessie soon discovers the difficulties of studying acting at Oakland Performing Arts Middle School, as she copes with a full schedule, the need to keep up her grades, a prejudiced teacher, and an eloquent rival. By the author of Chevrolet Saturdays. Original.

Nearly three decades offer its first publication, A Different Drummer remains one of the most trenchant, imaginative, and hard-hitting works of fiction to come out of the bitter struggle for African-American civil rights.

Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved to a housing estate in a small village. Solomon is a night-watchman, an immigrant from an unnamed country in Africa. Each is desperate for love. And yet each harbors secrets that may make attaining it impossible.
With breathtaking assurance and compassion, Caryl Phillips retraces the paths that lead Dorothy and Solomon to their meeting point: her failed marriage and ruinous obsession with a younger man, the horrors he witnessed as a soldier in his disintegrating native land, and the cruelty he encounters as a stranger in his new one. Intimate and panoramic, measured and shattering, A Distant Shore charts the oceanic expanses that separate people from their homes, their hearts, and their selves.

From Caryl Phillips—acclaimed author of The Nature of Blood and The Atlantic Sound—a masterful new novel set in contemporary England, about an African man and an English woman whose hidden lives, and worlds, are revealed in their fragile, fateful connection.

Dorothy and Solomon live in a new housing estate on the outskirts of an English village. She’s recently bought her bungalow; he’s recently become the night watchman. He is black, an immigrant. She is white, a recently retired music teacher. They are both solitary, reticent outsiders. When they move tenuously toward each other and their paths briefly cross, neither of them can know that it will be the last true human contact either will have.

The novel unfolds into the past to show us how Solomon and Dorothy have arrived at this moment: Solomon, a former soldier, escaping the horrors of a war-ravaged African country, entering England illegally, a non-man with no resources but his own waning strength, and no comprehension of the society that both hates and harbors him; Dorothy, the product of a troubled childhood and a messy divorce, fleeing the repercussions of a desperate obsession. In scene after resonant scene, we watch as Solomon and Dorothy come to live inside themselves, closing off from a world that has changed—and changed them—beyond recognition.

In their powerfully compelling stories, Caryl Phillips has created a brilliant and moving portrait of modern human displacement: from home, from heart, and from self.

Karim Spencer, raised in the home of a bootlegger in a run-down neighborhood, has gone on to become a successful businessman with a tony home, a beautiful girlfriend, and a son. But memories of tragedy and betrayal have kept him entrenched in the past, as have the living reminders of his former life, including his down-on-her-luck sister, Nadiah; JaQuan, Nadiah’s thugged-out teenage son; and Karim’s older brother, Omar, serving a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit.

As emotions reach a boiling point, does Karim have what it takes to set JaQuan on a straight path, clear his brother of a bogus indictment without jeopardizing his own future, and hold together the family that he so desperately loves?

As Travis Hunter skillfully draws us in with strong, believable characters with endearing flaws and broken dreams, A Family Sin, full of riveting twists and turns of plot, unravels the mystery of a long-buried secret that threatens to tear a family apart.

A series of interviews with Japanese Americans, who were placed in internment camps during World War II merely because they had Japanese ancestry, reveals how they lost businesses, homes, and personal possessions.

The eagerly anticipated inspirational memoir from Michelle Obama’s brother, celebrating the extraordinary family members and mentors who have shaped his life

When he stepped into history’s spotlight at the National Democratic Convention, Craig Robinson recalls that nothing could have been more gratifying than introducing his sister, Michelle Obama, to millions of Americans. Within minutes, he won the hearts of the nation by sharing highlights of growing up in the modest Robinson household, where the two were raised by devoted parents who taught them the values of education, hard work, and the importance of reaching far beyond what even seemed possible.

Those lessons of character were fundamentals in shaping Craig Robinson’s own remarkable journey: from his days playing street basketball on Chicago’s Southside, while excelling academically, to admission at Princeton University, where he was later named Ivy League Player of the Year, twice. After playing professionally in Europe, Robinson made an about-face, entering the competitive field of finance. With his MBA from the University of Chicago, his meteoric rise landed him a partnership in a promising new venture. But another dream beckoned and Craig made the unusual decision to forego the trappings of money and status in the business world in order to become a basketball coach. He soon helped transform three struggling teams - as an assistant coach at Northwestern, then as head coach at Brown and now at Oregon State University. In his first season at OSU, he navigated what was declared to be one of the nation’s best single season turnarounds.

In A Game of Character, Robinson takes readers behind the scenes to meet his most important influences in his understanding of the winning traits that are part of his playbook for success. Central to his story are his parents, Marian and Fraser, two indefatigable individuals who showed their children how to believe in themselves and live their lives with conviction through love, discipline and respect. With insights into this exemplary family, we relive memories of how Marian sacrificed a career to be a full-time mom, how Fraser got up and went to work every day while confronting the challenges of multiple sclerosis, how Craig and Michelle strengthened their bond as they journeyed out of the Southside to Princeton University and eventually, the national stage.

Heartwarming, inspiring, and even transformational, A Game of Character comes just at the right time in an era of change, reminding readers of our opportunity to work together and embrace the character of our nation, to make a difference in the lives of others and to pave the way for the next generation.

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Set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s, A Gathering of Old Men is a powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man.

"Poignant, powerful, earthy…a novel of Southern racial confrontation in which a group of elderly black men band together against whites who seek vengeance for the murder of one of their own."—Booklist

"A fine novel…there is a denouement that will shock and move readers as much as it does the characters."—Philadelphia Inquirer

Somehow, despite everything Calvin Trillin wrote about the Bush Administration in Obliviously On He Sails, his 2004 bestseller in verse, George W. Bush is still in the White House. Taking a philosophical view, Trillin has said, “We weren’t going to know whether you could bring down a presidency with iambic pentameter until somebody tried it.”

Now Trillin is trying again, back at his pithy and hilarious best to comment on the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq (“Then terrorists could count on what we’d do: / Attack us, we’ll strike back, though not at you”), his religiosity (“He treats his critics in the press / As if they’re yapping Pekineses. / Reporters deal in mundane facts; / This man has got the word from Jesus”), and whether he was wearing a transmitting device in the first presidential debate (“Could this explain his odd expressions? Is there proof he / Was being told, ‘If you can hear me now, look goofy’?”)

Trillin deals with the people around Bush, such as Nanny Dick Cheney and Mushroom Cloud Rice and Orange John Ashcroft and Orange John’s successor, Alberto Gonzales (“The A.G.’s to be one Alberto Gonzales– / Dependable, actually loyal über alles”). He tries to predict the behavior of the famously intemperate John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations in poems with titles like “Bolton Chases French Ambassador Up Tree” and “White House Says Bolton Can Do Job Even While in Straitjacket.”

Finally, in dealing with whether the entire Bush Administration, like the unfortunate Brownie, has done a heckuva job, he composes a small-government sea chantey for the Republicans:

’Cause government’s the problem, lads,
Americans would all do well to shun it.
Yes, government’s the problem, lads.
At least it is when we’re the ones who run it.

Benjie can stop using heroin anytime he wants to. He just doesn’t want to yet. Why would he want to give up something that makes him feel so good, so relaxed, so tuned-out? As Benjie sees it, there’s nothing much to tune in for. School is a waste of time, and home life isn’t much better. All Benjie wants is for someone to believe in him, for someone to believe that he’s more than a thirteen-year-old junkie. Told from the perspectives of the people in his life-including his mother, stepfather, teachers, drug dealer, and best friend-this powerful story will draw you into Benjie’s troubled world and force you to confront the uncertainty of his future.

A Lesson Before Dying, is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson’s godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting—and defying—the expected.

Ernest J. Gaines brings to this novel the same rich sense of place, the same deep understanding of the human psyche, and the same compassion for a people and their struggle that have informed his previous, highly praised works of fiction.

Generations of children have read, re-read, and loved Ezra Jack Keats?s award-winning, classic stories about Peter and his neighborhood friends. Now, for the first time, Peter?s Chair, A Letter to Amy, and Goggles! are available in paperback exclusively from Puffin.?A master of ingenious collages, AKeats? has made brilliant variegated pictures?? — The Horn BookEzra Jack Keats (1916?1983) was the beloved author and/or illustrator of over eighty-five books for children.

A poignant, powerful debut that combines the deep emotion of The House on Mango Street with uniquely creative storytelling.

Unfolding in a series of tiny vignettes, A Little Piece of Sky introduces an endearing new novelist and a truly unforgettable main character. In the first few chapters we meet a little girl named Song Byrd, who keenly reports on the world around her. She is African American (in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood), unwanted (conceived during an adulterous affair), and poor in the material sense but extraordinarily rich in spirit.

In piercingly insightful prose, Nicole Bailey-Williams takes readers on Song’s journey through life as she struggles against outsider status and intense guilt over her mother’s murder. Behind it all, places of pure joy, “dreaming the hurt away,” and glorious little pieces of sky shine through. Song’s tales—and Bailey-Williams’s narrative gift—are truly words to treasure.

A Delightful paean to African American love, this treasury of fifty letters written by well known figures and ordinary folk alike resonates with the joy and tenderness of romance, and offers glimpses into the social, literary, and political lives of black Americans throughout the last two centuries.

An elegantly designed volume, printed in sepia and enhanced with photographs, A LOVE NO LESS presents the letters of African American lovers of all walks of life—from slave letters to the celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to soldiers fighting World War II, to notable entertainers, businessmen, and civic leaders. Whether they were penned by literary masters or hastily scribbled by soldiers writing home to their wives or girlfriends, the letters are eloquent expressions of the writers’ most intimate feelings and touching revelations of the things that matter most in their lives.

A LOVE NO LESS is a testament to black love and to the bonds that endure in the face of physical separation, harsh times, and personal misfortunes. It also provides a peek into the more public arena, as writers tell their lovers about their everyday activities and encounters. Paul Laurence Dunbar writes to his wife about meeting Booker T. Washington and attending a lecture by W. E. B. DuBois. Letters from the Harlem Renaissance capture the excitement and vibrancy of that extraordinary period with stories about dinners, theater parties, shows and social outings with Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten and other luminaries. In a letter to her new husband written in the 1930s, stage and screen star Fredi Washington describes seeing a stereo for the first time and recounts her negotiations for a role in a Paramount film.

An enchanting and inspiring look at the power of love to transform and sustain, A LOVE NO LESS is the perfect gift for Valentines Day, anniversaries, birthdays, and weddings, a book that everyone who has ever been in love will treasure.

Friendship. Love. Family.

Bestselling author E. Lynn Harris is back with another new tale that embraces his signature themes.

Zola Denise Norwood is a young hot editor in chief of Bling Bling, (the magazine “for people who want everything!) who’s at the top of her game, ruling the roost in business as well as the bedroom. Having discovered “the power of three” (not tying herself down to just one guy) Zola surrounds herself with a coterie of men : her best male friend, the gay Hayden; her Monday night man, Jabar, and enjoys stolen nights with married Bling Bling owner and media mogul Davis Vincent McClinton, a man who chases power at all costs…Still, Zola dreams of finding true love.

Raymond Tyler, Jr., a favorite and classic Harris character has suffered a personal loss and picks up and moves to New York to re-build his life. As CEO of Bling Bling,Raymond struggles to enjoy his newfound success in business as he searches for love and meaning in his personal life. John Basil Henderson returns with a new lady in his life, and Raymond and Basil renew a friendship that is fraught with sexual tension. As Raymond examines his life and strains to move forward, tragedy strikes, and Raymond faces his biggest challenge ever.

As Zola and Raymond search for a love of their own, several characters from the past make cameo appearances and round out another E. Lynn Harris classic tale. A LOVE OF MY OWN is filled with all the marvelous ingredients the author’s fans the globe over have come to love. Sit back and get ready as E. Lynn Harris takes you on another satisfying and rip-roaring ride.

By the renowned author of Things Fall Apart, this novel foreshadows the Nigerian coups of 1966 and shows the color and vivacity as well as the violence and corruption of a society making its own way between the two worlds.

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery.

Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.

The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history — the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities.

In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.

Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . .

At the novel’s heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

A Miracle Every Day takes an illuminating and intimate look at flourishing single-mother families. Single motherhood and the children of single mothers have been the subject of overwhelmingly negative statistical analysis. But, asks Marita Golden, where are the studies that analyze the strengths of single mothers, the positive adaptive skills learned by their children, the support systems that help these families work?

In A Miracle Every Day Golden, once a single mother herself, and several other single mothers and their family members share their success stories with great honestly and insight. Golden identifies the coping characteristics these families have in common and organizes them into guiding themes, making A Miracle Every Day a book that single mothers and their support networks can turn to for wisdom, comfort, and inspiration.

Dear Reader,

Many people have wondered why I’ve been speaking out on controversial issues for the last few years. They say I’ve never held political office. I’m not a constitutional scholar. I’m not even a lawyer. All I can say to that is “Guilty as charged.”

It’s true that I’ve never voted for a budget America could not afford. I’ve never raised anyone’s taxes. And I’ve never promised a lobbyist anything in exchange for a donation.

Luckily, none of that really matters. Our founding fathers didn’t want a permanent governing class of professional politicians. They wanted a republic, in Lincoln’s words, "of the people, by the people, and for the people." A country where any farmer, small-business owner, manual laborer, or doctor could speak up and make a difference.

I believe that making a difference starts with understanding our amazing founding document, the U.S. Constitution. And as someone who has performed brain surgery thousands of times, I can assure you that the Constitution isn’t brain surgery.

The founders wrote it for ordinary men and women, in clear, precise, simple language. They intentionally made it short enough to read in a single sitting and to carry in your pocket.

I wrote this book to encourage every citizen to read and think about the Constitution, and to help defend it from those who misinterpret and undermine it. In our age of political correctness it’s especially important to defend the Bill of Rights, which guarantees our freedom to speak, bear arms, practice our religion, and much more.

The Constitution isn’t history—it’s about your life in America today. And defending it is about what kind of country our children and grandchildren will inherit.

I hope you’ll enjoy learning about the fascinating ways that the founders established the greatest democracy in history—and the ways that recent presidents, congresses, and courts have threatened that democracy.

As the Preamble says, the purpose of the Constitution is to create a more perfect union. My goal is to empower you to help protect that union and secure the blessings of liberty.

Sincerely,
Ben Carson

On the eve of World War II, African American boxer Joe Louis fought German Max Schmeling in a bout that had more at stake than just the world heavyweight title; for much of America their fight came to represent America’s war with Germany. This elegant and powerful picture book biography centers around the historic fight in which Black and White America were able to put aside prejudice and come together to celebrate our nation’s ideals.

The Africa of his ancestry, the Caribbean of his birth, the Britain of his upbringing, and the United States where he now lives are the focal points of award-winning writer Caryl Phillips’ profound inquiry into evolving notions of home, identity, and belonging in an increasingly international society.
At once deeply reflective and coolly prescient, A New World Order charts the psychological frontiers of our ever-changing world. Through personal and literary encounters, Phillips probes the meaning of cultural dislocation, measuring the distinguishing features of our identities–geographic, racial, national, religious–against the amalgamating effects of globalization. In the work of writers such as V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, and Zadie Smith, cultural figures such as Steven Spielberg, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Marvin Gaye, and in his own experiences, Phillips detects the erosion of cultural boundaries and amasses startling and poignant insights on whether there can be an answer anymore to the question “Where are you from?” The result is an illuminating–and powerfully relevant–account of identity from an exceedingly perceptive citizen of the world.

Bestselling author Travis Hunter returns with a stunning new novel about family, success, and just how far a man will go to protect those he loves.

Dallas Dupree is a one woman man. A handsome and successful teacher, he is both worshipped and envied in his Atlanta neighborhood and chooses to live and raise his daughter, Aja, in the ghetto where he grew up rather than desert his roots. The only problem is that the one woman for him—his beloved Yasmin—passed away giving birth to his daughter. Now Dallas struggles through a string of empty relationships, unable to commit his heart because no woman can measure up to Yasmin. However, when Dallas plays with the wrong woman, he finds the consequences may cost him much more than he can afford.

Dallas’s sister Carmen has issues of her own. All of her life she has struggled with a weight problem that had caused a lack of self esteem. Now she is an affluent doctor who lives in the suburbs with her handsome new husband, Sterling. When a family crisis forces her to take in her wayward niece, she realizes that the picture perfect world she worked so hard to create is an illusion.

Their older brother, Priest, is pretty secretive about how he makes his money—and he does make a lot of it. He has been a father figure to both Dallas and Carmen, but now that they are all grown up, they want nothing to do with their shady older brother. But when Dallas and Carmen are in trouble, they turn to the one person who has always been there for them—and learn there is more to Priest than meets the eye.


From the Hardcover edition.

The latest novel from "Morocco’s greatest living author" (The Guardian)

Award-winning, internationally bestselling author Tahar Ben Jelloun’s new novel is the story of an immigrant named Mohammed who has spent forty years in France and is about to retire. Taking stock of his life- his devotion to Islam and to his assimilated children-he decides to return to Morocco, where he spends his life’s savings building the biggest house in the village and waits for his children and grandchildren to come be with him. A heartbreaking novel about parents and children, A Palace in the Old Village captures the sometimes stark contrasts between old- and new-world values, and an immigrant’s abiding pursuit of home.

A Perfect World… Life is good for Los Angeles attorney Perry B. Richards. Blessed with good looks, courtroom brilliance, a beautiful psychologist wife by the name of Felicia Pridemore Richards, loyal friends and two wonderful daughters, for Perry it’s a perfect world. But, the perfect world of Perry Richards is shattered as a cruel façade. Days before Perry is to be appointed as the executive director of the public interest law firm he works for, Felicia vanishes on her way to meet him at their cabin in the mountains. Was it an accident, foul play, or something more sinister? Aided by his wealthy and beautiful colleague, Charleston Liria Bradley, Perry sets out to find the truth. Together they discover that the woman known as Felicia Pridemore was a construct of fiction – she never existed. He also discovers Charleston is so deeply in love him, she will go to any length to see that Felicia remains a haunting mystery. Perry’s search for the truth becomes a pitched battle against sexual temptation, racial politics, professional treachery and a host of people out to kill him. Perry Richards discovers that there is a deadly price to pay for disrupting someone else’s idea of a perfect world.

There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, or homelessness.

Cupcake Brown survived all these things before she’d even turned twenty.

And that’s when things got interesting…

You have before you the strange, heart-wrenching, and exhilarating tale of a woman named Cupcake. It begins as the story of a girl orphaned twice over, once by the death of her mother and then again by a child welfare system that separated her from her stepfather and put her into the hands of an epically sadistic foster parent. But there comes a point in her preteen years—maybe it’s the night she first tries to run away and is exposed to drugs, alcohol, and sex all at once—when Cupcake’s story shifts from a tear-jerking tragedy to a dark comic blues opera. As Cupcake’s troubles grow, so do her voice and spirit. Her gut-punch sense of humor and eye for the absurd, along with her outsized will, carry her through a fateful series of events that could easily have left her dead.

Young Cupcake learned to survive by turning tricks, downing hard liquor, partying like a rock star, and ingesting every drug she could find while hitchhiking up and down the California coast. She stumbled into gangbanging, drug dealing, hustling, prostitution, theft, and, eventually, the best scam of all: a series of 9-to-5 jobs. But Cupcake’s unlikely tour through the cubicle world was paralleled by a quickening descent into the nightmare of crack cocaine use, till she eventually found herself living behind a Dumpster.

Astonishingly, she turned it around. With the help of a cobbled together family of eccentric fellow addicts and “angels”—a series of friends and strangers who came to her aid at pivotalmoments—she slowly transformed her life from the inside out.

A Piece of Cake is unlike any memoir you’ll ever read. Moving and almost transgressive in its frankness, it is a relentlessly gripping tale of a resilient spirit who took on the worst of contemporary urban life and survived it with a furious wit and unyielding determination. Cupcake Brown is a dynamic and utterly original storyteller who will guide you on the most satisfying, startlingly funny, and genuinely affecting tour through hell you’ll ever take.

Back in print after more than five years, this is the extraordinary first short story collection by the author of Family.

Natural and man-made disasters are becoming more commonplace in children’s lives, and this touching free-verse picture book provides a straightforward account of Hurricane Katrina. In alternating voices, four friends describe their lives before, during, and after the storm and how, even though the world can change in a heartbeat, people define the character of their community and offer one another comfort and hope even in the darkest hours.
Adrienne, Keesha, Michael, and Tommy have been friends for forever. They live on the same street—a street in New Orleans where everyone knows everybody. They play together all day long, every chance they get. It’s always been that way. But then people start talking about a storm headed straight for New Orleans. The kids must part ways, since each family deals with Hurricane Katrina in a different manner. And suddenly everything that felt like home is gone.
Renée Watson’s lyrical free verse is perfectly matched in Shadra Strickland’s vivid mixed media art. Together they celebrate the spirit and resiliency of New Orleans, especially its children.

In this illuminating book, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and acclaimed poet Alice Walker reveals her remarkable philosophy of life. Curiously, this labor of love started with the author’s signature: Faced with the daunting task of providing autographs for multiple copies of one of her poetry collections, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, Walker turned an act of repetition into an act of inspiration. For each autograph became something more than a name: a thoughtful reflection, an impromptu sketch, a heartfelt poem. The result is this spontaneous burst of the unexpected. A Poem Traveled Down My Arm is a lovely collection of insights and drawings—by turns charming and humorous, provocative and profound—that represent the wisdom of one of today’s most beloved writers.

The essence of Walker’s independent spirit emanates from words and images that are simple but deep in meaning. An empowering approach to life…the inspiration to live completely in the moment…the chance to nurture one’s creativity and peace of mind—all these beautiful elements are evoked by this unusual and original book.

Never try to outrun your past . . .

Tough-minded FBI special agent Angela Bivens is just beginning to put her life back together. Still reeling from the bloody showdown where she took the lives of two serial killers, one of whom was her lover, Angela is hell-bent on facing the future. She’s enjoying the perks of a well-deserved promotion, as well as getting to know her new boyfriend on a romantic camping trip. All that changes when the FBI interrupts her relaxing getaway and puts her on a complicated high-profile case.

Inside a secluded Chesapeake bed-and-breakfast, Dr. Leslie Collins, a prominent African-American obstetrician, has been found dead and mutilated. His white mistress, a Clinton White House advisor, was also dead in their bed, apparently from a poisonous snakebite. And no one at the inn heard or saw a thing. Angela can’t help but be shaken to the core—Dr. Collins was a family friend, and now it’s up to her to apprehend the killer.
Angela’s superiors at the Bureau suspect a shadowy white supremacy group that has been terrorizing abortion clinics and liberal leaders, but such tidy motives are soon discredited as other influential Black men from the worlds of business, politics, and religion start to share the doctor’s gruesome fate. Angela’s quest for justice deepens when she discovers the unlikely connections that link the men to one another, and to Antoine Jones, a convicted murderer on death row. Angela’s investigation also uncovers disturbing evidence that these murders are bound to a world of spells and ancient prophecies rooted in South African witchcraft, and of age-old vendettas being played out in a very modern D.C.

In this compelling, action-packed sequel to the riveting debut Sympathy for the Devil, Christopher Chambers captivates his readers with an unpredictable plot that pits this strong and savvy female protagonist against a cast of formidable foes—both human and supernatural. His innovative blend of images from traditional African mysticism and the vivid landscape of our nation’s capital breathes new life into the suspense thriller genre. Fans of Walter Mosley, Thomas Harris, and Patricia Cornwell will all love this remarkably spellbinding page-turner.

A unique prison narrative that testifies to the power of books to transform a young man’s life

At the age of sixteen, R. Dwayne Betts—a good student from a lower-middle-class family-carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. In Virginia, carjacking is a ""certifiable"" offense, meaning that Betts would be treated as an adult under state law. A bright young kid, he served his nine-year sentence as part of the adult population in some of the worst prisons in the state.

A Question of Freedom chronicles Betts’s years in prison, reflecting back on his crime and looking ahead to how his experiences and the books he discovered while incarcerated would define him. Utterly alone, Betts confronts profound questions about violence, freedom, crime, race, and the justice system. Confined by cinder-block walls and barbed wire, he discovers the power of language through books, poetry, and his own pen. Above all, A Question of Freedom is about a quest for identity-one that guarantees Betts’s survival in a hostile environment and that incorporates an understanding of how his own past led to the moment of his crime.

A Rage in Harlem is a ripping introduction to Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, patrolling New York City’s roughest streets in Chester Himes’s groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series. 
 
For love of fine, wily Imabelle, hapless Jackson surrenders his life savings to a con man who knows the secret of turning ten-dollar bills into hundreds—and then he steals from his boss, only to lose the stolen money at a craps table. Luckily for him, he can turn to his savvy twin brother, Goldy, who earns a living—disguised as a Sister of Mercy—by selling tickets to Heaven in Harlem. With Goldy on his side, Jackson is ready for payback.

“…pivotal play in the history of the American Black theatre.”—Newsweek
“…a milestone in the American Theatre.”&mdash Ebony.

From Sacred Fire

A Raisin in the Sun, written by the then twenty-nine-year-old Hansberry, was the "movin' on up" morality play of the 1960s. Martin had mesmerized millions, and integration was seen as the stairway to heaven. Raisin had something for everyone, and for this reason it was the recipient of the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
The place: a tenement flat in Southside, Chicago. The time: post'World War II. Lena Younger, the strong-willed matriarch, is the glue that holds together the Younger family. Walter Lee is her married, thirty-something son who, along with his wife and sister, lives in his mother's apartment. He is short on meeting responsibilities but long on dreams. Beneatha (that's right, Beneatha) is Waiter's sister'an upwardly mobile college student who plans to attend medical school.

Mama Lena is due a check from her late husband's insurance, and Waiter Lee is ready to invest it in a liquor store. The money represents his opportunity to assert his manhood. It will bring the jump start he needs to set his life right. Beneatha tells him that it's "mama's money to do with as she pleases," and that she doesn't really expect any for her schooling. However, Mama wants to use her new money for a new beginning'in a new house, in a new neighborhood (white).

Walter cries, and Mama relents. She refrains from paying cash for the house and places a deposit instead, giving Waiter the difference to share equally between his investment and Beneatha's college fund. Walter squanders the entire amount. Meanwhile, Mama receives a call from the neighborhood "welcome committee" hoping to dissuade the family from moving in.

While roundly criticized for being politically accommodating to whites, Raisin accurately reflected the aspirations of a newly nascent black middle class.

This groundbreaking play starred Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeill, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands in the Broadway production which opened in 1959. Set on Chicago’s South Side, the plot revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family: son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis and matriarch Lena, called Mama. When her deceased husband’s insurance money comes through, Mama dreams of moving to a new home and a better neighborhood in Chicago. Walter Lee, a chauffeur, has other plans, however: buying a liquor store and being his own man. Beneatha dreams of medical school.

“I’ve simply seen too much goodness in this country—and have come so far in my own journey—not to believe in those ideals, and my faith in the future is sometimes restored under the darkest clouds.” —Governor Deval Patrick
 
In January 2007, Deval Patrick became the first black governor of the state of Massachusetts, one of only two black governors elected in American history. But that was just one triumphant step in a long, improbable journey that began in a poor tenement on the South Side of Chicago. From a chaotic childhood to an elite boarding school in New England, from a sojourn doing relief work in Africa to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, and then to a career in politics, Patrick has led an extraordinary life. In this heartfelt and inspirational book, he pays tribute to the family, friends, and strangers who, through words and deeds, have instilled in him transcendent lessons of faith, perseverance, and friendship. In doing so, he reminds us of the power of community and the imperative of idealism. With humility, humor, and grace, he offers a road map for attaining happiness, empowerment, and success while also making an appeal for readers to cultivate those achievements in others, to feel a greater stake in this world, and to shape a life worth living.
 
Warm, nostalgic, and inspirational, A Reason to Believe is destined to become a timeless tribute to a uniquely American odyssey and a testament to what is possible in our lives and our communities if we are hopeful, generous, and resilient.

GOVERNOR DEVAL PATRICK is donating a portion of the proceeds from A REASON TO BELIEVE to A Better Chance, a national organization dedicated to opening the doors to greater educational opportunities for young people of color. To learn more, visit www.abetterchance.org.

A Rose for Ana Maria: A Novel

At the greatest moments and in the cruelest times, black women have been a crucial part of America’s history.  Now, the inspiring history of black women in America is explored in vivid detail by two leaders in the fields of African American and women’s history.

A Shining Thread of Hope chronicles the lives of black women from indentured servitude in the early American colonies to the cruelty of antebellum plantations, from the reign of lynch law in the Jim Crow South to the triumphs of the Civil Rights era, and it illustrates how the story of black women in America is as much a tale of courage and hope as it is a history of struggle.  On both an individual and a collective level, A Shining Thread of Hope reveals the strength and spirit of black women and brings their stories from the fringes of American history to a central position in our understanding of the forces and events that have shaped this country.

A major publishing event: an unprecedented look into the life of the woman who most singularly shaped Barack Obama--his mother. Barack Obama has written extensively about his father, but little is known about Stanley Ann Dunham, the fiercely independent woman who raised him, the person he credits for, as he says, ""what is best in me."" Here is the missing piece of the story. Award-winning reporter Janny Scott interviewed nearly two hundred of Dunham’s friends, colleagues, and relatives (including both her children), and combed through boxes of personal and professional papers, letters to friends, and photo albums, to uncover the full breadth of this woman’s inspiring and untraditional life, and to show the remarkable extent to which she shaped the man Obama is today. Dunham’s story moves from Kansas and Washington state to Hawaii and Indonesia. It begins in a time when interracial marriage was still a felony in much of the United States, and culminates in the present, with her son as our president- something she never got to see. It is a poignant look at how character is passed from parent to child, and offers insight into how Obama’s destiny was created early, by his mother’s extraordinary faith in his gifts, and by her unconventional mothering. Finally, it is a heartbreaking story of a woman who died at age fifty-two, before her son would go on to his greatest accomplishments and reflections of what she taught him.

The culmination of a unique achievement in modern American literature: the six volumes of autobiography that began more than thirty years ago with the appearance of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

A Song Flung Up to Heaven opens as Maya Angelou returns from Africa to the United States to work with Malcolm X. But first she has to journey to California to be reunited with her mother and brother. No sooner does she arrive there than she learns that Malcolm X has been assassinated.

Devastated, she tries to put her life back together, working on the stage in local theaters and even conducting a door-to-door survey in Watts. Then Watts explodes in violence, a riot she describes firsthand.

Subsequently, on a trip to New York, she meets Martin Luther King, Jr., who asks her to become his coordinator in the North, and she visits black churches all over America to help support King’s Poor People’s March.

But once again tragedy strikes. King is assassinated, and this time Angelou completely withdraws from the world, unable to deal with this horrible event. Finally, James Baldwin forces her out of isolation and insists that she accompany him to a dinner party—where the idea for writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is born. In fact, A Song Flung Up to Heaven ends as Maya Angelou begins to write the first sentences of Caged Bird.

Read poet, Wanda Coelman’s Reaction

Bertram Francis, a British West Indian, has spent the last 20 years away from the Carribean. Now independence is looming and he is going back to see the end of colonial rule. But the visit is not the nostalgic homecoming he expected as he finds himself an outsider in a place he thought was home.

Bestselling author Treasure E. Blue returns with a gritty against-all-odds urban fairy tale set in the same unforgiving neighborhood as that of his breakout debut novel Harlem Girl Lost.

Desire was born on the streets of Harlem–literally. Her mom, a crack-addicted prostitute, delivered her on a bitter winter’s night after turning a trick and being brutally beaten by the john. Taken from her mother by the state, Desire grows up unwelcoming foster homes, until a local Good Samaritan takes her in. With Miss Hattie Mae’s love and Christian guidance, Desire gains confidence, joins the church choir, and discovers that she’s got a set of pipes–which soon attract the attention of hip-hop’s biggest exec.

But the road to superstardom is paved with dangers and temptations: drugged-out, violent rappers, untrustworthy pro athletes promising romance, and vicious drugs. Despite her phenomenal success and Miss Hattie Mae’s kindness, Desire seems destined for a fall from the top that will slam her back onto the pavement where her mama left her–until an unexpected angel picks her back up. . . .

Poignant and powerful, this debut collection from preeminent writer and critic Jabari Asim heralds his arrival as an exciting new voice in African American fiction.______________________________________________________________________ Through a series of fictional episodes set against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent years in modern history, Asim brings into pin-sharp focus how the tumultuous events of ’68 affected real people’s lives and shaped the country we live in today.   The sixteen connected stories in this exciting debut are set in the fictional Midwestern town of Gateway City, where second generation off-spring of the Great Migrators have pieced together a thriving, if fragile existence.  With police brutality on the rise, the civil rights movement gaining momentum, and wars raging at home and abroad, Asim has conjured a community that stands on edge.  But it is the individual struggles with love, childrearing, adolescence, etc, lyrically chronicled here, that create a piercing portrait of humanity. In I’d Rather Go Blind and Zombies, young Crispus Jones, who while sensitive to the tremors of upheaval around him is still much more concerned with his crush on neighbor Polly and if he’s ever going to be as cool as his brother.   When Ray Mortimer, a white cop, kills the owner of his favorite candy store, Crispus becomes aware of malice even more scary than zombies and the ghost that he thinks may be haunting his house.   In The Wheat from the Tares and A Virtuous Woman, Rose Whittier deals with her abusive husband with a desperate resignation until his past catches up with him and she’s given a second chance at love.  And Gabriel, her suitor, realizes that his whole-hearted commitment to The Struggle may have to give way for his own shot at romance. And in Ashes to Ashes we see how a single act of despicable violence in their childhoods cements a lasting connection between two unlikely friends.  From Crispus’ tender innocence to Ray Mortimer’s near pure evil, to Rose’s quiet determination, the characters in this book and their journeys showcase a world that is brimming with grace and meaning and showcases the talents of a writer at the top of his game.

Elaine Brown assumed her role as the first and only female leader of the Black Panther Party with these words: “I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?” It was August 1974. From a small Oakland-based cell, the Panthers had grown to become a revolutionary national organization, mobilizing black communities and white supporters across the country—but relentlessly targeted by the police and the FBI, and increasingly riven by violence and strife within. How Brown came to a position of power over this paramilitary, male-dominated organization, and what she did with that power, is a riveting, unsparing account of self-discovery.
            Brown’s story begins with growing up in an impoverished neighborhood in Philadelphia and attending a predominantly white school, where she first sensed what it meant to be black, female, and poor in America. She describes her political awakening during the bohemian years of her adolescence, and her time as a foot soldier for the Panthers, who seemed to hold the promise of redemption. And she tells of her ascent into the upper echelons of Panther leadership: her tumultuous relationship with the charismatic Huey Newton, who would become her lover and her nemesis; her experience with the male power rituals that would sow the seeds of the party’s demise; and the scars that she both suffered and inflicted in that era’s paradigm-shifting clashes of sex and power. Stunning, lyrical, and acute, this is the indelible testimony of a black woman’s battle to define herself.

“A glowing achievement.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Honest, funny, subjective, unsparing, and passionate. . . A Taste of Power weaves autobiography and political history into a story that fascinates and illuminates.” —The Washington Post
 
“A stunning picture of a black woman’s coming of age in America. Put it on the shelf beside The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” —Kirkus Reviews

This is a collection of short stories about children and young people in Jamaica. Full of wonderfully atmospheric background detail combined with the rhythms and patterns of speech, these contemporary narratives bring to life a culture highly relevant to multi ethnic Britain. Stories include "Becky and the Wheels and Brake Boys"; "A Thief in the Village"; "Tukku Tukku and Sampson"; "All other Days Run into Sunday"; "The Mouth Organ Boys"; "Elias and the Mongoose"; "The Pet, The Sea and Little Buddy"; "Fanso and Granny-Flo"; and, "The Banana Tree".

THE SUMMER STORY OF THREE SISTERS, ONE RESTUARANT, AND A (POSSIBLE) GERMAN SPY

World War II is coming in Europe. At least that’s what Frankie Baum heard on the radio. But from her small town in Maryland, in the wilting summer heat of 1939, the war is a world away.
 
Besides, there are too many other things to think about: first that Frankie’s father up and bought a restaurant without telling anyone and now she has to help in the kitchen, peeling potatoes and washing dishes, when she’d rather be racing to Wexler’s Five and Dime on her skates. Plus her favorite sister, Joanie Baloney, is away for the summer and hasn’t been answering any of Frankie’s letters.
 
But when some people in town start accusing her father of being a German spy, all of a sudden the war arrives at Frankie’s feet and she can think of nothing else.
 
Could the rumors be true? Frankie has to do some spying of her own to try to figure out her father’s secrets and clear his good name. What she discovers about him surprises everyone, but is nothing compared to what she discovers about the world.
 
In a heartfelt, charming, and insightful novel that is based on true events, Shawn K. Stout weaves a story about family secrets, intolerance, and coming of age that will keep readers guessing until the end.
 
Advance praise for A Tiny Piece of Sky:
 
“Shawn Stout’s Frankie Baum is that rare creation: a character so real, so true, we don’t just feel we know her—we are her. Irrepressible Frankie meets issues like prejudice and loyalty head on, in a story both highly entertaining and deeply thought-provoking. She may be #3 in her family, but she’ll be #1 in the hearts of all who read this book.”—Tricia Springstubb, author of What Happened on Fox Street

“At turns hilarious, at turns heartbreaking, Shawn Stout’s story shows us the damage that a whisper campaign can do to a family and a community, and at the same time shows us, each of us, a way to find our hearts. Frankie Baum is a hero from a distant time and yet a hero for all times, the kind of hero who never gets old. I loved this book from the very beginning to the very end.”—Kathi Appelt, author of the National Book Award finalist and Newbery Honor book The Underneath
 
"Stout uses an archly chummy direct address at several points, successfully and humorously breaking up tension in this cleareyed look at bad behavior by society….Successfully warmhearted and child-centered."—Kirkus Reviews

Horace Cross, the 16-year-old descendent of slaves and deacons of the church, spends a horror-filled spring night wrestling with the demons and angels of his brief life. Brilliant, popular, and the bright promise of his elders, Horace struggles with the guilt of discovering who he is, a young man attracted to other men and yearning to escape the narrow confines of Tim’s Creek. His cousin, the Reverend James Greene, tries to help Horace but finds he is no more prepared than the older generation to save Horace’s soul or his life. And as he views the aftermath of Horace’s horrible night, he is left with only questions and the passing of generations. 

In his powerful first novel, Randall Kenan—recipient of the Prix de Rome, the Whiting Award, and other accolades—shows us the effects of a proud family heritage on a generation that must confront a world far removed from anything they are prepared for. 

Told in a montage of voices and memories, A Visitation of the Spirits shows just how richly populated a family’s present is with the spirits of the past and the future.

The second novel by the acclaimed author of Gabriel’s Story, Walk Through Darkness is a story of history infused by myth, the intense narrative of an escaped slave trying to reunite with his pregnant wife.

Walk Through Darkness is the story of two very different men, each on a quest, both tied together by a history of remorse, jealousy, and a love that crosses the barriers of race during the time of slavery.

William, a fugitive slave from Maryland, is driven by two powerful needs—to find his wife, Dover, who is pregnant with his child, and to live as a free man. He undertakes the treacherous journey north to restore meaning to his life, putting him at odds with the law and the sentiments of a nation. Morrison, who fled a painful youth in Scotland, had once hoped to establish a new life in America with his brother, but the unforeseen realities of immigrant life drove them apart.

As David Anthony Durham traces the physical and spiritual journeys of William, Dover, and Morrison he captures in rich, evocative detail the events and the landscape of America just before the turmoil of the Civil War. Interweaving tragedy and hardship with a profound understanding of enduring love and the desire for freedom. Walk Through Darkness is a complex story that is uniquely American, reflecting the tortured nature of the country’s bloodlines and uncovering the deep bonds, and wounds, that exist across racial lines. This is a well-wrought work of "fiction in history" that follows two very different American men’s paths to freedom, and places a difficult part of our nation’s history under a magnifying glass to search for something beyond pain. In the end, it also presents a new possibility for healing — for the characters, and for the larger racial divide that still haunts the United States.

Building on the strengths of his extraordinary debut, Durham opens the reader’s eyes anew to the eternal odyssey to find a home and identity in America.

The twenty-first novel from New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey, a steamy thriller set in tropical Barbados

She is a woman of a thousand faces, an assassin who could be anyone, anywhere.

The Trinidad contract was supposed to be simple: to make a living man become a dead man. When the job goes bad under the watchful eye of a bank security camera, there is nowhere for agent MX-401, known as Reaper, to hide from the fearsome local warlords, the Laventille Killers.

Her employers, the Barbarians, send her to Barbados, the next island over, barely two hundred miles away, with the LK’s in hot pursuit of the woman who took many of their own. With the scant protection of a dank safe house, no passport, and no access to funds, an island paradise becomes her prison.

While she trawls for low-profile assignments to keep her skills sharp and a few dollars in her pocket, Reaper discovers that family ties run deep, on both sides of the fight. Will the woman everyone wants, who has lived countless lives in the service of others, finally discover who she really is?

In A Wanted Woman, New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey delivers an adrenaline-pumping rush of a read.

The compelling story of three black women who meet at a New England college in the late sixties and form a friendship that will guide them through the changes, the joys, and the tears of the coming years
 
Faith, small-boned and delicate, the daughter of a strong-willed mother and a father she no longer remembers, longs for the one experience that will show her to herself. Serena, a passionate and outspoken radical, has an intense political commitment and pride in her African roots, which will lead her to find a life on a continent far away. And Crystal, a poet from girlhood, has a long love affair with words that will be put to the ultimate test when she must explain to her father her love for a man of another race.

Praise for A Woman’s Place
 
“A radical new talent . . . The poignancy invites comparison to The Color Purple.”—New Woman
 
“A book that should be bought, read, and cherished, because it is a story of hope, a story of triumph and, above all, a testimony to resilience.”—The Philadelphia Tribune

The heralded Queen of Hip-Hop Lit presents an addictive collection of celebrated urban authors with their fingers on the pulse of the streets.
 
Street lit’s finest female voices—Keisha Starr, Tysha, LaKesa Cox, and Monique S. Hall—deliver searing stories about women who make hard sacrifices to stay on top of their hustle and seize the power, money, and fame they can’t live without. Enterprising and fearless, these players are more than equipped to handle whatever the street throws at them. That’s because they are hellbent on survival—by any means necessary. 

Once again, Nikki Turner shares ultra-realistic page-turners that will keep fans coming back for more.

Embracing the shattered pieces of the soul and championing the resilient nature of the heart, A Woman’s Worth takes readers on a journey of startling depth. From a speakeasy whorehouse in the bottoms of Alabama to a luxurious high-rise apartment in Kenya, acclaimed author Tracy Price-Thompson crosses boundaries of sexuality, gender, and culture to accentuate the core of black identity: the enormous strength of family.

“Ain’t nothing like a Black man. No other man on the face of the earth can hold a light up to him, coming or going. Why do you think women are all the time chasing behind them? Smooth game and all, when a brotha loves you, he loves you right.”
—from A Woman’s Worth

Abeni Omorru is a stunning Kenyan woman who is haunted by piercing memories. Although her father’s wealth ensures her a life of prestige, childhood trauma has left her emotionally damaged and sexually promiscuous. While Abeni takes on many lovers, none come close to healing the wounds of her heart—and only a man who understands her worth can truly claim her soul.

Bishop Johnson is also haunted by his past. Raised by prostitutes in a rural Alabama town, he is a promising teenage boxer—until his dreams are shattered when his parents are murdered during a violent robbery and he takes revenge on the perpetrators. Bishop goes to jail, and when he is released he has a volatile temper and a mean left hook to back it up.

Trouble continues to find Bishop, and he is forced to leave Alabama and travel to Kenya with the Peace Corps. There he falls in love with Abeni, and they marry. When Bishop learns the secret of Abeni’s past, he is force to make a decision that may cost him more than one man should ever have to sacrifice.

Embracing the shattered pieces of the soul and championing the resilient nature of the heart, A Woman’s Worth takes readers on a journey of startling depth. From a speakeasy whorehouse in the bottoms of Alabama to a luxurious high-rise apartment in Kenya, acclaimed author Tracy Price-Thompson crosses boundaries of sexuality, gender, and culture to accentuate the core of black identity: the enormous strength of family.

“Ain’t nothing like a Black man. No other man on the face of the earth can hold a light up to him, coming or going. Why do you think women are all the time chasing behind them? Smooth game and all, when a brotha loves you, he loves you right.”
—from A Woman’s Worth

Abeni Omorru is a stunning Kenyan woman who is haunted by piercing memories. Although her father’s wealth ensures her a life of prestige, childhood trauma has left her emotionally damaged and sexually promiscuous. While Abeni takes on many lovers, none come close to healing the wounds of her heart—and only a man who understands her worth can truly claim her soul.

Bishop Johnson is also haunted by his past. Raised by prostitutes in a rural Alabama town, he is a promising teenage boxer—until his dreams are shattered when his parents are murdered during a violent robbery and he takes revenge on the perpetrators. Bishop goes to jail, and when he is released he has a volatile temper and a mean left hook to back it up.

Trouble continues to find Bishop, and he is forced to leave Alabama and travel to Kenya with the Peace Corps. There he falls in love with Abeni, and they marry. When Bishop learns the secret of Abeni’s past, he is force to make a decision that may cost him more than one man should ever have to sacrifice.

In this hotly anticipated conclusion to his popular Invisible Life trilogy, E. Lynn Harris delivers a masterful tale that traces the evolving lives of his beloved characters Nicole Springer and Raymond Tyler, Jr., and reintroduces readers to their respective lovers, best friends, and potential enemies.  Abide with Me moves between the worlds of New York City, where Nicole has recently settled in order to pursue her dream of returning to the Broadway stage, and Seattle, where a late-night phone call from a U.S. Senator is about to change Raymond’s life dramatically.  Relationships and ambitions are tested as Harris deftly guides us toward this entertaining novel’s conclusion.

Sexy and heartwarming in equal measure, Abide with Me will thrill new readers as well as fans already familiar with Harris’s unique take on the universal themes of love, friendship, and family.  E. Lynn Harris has truly done it again.

Where jeans are $75 and love is free. Where stars set trends, celebrites throw fits, and the beautiful people get more beautiful. Abingdon’s. Where glitter is the weapon and power is the prize that threatens three of New York’s best kept secrets!

In this exquisite book, Alice Walker’s first new collection of poetry since 1991, are poems that reaffirm her as “one of the best American writers of today” (The Washington Post). The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems in Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Alice Walker opens us to feeling and understanding, with poems that cover a broad spectrum of emotions. With profound artistry, Walker searches for, discovers, and declares the fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to experience life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community. About Walker’s Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, America said, “In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind,” and the same can be said about this astonishing new collection, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth.

Leodan Akaran, ruler of the Known World, has inherited generations of apparent peace and prosperity, won ages ago by his ancestors. A widower of high intelligence, he presides over an empire called Acacia, after the idyllic island from which he rules. He dotes on his four children and hides from them the dark realities of traffic in drugs and human lives on which their prosperity depends. He hopes that he might change this, but powerful forces stand in his way. And then a deadly assassin sent from a race called the Mein, exiled long ago to an ice-locked stronghold in the frozen north, strikes at Leodan in the heart of Acacia while they unleash surprise attacks across the empire. On his deathbed, Leodan puts into play a plan to allow his children to escape, each to their separate destiny. And so his children begin a quest to avenge their father’s death and restore the Acacian empire–this time on the basis of universal freedom.

ACACIA is a thrilling work of literary imagination that creates an all-enveloping and mythic world that will carry readers away. It is a timeless tale of heroism and betrayal, of treachery and revenge, of primal wrongs and ultimate redemption. David Durham has reimagined the epic narrative for our time in a book that will surely mark his breakthrough to a wide audience.

Reba Freeman has loved two men in her life. Her current husband, Carl, has supported her through their twenty-year marriage and given her all the material wealth a suburban wife could hope for. Reba is comfortable, if not necessarily content, in her life with Carl and their blossoming teenage daughter, Marisa, until she learns that her first love and first husband, Joseph Thomas, has been detained by the World Court of Human Rights.

Joseph, a peaceful, gifted Liberian student, had dreams of returning to his native land and educating his people for the betterment of his country. Reba respected his strength and wanted to support his cause, but didn’t accompany Joseph to Liberia after graduation due to mysterious circumstances. Now, twenty years later, she must decide if finding out what has happened to her first husband is worth the risk of losing Carl and turning her comfortable world inside out.

Alternating between present-day action and a series of flashbacks, Accident of Birth creates an intricate tapestry of suspense, drama, and romance, while also looking at the moral and cultural differences between African Americans and Africans. Neff boldly exposes the rift between American comforts and the traumas of the world we choose to ignore, creating a moving and memorable story of courage and hope that readers will talk about for a long time.

Adam and Seymour are two young boys who wants to play soccer, but does not know how to play, they both signs up for soccer tryouts, believing that they could make the team with a little help and determination.

I want to change. I need to change. I’m gradually losing touch with myself.

Adultery, the provocative new novel by Paulo Coelho, best-selling author of The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes, explores the question of what it means to live life fully and happily, finding the balance between life’s routine and the desire for something new.

Piercingly intuitive, eloquent, and caustic, Affirmative Acts is an address to the social, economic, racial, and political conflicts that mar the otherwise beautiful human experience.

In this new collection of political essays, Jordan explores the confusion of an America in the grip of pseudo-multiculturalism and political intolerance. Continuing in the tradition of her classic collections Civil Wars and Technical Difficulties, Jordan acquaints readers with moments of American life threatened by social negligence and economic despair. With her characteristic insight, Jordan unveils how these too-frequent bouts of civil unrest bring out the weakest parts of the American spirit and challenges readers to remain inspired as society approaches the millennium.
June Jordan’s wisdom shines through in this brilliant collection of inspirational essays, which will be eagerly awaited by Jordan loyalists and enjoyed by her new readers.

These brief anthologies of ethnic American literature are ideal for ethnic, multicultural and American literature courses. They are designed to introduce undergraduates to the rich but often neglected literary contributions of established and newer ethnic writers to American literature. Each text is organized chronologically by genre and represent a wide range of literature.

African, Caribbean, and southern food are all known and loved as vibrant and flavor-packed cuisines. In Afro-Vegan, renowned chef and food justice activist Bryant Terry reworks and remixes the favorite staples, ingredients, and classic dishes of the African Diaspora to present wholly new, creative culinary combinations that will amaze vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores alike.

Blending these colorful cuisines results in delicious recipes like Smashed Potatoes, Peas, and Corn with Chile-Garlic Oil, a recipe inspired by the Kenyan dish irio, and Cinnamon-Soaked Wheat Berry Salad with dried apricots, carrots, and almonds, which is based on a Moroccan tagine. Creamy Coconut-Cashew Soup with Okra, Corn, and Tomatoes pays homage to a popular Brazilian dish while incorporating classic Southern ingredients, and Crispy Teff and Grit Cakes with Eggplant, Tomatoes, and Peanuts combines the Ethiopian grain teff with stone-ground corn grits from the Deep South and North African zalook dip. There’s perfect potluck fare, such as the simple, warming, and intensely flavored Collard Greens and Cabbage with Lots of Garlic, and the Caribbean-inspired Cocoa Spice Cake with Crystallized Ginger and Coconut-Chocolate Ganache, plus a refreshing Roselle-Rooibos Drink that will satisfy any sweet tooth.

With more than 100 modern and delicious dishes that draw on Terry’s personal memories as well as the history of food that has traveled from the African continent, Afro-Vegan takes you on an international food journey. Accompanying the recipes are Terry’s insights about building community around food, along with suggested music tracks from around the world and book recommendations. For anyone interested in improving their well-being, Afro-Vegan’s groundbreaking recipes offer innovative, plant-based global cuisine that is fresh, healthy, and forges a new direction in vegan cooking.

After Hours contains nineteen stories from some of the best black male authors in the business today, such as National Book Award Winner, Charles Johnson, Colin Channer, Curtis Bunn, Brandon Massey, Brian Egeston, Alexs D. Pate, and many more.

For twelve years Carson Blake inhabited a world of his own creation. Scorned by the father who was incapable of showing him affection and nearly consumed by the mean streets of Prince George’s County, Maryland, Carson did what no one else could: he saved himself.

After joining the police force and building a family with his wife, Bunny, Carson is finally in control of his life in the enclave where African American wealth and privilege shares the same zip code with black American crime and tragedy. Both Carson and his wife have great careers and three beautiful children: Roslyn, Roseanne, and Juwan. Carson is a devoted father, determined not to be the father that Jimmy Blake was to him. But while Juwan’s astounding artistic talent is his father’s pride, the boy’s close relationship with classmate Will conjures up emotions and questions in Carson that threaten to spill over and poison the entire Blake family.

And then, one night in March, nearing the end of a routine shift, Carson stops a young black man for speeding. He orders Paul Houston to exit the car and drop to his knees. But when Houston retrieves something from his waistband and turns to face Carson, three shots are fired, one man loses his life and two families are wrenched from everything that came before and hurled into the haunting future of everything that will come after. When it is revealed that Paul, a son of educators and a teacher in Southeast D.C., was only holding a cell phone, Carson’s carefully woven world begins to unravel.

After is a penetrating work of discovery for a man whose life careens more than once off the edge of disaster. Golden’s astounding prose will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

Penned in the same poetic voice introduced in her bestselling debut novel, Passing by Samaria, Sharon Ewell Foster’s Ain’t No River is a contemporary tale where the angst of modern life is seasoned with wisdom, humor, and a dash of African-American history. Meemaw has been a doting mother, grandmother, and church mother to her community. Suddenly she’s become a slimmed-down, silver-haired, seventy-something fox with a new attitude. And all fingers are pointing at a much younger ex-pro football player, GoGo Walker. When D.C. lawyer Garvin Daniels — Meemaw’s granddaughter — gets wind of what’s happening, she heads back to her hometown determined to help her Meemaw get it together before she goes too far.

A dazzling memoir of an African childhood from Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian novelist, playwright, and poet Wole Soyinka.

Aké: The Years of Childhood gives us the story of Soyinka’s boyhood before and during World War II in a Yoruba village in western Nigeria called Aké. A relentlessly curious child who loved books and getting into trouble, Soyinka grew up on a parsonage compound, raised by Christian parents and by a grandfather who introduced him to Yoruba spiritual traditions. His vivid evocation of the colorful sights, sounds, and aromas of the world that shaped him is both lyrically beautiful and laced with humor and the sheer delight of a child’s-eye view. A classic of African autobiography, Aké is also a transcendantly timeless portrait of the mysteries of childhood.

The long-awaited sequel to the genre-breaking Akata Witch by multiple award-winner Nnedi Okorafor!

“The most imaginative, gripping, enchanting fantasy novels I have ever read!” —Laurie Halse Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of Speak

A year ago, Sunny Nwazue, an American-born girl Nigerian girl, was inducted into the secret Leopard Society. As she began to develop her magical powers, Sunny learned that she had been chosen to lead a dangerous mission to avert an apocalypse, brought about by the terrifying masquerade, Ekwensu. Now, stronger, feistier, and a bit older, Sunny is studying with her mentor Sugar Cream and struggling to unlock the secrets in her strange Nsibidi book.

Eventually, Sunny knows she must confront her destiny. With the support of her Leopard Society friends, Orlu, Chichi, and Sasha, and of her spirit face, Anyanwu, she will travel through worlds both visible and invisible to the mysteries town of Osisi, where she will fight a climactic battle to save humanity.

Much-honored Nnedi Okorafor, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, merges today’s Nigeria with a unique world she creates. Akata Warrior blends mythology, fantasy, history and magic into a compelling tale that will keep readers spellbound.

Read Nnedi Okorafor’s blogs and other content on the Penguin Community.Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she’s albino. She’s a terrific athlete, but can’t go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits. And then she discovers something amazing-she is a "free agent," with latent magical power. Soon she’s part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But will it be enough to help them when they are asked to catch a career criminal who knows magic too?

Chaos results when a dream tells all the children and animals of the world that they should do whatever they want without fear of adult reprisal, and it is up to Albidaro, Guardian of Children, and Olara, Guardian of Animals, to put everyone back where they are supposed to be.

Transform your life. Rewrite your destiny.

In his most personal novel to date, internationally bestselling author Paulo Coelho returns with a remarkable journey of self-discovery. Like the main character in his much-beloved The Alchemist, Paulo is facing a grave crisis of faith. As he seeks a path of spiritual renewal and growth, his only real option is to begin again—to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the landscapes around him.

Setting off to Africa, and then to Europe and Asia via the Trans-Siberian railroad, he initiates a journey to revitalize his energy and passion. Even so, he never expects to meet Hilal. A gifted young violinist, she is the woman Paulo loved five hundred years before—and the woman he betrayed in an act of cowardice so far-reaching that it prevents him from finding real happiness in this life. Together they will initiate a mystical voyage through time and space, traveling a path that teaches love, forgiveness, and the courage to overcome life’s inevitable challenges. Beautiful and inspiring, Aleph invites us to consider the meaning of our own personal journeys.

Everyone knows Alex Haley as the world-renowned author of the international bestseller ROOTS, and as the writer who collaborated with Malcolm X on his historic autobiography. What many people don’t know is that Alex Haley began his professional writing career as a journalist. It was his experience in this arena that earned him the plum assignment as Playboy’s first — and foremost — interviewer.
Witness Haley’s work with the pre-Ali Cassius Clay, in which the posture of the young rebel fell away and a sensitive, intelligent young man emerged. He lured Malcolm X beyond his scathing Black Muslim rhetoric to reveal the agile, perceptive mind of a charismatic leader. With Johnny Carson, Haley revealed the man behind the mask of a charming television raconteur. And, in a devasting interview with George Lincoln Rockwell, the self-appointed fuhrer of the American Nazi Party, Haley deftly exposed the frightening heart and soul of the twisted man and his racist ideology.
A fascinating slice of recent history, an extraordinarily candid collection of celebrity interviews and personal reminiscences, ALEX HALEY: THE PLAYBOY INTERVIEWS anthologizes for the first time a gifted writer’s finest work at its controversial and informative best.

The bestselling commentator, hailed for his frank and fearless arguments on race, imparts a scathing look at the hypocrisy of hip-hop—and why its popularity proves that black America must overhaul its politics.

One of the most outspoken voices in America’s cultural dialogues, John McWhorter can always be counted on to provide provocative viewpoints steeped in scholarly savvy. Now he turns his formidable intellect to the topic of hip-hop music and culture, smashing the claims that hip-hop is politically valuable because it delivers the only “real” portrayal of black society.

In this measured, impassioned work, McWhorter delves into the rhythms of hip-hop, analyzing its content and celebrating its artistry and craftsmanship. But at the same time he points out that hip-hop is, at its core, simply music, and takes issue with those who celebrate hip-hop as the beginning of a new civil rights program and inflate the lyrics with a kind of radical chic. In a power vacuum, this often offensive and destructive music has become a leading voice of black America, and McWhorter stridently calls for a renewed sense of purpose and pride in black communities.

Joining the ranks of Russell Simmons and others who have called for a deeper investigation of hip-hop’s role in black culture, McWhorter’s All About the Beat is a spectacular polemic that takes the debate in a seismically new direction.

In the latest and most surprising novel in the bestselling Leonid McGill series, Leonid finds himself caught between his sins of the past and an all-too-vivid present.Seven years ago, Zella Grisham came home to find her man, Harry Tangelo, in bed with her friend. The weekend before, $6.8 million had been stolen from Rutgers Assurance Corp., whose offices are across the street from where Zella worked. Zella didn’t remember shooting Harry, but she didn’t deny it either. The district attorney was inclined to call it temporary insanity-until the police found $80,000 from the Rutgers heist hidden in her storage space.For reasons of his own, Leonid McGill is convinced of Zella’s innocence. But as he begins his investigation, his life begins to unravel. His wife is drinking more than she should. His oldest son has dropped out of college and moved in with an exprostitute. His youngest son is working for him and trying to stay within the law. And his father, whom he thought was long dead, has turned up under an alias.A gripping story of murder, greed, and retribution, All I Did Was Shoot My Man is also the poignant tale of one man’s attempt to stay connected to his family.

From acclaimed author Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, comes an unforgettable love story about a searing affair between an American woman and an African man in 1970s America and an unflinching novel about the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories. 

All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apart—one into the deepest peril, as the movement gathers inexorable force, and the other into the safety of exile in the American Midwest. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past: the acts he committed and the work he left unfinished. Most of all, he is haunted by the beloved friend he left behind, the charismatic leader who first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed everything to ensure his freedom.
 
Elegiac, blazing with insights about the physical and emotional geographies that circumscribe our lives, All Our Names is a marvel of vision and tonal command. Writing within the grand tradition of Naipul, Greene, and Achebe, Mengestu gives us a political novel that is also a transfixing portrait of love and grace, of self-determination and the names we are given and the names we earn.

A golden Cadillac big enough to cross the ocean has been seen sailing along the streets of Harlem. A hit-and-run victim’s been hit so hard she got embedded in the wall of a convent. A shootout with three heistmen dressed as cops has left an important politician in a coma - and a lot of money missing. And Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are the ones who have to piece it all together.All Shot Up is chaotic, bloody - and completely unforgettable. Chester Himes wrote detective fiction darker, dirtier and more extreme than anyone else dared.

Kevin King’s debut novel, All the Stars Came Out That Night, is a vivid portrait of Depression-era America written in a voice at once humorous and poetic. Set at Boston’s Fenway Park on October 20, 1943, All the Stars Came Out That Night imagines a late-night baseball game bankrolled by Henry Ford, pitting Dizzy Dean’s all-white all-stars against Satchel Paige’s black all-stars. Not a contest waged for money or trophies, the outcome of this game carries with it both the weight of a historic injustice?the barring of blacks from baseball?and the promise of vindication and redemption. Steeped in baseball lore and featuring an array of iconic American figures?from Babe Ruth to Clarence Darrow?All the Stars Came Out That Nightfar transcends the sport of baseball, creating a tale that is mythic, captivating, and above all, quintessentially American.

ALLAH IS NOT OBLIGED TO BE FAIR ABOUT ALL THE THINGS HE DOES HERE ON EARTH.These are the words of the boy soldier Birahima in the final masterpiece by one of Africa’s most celebrated writers, Ahmadou Kourouma. When ten-year-old Birahima’s mother dies, he leaves his native village in the Ivory Coast, accompanied by the sorcerer and cook Yacouba, to search for his aunt Mahan. Crossing the border into Liberia, they are seized by rebels and forced into military service. Birahima is given a Kalashnikov, minimal rations of food, a small supply of dope and a tiny wage. Fighting in a chaotic civil war alongside many other boys, Birahima sees death, torture, dismemberment and madness but somehow manages to retain his own sanity. Raw and unforgettable, despairing yet filled with laughter, Allah Is Not Obliged reveals the ways in which children’s innocence and youth are compromised by war.

The third book in the Dyamonde Daniels series, by bestselling author Nikki Grimes, is perfect for fans of the Keena Ford, Judy Moody, and Magnificent Mya Tibbs series and includes illustrations by Coretta Scott King honor winner R. Gregory Christie. 

Dyamonde really wants red high-top sneakers. Too bad they’re so expensive! A classmate tells her it’s her mom’s job to give her what she needs, but when Dyamonde tries that argument, her mom teaches her a lesson by literally only giving her what she needs. Now Dyamonde is down to almost zero outfits! But then she finds out one of her friends has it much worse, and she’s determined to do what she can to help.

  As a cultural and political commentator, Stanley Crouch in unapologetically contentious and delightfully iconoclastic. Whether he is writing on the uniqueness of the American South, the death of Tupak Shakur, the O.J. Simpson verdict, or the damage done by the Oklahoma City bombing, Crouch’s high-velocity exchange with American culture is conducted with scrupulous allegiance to the truth, even when it hurts—and it usually does. And on the subject of jazz—from Sidney Bechet to Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington to Miles Davis—there is no one more articulate, impassioned, and encyclopedic in his knowledge than Stanley Crouch.

   Crouch approaches everything in his path with head-on energy, restless intelligence, and a refreshing faith in the collective experiment that is America—and he does so in a virtuosic prose style that is never less than thrilling.

Grace loves stories, whether they’re from books, movies, or the kind her grandmother tells. So when she gets a chance to play a part in Peter Pan, she knows exactly who she wants to be. Remarkable watercolor illustrations give full expression to Grace’s high-flying imagination.

In this beautiful, deeply moving poem, Maya Angelou inspires us to embrace the peace and promise of Christmas, so that hope and love can once again light up our holidays and the world. “Angels and Mortals, Believers and Nonbelievers, look heavenward,” she writes, “and speak the word aloud. Peace.”

Read by the poet at the lighting of the National Christmas Tree at the White House on December 1, 2005, Maya Angelou’s celebration of the “Glad Season” is a radiant affirmation of the goodness of life and a beautiful holiday gift for people of all faiths.

This riveting novel in verse, perfect for fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Toni Morrison, explores American history and race through the eyes of a teenage boy embracing his newfound identity
 
Connor’s grandmother leaves his dad a letter when she dies, and the letter’s confession shakes their tight-knit Italian-American family: The man who raised Dad is not his birth father.
 
But the only clues to this birth father’s identity are a class ring and a pair of pilot’s wings. And so Connor takes it upon himself to investigate—a pursuit that becomes even more pressing when Dad is hospitalized after a stroke. What Connor discovers will lead him and his father to a new, richer understanding of race, identity, and each other.

In the tradition of Alice Walker, this electrifying new African American voice delivers the verdict on the urban condition in a sensual, propulsive, and prophetic book of poetry and prose.

Whether she is writing about an enraged teenager gone "wilding" in Central Park, fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins gunned down by a Korean grocer, or a brutalized child who grows up to escape her probable fate through the miracle of art, Sapphire’s vision in this collection of poetry and prose is unswervingly honest.

"Stunning . . . . One of the strongest debut collections of the ’90s."—Publishers Weekly

They fought on Lexington Green the first morning of the Revolution and survived the bitter cold winter at Valley Forge. They stormed San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and manned an anti-aircraft gun at Pearl Harbor. They are the black Americans who fought, often in foreign lands, for freedoms that they did not enjoy at home.
Adapted for young readers, this dramatic story brings to life the heroism of people such as Crispus Attucks, Benjamin O. Davis, Charity Adams, and Colin Powell, and captures the spirit that drove these Americans to better their lives and demand of themselves the highest form of sacrifice.

A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America’s most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award winning author of Lighthead

In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country’s past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered—the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

From the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a dazzling new novel: a story of love and race centered around a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices and challenges in the countries they come to call home.

As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu—beautiful, self-assured—departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze—the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor—had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.

Years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion—for their homeland and for each other—they will face the toughest decisions of their lives. Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today’s globalized world: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s most powerful and astonishing novel yet.

A monumental literary event: the newly discovered final novel by seminal Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay, a rich and multilayered portrayal of life in 1930s Harlem and a historical protest for black freedom
 
The unexpected discovery in 2009 of a completed manuscript of Claude McKay’s final novel was celebrated as one of the most significant literary events in recent years. Building on the already extraordinary legacy of McKay’s life and work, this colorful, dramatic novel centers on the efforts by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia, a crucial but largely forgotten event in American history. At once a penetrating satire of political machinations in Depression-era Harlem and a far-reaching story of global intrigue and romance, Amiable with Big Teeth plunges into the concerns, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of African-Americans at a moment of crisis for the soul of Harlem—and America.
 
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A monumental literary event: the newly discovered final novel by seminal Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay, a rich and multilayered portrayal of life in 1930s Harlem and a historical protest for black freedom
 
The unexpected discovery in 2009 of a completed manuscript of Claude McKay’s final novel was celebrated as one of the most significant literary events in recent years. Building on the already extraordinary legacy of McKay’s life and work, this colorful, dramatic novel centers on the efforts by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia, a crucial but largely forgotten event in American history. At once a penetrating satire of political machinations in Depression-era Harlem and a far-reaching story of global intrigue and romance, Amiable with Big Teeth plunges into the concerns, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of African-Americans at a moment of crisis for the soul of Harlemand America.
 
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

James Thicke is a man whose mysterious past runs as deep as his violent streak. He's channeled the intensity of his soul into twin passions-success as a screenwriter, and marriage to movie actress Regina Baptiste. In the midst of filming his latest script, starring Regina and leading man Johnny Bergs, James receives a video of his wife caught in the most compromising of situations.

Hours later, the clip of the on-set infidelity has hit the Internet and gone viral in the blogosphere and across all channels of social media. James responds to the affront by savagely attacking Johnny Bergs, and the spectacle has both the paparazzi and the police amassing at the married couple's estate. James goes on the run, but only as far as the city of Downey, California. As James tries to protect Regina from Hollywood's underbelly, lust, blackmail, and revenge become his constant companions. Does an accidental affair spell permanent danger?

An Accidental Affair has the eroticism of Pleasure, the intrigue of Thieves' Paradise, the relentless pacing of Drive Me Crazy, and a female lead as complex as Genevieve.

Dreams are the currency of Okri’s writing, particularly in this first book of poems, An African Elegy, but also in his books of short stories and prize-winning novel The Famished Road. Okri’s dreams are made on the stuff of Africa’s colossal economic and political problems, and reading the poems is to experience a constant succession of metaphors of resolution in both senses of the word. Virtually every poem contains an exhortation to climb out of the African miasma, and virtually every poem harvests the dream of itself with an upbeat restorative ending’ - Giles Foden, Times Literary Supplement.

With Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven, Dawn Turner Trice established herself as a powerful and unique new fiction writer with a first novel called "touching and memorable" by the New York Times. Now, with An Eighth of August, she delivers on the promise of her stunning debut with an eloquent, evocative novel about the strong ties and haunting memories that bind family and friends in a small town.

Since the late 1800s, Halley’s Landing has commemorated the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation with one of the grandest festivals in the Midwest. Year after year, celebrants come from near and far to show off their best clothes, cook up special dishes, and pay tribute to the rich heritage of the former slaves who settled the Illinois town, hoping to piece together a life. But along with stories of the good times come unbearably painful memories and long-buried resentments.

Narrated by a chorus of voices, An Eighth of August begins with the Sunday church services of the 1986 celebration, a year after a terrible tragedy rocked the people of this close-knit community. The festival provides the backdrop for a vividly moving story that weaves together the lives and voices of the residents of Halley’s Landing. We hear from strong-willed Flossie Jo Penticott and her estranged daughter, Sweet Alma, whose relationship has been torn apart by an unimaginable sorrow; Flossie’s scatterbrained sister-in-law Thelma and her salt-of-the-earth husband, Herbert, who remain steadfastly devoted despite life’s ups and downs; Aunt Cora, whose humor, generous spirit,  and large home provide refuge for the weary; and May Ruth, an eccentric older white woman who fits in like any other family member.

As we grow to know and love these characters, we witness how this Emancipation Festival will offer up its own particular brand of freedom and herald a change in each of their lives. Like Gloria Naylor, Dawn Turner Trice draws us into a remarkable world in An Eighth of August and invites us to spend time with a group of extraordinary individuals who linger long after the story is complete.

A collection of stories captures the lives of different teenagers growing up in the barrio, including Rita, who goes to live with her grandparents in Puerto Rico; Luis, who spends his days working at his father’s junkyard; and Sandra, who tries to rediscover her natural Latino beauty. Reprint. PW. AB. SLJ.

"An engaging saga of unconditional friendship, love, and foregiveness…Golden’s style is modern, refreshing and accurately captures a slice of African-American life."
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES
In the exciting, yet frightening days of Freedom Summer in 1963, two very different African-American women meet, each to discover in the other an elegant completion of herself. Jessie, running from her sexually abusive father and distant mother, is a born actress. In the movement she discovers an unknown world of personal freedom that could shape her into an extraordinary talent or destroy her from within. Macon, beautiful, fearless, and brilliant, knows she is too good to settle for less than she’s worth, but her activism threatens the man she loves.
In a vital time of politics and passion, dedication and distress, two women struggle to recreate themselves and their world—and learn to love the fight.

Eighteen-year-old Imamu’s newly-found contentment, with his job and the apartment he shares with his frail mother, is shattered when he is inadvertently drawn into the sinister events taking place in a wealthy household where he has been delivering groceries.

A stellar quarterback, an ambitious sportscaster. What happens when rising stars collide?In And This Too Shall Pass, Harris takes us into the locker rooms and newsrooms of Chicago, where four lives are about to intersect in romance and scandal. At the heart of the novel is the celibate Zurich, a rookiequarterback for the Chicago Cougars whose trajectory for superstardom is interrupted by a sexual assault charge by Mia, a sportscaster with her own sights on fame. With his career in jeopardy, Zurich hires Tamela, a high-powered attorney, to defend him, while Sean, a gay sportswriter, covers the story and uncovers his heart.All of these characters face the challenge of keeping the faith—in themselves and in God—while Harris’s heartfelt storytelling reveals how the love of family can help one to face the terrible legacy of long-held secrets. Throughout these characters’ search for self-knowledge, Harris weaves the stories of MamaCee, Zurich’s grandmother, whose lessons of faith teach one and all that "this too shall pass."Breaking new ground in contemporary fiction, And This Too Shall Pass entertains and affirms with its stirring message about the healing power of family and faith.

Anna is a 9 year old girl, that loves music but does not know how to play an instrument. Anna decides to learn to play the violin and realizes that playing an instrument takes a lot of practice. See how persistent Anna is when it comes to playing the violin and how practice makes perfect.

Another Africa is a book that fuses photographs, poetry, and text to create a view of present-day Africa that moves beyond the stereotypes commonly held by most westerners: an open-air ethnographic museum, a continent in constant turmoil, a vast expanse of beautiful sand dunes and tropical savannas where herds of wildlife roam. This work peels away myths to explore the complexity, diversity, and human dimensions of a place called Africa—one that celebrates the commonplace and exotic simultaneously. The photographs are highly subjective, a personal investigation that reflects the sensibilities, formal concerns, and the ongoing engagement of the photographer in this part of the world.

With the brilliant Chinua Achebe—a Nigerian—contributing his poems and an essay, the book takes on a further and critical dimension. He presents a concise view of Africa today, including the individual and political issues facing its countries. He deals with Africa on its own terms—from within, not from an outsider’s perspective.

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.

"A charming, provocative novel in which Mr. Flowers seamlessly blends the rich rythms of the blues and a Deep South patois in a lyrical, literate style."
- THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
It’s Beale Street in Memphis in the age when jazz was spelled "jass" and ragtime was just a glint in Scott Joplin’s eye. Lucas Bodeen is the bluesman, and Melvira Dupree is the conjure woman he loves. But pitted against them are all the forces of nature, the clashing of their own stubborn wills, and a society mired in the laws of Jim Crow and the mob. Combining the ancient African storytelling art of the griot with the American offshoots of blues and hoodoo, Arthur Flowers sings us a story that makes us smile - a story of life, and how love and happiness really happen.

In the fictional West African nation Kangan, newly independent of British rule, the hopes and dreams of democracy have been quashed by a fierce military dictatorship. Chris Oriko is a member of the cabinet of the president for life, one of his oldest friends. When the president is charged with censoring the oppositionist editor of the state-run newspaper—another childhood friend—Chris’s loyalty and ideology are put to the test. The fate of Kangan hangs in the balance as tensions rise and a devious plot is set in motion to silence the firebrand critic.

At the end of Not a Day Goes By, the terminally bisexual John Basil Henderson declares: “I’m back, in full form. And I’m out there. Roamin’. And switching lanes.” Now, in Any Way the Wind Blows, Basil, good-looking gadabout and homme fatal, is back at the top of his game (razzle-dazzling both the women and the men). All is well until Basil’s picture-perfect life starts to unravel . . .
Left at the altar a year before, jilted Broadway bombshell Yancey Harrington Braxton stages her comeback–this time as a recording star–but has she forgiven ex-fiancé Basil, or does she still need to even the score? As Yancey’s star continues to rise, her past threatens to catch up with her and she fears someone may be after her as well . . .
In a wicked little dance of revenge, Basil and Yancey struggle to keep their lives on track, while a chorus of unforgettable characters either come to their aid, or make matters worse. In the mix are: Yancey’s mother, Ava “Mama Dearest” Braxton, a diva’s diva and a second-rate showgirl housed in the body of an aging supermodel; the wise and wonderful Windsor Adams; and the new guy in town, Bartholomew “Bart” Dunbar, a rogue’s rogue and handsome hunk of a man who stands to make Basil look like a choirboy.
With just the right amount of wickedness, love, and compassion, Harris’s masterful storytelling and delicious plot twists will have fans and newcomers alike frantically turning pages trying to find the answer to the ultimate question: Does revenge ever really pay?

The town of Winthrop has decided it needs a new name. The resident software millionaire wants to call it New Prospera; the mayor wants to return to the original choice of the founding black settlers; and the town’s aristocracy sees no reason to change the name at all. What they need, they realize, is a nomenclature consultant. And, it turns out, the consultant needs them. But in a culture overwhelmed by marketing, the name is everything and our hero’s efforts may result in not just a new name for the town but a new and subtler truth about it as well.

Now in paperback, a haunting chorus of voices that tells the story of the captivity, education, language, hopes, dreams, and fight for freedom, of the African Americans abducted in the Amistad rebellion.

Based on the 1840 mutiny on board the slave ship Amistad, Ardency begins with "Buzzard," a sequence of poems told in the voice of the interpreter for the captive rebels, who were jailed in New Haven. In "Correspondence," we encounter the remarkable letters to John Quincy Adams and others that the captives wrote from jail. The book culminates in "Witness," a libretto chanted by Cinque, the rebel leader, who yearns for his family and freedom while eloquently evoking the Amistads’ conversion and life in America. As Young conjures this array of characters, interweaving the liberation cry of Negro spirituals and the indoctrinating wordplay of American primers, he delivers his signature songlike immediacy at the service of an epic built on the ironies, violence, and virtues of American history.

Set in the Ibo heartland of eastern Nigeria, one of Africa’s best-known writers describes the conflict between old and new in its most poignant aspect: the personal struggle between father and son.

Featuring introductions by Billie Jean King, Lori McNeil, John McPhee, and George Vecsey, this collection of invaluable instructional advice and tennis wisdom from the late Arthur Ashe is infused with the finest insights of a great man and a great tennis mind.

Artists Leo and Diane Dillon won their second consecutive Caldecott Medal for this stunning ABC of African culture. "Another virtuoso performance. . . . Such an astute blend of aesthetics and information is admirable, the child’s eye will be rewarded many times over."—Booklist. ALA Notable Book; Caldecott Medal.

Art from Ashanti Zulu

It is easy to shrink from our country’s brutal history of lynching. Lynching is called the last great skeleton in our nation’s closet: It terrorized all of black America, claimed thousands upon thousands of victims in the decades between the 1880s and the Second World War, and leaves invisible but deep scars to this day. The cost of pushing lynching into the shadows, however—misremembering it as isolated acts perpetrated by bigots on society’s fringes—is insupportably high: Until we understand how pervasive and socially accepted the practice was—and, more important, why this was so—it will haunt all efforts at racial reconciliation.

“I could not suppress the thought,” James Baldwin once recalled of seeing the red clay hills of Georgia on his first trip to the South, “that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees.” Throughout America, not just in the South, blacks accused of a crime—or merely of violating social or racial customs—were hunted by mobs, abducted from jails, and given summary “justice” in blatant defiance of all guarantees of due process under law. Men and women were shot, hanged, tortured, and burned, often in sadistic, picnic-like “spectacle lynchings” involving thousands of witnesses. “At the hands of persons unknown” was the official verdict rendered on most of these atrocities.

The celebrated historian Philip Dray shines a clear, bright light on this dark history—its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. He also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose and eradicate lynching, including Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W.E.B. Du Bois. If lynching is emblematic of what is worst about America, their fight may stand for what is best: the love of justice and fairness and the conviction that one individual’s sense of right can suffice to defy the gravest of wrongs. This landmark book follows the trajectory of both forces over American history—and makes the history of lynching belong to us all.

11 April 1982: a smell is coming down John Golding Road right alongside the boy-child, something attached to him, like a spirit but not quite. Ma Taffy is growing worried. She knows that something is going to happen. Something terrible is going to pour out into the world. But if she can hold it off for just a little bit longer, she will. So she asks a question that surprises herself even as she asks it, "Kaia, I ever tell you bout the flying preacherman?"

Set in the backlands of Jamaica, Augustown is a magical and haunting novel of one woman’s struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth.

Picking up where the bestselling Losing the Race left off, this penetrating and profound collection of essays by the controversial thinker and passionate advocate for racial enlightenment and achievement explores what it means to be black in America today.

According to the author, nearly forty years after the Civil Rights Act, African-Americans in this country still remain "a race apart." He feels that modern black Americans have internalized a tacit message: "authentically black" people stress initiative in private but cloak the race in victimhood in public in order to protect black people from an ever-looming white backlash. He terms this the "New Double Consciousness" in homage to W.E.B. DuBois’ description of a different kind of double consciousness in blacks a century ago.

Within this context McWhorter takes the reader on a guided tour through the race issues dominant in our moment: racial profiling, getting past race, the reparations movement, black stereotypes in film and television, hip-hop, diversity, affirmative action, the word nigger, and Cornel West’s resignation from Harvard.

With his fierce intelligence and fervent eloquence, McWhorter makes a powerful case for the advancement of true racial equality.

A timely and important work about issues that must be addressed by blacks and whites alike, Authentically Black is a book for Americans of every racial, social, political, and economic persuasion.

Autobiography of a People is an insightfully assembled anthology of eyewitness accounts that traces the history of the African American experience.  From the Middle Passage to the Million Man March, editor Herb Boyd has culled a diverse range of voices, both famous and ordinary, to creat a unique and compelling historical portrait:

Benjamin Banneker on Thomas Jefferson Old Elizabeth on spreading the Word Frederick Douglass on life in the North W.E.B. Du Bois on the Talented Tenth Matthew Henson on reaching the North Pole Harriot Jacobs on running away James Cameron on escaping a mob lyniching Alvin Ailey on the world of dance Langston Hughes on the Harlem Renaissance Curtis Morriw on the Korean War Max ROach on ""jazz"" as a four-letter word LL Cool J on rap Mary Church Terrell on the Chicago World’s Fair Rev. Bernice King on the future of Black America And many others.

“I am excited to announce my first book, The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6' 4", African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama’s Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian, is going to be released on May 2nd!”

“The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell of W. Kamau Bell’ is my humorous take on the world today. In the book, I tackle a wide range of issues, such as race relations; fatherhood; the state of law enforcement today; comedians and superheroes; right-wing politics; failure; my interracial marriage; my upbringing by very strong-willed, race-conscious, yet ideologically opposite parents; my early days struggling to find my comedic voice, then my later days struggling to find my comedic voice; why I never seemed to fit in with the Black comedy scene…or the white comedy scene; how I was a Black nerd way before that became a thing; how it took my wife and an East Bay lesbian to teach me that racism and sexism often walk hand in hand; and much, much more.”

Television lifestyle expert B. Smith shares her passion and ideas for entertaining, cooking, and crafts in this fabulous twelve-month celebration of holidays and rituals. As a restaurateur, TV host, columnist, and former model, B. Smith lets us in on the tricks of entertaining with flair and personal style.

The first in a series, Rituals & Celebrations is organized by calendar month, each including two or three celebrations and containing a history of the ritual, full-course recipes, party ideas, and step-by-step craft  instructions. In addition to such basic celebrations as a wine tasting at home,a Labor Day picnic on the beach, and a New Year’s Eve pajama party for kids, Rituals & Celebrations also incorporates such African American traditions as a Juneteenth celebration and a bid whist card party. The book also includes some wonderful variations on traditional holidays, such as a hot pink Valentine’s Day, a Thanksgiving featuring Jerked Roast Turkey, and Christmas Eve spent dipping into fondue.

Shrimp Dumplings with Ginger Soy Sauce, Candied Glazed Pork Tenderloin with Sweet Potato Stuffing, and Triple Chocolate Torte are just a few of the  other mouthwatering recipes included. Craft ideas    include putting together the perfect houseguest thank-you basket and creating beautiful personalized hand-painted glassware.

B. Smith brings these celebrations into your home and helps you make them your own. Filled with beautiful full-color photographs, B. Smith: Rituals & Celebrations completes any home and makes a great gift all year long.










B. Smith gives us twelve months of menus, recipes, crafts, and party ideas that help us celebrate with style

When Regina Burns married Blue Hamilton, she knew he was no ordinary man. A charismatic R&B singer who gave up his career to assume responsibility for the safety of Atlanta’s West End community, Blue had created an African American urban oasis where crime and violence were virtually nonexistent. In the beginning, Regina enjoyed a circle of engaging friends and her own work as a freelance communications consultant. Most of all, she relished the company of her husband, who never ceased to be a source of passion and delight.

Then everything changed. More and more frightened women were showing up in West End, seeking Blue’s protection from lovers who had suddenly become violent. When the worst offenders begin to disappear without a trace, the signs–all of them grim–seem to point toward Blue and his longtime associate, Joseph “General” Richardson. Now that Regina is pregnant, her fear for Blue’s safety has become an obsession that threatens the very heart of their relationship.

At the same time, Regina’s friend Aretha Hargrove is desperately trying to redefine her own marriage. Aretha’s husband, Kwame, is lobbying for them to leave West End and move to midtown. Aretha resists at first, but finally agrees in an effort to rekindle the flame that first brought them together.

Regina and Aretha have no way of knowing that what they regard as their private struggles will soon become very public. When Baby Brother, a charming con man, insinuates himself into the community, it becomes clear that there is more to his handsome façade than meets the eye. He carries the seeds of change that will affect both women in profound and startling ways.

Returning to the vividly rendered Atlanta district of her last two novels, New York Times bestselling author Pearl Cleage brilliantly weaves the threads of her characters’ intersecting lives into a story of family, friendship and, of course, love. Baby Brother’s Blues is full of wit and warmth, illumination the core of every woman’s hopes and dreams.


From the Hardcover edition.

From the international bestselling author of Black, White, and Jewish comes a "wonderfully insightful" (Associated Press) book that’s destined to become a motherhood classic. Now in trade.

Like many women her age, thirty-four-year-old Rebecca Walker was brought up to be skeptical of motherhood. As an adult she longed for a baby but feared losing her independence. In this very smart memoir, Walker explores some of the larger sociological trends of her generation while delivering her own story about the emotional and intellectual transformation that led her to motherhood.

Catherine Sanderson seems to have it all: a fulfilling career helping immigrant women find jobs, a lovely home, and a beautiful, intelligent daughter on her way to Smith College. What Catherine doesn’t have: a father for her child– and she’s spent many years dodging her daughter’s questions about it. Now Phoebe is old enough to start poking around on her own. It doesn’t help matters that the mystery man, B.J. Johnson–the only man Catherine has ever loved–doesn’t even know about Phoebe. He’s been living in Africa.

Now B.J., a renowned newspaper correspondent, is back in town and needs Catherine’s help cracking a story about a female slavery ring operating right on the streets of Atlanta. Catherine is eager to help B.J., despite her heart’s uncertainty over meeting him again after so long, and confessing the truth to him–and their daughter.

Meanwhile, Catherine’s hands are more than full since she’s taken on a new client. Atlanta’s legendary Miss Mandeville–a housekeeper turned tycoon–is eager to have Catherine staff her housekeeping business. But why are the steely Miss Mandeville and her all-too-slick sidekick Sam so interested in Catherine’s connection to B.J.? What transpires is an explosive story that takes her world–not to mention the entire city of Atlanta–by storm.

From the New York Times bestselling author of What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day . . . comes another fast-paced and emotionally resonant novel, by turns warm and funny, serious and raw. Pearl Cleage’s ability to create a gripping story centered on strong, spirited black women and the important issues they face remains unrivaled.

October 1962. The Soviet Union has smuggled missiles into Cuba. Kennedy and Khrushchev are in the midst of a military face-off that could lead to nuclear conflagration. Warships and submarines are on the move. Planes are in the air. Troops are at the ready. Both leaders are surrounded by advisers clamoring for war. The only way for the two leaders to negotiate safely is to open a “back channel”—a surreptitious path of communication hidden from their own people. They need a clandestine emissary nobody would ever suspect. If the secret gets out, her life will be at risk . . . but they’re careful not to tell her that.

Stephen L. Carter’s gripping new novel, Back Channel, is a brilliant amalgam of fact and fiction—a suspenseful retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the fate of the world rests unexpectedly on the shoulders of a young college student.

On the island of Curaçao, a visiting Soviet chess champion whispers state secrets to an American acquaintance.

In the Atlantic Ocean, a freighter struggles through a squall while trying to avoid surveillance.

And in Ithaca, New York, Margo Jensen, one of the few black women at Cornell, is asked to go to Eastern Europe to babysit a madman.

As the clock ticks toward World War III, Margo undertakes her harrowing journey. Pursued by the hawks on both sides, protected by nothing but her own ingenuity and courage, Margo is drawn ever more deeply into the crossfire—and into her own family’s hidden past.

“When she was perfect, beautiful, and innocent, I found no toehold where I could connect with Eve. When she was tempted by her flesh, humbled by her sin, and redeemed by her God, I could sing out, ‘Oh, sister Eve! Can we talk?’ - from Bad Girls of the Bible

Ten of the Bible’s best-known femmes fatales parade across the pages of Bad Girls of the Bible with situations that sound oh-so-familiar.

Eve had food issues. Potiphar’s Wife and Delilah had man trouble. Lot’s Wife and Michal couldn’t let go of the past, Sapphira couldn’t let go of money, and Jezebel couldn’t let go of anything. Yet the Woman at the Well had her thirst quenched at last, while Rahab and the Sinful Woman left their sordid histories behind. Let these Bad Girls show you why studying the Bible has never been more fun!

Affairs of the heart can be lethal in New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey’s latest sensual, thrilling novel.

As a low-level enforcer in Los Angeles, Ken Swift knows danger, but nowhere does he feel it more than in his tangled romances. Divorced from one woman, in love with another, and wrestling with a strong desire to get to know a third, his life is far from perfect, and it becomes all the more complicated when his troubled daughter resurfaces on the same day as a major job. Margaux is pregnant, bitter, and desperate: she needs $50,000 immediately, and she isn’t above blackmailing Ken to get it. Yet even as the tension-filled father/daughter reunion escalates into a clashing of wills and desires that spread far beyond their family, Ken’s latest contract spirals quickly out of control, and he finds it is not only his daughter looking to seek revenge.

With the strong characters, heart-pounding action, and intense passion he is known for, New York Times bestseller Eric Jerome Dickey lays bare a tale of lust and angst that will leave readers breathless.

Set in a diner where the food isn’t very good and the ambience veers between heaven and hell, this bestselling novel from the author of Mama Day and The Women of Brewster Place is a feast for the senses and the spirit. "A virtuoso orchestration of survival, suffering, courage and humor."—New York Times Book Review.

When a chemical explosion in a facility owned by her employer rocks her hometown of Flatwoods, Texas, Elise Jeffries is torn between professional ethics and personal loyalty to her childhood friends."

Perfect for newly independent readers—the amazing true story of Michaela DePrince, one of America’s top ballerinas.

At the age of three, Michaela DePrince found a photo of a ballerina that changed her life. She was living in an orphanage in Sierra Leone at the time, but was soon adopted by a family and brought to America. Michaela never forgot the photo of the dancer she once saw, and quickly decided to make her dream of becoming a ballerina come true. She has been dancing ever since and is now a principal dancer in New York City and has been featured in the ballet documentary First Position, as well as Dancing with the Stars, Good Morning America, and Oprah magazine.

Young readers will love learning about this inspiring ballerina in this uplifting and informative leveled reader. This Step 4 Step into Reading book is for newly independent readers who read simple sentences with confidence.

A biography of the Congresswoman from Texas, the first black woman ever to be elected to that office from the South.

Southern & Western Style Barbeque Recipes Veggie-Grill & LowFat Heart Smart Recipies including Sauces, Barbeque BASTE MARINADES, Side Dishes, & BobbyQue Quick recipies All by & with Bobby Seale’s 50 years recipe-perfected pit-smoke & pit-grilling Methodology

Some call it polite behavior,or good manners.  Others call it proper breeding, but to most African  Americans its simply called "home training."  Now in Basic Black, authors  Karen Grigsby Bates and Karen E. Hudson offer a  modern guide for gracious  living.

Contrary to the more traditional etiquette books  that most African Americans may find stodgy,  off-putting, and culturally alien, Basic  Black is for real people who live  real lives—and addresses many of the  issues of a growing black middle class who want to  live riche without seeming  noveau. Straightforward,  user-friendly and illustrated with line drawings,  Basic Black includes all the  information any well-mannered person would want to know  about the social rites of passage (marriage, birth,  christening, death), the new corporate workplace  (standard work issues and the more delicate issue  of race and its impact in an integrated  workplace), various occasions (having guests or being a  guest at one’s summer home, etc.), and everyday  rules and rituals that make living in hectic times a  little easier.

For singles and  families alike, Basic Black  takes the mystery out of conventional etiquette and  will arm the reader with the ability to be  comfortable and confident in just about any situation.

E. Lynn Harris has wowed and seduced more than three million readers with the wicked drama and undeniable heart in his novels. Now he’s back with another winner sure to top the bestseller lists—a rip-roaring tale of sex, secrets, betrayal . . . and blackmail.

Aldridge James “AJ” Richardson is living the good life. He has a gorgeous town house in always-flavorful New Orleans, plenty of frequent-flier miles from jet-setting around the country on a whim, and an MBA—but he’s never had to work a regular job. He owes it all to his longtime lover, Dray Jones. Dray Jones the rich and famous NBA star. They fell in love in college when AJ was hired to tutor Dray, a freshman on the basketball team. But Dray knew if he wanted to make it to the big time, he must juggle his public image and his private desires. Built on a deep, abiding love, their hidden relationship sustains them both, but when Dray’s teammates begin to ask insinuating questions about AJ, Dray puts their doubts to rest by marrying Judi, a beautiful and ambitious woman. Judi knows nothing about Dray’s “other life.” Or does she?
In Basketball Jones, E. Lynn Harris explores the consequences of loving someone who is forced to conform to the rules society demands its public heroes follow. Filled with nonstop twists and turns, it will keep readers riveted from the first page to the last.

AJ Richardson is living the good life. Thanks to his longtime lover, NBA star Dray Jones, he has a gorgeous townhouse in New Orleans, plenty of frequent-flier miles, and an MBA he’s never had to use. Built on a deep and abiding love, their hidden relationship sustains them both. But when Dray’s teammates begin to ask insinuating questions, Dray puts their doubts to rest by marrying Judi, a beautiful and ambitious woman. Judi knows nothing about Dray’s “other life.” Or does she?
 
In Basketball Jones, E. Lynn Harris explores the consequences of loving someone who is desperate to conform. Filled with nonstop twists and turns, it will keep readers riveted from the first page to the last.

An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States

As I prepare to share BECOMING this fall, I hope you’ll also think about your own story, and trust that it will help you become whoever you aspire to be. Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own. #BECOMING pic.twitter.com/agb7uJhYu8

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) May 24, 2018

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African-American to serve in that role--she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it--in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations--and whose story inspires us to do the same.

Traces black history from its origins in western Africa, through the transatlantic journey and slavery, the Reconstruction period, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights movement, to life in the 1990s. Reprint. 35,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo.

Maiyanah Milton is a chic, young, beautiful reporter with a caring heart. When she throws her friend a surprise party at the local UAW, she’s the one who gets surprised. The magnetic pull she feels for the handsome stranger obviously down on his luck, is unexpected and has her second guessing herself. From the moment Javon Miller first laid eyes on Yani, she had consumed his every thought. The strong attraction he feels for her is shocking but he soon realizes she’s more than just another pretty face. They become fast friends and Jay struggles to suppress his growing feelings for Yani. Will Jay’s feelings for Yani risk their friendship or will Yani succumb to her own feelings for the sexy truck driver who’d charmed his way into her heart.

Imbolo Mbue’s The Longings of Jende Jonga one of two books to earn $1 Million+ advances at the Frankfurt Book Fair read more; “Frankfurt Book Fair 2014: Two Debuts Draw Seven Figures”

For fans of Americanah and The Lowland comes a debut novel about an immigrant couple striving to get ahead as the Great Recession hits home. With profound empathy, keen insight, and sly wit, Imbolo Mbue has written a compulsively readable story about marriage, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream.

Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at their summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future.

However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ facades.

Then the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Desperate to keep Jende’s job, which grows more tenuous by the day, the Jongas try to protect the Edwardses from certain truths, even as their own marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.

Advance praise for Behold the Dreamers

“A beautiful novel about one African couple starting a new life in a new land, Behold the Dreamers will teach you as much about the promise and pitfalls of life in the United States as about the immigrants who come here in search of the so-called American dream.”—Sonia Nazario, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Enrique’s Journey

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.

Toni Morrison’s masterpiece of a novel Beloved is based upon the true story of Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave from Kentucky, killed one of her children rather than permit her to be returned to slavery. Garner drowned in a shipwreck as she was being brought back to slavery.

Rebecca Primus was the daughter of a prominent black Connecticut family who was sent south during Reconstruction by the Hartford Freedmen’s Aid Society to teach newly freed slaves. Addie Brown was a domestic servant in Connecticut and New York City—as well as Rebecca’s best friend and romantic companion. These two spirited, intelligent women wrote letters in this astonishing, historically priceless volume. Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends breaks the long silence surrounding the lives of black women in America and reveals an amazing world until now unknown.

"I have today put my second class into the third Reader," wrote Rebecca from the school in Maryland’s Eastern Shore that was later to bear her name. "I hear the President Johnson expect to be in Hartford the 26th," exclaimed Addie. "I wish some of them present him with a ball through his head."

Shared passion, ambitions, frustrations, politics, gossip, all the fascinating minutiae of daily life, give these unique letters extraordinary flavor and richness—and offer us an unprecedented piece of American history.

This exciting collection introduces the first-ever annual anthology of writing by African Americans. Here are remarkable essays on a variety of subjects informed by—but not necessarily about—the experience of blackness, as seen through the eyes of some of our finest writers.

From art, entertainment, and science to technology, sexuality, and current events—including the battle for the Democratic nomination for the presidency—the essays in this inaugural anthology offer the compelling perspectives of a number of well-known, distinguished writers, among them Malcolm Gladwell, Jamaica Kincaid, James McBride, and Walter Mosley, and a number of other writers who are just beginning to be heard.

Selected from a diverse array of respected publications such as the New Yorker, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, and National Geographic, the essays gathered here are about making history, living everyday life—and everything in between. In “Fired,” author and professor Emily Bernard wrestles with the pain of a friendship inexplicably ended. Kenneth McClane writes hauntingly of the last days of his parents’ lives in “Driving.” Journalist Brian Palmer shares “The Last Thoughts of an Iraq War Embed.” Jamaica Kincaid describes her oddly charged relationship with that quintessentially British, Wordsworthian flower in “Dances with Daffodils,” and writer Hawa Allan depicts the forces of race and rivalry as two catwalk icons face off in “When Tyra Met Naomi.” A venue in which African American writers can branch out from traditionally “black” subjects, Best African American Essays features a range of gifted voices exploring the many issues and experiences, joys and trials, that, as human beings, we all share.


Please click the "Behind the Book" link for contributor’s bios.


From the Hardcover edition.

Bursting with energy and innovation, the second volume in the annual anthology collects the year’s best short stories by African American authors.
 
Dealing with all aspects of life from the pain of war to the warmth of family, the superb tales in Best African American Fiction 2010 are a tribute to the stunning imaginations thriving in today’s African American literary community. Chosen by this year’s guest editor, the legendary Nikki Giovanni, these works delve into international politics and personal histories, the clash of armies and of generations—and come from such publications as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, and Callaloo.

In "Ghosts," Edwidge Danticat portrays an aspiring radio talk show host in Bel Air—which some call the Baghdad of Haiti—who is brutally scapegoated, and in "Three Letters, One Song & a Refrain," Chris Abani gives a searing account of the violent life of a thirteen-year-old member of a Burmese hill tribe. Jeffery Renard Allen dramatizes the mysterious arrival in Harlem of a child’s hated grandmother, and Wesley Brown fictionalizes the life of the great saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, with cameo appearances by Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and other immortals. John Edgar Wideman contributes dense and textured "Microstories" that interweave everything from taboo sex acts to Richard Wright’s last works to murder in a modern family. Desiree Cooper depicts a debutante from Atlanta moving to Detroit, "a city where there’s no place to hide," while in "Been Meaning to Say" by Amina Gautier, a widower gets an unforgettable holiday visit from his resentful daughter.

From Africa to Philadelphia, from the era of segregation to the age of Obama, the times and places, people and events in Best African American Fiction 2010 reveal inconvenient truths through incomparable fiction.

Introducing the first volume in an exciting new annual anthology featuring the year's most outstanding fiction by some of today's finest African American writers.

From stories that depict black life in times gone by to those that address contemporary issues, this inaugural volume gathers the very best recent African American fiction. Created during a period of electrifying political dialogue and cultural, social, and economic change that is sure to captivate the imaginations of writers and readers for years to come, these short stories and novel excerpts explore a rich variety of subjects. But most of all, they represent exceptional artistry.

Here youill find work by both established names and up-and-comers, ranging from Walter Dean Myers to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mat Johnson, and Junot Díaz . They write about subjects as diverse as the complexities of black middle-class life and the challenges of interracial relationships, a modern-day lynching in the South and a young musician's coming-of-age during the Harlem Renaissance. What unites these stories, whether set in suburbia, in eighteenth-century New York City, or on a Caribbean island that is supposed to be "brown skin paradise," is their creators' passionate engagement with matters of the human heart.

Masterful and engaging, this first volume of Best African American Fiction features stories you'll want to savor, share, and return to again and again.

This thought-provoking companion to Nikki Grimes’ Coretta Scott King Award-winning Bronx Masquerade shows the capacity poetry has to express ideas and feelings, and connect us with ourselves and others.
 
Darrian dreams of writing for the New York Times. To hone his skills and learn more about the power of words, he enrolls in Mr. Ward’s class, known for its open-mic poetry readings and boys vs. girls poetry slam. Everyone in class has something important to say, and in sharing their poetry, they learn that they all face challenges and have a story to tell—whether it’s about health problems, aging out of foster care, being bullied for religious beliefs, or having to take on too much responsibility because of an addicted parent. As Darrian and his classmates get to know one another through poetry, they bond over the shared experiences and truth that emerge from their writing, despite their private struggles and outward differences.

Debuted #1 New York Times Best Seller • Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States” (The New York Observer) 
“This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”
 
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
 
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Nothing in the annals of sports has aroused more passion than the heavyweight fights in New York in 1936 and 1938 between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling — bouts that symbolized the hopes, hatreds, and fears of a world moving toward total war. Acclaimed journalist David Margolick takes us into the careers of both men — a black American and a Nazi German hero — and depicts the extraordinary buildup to their legendary 1938 rematch. Vividly capturing the outpouring of emotion that the two fighters brought forth, Margolick brilliantly illuminates the cultural and social divisions that they came to represent.

“[A] haunting story . . . Bears witness to the struggles of an African Caribbean woman as she seeks to find her place in America without selling her soul.” –BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL, Author of Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine

When Sara Edgehill is given a scholarship to leave Trinidad and attend a college in Wisconsin, she is thrilled. America, the one she has seen in the movies, is a land of dreams, prosperity, and equality. Not like Trinidad, where her parents cast disappointed glances her way because she wasn’t born with lighter-colored skin. But when Sara leaves her island’s brilliant green fields and warm sparkling waters for the pale cornfields of the Midwest, the ties to her home and her past grip her as strongly as America’s cold, winter winds.

For as soon as Sara sets foot in her new home, she must make tough decisions. Wanting desperately to fit in, she begins to understand that in America, the color lines run deeper than they did even in Trinidad. And as Sara forms ties with two other West Indian students–the beguiling, haunted Courtney and the passionate, vivacious Sam–she is irrevocably pulled into the very center of America’s exploding civil rights movement.

A passionate manifesto that exposes hypocrisy on both sides of the political divide and points a way out of the tribalism that is tearing America apart—by the CNN political contributor and host hailed as “a star of the 2016 campaign” (The New York Times) who coined the term “whitelash”

Van Jones burst into the American consciousness during the 2016 presidential campaign with an unscripted, truth-telling style and an already established history of bridge-building across party lines. His election night commentary became a viral sensation. A longtime progressive activist with deep roots in the conservative South, Jones has made it his mission to challenge voters and viewers to stand in one another’s shoes and disagree constructively.

Now, in Beyond the Messy Truth, Jones offers a blueprint for transforming our collective anxiety into meaningful change. Tough on Donald Trump but showing respect and empathy for his supporters, Jones takes aim at the failures of both parties before and after Trump’s victory. He urges both sides to abandon the politics of accusation and focus on real solutions. Calling us to a deeper patriotism, he shows us how to get down to the vital business of solving, together, some of our toughest problems.

“The entire national conversation today can be reduced to a simple statement—‘I’m right, and you’re wrong,’” Jones has said. But the truth is messier; both sides have flaws. Both parties have strayed from their highest principles and let down their core constituencies. Rejecting today’s political tribalism, Jones issues a stirring call for a new “bipartisanship from below.” Recognizing that tough challenges require the best wisdom from both liberals and conservatives, he points us toward practical answers to problems that affect us all regardless of region or ideology: rural and inner-city poverty, unemployment, addiction, unfair incarceration, and the devastating effects of the pollution-based economy on both coal country and our urban centers. 

In explaining how he arrived at his views, Jones shares behind-the-scenes memories from his decades spent marching and protesting on behalf of working people, inspiring stories of ordinary citizens who became champions of their communities, and little-known examples of cooperation that have risen from the fog of partisan conflict. In his quest for positive solutions, Van Jones encourages us to set fire to our old ways of thinking about politics and come together where the pain is greatest.

Advance praise for Beyond the Messy Truth

“Part manifesto, part manual for activism, [Beyond the Messy Truth] is enlivened by case histories and personal anecdotes that serve as support for the author’s assertions. . . . The author proposes common projects that may bring opposing sides together . . . [and] offers concrete suggestions to revive democracy, heal culture wars, and prevent a Trump victory in 2020.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Van Jones is a light in the darkness when we need it most. Beyond the Messy Truth breaks with the tribalism of today’s politics and offers us a way forward. In the tradition of the great bridge builders of our past, Van’s love for this country and all its people shines through.”—Cory Booker, U.S. senator, New Jersey

Includes an invaluable resource of contacts, books, media, and organizations for bipartisan bridge-building and problem solving.

Bibsy’s life changes forever when she falls in love after a chance meeting in a Harlem bar in 1952. The tranquil, free-spirited lifestyle she casually enters into with Jake Tucker collides with intractable memories of a difficult past, a new community fated for development and heartbreaking loss. This multifaceted and riveting historical novel gives greater insight into the complexity of African American lives. With New York State’s major road and bridge construction in the background, rural enclaves become casualties of suburbanization.

"[An] empathetic portrait of a modern woman wrestling with issues of love, work, and family obligations."—Publishers Weekly

Born into a comfortable Washington, D.C., home, Naomi Jefferson leads a life that is only occasionally marred by racism. As a teenager in the 1960s, her biggest concern centers around virginity. But all that changes when her older brother, Joshua—who seems destined for greatness—is killed in a tragic car accident on his way to a civil rights demonstration. Now the rift between black and white America becomes much too personal, and Naomi embarks on a journey to honor her brother’s legacy—and to find herself.

This brilliant new novel, from the bestselling author of Sisters & Lovers, traces three decades in the life of a woman readers will not soon forget, as she searches for love and purpose in a harsh often unforgiving world.

"Contains an infectious hope and optimism."
—Los Angeles Times

A fiendishly imaginative comic novel about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.


Ricky Rice was as good as invisible: a middling hustler, recovering dope fiend, and traumatized suicide cult survivor running out the string of his life as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter appears, summoning him to the frozen woods of Vermont. There, Ricky is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard The Voice: a mysterious murmur on the wind, a disembodied shout, or a whisper in an empty room that may or may not be from God.

Evoking the disorienting wonder of writers like Haruki Murakami and Kevin Brockmeier, but driven by Victor LaValle’s perfectly pitched comic sensibility Big Machine is a mind-rattling literary adventure about sex, race, and the eternal struggle between faith and doubt.

While white Americans were evenly divided about Bill Clinton’s impeachment ninety percent of African-Americans opposed it. Now from a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists comes a groundbreaking new book that explores the deep and unique connection between the former president and the black community–in the words of journalists, celebrities, academics, and other thoughtful Americans.

Going well beyond mere TV punditry, luminaries such as Dr. Mary Frances Berry, Bill Gray, Kweisi Mfume, and Alice Randall, as well as ordinary citizens, offer insight into why African-Americans for the first time saw themselves in the soul of a president–Whether it was the large African-American presence in his administration, his perceived legal persecutions, his personal style, or his lasting yet tumultuous marriage–and why that kinship has sweeping cultural implications. Bill Clinton’s actions, associations, and essence are all analyzed in light of their effect on and appeal to this crucial constituency.

Much-awaited and long overdue, Bill Clinton and Black America features fascinating, provocative interpretations of the special relationship between the black people and this extraordinary man who, when his presidency ended, moved his office from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue–White America’s most famous address–to Harlem’s 125th Street–the heart of Black America.

Albert French lights up the monstrous face of American racism in this harrowing tale of ten-year-old Billy Lee Turner, who is convicted of and executed for murdering a white girl in Banes County, Mississippi in 1937. Billy is about the deaths of two children, one girl, one boy, the girl’s death an accident, the boy’s a murder perpetrated by the state. Though the events Billy records occur during the 1930s in a small Mississippi town, the range of characters, emotions, and social forces, and the inexorable march to doom of a ten-year-old boy and the society that dooms him, catapult the story far beyond a specific time and location. Narrated by an anonymous observer in the rich accents of the region, constructed in a series of powerfully lean vignettes, Billy imparts an intensity that is nearly unbearable. It is a tour de force of dramatic compression. Albert French evokes with cinematic vividness the picking fields and town streets; the heat, the dust, the unrelenting sun, the poverty of 1930s Mississippi. High-spirited Billy; his mysterious and passionate mother, Cinder; his friend, Gumpy; and other characters black and white are realized with depth and authority. Told in classic, unrelieved terms yet with remarkable compassion and restraint, their story is an unsentimental and ultimately heart-rending vision of racial injustice. Billy is, quite simply, one of the most powerfully affecting novels to come along in years.

Billy’s parents have always decided what is right for him, but when new neighbors move in next door, he begins to demonstrate that he has a mind of his own. By the author of My Love, My Love.

This scathingly hilarious political satire—produced from a collaboration of three of our funniest humorists—answers the burning question: Would anyone care if East St. Louis seceded from the Union?

East St. Louis, Illinois (“the inner city without an outer city”), is an impoverished town, so poor that Fred Fredericks, its idealistic mayor, starts off Election Day by collecting the city’s trash in his own minivan. But the mayor believes in the power of democracy and rallies his fellow citizens to the polls for the presidential election, only to find hundreds of them turned away for trumped-up reasons. Even sweet old Miss Jackson—not to mention the mayor himself—is denied the vote because her name turns up on a bogus list of felons. The national election hinges on Illinois’s electoral votes and, as a result of the mass disenfranchisement of East St. Louis, a radical right-wing junta led by a dim-witted Texas governor seizes the Oval Office.

Prodded by shady black billionaire and old friend John Roberts, Fredericks devises a radical plan of protest: East St. Louis will secede from the Union. Roberts opens an “offshore” bank (albeit in the heart of the U.S.) to finance the newly liberated country, and suddenly East St. Louis becomes the Switzerland of the American heartland, flush with money. It also begins to attract a motley circus of idealistic young militants, OPEC-funded hitmen, CIA operatives, tabloid reporters, and AWOL black servicemen eager to protect and serve the new nation.

Problems set in almost immediately: Controversies rage over the name and national anthem of the new country (they decide on the Republic of Blackland with an anthem sung to the tune of the theme from Good Times), and local thug Roscoe becomes a warlord and turns his gang into a paramilitary force. When the U.S. military begins to move in, Fredericks is forced to decide whether his protest is worth taking all the way.

Birth of a Nation starts with a scenario drawn from the botched election of 2000 and spins it into a brilliantly absurd work of sharply pointed satire. Along the way the authors lay into a host of hot social and cultural issues—skewering white supremacists, black nationalists, and everyone in between—drawing real blood and real laughs in equal measure in this riotous send-up of American politics.

Clifford. Victor. Nathan. Three brothers as different as they come. Three lives that veer unexpectedly off course. One bond that heals them all. . . .

Clifford sees his life as picture-perfect: two wonderful young sons, a fast-track career, and a solid marriage. But fresh back from a family vacation in Florida, Clifford is hit with a stunning blow when his wife Demetria declares that she is leaving him for “true love, excitement, and fun”–an announcement that throws him into an uncontrollable tailspin of denial.

With one failed marriage under his belt, and a precious daughter his ex-wife bars him from seeing, Victor is no expert in romantic love. His philosophy? The only way to keep a woman from squeezing every last drop from you is to get out before things get too deep. But lately Victor hasn’t been feeling quite like himself–especially since he’s been falling for Edie and her little girl. Seems like he spends more time looking out for her then he does staking out new booty calls.

Even in the face of tragedy and travail, Nathan, a minister, remains hopeful. His marriage is a paragon of Christian ideals, his loving wife Brenda is his soul mate and support. But it wasn’t always that way. Nathan has left some ugly wreckage in his wake before finding God. Now he and Brenda are truly blessed with a solid family and an adoring congregation. Then, a troubled divorcée tempts Nathan–and threatens the sacred vows he swore to uphold.

While Clifford, Victor, and Nathan struggle with the unexpected–faltering marriages, breaking hearts, and torn childhoods that threaten to repeat themselves in the lives of their children–each will discover the true redemptive power of a brother’s love.

By turns fierce and passionate, tender and humorous, this wise novel blasts the stereotype that black men’s ties to their families are tenuous at best. Freddie Lee Johnson III tells a refreshing story of three complex men who fight to do right by their families–both the ones they created, and the one they were born into. The result is Bittersweet.

1982, First Edition, Large Paperback, 109 pages

“I may be a supersoldier but I sure as hell ain’t no Superwoman. Yes, it’s true my hand is steady, I have the eye of a marksman, and I can hit a moving target dead center at four hundred meters, but when it comes to making clever love decisions, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. While I look pretty lofty in my spit-shined combat boots and razor-sharp battle dress uniform, like a lot of young sisters from the ’hood, I’ve taken a few wrong turns down the back alleys of life.”

Meet Sergeant Sanderella Coffee, who has just completed a three-year overseas tour and is now reporting to a military installation in Virginia. She is a single mother whose goal is to attend the Army’s prestigious Officer Candidate School, which will guarantee a better life for her and her children.

Sandie meets a man who matches her ambition and determination step for step in the form of Drill Sergeant Romulus Caesar, who literally marches into her life and turns it upside down. They fall in love, and Rom is everything Sandie could want—supportive, confident, self-reliant—but he’s also married. Because of the military’s tough policy on fraternization and adultery, Sandie could find her carefully orchestrated career slipping away like sand in a breeze.

At the age of thirty-three, Ekow Eshun—born in London to African-born parents—travels to Ghana in search of his roots. He goes from Accra, Ghana’s cosmopolitan capital city, to the storied slave forts of Elmina, and on to the historic warrior kingdom of Asante. During his journey, Eshun uncovers a long-held secret about his lineage that will compel him to question everything he knows about himself and where he comes from. From the London suburbs of his childhood to the twenty-first century African metropolis, Eshun’s is a moving chronicle of one man’s search for home, and of the pleasures and pitfalls of fashioning an identity in these vibrant contemporary worlds.

In 1972 Lorene Cary, a bright, ambitious black teenager from Philadelphia, was transplanted into the formerly all-white, all-male environs of the elite St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, where she became a scholarship student in a "boot camp" for future American leaders.  Like any good student, she was determined to succeed.  But Cary was also determined to succeed without selling out.  This wonderfully frank and perceptive memoir describes the perils and ambiguities of that double role, in which failing calculus and winning a student election could both be interpreted as betrayals of one’s skin.  Black Ice is also a universally recognizable document of a woman’s adolescence; it is, as Houston Baker says, "a journey into selfhood that resonates with sober reflection, intellignet passion, and joyous love."

A refreshingly clearheaded and taboo-breaking look at race in America reveals our culture as neither Black nor White nor Other, but a mix-a mongrel.

Black Like You is an erudite and entertaining exploration of race relations in American popular culture. Particularly compelling is the author’s ability to tackle blackface—a strange, often scandalous, and now taboo entertainment. Although blackface performance came to be denounced as purely racist mockery, and shamefacedly erased from most modern accounts of American cultural history, Strausbaugh shows that, nevertheless, its impact has been deep and longlasting. The influence of blackface can be seen in rock and roll and hip-hop; in vaudeville, Broadway, and drag performances; in Mark Twain and "gangsta lit"; in the earliest filmstrips and Hollywood’s 2004 White Chicks; on radio and television; in advertising and product marketing; and even in the way Americans speak.

With remarkable common sense and clarity, Strausbaugh candidly illuminates truths about race rarely discussed in public, including:

- American culture neither conforms to knee-jerk racism nor to political correctness. It is neither Black nor White nor Other, but a mix-a mongrel.
- No history is best forgotten-however uncomfortable it may be to remember. The power of blackface to enrage and mortify Americans to this day is reason enough to examine what it still tells us about our culture and ourselves.
- Blackface is still alive. Its impact and derivations- including Black performers in "whiteface"-can be seen all around us.

Kevin Young follows his acclaimed exploration of the blues in Jelly Roll with another playful riff on a vital art form, giving us a film noir in verse. Black Maria–the title is a slang term for a police van as well as a hearse–is a twisting tale of suspicion, passion, mystery, and the city. Young channels the world of detective movies, picking up its lingo and dark glamour in five “reels” of poetry–the adventures of a “soft-boiled” private eye, known as A.K.A. Jones, and an ingenue turned femme fatale, Delilah Redbone, who’s come to town from down south (“Mama bent till dark / tending rows to send / Me to school . . . I wanted / To head on & hitch . . . strike it / Big”). We follow Jones and Delilah through a maze of aliases and ambushes, sex and suspicions, fast talk and hard luck, in Shadowtown where noir characters abound. The Killer, The Gunsel, The Hack, The Director, The Champ, and The Snitch are among the local luminaries and beautiful losers who mingle with Jones and his elusive lady as they stalk one another through the scenes of the poet’s dazzling “treatment.” Charming, funky, bleak, humorous, picaresque, and full of pathos, Black Maria is brimming with the originality and stark lyricism we have come to expect from this remarkable poet.

When we met her first request:
Got a light?
*
I only had dark
so gave her that instead.
*
Ashtray full of butts
& maybes.
*
The sound of her heels down the hall
to me means reveille.

(from “Stills”)

Click on the poem titles below to hear Kevin Young read from Black Maria.


From the Hardcover edition.

From ESSENCE Books comes an exquisitely designed collection of essays from some of today’s most influential, respected, and recognized Black men, who speak candidly and eloquently about their lives and passions.

Black Men: In Their Own Words is an inspiring look at men of color who have reached the top of their chosen professions. Beautifully illustrated with striking photographs, it features prominent Black men speaking openly about the forces that have shaped their lives—from their friendships, passions, loves, and family relationships to racism and historical legacies.

A unique who’s who of contemporary African-American history and culture, Black Men: In Their Own Words is a fascinating compilation of personal testimonies from almost a hundred men. Filled with rich and powerful reflections from leading civil-rights activists and news-making politicians (Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson, Jr.), artists and entertainers (Samuel L. Jackson, Damon Wayans, Wynton Marsalis), sports stars (Kobe Bryant, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), media stalwarts (Ed Bradley, Tavis Smiley), and powerful thinkers and businessmen (Omar Wasow, Alvin Poussaint, Russell Simmons), this book’s thoughtful, enlightening stories and dynamic photographs will evoke feelings of pride and purpose in every reader—male or female.

A wonderful combination of poignant writing and photographic artistry, Black Men: In Their Own Words is a deeply felt and engaging book that acknowledges the past, celebrates today’s accomplishments, and salutes the future of Black men in all walks of life.

In 1967, this revolutionary work exposed the depths of systemic racism in this country and provided a radical political framework for reform: true and lasting social change would only be accomplished through unity among African-Americans and their independence from the preexisting order. An eloquent document of the civil rights movement that remains a work of profound social relevance 25 years after it was first published.

The grandson of slaves, born into poverty in 1892 in the Deep South, A. G. Gaston died more than a century later with a fortune worth well over $130 million and a business empire spanning communications, real estate, and insurance. Gaston was, by any measure, a heroic figure whose wealth and influence bore comparison to J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. Here, for the first time, is the story of the life of this extraordinary pioneer, told by his niece and grandniece, the award-winning television journalist Carol Jenkins and her daughter Elizabeth Gardner Hines.

Born at a time when the bitter legacy of slavery and Reconstruction still poisoned the lives of black Americans, Gaston was determined to make a difference for himself and his people. His first job, after serving in the celebrated all-black regiment during World War I, bound him to the near-slavery of an Alabama coal mine—but even here Gaston saw not only hope but opportunity. He launched a business selling lunches to fellow miners, soon established a rudimentary bank—and from then on there was no stopping him. A kind of black Horatio Alger, Gaston let a single, powerful question be his guide: What do our people need now? His success flowed from an uncanny genius for knowing the answer.

Combining rich family lore with a deep knowledge of American social and economic history, Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Hines unfold Gaston’s success story against the backdrop of a century of crushing racial hatred and bigotry. Gaston not only survived the hardships of being black during the Depression, he flourished, and by the 1950s he was ruling a Birmingham-based business empire. When the movement for civil rights swept through the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gaston provided critical financial support to many activists.

At the time of his death in 1996, A. G. Gaston was one of the wealthiest black men in America, if not the wealthiest. But his legacy extended far beyond the monetary. He was a man who had proved it was possible to overcome staggering odds and make a place for himself as a leader, a captain of industry, and a far-sighted philanthropist. Writing with grace and power, Jenkins and Hines bring their distinguished ancestor fully to life in the pages of this book. Black Titan is the story of a man who created his own future—and in the process, blazed a future for all black businesspeople in America.


From the Hardcover edition.

#1 bestselling author Nikki Turner returns with an explosive new novel about a woman at an emotional crossroads–and the men left in her wake.

Isis Tatum knows firsthand the way love can mess up a person. After all, she saw her mother drive a truck through the home of her father’s mistress before killing her dad. And ever since Isis was a teenager, her love life has been a series of disasters: Her first sweetheart was executed by the state of Virginia, and her next lover was sent to jail for murder. Now Isis is a successful jewelry designer, but she remains a failure with men. When she meets Logic, a Las Vegas high roller who treats her like a princess, Isis reckons she’s finally struck gold–literally. Logic sees to it that her custom pieces of jewelry are seen on the hottest rap stars and pro athletes.

But when this Mr. Right ends up in jail too, Isis starts to believe that she’s cursed, that she’s a true Black Widow. Always one to roll with the punches, she embraces her life and walks bravely down all its twisted paths, taking her business to unprecedented heights while letting the men who dare to get involved with her take their chances.


“Few writers working in the field today bring the drama quite as dramatically as Nikki Turner. . . . [She’s] a master at weaving juicy, ’hood-rich sagas of revenge, regret, and redemption.”
–Vibe.com

“Turner [takes] street literature to the next level, further proving that she is indeed ‘The Queen of Hip-Hop Fiction.’ ”
–UrbanPublicity.com

With fierce candor and an unflinching eye, the highly praised author of Push journeys through the harsh realities of African American existence to find the "door to the possibility of now." The heroes that emerge from these forty-seven vigorous poems confront the agony of betrayal as they strive in their quest for self-transformation and redemption.

From the city streets to the rich landscape of dreams, each of these poems holds out the "black wings of expectation" offering the chance to emerge from the pain of the past and arrive at "the day you have been waiting for/when you would finally begin to live." At turns alarming and inspiring, the raw lyrics and piercing wisdom of Black Wings & Blind Angels remind us of Sapphire's place as a unique and fearless voice.

This unique volume provides each writers reflection on her work, an evaluation of that writer by two perceptive critics, and detailed biographical and bibliographical data.  Included are Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and ten other outstanding writers.

The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented. In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself as a soul instead of a symbol—and offers a new look at the challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique and truly universal.

This book combines in one volume two now classic short story collections.  The editor has added a new introduction and prefatory material.



"Mary Helen Washington has had a greater impact upon the formation of the canon of Afro-American literature than has any other scholar." —The New York Times Book Review

A sweeping, unforgettable debut novel that traces remarkable parallel voyages of self-discovery, Blackgammon reveals the intertwined lives of two African-American women—soul sisters whose vow to stay true to one another will carry them through love, loss, and triumph on the way to finding out who they really are . . . and who they were meant to be.

After twenty-five years of self-imposed exile in Paris, legendary African American artist Chloe Emmanuel faces a daunting prospect: the chance of a triumphant return to the United States. She came to the City of Light in search of freedom . . . the freedom to paint, freedom from a love that nearly destroyed her, freedom from the racial strife in the country she once called home. Swept into the seductive world of high fashion and art gallery intrigues, Chloe finds that Paris posed its own set of challenges—the pressures of living up to her acclaimed reputation, the difficulty of expressing her feelings without a brush, the vow always to remain strong and directed, and the hope of never again allowing a man to turn her away from her dreams.

While Chloe reflects on her life, her relationships, and the meaning of her art, she begins to wonder: Is her artistic success linked to her "inability to love," as an enigmatic lover once suggested? If that is true, Chloe must somehow help her younger "sister" and closest friend, Michael Davies Northcross, who is confronting a devastating personal crisis of her own.

A distinguished African-American professor in England, married to a brilliant British scholar, Michael has modeled her life on the lies that Chloe has lived. When a visiting professor challenges not only her marriage but her reasons for staying devoted to a white man, Michael must sort through the half-truths and deceptions— and find her way back to that fragile place where real love exists.

Unwilling to sacrifice the dreams they dared to make real, Chloe and Michael are forced to the limits of their strength and independence. They must gamble everything to recapture what they have lost . . . in a dazzling game called Blackgammon.

Shawni Baldwin has everything she has ever closed her eyes and wished for. She can wrap her arms around a devoted and very sexy fiancé, Bo Delaney, an entertainment attorney. She is living a glamorous life as a successful, jet-setting fashion model. But now, much to the dismay of her mother, Shawni has decided not to sign her next modeling contract. For beyond the pop of the flash bulb, beneath the glitzy trappings of fame and fortune, Shawni feels like just another empty doll on the runway.

As the cold war with her commanding mother silently rages on, and her overprotective brother tries not to cramp her style, Shawni starts a new career as an independent beauty and fashion consultant. But a current client, a band of gorgeous crooners known as The Gentlemen, challenges her in ways she would never have imagined. In particular, one of the singers, Zin, with his Kenneth Cole boots and Joop cologne, defines sensuality and knocks her feelings of fidelity off balance.

Suddenly there is a wedge between Shawni and her groom-to-be—and the estrangement turns a woman’s confidence into uncertainty. As her life begins to recklessly spiral out of control, Shawni is forced to confront demons she never knew she had. She asks herself a profound question: Does her sense of self, her happiness, her very existence, depend upon a man?


By turns probing and funny, searing and sweet, Blame It On Eve follows the ups and downs of a sassy new heroine as she navigates brave new emotional terrains of the heart and soul. It’s an infectious novel about independence, sisterhood, and finding the strength to be true to oneself. If you don’t like that truth, well . . . Blame It On Eve!

The heroine of the top-selling mystery Blanche on the Lam—black domestic worker extraordinaire, accidental sleuth Blanche White—is enlisted to use her considerable wiles to discover the link between a suicide and a murder, and uncovers a web of secrets that someone may be willing to kill for.

Tart-tongued and shrewd—with a keen nose for trouble—Blanche is unique in the field of amateur sleuths: a queen-sized, middle-aged black woman rooted in working-class America. Blanche sees at a glance what people, and society, are up to—especially if it’s criminal. This time, she’s filling in as cook-housekeeper to a Boston Brahmin politician and his venal wife when she becomes enmeshed in a festering canker of a scandal that moves from the Brindles’ house in Brookline (a.k.a Prozac House) to the center of her own black community in Roxbury. Hot on the trail, she encounters a love triangle with bent angles, teen pregnancy, phony spirituality, and at least one person who doesn’t mean her any good. In Blanche, BarbaraNeely has created a heroine to cheer for—and Blanche Cleans Up is a novel that will thrill not only her ardent fans and other mystery buffs, but also mainstream readers eager to explore a new neighborhood with a feisty, funny black woman as their guide.

Praise the Ancestors! After three years of housekeeping for Boston’s haughty elite, Blanche White is finally coming home to North Carolina for an entire summer. And like a sign from above that she’s headed in the right direction, Blanche has already lined up a date with the handsome train conductor she met somewhere between Boston and Baltimore. The summer holds lots of promise, including helping her best friend, Ardell, with her new catering business. Then, on her first night back, Blanche runs into David Palmer, the man who raped her eight years ago. The time has now come for Blanche to exact her revenge. So when a young girl is murdered and it looks as if Palmer may be involved, Blanche pursues every possible lead to help put an end to his legacy once and for all.

At once grotesquely comic and unflinchingly violent, Blind Man With a Pistol is the final entry in Chester Himes’s trailblazing Harlem Detectives series.
 
New York is sweltering in the summer heat, and Harlem is close to the boiling point. To Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, at times it seems as if the whole world has gone mad. Trying, as always, to keep some kind of peace—their legendary nickel-plated Colts very much in evidence—Coffin Ed and Grave Digger find themselves pursuing two completely different cases through a maze of knifings, beatings, and riots that threaten to tear Harlem apart.

“To look is to see only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind spot. What is missing?”

When it comes to Teju Cole, the unexpected is not unfamiliar: He’s an acclaimed novelist, an influential essayist, and an internationally exhibited photographer. In Blind Spot, readers follow Cole’s inimitable artistic vision into the visual realm as he continues to refine the voice, eye, and intellectual obsessions that earned him such acclaim for Open City.

Here, journey through more than 150 of Cole’s full-color, original photos, each accompanied by his lyrical and evocative prose, forming a multimedia diary of years of near-constant travel: from a park in Berlin to a mountain range in Switzerland, a church exterior in Lagos to a parking lot in Brooklyn; landscapes, beautiful or quotidian, that inspire Cole’s memories, fantasies, and introspections. Ships in Capri remind him of the work of writers from Homer to Edna O’Brien; a hotel room in Wannsee brings back a disturbing dream about a friend’s death; a home in Tivoli evokes a transformative period of semi-blindness, after which "the photography changed… The looking changed." As exquisitely wrought as the work of Anne Carson or Chris Marker, Blind Spot is a testament to the art of seeing by one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature.

Praise for Blind Spot

“[Teju] Cole’s fiction and essays are incredible, unexpected, and beautiful; he’s also a spectacular photographer. His first collection of photographs, each image accompanied by his stunning prose, promises to show us the world through his eyes, which always seem to see things in a brilliant new light.”—Lisa Lucas, National Book Foundation

“Once you get a taste of [Cole’s] writing, you can quickly (and hungrily) burn through what’s available. Thankfully, Blind Spot will indulge the senses by combining both of Cole’s loves in this . . . full-color collection of Cole’s photos, accompanied by his prose.”—The Week

“Many artists have felt the lure of juxtaposing photographs and text, but few have succeeded as well as Teju Cole. He approaches this problem with an understanding of the limitations and glories of each medium.”—Stephen Shore, author of Uncommon Places

Praise for Teju Cole

“The places [Teju Cole] can go, you feel, are just about limitless.”—The New York Times

“[Cole is] one of the most vibrant voices in contemporary writing.”—LA Times

“There’s almost no subject Cole can’t come at from a startling angle. . . . His [is a] prickly, eclectic, roaming mind.”—The Boston Globe

“To read, see, and travel with him is to be changed by the questions that challenge him.”—Publishers Weekly

“In following [Cole’s] wanderings, I have often a sense of beholding something more delicate . . . but also more ordinary and more heartbreaking than the eye can typically bear. [His] photographs . . . insist on intimacy, transparency, confrontation.”—Taiye Selasi, author of Ghana Must Go

The hardcore hip-hop debut novel from a natural born storyteller.

"I had all this s-racing through my head. I figured that if the pigs was asking about Dex then they had to know he was rolling with somebody which meant they was going to be looking for me too…"

Blinking Red Light is a story of temptation and betrayal, where sex looks easy but the stakes are way higher than the players could have known.

When Dexter and a longtime friend come across a sweet hook up, it’s a deal neither can refuse: they are paid large sums of money to sleep with women with no strings attached… part of a blackmail ring that quickly backfires. Soon the two are caught in a predicament with lethal consequences. Twists and turns come flying at them full speed from the rugged streets of North Philly to the eerie back roads of North Carolina.

Blinking Red Light is fast-paced and intriguing, from its opening line to the shocking conclusion——-a thrilling ride about the madness that ensues when easy money comes a man’s way.

Danyel Smith is one of the most acclaimed music journalists of her generation, a prose stylist who “writes with music in her language” (Quincy Jones). In Bliss, a thrillingly sensual tale drenched with love and music, Smith dives deep into an intriguing set of characters facing life-changing choices in the swirl of the music industry at its decadent peak.

At a glossy gathering on Paradise Island, record exec Eva Glenn—soulful, sexy, powerful, and possibly pregnant—is hosting a comeback showcase for her singing sensation Sunny Addison, a barefoot diva with a poet’s heart and the voice of a lion. At the event’s high-strung peak, however, Eva begins to sink beneath the waves of anxiety washing over her—anxiety about a confusing sexual triangle, a career at a crossroads, and choices to be made about her possible pregnancy—and decides, in a blink, to flee. She leaves Paradise for the petite, pastoral island of Cat, accompanied by her sometime-lover D’Artagnan Addison, an earnestly crazy mystic looking for answers of his own. What begins as an idyllic break quickly turns into an intense sojourn that brings Eva to terms with the crises closing in on her.

Smith casts a wittily skeptical eye on the absurd drama of the music industry, but infuses every page with an infectious, bracing, unashamed passion for the power of pop. Her language matches the spirit of the music she writes about, echoing everything from throaty blues shouts and hip hop menace to the transcendent joy of a perfect R & B love song. This is a novel about the real rhythm and blues of life, about pain and loss and why we hold tight, in the end, to the sex and music and love that offer us a fleeting glimpse of bliss, even when the price is steep.

The most provocative debut novel of the year, "a dizzying satire" (The New Yorker) that "boldly turns history on its head" (Elle).

What if the history of the transatlantic slave trade had been reversed and Africans had enslaved Europeans? How would that have changed the ways that people justified their inhuman behavior? How would it inform our cultural attitudes and the insidious racism that still lingers today? We see this tragicomic world turned upside down through the eyes of Doris, an Englishwoman enslaved and taken to the New World, movingly recounting experiences of tremendous hardship and the dreams of the people she has left behind, all while journeying toward an escape into freedom.

A poignant and dramatic story grounded in provocative ideas, Blonde Roots is a genuinely original, profoundly imaginative novel.

“Daddy and Roger and ’em shot ’em a nigger.”

Those words, whispered to ten-year-old Tim Tyson by one of his playmates in the late spring of 1970, heralded a firestorm that would forever transform the small tobacco market town of Oxford, North Carolina.

On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel, a rough man with a criminal record and ties to the Ku Klux Klan, and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased Marrow, beat him unmercifully, and killed him in public as he pleaded for his life. In the words of a local prosecutor: “They shot him like you or I would kill a snake."

Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets, led by 22-year-old Ben Chavis, a future president of the NAACP. As mass protests crowded the town square, a cluster of returning Vietnam veterans organized what one termed “a military operation.” While lawyers battled in the courthouse that summer in a drama that one termed “a Perry Mason kind of thing,” the Ku Klux Klan raged in the shadows and black veterans torched the town’ s tobacco warehouses.

With large sections of the town in flames, Tyson’ s father, the pastor of Oxford’ s all-white Methodist church, pressed his congregation to widen their vision of humanity and pushed the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away.

Years later, historian Tim Tyson returned to Oxford to ask Robert Teel why he and his sons had killed Henry Marrow. “That nigger committed suicide, coming in here wanting to four-letter-word my daughter-in-law,” Teel explained.

The black radicals who burned much of Oxford also told Tim their stories. “It was like we had a cash register up there at the pool hall, just ringing up how much money we done cost these white people,” one of them explained. “We knew if we cost ’ em enough goddamn money they was gonna start changing some things.”

In the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird, Blood Done Sign My Name is a classic work of conscience, a defining portrait of a time and place that we will never forget. Tim Tyson’ s riveting narrative of that fiery summer and one family’ s struggle to build bridges in a time of destruction brings gritty blues truth, soaring gospel vision, and down-home humor to our complex history, where violence and faith, courage and evil, despair and hope all mingle to illuminate America’ s enduring chasm of race.

In these five stories, Gaines returns to the cane fields, sharecroppers’ shacks, and decaying plantation houses of Louisiana, the terrain of his great novels A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. As rendered by Gaines, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering, and courage, as Ralph Ellison’s Harlem or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.

STORIES INCLUDE:

A Long Day in November

The Sky Is Gray

Three Men

Bloodline

Just Like a Tree

A rich and lively gathering of highlights from the first twenty years of an extraordinary career, interspersed with “B sides” and “bonus tracks” from this prolific and widely acclaimed poet.

Blue Laws gathers poems written over the past two decades, drawing from all nine of Kevin Young’s previously published books of poetry and including a number of uncollected, often unpublished, poems. From his stunning lyric debut (Most Way Home, 1995) and the amazing “double album” life of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2001, “remixed” for Knopf in 2005), through his brokenhearted Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003) and his recent forays into adult grief and the joys of birth in Dear Darkness (2008) and Book of Hours (2014), this collection provides a grand tour of a poet whose personal poems and political poems are equally riveting. Together with wonderful outtakes and previously unseen blues, the profoundly felt poems here of family, Southern food, and loss are of a piece with the depth of personal sensibility and humanity found in his Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels or bold sequences such as “The Ballad of Jim Crow” and a new “Homage to Phillis Wheatley.”

Joyce Collins desperately wants to be accepted into the popular circle, and when she is cut from the ballet recital, she is devastated, until she joins an African dance troupe and quickly discovers a place where she truly feels she belongs. Reprint. H.

From one of this country’s most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture.

The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smithpublished here in their entirety for the first timeDavis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.

Follow along with Bobby as his faith in God, leads him to realizing his dream. 9- year old Bobby wishes he could play basketball like the other kids at his recreation center but a medical condition stops him. With a little faith and a lot of prayer, Bobby learns that anything is possible if you just believe.

In his barracks, Walter Burke is trying to write a letter to the parents of a fallen soldier, an Alabama man who died in a muddy rice paddy. But all he can think of is his childhood friend Lamar, the friend with whom he first experienced the fury of violence, on the streets of Birmingham, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The juxtaposition is so powerful—between war-torn Vietnam and terror-filled “Bombingham”—that he is drawn back to the summer that would see his transition from childish wonder at the world to his certain knowledge of his place in it.

Walter and Lamar were always aware of the terms of segregation—the horrendous rules and stifling reality. Their paper route never took them to the white areas of town. But that year, everything exploded. And so did Walter’s family. As the great movement swelled around them, the Burkes faced tremendous obstacles of their own. From a tortured past lingered questions of faith, and a terrible family crisis found its climax as the city did the same. In the streets of Birmingham, ordinary citizens risked their lives to change America. And for Walter, the war was just beginning.

A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing “her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air.” Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking “What good/are wishes if they aren’t / used up?” while understanding “How to listen / to what’s gone.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries.

In the night I brush
my teeth with a razor

He tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement

Not the storm
but the calm
that slays me

Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing

her face
full of fire, then groaning your face
out like a flower, blood-bloom,
crocused into air.

Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking

What good
are wishes if they aren’t
used up?

while understanding

How to listen
to what’s gone.

Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of one man’s coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times • Newsday • Esquire • NPR • Booklist

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.

The stories collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty. His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother’s unconventional, unconditional love.

Praise for Born a Crime

 “[A] compelling new memoir . . . By turns alarming, sad and funny, [Trevor Noah’s] book provides a harrowing look, through the prism of Mr. Noah’s family, at life in South Africa under apartheid. . . . Born a Crime is not just an unnerving account of growing up in South Africa under apartheid, but a love letter to the author’s remarkable mother.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“[An] unforgettable memoir.”—Parade

 “What makes Born a Crime such a soul-nourishing pleasure, even with all its darker edges and perilous turns, is reading Noah recount in brisk, warmly conversational prose how he learned to negotiate his way through the bullying and ostracism. . . . What also helped was having a mother like Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah. . . . Consider Born a Crime another such gift to her—and an enormous gift to the rest of us.”—USA Today

“[Noah] thrives with the help of his astonishingly fearless mother. . . . Their fierce bond makes this story soar.”—People

“[Noah’s] electrifying memoir sparkles with funny stories . . . and his candid and compassionate essays deepen our perception of the complexities of race, gender, and class.”—Booklist (starred review)

“A gritty memoir . . . studded with insight and provocative social criticism . . . with flashes of brilliant storytelling and acute observations.”—Kirkus Reviews

As seen on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where it was described as “gloriously unsettling… evoking Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Angela Carter, Edgar Allan Poe, Gabriel García Márquez, Chris Abani and even Emily Dickinson,” and already one of the year’s most widely acclaimed novels:

“Helen Oyeyemi has fully transformed from a literary prodigy into a powerful, distinctive storyteller…Transfixing and surprising.”—Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A)

“I don’t care what the magic mirror says; Oyeyemi is the cleverest in the land…daring and unnerving… Under Oyeyemi’s spell, the fairy-tale conceit makes a brilliant setting in which to explore the alchemy of racism, the weird ways in which identity can be transmuted in an instant — from beauty to beast or vice versa.” – Ron Charles, The Washington Post

From the prizewinning author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, coming February 2016, the Snow White fairy tale brilliantly recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity.

In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman.A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.

Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.

Two noted psychologists, who are parents themselves, share their wisdom in this indispensable book on raising African-American boys.

With the success of books such as Raising Cain and Real Boys comes the awareness of the increasing need we have to help boys grow into healthy, happy men. But for African-American boys, the statistics are often grim. They enter this world having a distinct disadvantage, still the target of racism, prejudice, and discrimination. Now, in the first book of its kind, husband and wife psychologists Drs. Nancy Boyd-Franklin and A. J. Franklin address the long overdue issues involved in raising African-American teenage boys and how to combat the overwhelming influences that can negatively affect these young men.

Parents and educators will learn how to deal with problems such as violence, drugs, sex, and racism, as well as with the effects of music, the media, and sports. Based on the authors’ own experience as psychologists and as the parents of four children, and including stories from dozens of other African-American families, Boys into Men offers simple, effective strategies for problem-solving, improving communication, and instilling a positive racial identity in African-American boys. This important book includes resources on finding a professional counselor as well as offering related reading, websites, and helpful organizations.

Bethesda Barnes has reached a point in life where she at last feels comfortable. She loves her family, despite a stormy relationship with her mother. For romance, there’s Lloyd Bounds, a devoted postal clerk. Although, cards on the table, Beth wouldn’t mind a ring. Ask Beth what part of her life is truly fulfilling and she just might answer “my beautiful career.”

After landing a plum teaching position at an Ivy League college, Dr. Barnes focuses her energies on her students, even the obnoxious ones, encouraging them all to “always strive for more.” Though driven and dedicated, Beth is fairly detached from her faculty colleagues, well aware that she is one of the only black faces in a sea of white. Despite the disparity, she loves her job and pursues it with gusto. Until an incident on campus rocks her worldand forces her to confront society’s uglier side.

Late one night, four African American sorority sisters are called vile names and assailed with garbage. The students decide to charge the boys with assault and racial insensitivity for violating the university’s harassment code. They ask Beth to be their faculty advisor for the case.

When Beth accepts, she walks into a racially charged firestorm of heated protest and dangerous threats. It turns out that one of the boys is a skinhead who seems to have sympathizers in high places. When the case goes national, even the editorial boards of presumably liberal newspapers criticize the victims and their cause. Though some of girls drop out of the case, and her personal life is blindsided by tragedy, Beth perseveres with the cause, believing some things are worth fighting for . . . especially in the name of justice.

A powerful novel that boldly takes on large, important themes while telling an intimate story of a courageous woman, Breaking Away is Kristin Lattany’s most persuasive and searing novel to date.

A striking collection of works from authors both established and emerging, this is the first original anthology of African-American writing in over a decade. Featured contributors include: J. California Cooper, Marita Golden, Gloria Naylor, Darryl Pinckney, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, Terry McMillan, and many others.

At an astonishingly young age, Edwidge Danticat has become one of our most celebrated new novelists, a writer who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti—and the enduring strength of Haiti’s women—with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people’s suffering and courage.  

At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti—to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people (an Oprah Book Club selection).

Ten-year-old Tae Kwon Do blue belt and budding rock hound Brendan Buckley keeps a CONFIDENTIAL notebook for his top-secret discoveries. And he's found something totally top secret. The grandpa he's never met, whom his mom refuses to see or even talk about, is an expert mineral collector, and he lives nearby! Brendan sneaks off to visit his grandpa Ed DeBose, whose skin is pink, not brown like Brendan's, his dad's, and the late Grandpa Clem's. Brendan sets out to find the reason behind Ed's absence, but what he discovers can't be explained by science, and now he wishes he'd never found Ed at all. . . .

In Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, Donald Bogle tells–for the first time–the story of a place both mythic and real: Black Hollywood. Spanning sixty years, this deliciously entertaining history uncovers the audacious manner in which many blacks made a place for themselves in an industry that originally had no place for them.

Through interviews and the personal recollections of Hollywood luminaries, Bogle pieces together a remarkable history that remains largely obscure to this day. We discover that Black Hollywood was a place distinct from the studio-system-dominated Tinseltown–a world unto itself, with unique rules and social hierarchy. It had its own talent scouts and media, its own watering holes, elegant hotels, and fashionable nightspots, and of course its own glamorous and brilliant personalities.

Along with famous actors including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Hattie McDaniel (whose home was among Hollywood’s most exquisite), and, later, the stunningly beautiful Lena Horne and the fabulously gifted Sammy Davis, Jr., we meet the likes of heartthrob James Edwards, whose promising career was derailed by whispers of an affair with Lana Turner, and the mysterious Madame Sul-Te-Wan, who shared a close lifelong friendship with pioneering director D. W. Griffith. But Bogle also looks at other members of the black community–from the white stars’ black servants, who had their own money and prestige, to gossip columnists, hairstylists, and architects–and at the world that grew up around them along Central Avenue, the Harlem of the West.

In the tradition of Hortense Powdermaker’s classic Hollywood: The Dream Factory and Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own, in Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, Donald Bogle re-creates a vanished world that left an indelible mark on Hollywood–and on all of America.


From the Hardcover edition.

A Coretta Scott King Award winner!

Using the structure of a poetry slam, Nikki Grimes’ award-winning novel is a powerful exploration of self, an homage to spoken-word poetry, and an intriguing look into the life of eighteen urban teens. This anniversary edition—celebrating ten years of this wonderfully evocative work—will feature discussion questions, testimonials from teachers, and an all new introduction from the author.

"All of the [students], black, Latino, white, male, and female, talk about the unease and alienation endemic to their ages, and they do it in fresh and appealing voices. Rich and complex."
—Kirkus Reviews

"As always, Grimes gives young people exactly what they’re looking for—real characters who show them they are not alone."
—School Library Journal

"Readers will enjoy the lively, smart voices that talk bravely, about real issues and secret fears. A fantastic choice."
—Booklist

From the best-selling author of The Dew Breaker, a major work of nonfiction: a powerfully moving family story that centers around the men closest to her heart—her father, Mira, and his older brother, Joseph.

From the age of four, Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph, a charismatic pastor, as her “second father,” when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for a better life in America. Listening to his sermons, sharing coconut-flavored ices on their walks through town, roaming through the house that held together many members of a colorful extended family, Edwidge grew profoundly attached to Joseph. He was the man who “knew all the verses for love.”

And so she experiences a jumble of emotions when, at twelve, she joins her parents in New York City. She is at last reunited with her two youngest brothers, and with her mother and father, whom she has struggled to remember. But she must also leave behind Joseph and the only home she’s ever known.

Edwidge tells of making a new life in a new country while fearing for the safety of those still in Haiti as the political situation deteriorates. But Brother I’m Dying soon becomes a terrifying tale of good people caught up in events beyond their control. Late in 2004, his life threatened by an angry mob, forced to flee his church, the frail, eighty-one-year-old Joseph makes his way to Miami, where he thinks he will be safe. Instead, he is detained by U.S. Customs, held by the Department of Homeland Security, brutally imprisoned, and dead within days. It was a story that made headlines around the world. His brother, Mira, will soon join him in death, but not before he holds hope in his arms: Edwidge’s firstborn, who will bear his name—and the family’s stories, both joyous and tragic—into the next generation.

Told with tremendous feeling, this is a true-life epic on an intimate scale: a deeply affecting story of home and family—of two men’s lives and deaths, and of a daughter’s great love for them both.

From the age of four, award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph as her “second father,” when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for America. And so she was both elated and saddened when, at twelve, she joined her parents and youngest brothers in New York City. As Edwidge made a life in a new country, adjusting to being far away from so many who she loved, she and her family continued to fear for the safety of those still in Haiti as the political situation deteriorated.

In 2004, they entered into a terrifying tale of good people caught up in events beyond their control. Brother I'm Dying is an astonishing true-life epic, told on an intimate scale by one of our finest writers.

"[AN] OUTSTANDING COLLECTION…
The powerful opening excerpt by Frederick Douglass evokes his boyhood as a slave, and the collection closes with an eloquent discussion of the race problem today by Cornel West. A distinguished addition to black studies."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The purpose of this extraordinary anthology is made abundantly clear by the editors’ stated intention: "to create a living mosaic of essays and stories in which Black men can view themselves, and be viewed without distortion." In this, they have succeeded brilliantly. Brotherman contains more than one hundred and fifty selections, some never before published—from slave narratives, memoirs, social histories, novels, poems, short stories, biographies, autobiographies, position papers, and essays.
Brotherman books us passage to the world that Black men experience as adolescents, lovers, husbands, fathers, workers, warriors, and elders. On this journey they encounter pain, confusion, anger, and love while confronting the life-threatening issues of race, sex, and politics—often as strangers in a strange land. The first collection of its kind, Brotherman gathers together a multitude of voices that add a new, unforgettable chapter to American cultural identity.

As John Wideman was building a reputation as one of our finest writers, his brother Robby went from the streets of Philadelphia to a life sentence in prison for murder. As it weighs their shared bonds of blood, tenderness, and guilt, Brothers and Keepers yields an unsparing analysis of America’s racial contract.

A powerful wartime saga in the bestselling tradition of Flags of Our Fathers, Brothers in Arms recounts the extraordinary story of the 761st Tank Battalion, the first all-black armored unit to see combat in World War II.

“Ms. Woodson writes with a sure understanding of the thoughts of young people, offering a poetic, eloquent narrative that is not simply a story… but a mature exploration of grown-up issues and self-discovery.”—The New York Times Book Review

Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse.

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.

First in a Series

Brown Sugar brings together some of the most acclaimed voices in today’s black literary world — Sapphire, Natasha Tarpley, Reginald Harris, and Pamela Sneed, among them. These titillating stories cover the full spectrum of black experience and identity as they reveal sexuality and sensuality in all their varied and exotic forms. From the subtle to the graphic, Brown Sugar embraces the ardor and passion of black love and lust, and will appeal to both men and women. Featuring both well-established authors and promising new writers, this one-of-a-kind collection represents the past, present, and future of black literature at its pleasurable and outrageous best. It is a must-have for every lover, as well as every lover of first-rate fiction.

James Brown. John Brown’s raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prize-winning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things "brown" in this powerful new collection.

Divided into "Home Recordings" and "Field Recordings," Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a black Kansas boyhood to comment on our times. From "History"—a song of Kansas high-school fixture Mr. W., who gave his students "the Sixties / minus Malcolm X, or Watts, / barely a march on Washington"—to "Money Road," a sobering pilgrimage to the site of Emmett Till’s lynching, the poems engage place and the past and their intertwined power. These thirty-two taut poems and poetic sequences, including an oratorio based on Mississippi "barkeep, activist, waiter" Booker Wright that was performed at Carnegie Hall and the vibrant sonnet cycle "De La Soul Is Dead," about the days when hip-hop was growing up ("we were black then, not yet / African American"), remind us that blackness and brownness tell an ongoing story. A testament to Young’s own—and our collective—experience, Brown offers beautiful, sustained harmonies from a poet whose wisdom deepens with time.

The year is 1954. A white woman’s body, stuffed in a coconut bag, has washed ashore in Otatiti, Trinidad, and the British colony is rife with rumors. In two homes, one in a distant shantytown, the other on the outskirts of a former sugar cane estate, two women hear the news and their blood runs cold. Rosa, the white daughter of a landowner, and Zuela, the adopted “daughter” of a Chinese shop owner used to play together as girls—and witnessed something terrible behind a hibiscus bush many years ago.

Brutal Imagination is the work of a poet at the peak of his considerable powers. Its two central sections—which could be called song cycles—confront the same subject: the black man in America.The first, which carries the book’s title, deals with the vision of the black man in white imagination. Narrated largely by the black kidnapper that Susan Smith invented to cover up the killing of her two sons, the cycle displays all of Mr. Eady’s range: his deft wit, inventiveness, and skillfully targeted anger, and the way in which he combines the subtle with the charged, street idiom with elegant inversions, harsh images with the sweetly ordinary. The second cycle, "Running Man," presents poems Mr. Eady drew on for his libretto for the music-drama of the same name, which was a l999 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Here, the focus is the black family and the barriers of color, class, and caste that tear it apart. As the Village Voice said, "It is a hymn to all the sons this country has stolen from her African- American families."

A rebellious boy’s journey through the wilds of urban America and the shrapnel of a self-destructing family—this is the riveting story of a generation told through one dazzlingly poetic new voice.
 
MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: a mother who led the new nation’s dance company and a father who would soon become a revered pioneer in black studies. But things fell apart, and a decade later MK was in America, a teenager lost in a fog of drugs, sex, and violence on the streets of North Philadelphia. Now he was alone—his mother in a mental hospital, his father gone, his older brother locked up in a prison on the other side of the country—and forced to find his own way to survive physically, mentally, and spiritually, by any means necessary.
 
Buck is a powerful memoir of how a precocious kid educated himself through the most unconventional teachers—outlaws and eccentrics, rappers and mystic strangers, ghetto philosophers and strippers, and, eventually, an alternative school that transformed his life with a single blank sheet of paper. It’s a one-of-a-kind story about finding your purpose in life, and an inspiring tribute to the power of education, art, and love to heal and redeem us.

Praise for Buck
 
“A story of surviving and thriving with passion, compassion, wit, and style.”—Maya Angelou 
 
“In America, we have a tradition of black writers whose autobiographies and memoirs come to define an era. . . . Buck may be this generation’s story.”—NPR

“The voice of a new generation. . . . You will love nearly everything about Buck.”—Essence

“A virtuoso performance . . . [an] extraordinary page-turner of a memoir . . . written in a breathless, driving hip-hop prose style that gives it a tough, contemporary edge.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Frequently brilliant and always engaging . . . It takes great skill to render the wide variety of characters, male and female, young and old, that populate a memoir like Buck. Asante [is] at his best when he sets out into the city of Philadelphia itself. In fact, that city is the true star of this book. Philly’s skateboarders, its street-corner philosophers and its tattoo artists are all brought vividly to life here. . . . Asante’s memoir will find an eager readership, especially among young people searching in books for the kind of understanding and meaning that eludes them in their real-life relationships. . . . A powerful and captivating book.”—Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

“Remarkable . . . Asante’s prose is a fluid blend of vernacular swagger and tender poeticism. . . . [He] soaks up James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Walt Whitman like thirsty ground in a heavy rain. Buck grew from that, and it’s a bumper crop.”—Salon
 
“Buck is so honest it floats—even while it’s so down-to-earth that the reader feels like an ant peering up from the concrete. It’s a powerful book. . . . Asante is a hip-hop raconteur, a storyteller in the Homeric tradition, an American, a rhymer, a big-thinker singing a song of himself. You’ll want to listen.”—The Buffalo News

It’s 1936, in Flint, Michigan, and when 10-year-old Bud decides to hit the road to find his father, nothing can stop him.

Bum Rush the Page is a groundbreaking collection, capturing the best new work from the poets who have brought fresh energy, life, and relevance to American poetry.

“Here is a democratic orchestration of voices and visions, poets of all ages, ethnicities, and geographic locations coming together to create a dialogue and to jam–not slam. This is our mouth on paper, our hearts on our sleeves, our refusal to shut up and swallow our silence. These poems are tough, honest, astute, perceptive, lyrical, blunt, sad, funny, heartbreaking, and true. They shout, they curse, they whisper, and sing. But most of all, they tell it like it is.”
–Tony Medina, from the Introduction

When throngs of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square to demand the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Ahdaf Soueif—author, journalist, lifelong progressive—was among them. Now, in this deeply personal work, Soueif summons her storytelling talents to trace her city’s—and nation’s—ongoing transformation.
         She writes of the youth who led the revolts, and of the jubilation in the streets at Mubarak’s departure. We then watch as Egyptians fight for democracy, as the interim military government throws up obstacles at every step, and as an Islamist is voted into power. Against this stormy backdrop, Soueif casts memories of her own Cairo—the open-air cinema; her family’s land, in sight of the pyramids—and affirms the beauty of this ancient city. Soueif’s postscript considers Egypt’s more recent turns in its difficult but deeply inspiring path toward its great human aims.

One of England’s most widely acclaimed young novelists adopts two eerily convincing narrative voices and juxtaposes their stories to devastating effect in this mesmerizing portrait of slavery. Cambridge is a devoutly Christian slave in the West Indies whose sense of justice is both profound and self-destructive, while Emily is a morally-blind, genteel Englishwoman.

The poignant tale of a woman who discovers the fragility of life and the strength of a family’s love, from an author praised by Toni Morrison for “…searing, expertly imagined scenes.&rsdquo;

Known for bringing to life a host of endearing characters who reveal tender truths about humanity, Bernice L. McFadden now turns her storytelling talents to an unforgettable and deeply troubled woman named Camilla.

Unfolding in a progression of stirring and powerful chapters, Camilla’s Roses presents a life haunted by the past. Camilla’s childhood was immersed in chaos and love, and steeped in the myth of perfection. As an adult, she never looked back, refusing to acknowledge the people and places that had scarred her so many years ago. But a legacy of cancer proves inescapable, forcing Camilla to embrace the past—no matter how painful it may be—and to salvage what is left of her love in order to save her daughter. As Camilla discovers the bittersweet limitations of motherhood and reconciliation, she also awakens an inspiring message about the mortality issues we all must face.

A psychotherapist and the author of the best-seller, In the Company of My Sisters, presents the first prescriptive book by a black therapist on black women and depression, analyzing the signs of depression and offering strategies for recovery.

True crime, desperation, fraud, and adventure: From the impoverished young woman who enchanted nineteenth-century British society as a faux Asian princess, to the sixteen-year-old boy who "stole" a subway train in 1993, to the lonely but clever Frank Abagnale of Catch Me if You Can fame, these ten vignettes offer riveting insight into mind-blowing masquerades. Graphic panels draw you into the exploits of these pretenders, and meticulously researched details keep you on the edge of your seat. Each scene is presented in the second person, a unique point of view that literally places you inside the faker’s mind. With motivations that include survival, delusion, and plain, old-fashioned greed, the psychology of deception has never been so fascinating or so close at hand.

The memorable men and women of P.G. County are back in Connie Briscoe’s wickedly funny and deliciously daring novel of romance and betrayal, dangerous choices and seductive second chances.

“This romp of a read combines lush settings, humorous dialogue and outrageous behavior . . .” Ebony magazine wrote of P.G. County, Connie Briscoe’s first excursion into the world of the overprivileged and undersatisfied inhabitants of an elite suburb of Washington, D.C. Readers will be delighted to learn that their mischievous machinations and meddlesome ways reach new heights—and sink to new depths—in CAN’T GET ENOUGH, the much-anticipated follow-up to P.G. County.

Barbara Bentley, the grand dame of P.G. County, is tentatively embarking on a fresh approach to life, abandoning the alcohol that served to soften the edges of her marriage to her bimbo-loving millionaire husband, Bradford. She’s been sober for nearly a year, her part-time work as a real estate agent has boosted her self-confidence, and the unexpected attentions of a handsome young colleague have done wonders for her ego. For Jolene, Bradford’s ambitious, conniving ex-mistress, the status she covets remains tantalizingly out of reach. Her decent, hard-working husband, Patrick, has left her for Pearl, a woman proud of her success as a beauty shop owner and eager to create a loving home for Patrick and his two mixed-up teenage daughters. Royalty comes to Silver Lake in the form of Veronique. She’s rich, fabulous and everyone’s new friend, or is she?

As the characters slip in and out of their Pratesi sheets and stride into mayhem and misdeeds in their Jimmy Choo shoes, CAN’T GET ENOUGH will hold readers spellbound. A delectable and scrumptious page-turner, it ushers in spring with the fabulous force of a Gucci-clad lion.

SHE WANTED TO BE A HIP-HOP STAR BUT THE STREETS GOT IN THE WAY.

Have you ever laid down with a man and wasn’t sure if you’d ever get back up? Tossed the sheets with a bone-knocking fear that only a hard-core hustler could produce? Sexed him like your life depended on it, because in reality it did? You still with me? Then let’s roll over to my house. Harlem. 145th Street. Grab a seat and brace yourself as I show you the kind of pain that street life and so-called success can bring. . . .

Nineteen-year-old Candy Raye Montana, an ex—drug runner for the Gabriano crime family and a former foster child, dreams of becoming a hip-hop superstar, if only someone will discover her talents.

Someone does. Mega music producer and king thug of Harlem, Junius “Hurricane” Jackson, CEO of the House of Homicide recording studio, cuts a deal and puts Candy on the stage. Suddenly she is a hot new artist on the notorious Homicide Hitz record label. Her career takes off and she blazes the charts, but it’s not long before Candy realizes that the man she thought was her knight is nothing more than a cold-blooded nightmare.

Caught between the music and the madness, between the dollars and the deals, Candy belongs to Hurricane–body and soul–and must endure his sadistic bedroom desires while keeping his sexual secrets hidden from the world. But Candy has some strong desires of her own that simply cannot be denied, especially when she finds herself turned on by a brilliant investment baller who just happens to be Hurricane’s right-hand man. Candy longs for her freedom, but if Hurricane gets wind of her betrayal the blowback will be lethal–and not only will she risk losing her recording contract, she just might lose her life.

African-American poetry is an ever-growing and ever-changing art form… in coffee houses and night clubs... from the blues and be-bop, to rap and hip-hop. Catch the Fire!!! is more than a poetry anthology. It is a cultural event: the indroduction of a new generation of African-American poets by an established generation, and a celebration of contemporary African-American poetry. Through the themes of family, the city, revolution, the body, and the soul, included selections written by several noted poets and writers including the late Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Quincy Troupe, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets, and many others. discuss their own generation of poets and their thoughts about the emerging poets whose poems they are presenting here.

The Revolution Will Be on the Big Screen

My man Gil Scott Heron once said:
The revolution will not be televised
Well...
Gil Scott may have a point
The revolution may not be televised
But...
The revolution will be a major motion picture
The revolution will not be televised
But...
The revolution will be on the big screen

The Revolution will be a fifty million dollar production
The Revolution will be written by John Grisham
And directed by Oliver Stone
The Revolution will star Kevin Costner and Julia Roberts
And they will teach people of color
How to revolt
And how to fight and how to hide and how to kill
And how to SCREAM
The Revolution will be on the big screen, brother.

The Revolution will have one Latino extra
Playin' a thief
One Asian extra
Playin' a servant
And one Native American extra runnin’
down Florence and Normandie yellin’
Geronimo.

The Revolution will have one Black supporting actor
Denzel Washington
Who will be killed by Kevin Costner in the first
three minutes
For looking at Julia Roberts for more than
one minute
While Kevin Costner will have a picture of Whitney Houston
Burnin' in his wallet
The Revolution will be on the big screen, sistah.

The Revolution will be coming soon to a theatre near you
And will get two thumbs up from Siskel and Ebert
And will make more money than Jurassic Park and ET
The Revolution will cost $7.50 to see or $5.50 if
you got a student i.d.
The Revolution will go good with popcorn, bon bons and licorice
The Revolution will be on the big screen.

The Revolution will have a multi platinum soundtrack
Wtih revolutionary songs sung by
Guns 'N' Roses, Metallica and Madonna
The Revolution will be advertised on billboards, buses, t shirts
and at Taco Bell and Micky Dees
The Revolution will be on the big screen.

The Revolution will be distributed internationally
The Revolution will be seen in Cuba, Ruwanda and Haiti
The Revolution will change the way the world thinks about
Revolution
And the way the world thinks about
Change
The Revolution will be on the big screen.

The Revolution will have a sequel
The Revolution will have a part III
The Revolution will be too large for t.v.
Too large for the little screen
The Revolution will be larger than life
Larger than large
And larger than larger than large
The Revolution will not be televised
Will not be televised
Not be televised
Be televised
The Revolution will be
On the Big Screen.

D-Knowledge
(Derrick I.M. Gilbert)

By the author of A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Catherine Carmier is a compelling love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence.

After living in San Francisco for ten years, Jackson returns home to his benefactor, Aunt Charlotte. Surrounded by family and old friends, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation from those around him, he falls in love with Catherine Carmier, setting the stage for conflicts and confrontations which are complex, tortuous, and universal in their implications.

In Caucasia—Danzy Senna’s extraordinary debut novel and national bestseller—Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970s Boston. The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can’t be sisters: Birdie appears to be white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at the Afrocentric school they attend. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness.Then their parents’ marriage falls apart. Their father’s new black girlfriend won’t even look at Birdie, while their mother gives her life over to the Movement: at night the sisters watch mysterious men arrive with bundles shaped like rifles.One night Birdie watches her father and his girlfriend drive away with Cole—they have gone to Brazil, she will later learn, where her father hopes for a racial equality he will never find in the States. The next morning—in the belief that the Feds are after them—Birdie and her mother leave everything behind: their house and possessions, their friends, and—most disturbing of all—their identity. Passing as the daughter and wife of a deceased Jewish professor, Birdie and her mother finally make their home in New Hampshire. Desperate to find Cole, yet afraid of betraying her mother and herself to some unknown danger, Birdie must learn to navigate the white world—so that when she sets off in search of her sister, she is ready for what she will find. At once a powerful coming-of-age story and a groundbreaking work on identity and race in America, "Caucasia deserves to be read all over" (Glamour).

After the destruction of the Civil War, the United States faced the immense challenge of rebuilding a ravaged South and incorporating millions of freed slaves into the life of the nation. On April 11, 1865, President Lincoln introduced his plan for reconstruction, warning that the coming years would be “fraught with great difficulty.” Three days later he was assassinated. The years to come witnessed a time of complex and controversial change.

A Sample Page from Cause: Reconstruction America 1863-1877

Grace, dignity, and eloquence have long been hallmarks of Maya Angelou’s poetry. Her measured verses have stirred our souls, energized our minds, and healed our hearts. Whether offering hope in the darkest of nights or expressing sincere joy at the extraordinariness of the everyday, Maya Angelou has served as our common voice.

Celebrations is a collection of timely and timeless poems that are an integral part of the global fabric. Several works have become nearly as iconic as Angelou herself: the inspiring “On the Pulse of Morning,” read at President William Jefferson Clinton’s 1993 inauguration; the heartening “Amazing Peace,” presented at the 2005 lighting of the National Christmas Tree at the White House; “A Brave and Startling Truth,” which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations; and “Mother,” which beautifully honors the first woman in our lives. Angelou writes of celebrations public and private, a bar mitzvah wish to her nephew, a birthday greeting to Oprah Winfrey, and a memorial tribute to the late Luther Vandross and Barry White.

More than a writer, Angelou is a chronicler of history, an advocate for peace, and a champion for the planet, as well as a patriot, a mentor, and a friend. To be shared and cherished, the wisdom and poetry of Maya Angelou proves there is always cause for celebration.

Everyone knows the flamboyant, larger-than-life Celia Cruz, the extraordinary salsa singer who passed away in 2003, leaving millions of fans brokenhearted. indeed, there was a magical vibrancy to the Cuban salsa singer. to hear her voice or to see her perform was to feel her life-affirming energy deep within you. relish the sizzling sights and sounds of her legacy in this glimpse into Celia’s childhood and her inspiring rise to worldwide fame and recognition as the Queen of salsa. Her inspirational life story is sure to sweeten your soul.

A sparkling collection of Zadie Smith?s nonfiction over the past decade.

Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.

Split into four sections??Reading,? ?Being,? ?Seeing,? and ?Feeling??Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith?s unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays?some published here for the first time?on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani.

In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers?E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others?have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences?in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond?that have nourished Smith?s rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected.

Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.

Walter Mosley’s indelible detective Easy Rawlins is back, with a new detective agency and a new mystery to solve.

Picking up where his last adventures in Rose Gold left off in L.A. in the late 1960s, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins finds his life in transition. He’s ready—finally—to propose to his girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, and start a life together. And he’s taken the money he got from the Rose Gold case and, together with two partners, Saul Lynx and Tinsford “Whisper” Natly, has started a new detective agency. But, inevitably, a case gets in the way: Easy’s friend Mouse introduces him to Rufus Tyler, a very old man everyone calls Charcoal Joe. Joe’s friend’s son, Seymour (young, bright, top of his class in physics at Stanford), has been arrested and charged with the murder of a white man from Redondo Beach. Joe tells Easy he will pay and pay well to see this young man exonerated, but seeing as how Seymour literally was found standing over the man’s dead body at his cabin home, and considering the racially charged motives seemingly behind the murder, that might prove to be a tall order.

Between his new company, a heart that should be broken but is not, a whole raft of new bad guys on his tail, and a bad odor that surrounds Charcoal Joe, Easy has his hands full, his horizons askew, and his life in shambles around his feet.

Eight-time New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey’s new novel is filled with intrigue, speed, and sex appeal. And an unforgettable female narrator rides her sexy yellow motorcycle right through it all. Billie (aka "Ducati") is known as much for her extraordinary beauty as for the sexy yellow motorcycle she rides through the mean streets of Los Angeles. Tough, talented, and self-assured, Billie’s used to doing things her way—but that was before love threw an oil slick in the road and spun her life into chaos. Billie’s first problem is simple: she’s pregnant.
Her second problem is that her lover, Keith, is still married. Keith has some "things" to deal with, and the people in his life are dark and duplicitous enough to take matters into their own hands, determined to keep Billie from having her baby. Billie suddenly finds herself confronted, attacked, run off highways, threatened and shadowed. Keith still has ties to his manipulative wife, Carmen, and he adores his fifteen-year-old daughter Destiny. Will he do the right thing by his new family, or stand by his old one? Soon all eyes shift as everyone finds themselves desperately chasing Destiny, a troubled and deceptive girl dancing on the edge of womanhood. When the rubber meets the road, everyone’s fighting dirty for what they want…and they’re all willing to destroy their enemy or go down in flames to get it.

The sibilant sound of ’Girl, you know you crazy!’ resonates through our common airspace matter-of-factly. We grow up with different flavors of insanity all around. For our family it was great aunt Henrietta, who stopped wearing underwear because the Lord told her so. At least that is how she interpreted the Lord’s divine message. Aunt Henrietta is proof that even the holiest require a personal crusade to stay sane. Chicken on a Leash: Lessons in Strength in Mind recognizes the challenges of growing into personal leadership - getting from there to here - sane. It is about one African American woman of color who reaches back into her childhood diary to see where her lessons in leadership began. To her amazement, leadership was rooted in the most insane, bizarre, or even violent moments. Susan Raleigh finds that life’s path though littered with lessons in insanity, paved the way for purposeful leadership and strength of mind in every facet of her life from the bedroom to the boardroom. Readers will be able to wrestle with their own paths through the experiences of Dr. Susan Raleigh who eventually finds herself asking: ’How did I manage to grow up sane?’ The answer is amply described in thirty personality-shaping events that she adeptly calls: Lessons in Strength of Mind.

The more Chike saw the ferry-boats the more he wanted to make the trip to Asaba. But where would he get the money? He did not know. Still, he hoped.

Eleven-year-old Chike longs to cross the Niger River to the city of Asaba, but he doesn’t have the sixpence he needs to pay for the ferry ride. With the help of his friend S.M.O.G., he embarks on a series of adventures to help him get there. Along the way, he is exposed to a range of new experiences that are both thrilling and terrifying, from eating his first skewer of suya under the shade of a mango tree, to visiting the village magician who promises to double the money in his pocket. Once he finally makes it across the river, Chike realizes that life on the other side is far different from his expectations, and he must find the courage within him to make it home.

Chike and the River is a magical tale of boundaries, bravery, and growth, by Chinua Achebe, one of the world’s most beloved and admired storytellers.

This book records the stories of thirteen Harlem residents, focusing on their struggles against poverty, crime, and drugs.

Seventeen years after fleeing the revolutionary Ethiopia that claimed his father’s life, Stepha Stephanos is a man still caught between two existences: the one he left behind, aged nineteen, and the new life he has forged in Washington D.C. Sepha spends his days in a sort of limbo: quietly running his grocery store into the ground, revisiting the Russian classics, and toasting the old days with his friends Kenneth and Joseph, themselves emigrants from Africa. But when a white woman named Judith moves next door with her only daughter, Naomi, Sepha’s life seems on the verge of change…

In the slums of Accra, Ghana’s fast-moving, cosmopolitan capital, teenagers are turning up dead. Inspector Darko Dawson has seen many crimes, but this latest string of murders—in which all the young victims bear a chilling signature—is the most unsettling of his career. Are these heinous acts a form of ritual killing or the work of a lone, cold-blooded monster? With time running out, Dawson embarks on a harrowing journey through the city’s underbelly and confronts the brutal world of the urban poor, where street children are forced to fight for their very survival—and a cunning killer seems just out of reach.

Still reeling from divorce and feeling estranged from her teenage son, Trish Taylor is in the midst of salvaging the remnants of her life when she uncovers a shocking secret: her sister is alive. For years Trish believed that her mother and infant sister had died in a car accident. But the truth is that her mother fatally overdosed and that Trish’s grandparents put the baby girl up for adoption because her father was black.

After years of drawing on the strength of her black ancestors, Billie Cousins is shocked to discover that she was adopted. Just as surprising, after finally overcoming a series of health struggles, she is pregnant–a dream come true for Billie but a nightmare for her sweetie, Nick, and for her mother, both determined to protect Billie from anything that may disrupt her well-being.

Chinua Achebe is one of the founding fathers of African literature in English, a writer of world stature whose novel Things Fall Apart is one of the essential works of the twentieth century. This Collected Poems draws on his three collections of poetry, and includes seven previously unpublished poems; it reveals a lifetime of poetic engagement with politics, war and culture, inherited wisdom and the making of new futures. Achebe’s poems are ironic, generous and tender, drawing deep on the Igbo traditions of his African roots, confronting the continent’s harsh realities of violence and exploitation.

Chinua Achebe volume of poetry was the joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

The undisputed queen of hip-hop fiction, #1 Essence bestselling author Nikki Turner unwraps a talented new collection of writers with raw urban stories to jingle your bells this season.

Christmas in the Hood presents fresh talent alongside shining stars such as K. Elliott and Seth “Soul Man” Ferranti–all writing gritty tales that reveal what the holidays bring for the naughty and the nice who live by the code of the street. In “Secret Santa,” after her children’s Christmas presents are stolen, a woman has to decide what she’s willing to sacrifice to give them the holiday they deserve; in “Me and Grandma,” a senior sleighs more crack than candy canes to bring Christmas cheer to her needy grandkids; and in “Holiday Hell,” Noelle must raise $23,000 to repay a loan shark or her sister will become a ghost of Christmas past. True to the streets and true to the season, these stories will raise the holiday spirit in the heart of even the most ghetto-hardened gangsta.

“The ghetto’s voice without constraint.”
–Upscale, on Tales from da Hood

A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister.
Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society—not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.

In the new book Church Ladies: Untold Stories of Harlem Women in the Powell Era by renowned scholar and historian Dr. Martia Goodson, featuring a foreword written by Adam Clayton Powell III and numerous rare archival photographs, readers will meet fifteen extraordinary women who left their spiritual and historical imprints on Harlem’s formidable Abyssinian Baptist Church, their surrounding communities, and the nation at large. Dr. Goodson, who specializes in African American oral history and is the author of New York’s African Burial Ground, interviewed these church ladies extensively over the course of a decade, from 1992 until 2002 about topics ranging from the oratory and sartorial splendor of Powell Sr.’s ministry, to Powell Jr.’s political career and activism, to the Civil Rights Movement, to their jobs and families, to how they each confronted and combatted racism in her life’s journey.

Dr. Goodson also conducted years of research through the Abyssinian Baptist Church archives, creating an engaging, page-turning historical record that will serve as a resource for historians, educators, and countless others for decades to come. Although only two of the women remain, their unique voices are alive with rich and vibrant accounts that take readers to a period that stretches back to the 1920s during Adam Clayton Powell Sr.’s “Church of the Classes,” to the era of Powell Jr.’s “Church of the Masses”, and extends to the early 1970s around the time of Powell Jr.’s death.

“I am extremely proud of this work and feel that it’s some of the most significant research that I’ve done to date,” says Dr. Goodson. “These women tell their own stories and in doing so, give voice to the history of Abyssinian and to the Powell Era in ways that others cannot…CHURCH LADIES is twentieth-century American history – seen through the eyes of the women of a black church. It is formed from the reminiscences of solid women: dignified, modest, hardworking, poised, imaginative, and intolerant of continued second-class citizenship.”

This title is set in Banes, Mississippi, 1938. The Catfish creek separates the Patch from the town, black from white. These worlds and their prejudices are hauntingly evoked in the rich accents of the American South. Cinder is a woman who belongs to neither, her beauty marking her out as different. Time passes slowly, and the inhabitants of Banes follow the same daily rhythm as they have done for years. Shorty sweeps up in Mister Macky’s store, then drinks his wages at LeRoy’s bar, men sit spitting outside the Rosey Gray, old people watch the world go by from their porches. But one quiet Sunday morning, when the bombs are dropped on Pearl Harbor, change comes to this small Mississippi town. Spanning four years, ""Cinder"" is the follow-up to Albert French’s outstanding novel, ""Billy"". It is at once the story of a woman whose life has been torn apart by tragedy, and the portrait of a town divided. It is about loss, community, history and the ties that bind.

From the best-selling author of Brother, I’m Dying and The Dew Breaker: a stunning new work of fiction that brings us deep into the intertwined lives of a small seaside town where a little girl, the daughter of a fisherman, has gone missing.

Claire Limyè Lanmè—Claire of the Sea Light—is an enchanting child born into love and tragedy in Ville Rose, Haiti. Claire’s mother died in childbirth, and on each of her birthdays Claire is taken by her father, Nozias, to visit her mother’s grave. Nozias wonders if he should give away his young daughter to a local shopkeeper, who lost a child of her own, so that Claire can have a better life.

But on the night of Claire’s seventh birthday, when at last he makes the wrenching decision to do so, she disappears. As Nozias and others look for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are unearthed among the community of men and women whose individual stories connect to Claire, to her parents, and to the town itself. Told with piercing lyricism and the economy of a fable, Claire of the Sea Light is a tightly woven, breathtaking tapestry that explores what it means to be a parent, child, neighbor, lover, and friend, while revealing the mysterious bonds we share with the natural world and with one another. Embracing the magic and heartbreak of ordinary life, it is Edwidge Danticat’s most spellbinding, astonishing book yet.

Fans of Princess Posey and Ivy and Bean will enjoy rooting for Jada Jones as she runs for student council in this easy-to-read chapter book. As a candidate for class representative, Jada is ready to give the campaign her all. But when rumors start to fly about her secret fear of public speaking, she isn’t sure who she can trust. And the pressure to make promises she can’t keep only adds to her growing list of problems. Is winning even worth it when friendships are on the line? This easy-to-read story--with plenty of pictures and a charming, relatable cast of characters--is a sure winner. The early chapter book bridges between leveled readers and chapter books for fluent readers adjusting to the chapter book format. At about 5,000 words, with short chapters and two-color art on almost every page, it will appeal to this unique reader. The two-color art throughout will help readers transition from the familiar four-color art of leveled readers and ease them into black-and-white chapter books.

In this new book developed from the prestigious Reith Lectures, Nobel Prize—winning author Wole Soyinka, a courageous advocate for human rights around the world, considers fear as the dominant theme in world politics.

Decades ago, the idea of collective fear had a tangible face: the atom bomb. Today our shared anxiety has become far more complex and insidious, arising from tyranny, terrorism, and the invisible power of the “quasi state.” As Wole Soyinka suggests, the climate of fear that has enveloped the world was sparked long before September 11, 2001.

Rather, it can be traced to 1989, when a passenger plane was brought down by terrorists over the Republic of Niger. From Niger to lower Manhattan to Madrid, this invisible threat has erased distinctions between citizens and soldiers; we’re all potential targets now.

In this seminal work, Soyinka explores the implications of this climate of fear: the conflict between power and freedom, the motives behind unthinkable acts of violence, and the meaning of human dignity. Fascinating and disturbing, Climate of Fear is a brilliant and defining work for our age.

Tracking a white serial killer of African-American gang members in downtown Detroit, detective Tony Hill must capture the murderer while the city erupts in race-related violence all around him. A first novel. 25,000 first printing.

"This novel is about a young, black woman name Autumn. Autumn has always dreamt to become a movie star in the rolling hills of Hollywood. Autumn is a 6 foot beauty with natural, golden blonde hair and eyes the color of the clear, blue/green ocean. Her skin is the perfect hue of the color of milk.
Autumn is in love. Autumn meets and starts dating the Mayor of Dallas who happens to be the first black mayor the city has ever had. Autumn is confused. How can Autumn love the Mayor when Nelly has her heart and refuses to let go. Nelly and Autumn’s chemistry is too hot to handle. Autumn’s love for Nelly hurt so bad she had to let him go. Nelly is a true big baller who just ‘happens’ to be white and married with kids.
Nelly asks Autumn, “What do you want me to do, Color Me Black?”
In midst of Autumn’s love triangle she gets the break she has been waiting on. Her best friend Bug-a-Loo who is an up and coming rapper gives her the lead role in his new rap video. Autumn’s success skyrockets.

Who will pay the price for Autumn’s success? Autumn, The Mayor, Nelly or will it be Bug."

From an American Book Award-winning author comes a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection that ushers readers into a now-vanished "colored" world and extends and deepens our sense of African-American history, even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling.

Colored Sugar Water introduces Lucy Merriweather and Adel Kelly, both dealing with life issues. Lucy is thirty-five, single, and in great shape thanks to her career as a fitness manager for a string of Texas health clubs. Adel is the vice president for human resources at American Oil, pulling in a six-figure salary and annual bonuses. Unfortunately, neither is happy.

Lucy struggles with her emotional and spiritual dreams. Her boyfriend Spencer, a basic kind of guy who loves his mama, sports, fried chicken, and Lucy in that order doesn’t seem to measure up. So she decides to get out of her rut with a Sexy Soul Psychic named Kuba. Self-assured and sensitive, Kuba seems to know exactly what women want. Or does he?

Adel struggles with a husband, Thad, who refuses to grow up and a job that is less than satisfying despite its financial gains. She is eventually forced to reexamine her faith as she searches for a life that brings her closer to happiness and fulfillment.

Filled with the humor, passion, and pathos of modern relationships, Colored Sugar Water tells the story of two women who discover the power of their unique spiritual gifts. It further establishes Venise Berry as one of the freshest, wittiest, and wisest writers on today’s fiction scene-as New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey wrote, "magnificient and honest, Venise Berry’s writing comes from her soul."

Explores the immigrant experiences of Mexicans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans in the United States.

2000 marks the centenary of "Lift Every Voice and Sing," James Weldon Johnson’s most famous lyric, which is now embraced as the Negro National Anthem. In celebration, this Penguin original collects all the poems from Johnson’s published works—Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917), God’s Trombones (1927), and Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day (1935)—along with a number of previously unpublished poems.Sondra Kathryn Wilson, the foremost authority on Johnson and his work, provides an introduction that sheds light on Johnson’s many achievements and his pioneering contributions to recording and celebrating the African American experience.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Confirmation: The Spiritual Wisdom That Has Shaped Our Lives is a very personal collection of inspirational writings gathered by the husband and wife team of Khephra Burns and Susan L. Taylor from more than a hundred different sources, representing the wisdom of diverse cultures throughout the world that have helped to shape their spiritual life. Introduced by a moving essay describing Susan and Khephra’s spiritual coming-of-age, and informed by scores of narrative bridges by the authors explaining and annotating the selections they include, the collection spotlights the wisdom of the ages that has been at the core of the author’s spiritual growth over the past twenty years.

Organized under a dozen different subject areas, from love and forgiveness to fear, death, prayer and meditation, this enthralling collection includes passages not only from the traditional sacred texts of the world’s major religions—the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, Bhagavad Gita and the teachings of Buddha-but from African proverbs and the writings of animists, mystics, poets, seers and songwriters elucidating the oneness of being. Among the authors included are Christian mystic Howard Thurman, Maya Angelou, Kahlil Gibran, Deepak Chopra, Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, Black Elk, Lao-Tzu, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, John Coltrane, African shaman Malidoma Some, and many more.

Confirmation is a rich and varied treasury of spiritual delights that will be nothing less than a sacred feast to Susan Taylor’s devoted fans and followers.


From the Hardcover edition.

Book by Shepard, Ray Anthony, Chesnutt, Charles Waddell

Every design has a name and means something in the powerful past and present richness of the Black tradition.

Mama’s and Great-Grammaw’s gentle fingers weave the design, and their lulling voices weave the tale, as they braid their children’s hair into the striking cornrow patterns of Africa.

A classic entry in Chester Himes’s trailblazing Harlem Detectives series, Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of his hardest-hitting and most entertaining thrillers.
 
Flim-flam man Deke O’Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta’s state penitentiary than he’s back on the streets working the scam of a lifetime. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement, he’s counting on a big Harlem rally to produce a massive collection—for his own private charity. But the take is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everyone wants to get his hands on. As NYPD detectives “Coffin Ed” Johnson and “Grave Digger” Jones piece together the complexity of the scheme, we are treated to Himes’s brand of hard-boiled crime fiction at its very best.

The luminous, uplifting story of a woman who cooks up a plan to bring her family back together and discovers that love, sharing, and a dash of daring are the secret ingredients that can turn dreams into reality.

Camille Broussard can remember a time when she had more pep in her stride and her single-story house was one of the nicest homes in the cozy, well-kept neighborhood of Watts. Her kitchen overflowed with the fragrant aromas of Creole cooking, and the taste of her divine crawfish, rich gumbos, and delicious pralines had family and friends begging for seconds and thirds. The devastation of the Watts riots and the ravages of Reaganomics, however, changed everything. Her neighbors have fled, the church pews are nearly empty at Sunday mass, and her own children have turned their backs on Watts and on the pride and values Camille instilled in them.

Her grandson Nicholas has just finished serving time for a crime he knew better than to commit; her politically active lesbian daughter, Grace, is struggling with an identity crisis; and Yvette, her naïve, sexually cloistered daughter, has a husband whose secrets threaten to destroy the bond between mother and daughter. But despite how far they have strayed, Camille is not ready to give up on the family who has nourished her as she has nourished them. So she decides to combine her love of family and her love of cooking into one great enterprise. She opens Camille’s Creole Kitchen and recruits her family to help her get the restaurant on its feet. As the business gradually grows, Camille not only restores her family’s spirit and sense of purpose, she also recovers her own lost dreams.

Written with grace and vitality, Crawfish Dreams is a generous novel about responsibility, community, family loyalty, and the pursuit of personal happiness. From its heartwarming messages to the recipes sprinkled throughout its pages, it is an irresistible treat from start to finish.

A gripping new novel from today’s "most important African novelist". (The New York Times Review of Books) A dozen years after his last visit, Jeebleh returns to his beloved Mogadiscio to see old friends. He is accompanied by his son-in-law, Malik, a journalist intent on covering the region’s ongoing turmoil. What greets them at first is not the chaos Jeebleh remembers, however, but an eerie calm enforced by ubiquitous white-robed figures bearing whips.Meanwhile, Malik’s brother, Ahl, has arrived in Puntland, the region notorious as a pirates’ base. Ahl is searching for his stepson, Taxliil, who has vanished from Minneapolis, apparently recruited by an imam allied to Somalia’s rising religious insurgency. The brothers’ efforts draw them closer to Taxliil and deeper into the fabric of the country, even as Somalis brace themselves for an Ethiopian invasion. Jeebleh leaves Mogadiscio only a few hours before the borders are breached and raids descend from land and sea. As the uneasy quiet shatters and the city turns into a battle zone, the brothers experience firsthand the derailments of war.Completing the trilogy that began with Links and Knots, Crossbones is a fascinating look at individuals caught in the maw of zealotry, profiteering, and political conflict, by one of our most highly acclaimed international writers.

In this beautifully crafted, Rashomon-like novel, Maryse Conde has written a gripping story imbued with all the nuances and traditions of Caribbean culture. Francis Sancher—a handsome outsider, loved by some and reviled by others—is found dead, face down in the mud on a path outside Riviere au Sel, a small village in Guadeloupe.  None of the villagers are particularly surprised, since Sancher, a secretive and melancholy man, had often predicted an unnatural death for himself.  As the villagers come to pay their respects they each—either in a speech to the mourners, or in an internal monologue—reveal another piece of the mystery behind Sancher’s life and death.  

Like pieces of an elaborate puzzle, their memories interlock to create a rich and intriguing portrait of a man and a community. In the lush and vivid prose for which she has become famous, Conde has constructed a Guadeloupean wake for Francis Sancher.  Retaining the full color and vibrance of Conde’s homeland, Crossing the Mangrove pays homage to Guadeloupe in both subject and structure.

Countless black women would rather attend church naked than hatless. For these women, a church hat, flamboyant as it may be, is no mere fashion accessory;  it’s a cherished African American custom, one observed with boundless passion by black women of various religious denominations. A woman’s hat speaks long before its wearer utters a word.  It’s what Deirdre Guion calls "hattitude…there’s a little more strut in your carriage when you wear a nice hat. There’s something special about you." If a hat says a lot about a person, it says even more about a people-the customs they observe, the symbols they prize, and the fashions they fancy.

Photographer Michael Cunningham beautifully captures the self-expressions of women of all ages-from young glamorous women to serene but stylish grandmothers. Award-winning journalist Craig Marberry provides an intimate look at the women and their lives. Together they’ve captured a captivating custom, this wearing of church hats, a peculiar convergence of faith and fashion that keeps the Sabbath both holy and glamorous.

New from the Blackboard-bestselling author of When All Hell Breaks Loose: When some old secrets make office politics spiral out of control, three women will have to decide how far they’re willing to go to climb the corporate ladder.

At first glance, you couldn’t find three women more different than Margaret, Faulkner, and Joyce. Margaret is almost sixty, devoutly religious, and getting ready to retire from her job at Meridian Southwest. Faulkner is a young go-getter who really wants to land a position in upper management. And Joyce is a domineering, immaculately dressed middle-aged woman who’s moments away from receiving a top executive appointment.

But something just doesn’t seem right with these three. Isn’t it strange that Margaret and Joyce have worked together for more than twenty years but barely even speak? Why is it that the more Faulkner tries to impress Joyce with her hard work, the more Joyce seems to hate her? Who can explain why the management position for which Faulkner is the best qualified applicant remains vacant? And why is James, the department intern, always smiling about something?

Over the course of a few weeks, Margaret, Faulkner, and Joyce are unexpectedly drawn together as a tangled web woven decades earlier begins to unravel.


From the Hardcover edition.

Eleven-year-old Curtis and his family enjoy more adventures, in a debut collection of comics by the nationally syndicated comic strip artist.

A second collection of hilarious and heartwarming comic strips starring one of America’s hottest new characters by a widely acclaimed cartoonist. By the author of Curtis.

Single guy Shawn Wayne has a problem . . . actually he has three problems:

(1) His girlfriend, a no-nonsense TV star named Dawn, expects the New Year’s broadcast of her new BET talk show to produce a long-awaited proposal from Shawn.

(2) His “sort-of” ex-girlfriend, the shapely and seductive Troi, announces that she’s pregnant and coming to be with Shawn in Washington, D.C.

(3) Shawn doesn’t know if the baby is his, though he would never deny it, and now he must decide if he should tell Dawn about the baby. He simply can’t afford to risk losing his one and only soul mate without first knowing he is, indeed, the father.

Shawn’s embarrassing, nationally televised confession is the centerpiece of this much-anticipated follow-up to Van Whitfield’s smash debut romantic comedy, Beeperless Remote. Taking an uncompromising and revealing look at the state of black fatherhood, this hilarious new novel includes the Official “Baby Mama” Checklist, the Why Men Are Lost Quotient, and the What It Takes to Be a Dad Inventory.

With Whitfield’s trademarked witty, fast-paced style, Dad Interrupted brings back Donnie, the recovering crack addict who now works as a drug counselor; Kelly, whose crush on Shawn may finally be realized; and Shawn’s lovable parents, who spin their special brand of wisdom from the great beyond. Everybody has a take on what Shawn should do and, more importantly, who he should do it with . . . Dawn or Troi.

The widow of tennis star Arthur Ashe, who recently died of AIDS, offers a photographic portrait of Ashe’s relationship with his six-year-old daughter during his illness, accompanied by the child’s reflections on living with and helping her father.

In a collection of poetry celebrating fatherhood, children offer a heartwarming, poignant appeal to their fathers to support them as they cope with school, changes in personal relationships, grief, dreams, and growing up.

Heart & Soul founding editor Stephanie Stokes Oliver shows African American women how to soothe the soul, satisfy the mind, and revive the body 365 days a year.

Written in an affirming style that is prescriptive but never preachy, fun but not frivolous, Daily Cornbread is a day-by-day compendium of Oliver’s creative ideas for leading an enjoyable and fulfilling life. On January 2, for example, Oliver suggests taking time out to "get happy" (do something that makes you happy an hour a day); to schedule a personal retreat; and to develop a strategic plan for the upcoming year.

Reminiscent of Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance and Iyanla Vanzant’s Acts of Faith: Daily Meditations for People of Color, but with a special emphasis on nurturing the body as well as the mind, Daily Cornbread shows African American women how to make each day better.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the author of the acclaimed debut novel Dark, a searing and authentic new novel about the mano a mano feud between a famous rap artist and an intrepid, won’t-back-down hip-hop journalist.

Dakota Grand is a young music journalist who’s left his Southern roots behind and moved to the Big Apple to cover the rough-and-tumble world of rap. He’s part of the star-making machinery, spinning the web of interviews, reviews, and “inside stories” that move the CD’s off the racks. He’s good at this, but what it’s gotten him so far is an apartment in deepest Brooklyn, a check-to-check freelancer’s existence, and a hit-and-run love life. Then the break of his career comes: the opportunity to interview one of his rap heroes, Mirage, one half of the legendary group Arbor Day, for a cover story for The Magazine. Puffing on a spliff, Mirage spills plenty of beans to Dakota Grand, but he’s less than pleased by the resulting article. In fact, he has his boys assault Dakota in a midtown elevator and send him to the hospital. What ensues is an increasingly tense and violent duel between Mirage and Dakota Grand, with the young writer determined to fight back for his own honor and that of his fellow journalists.

As gripping as the best “Behind the Music” episode, Dakota Grand is a vivid and provocative study of a young writer and the multiplatinum, chart-topping culture that has begun to consume him—a significant step forward for a rising young star in the African-American literary world.

A searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874—1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.

Even as an eleven-year-old child living in Southern California in the late 1800s–his family had recently emigrated from the Bahamas–Bert Williams understood that he had to “learn the role that America had set aside for him.” At the age of twenty-two, after years of struggling for success on the stage, he made the radical decision to do his own “impersonation of a negro”: he donned blackface makeup and played the “coon” as a character. Behind this mask, he became a Broadway headliner, starring in the Ziegfeld Follies for eight years and leading his own musical theater company–as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields.
Williams was a man of great intelligence, elegance, and dignity, but the barriers he broke down onstage continued to bear heavily on his personal life, and the contradictions between the man he was and the character he played were increasingly irreconcilable for him. W. C. Fields called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew,” and it is this dichotomy at Williams’s core that Caryl Phillips illuminates in a richly nuanced, brilliantly written narrative.

The story of a single life, Dancing in the Dark is also a novel about the tragedies of race and identity, and the perils of self-invention, that have long plagued American culture. Powerfully emotional and moving, it is Caryl Phillips’s most accomplished novel yet.

In this searing novel, Caryl Phillips reimagines the life of the first black entertainer in the U.S. to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.After years of struggling for success on the stage, Bert Williams (1874—1922), the child of recent immigrants from the Bahamas, made the radical decision to don blackface makeup and play the “coon.” Behind this mask he became a Broadway headliner–as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields, who called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.” It is this dichotomy at Williams’ core that Phillips explores in this richly nuanced, brilliantly written novel, unblinking in its attention to the sinister compromises that make up an identity.

Sassy worries that her too-large feet, too-long legs, and even her big mouth will keep her from her dream of becoming a star ballerina. So for now she’s just dancing in the wings, watching from behind the curtain, and hoping that one day it will be her turn to shimmer in the spotlight. When the director of an important dance festival comes to audition her class, Sassy’s first attempts to get his attention are, well, a little wobbly. But Sassy just knows, somehow, that this is her time to step out from those wings, and make her mark on the world. Actress/choreographer Debbie Allen and Kadir Nelson collaborated on Brothers of the Knight, about which School Library Journal raved, "the strutting high-stepping brothers are full of individuality, attitude, and movement."

At forty-one, Juanita Lewis is running away from home, courtesy of a one-way ticket to Montana, a place that seems about as far away from the violence and poverty of the Columbus, Ohio, projects as the moon. She wants adventure and excitement–if such things exist for a pre-menopausal African American woman with three grown, deadbeat children.

Juanita’s new life in Paper Moon, Montana, begins at a local diner where a culinary face-off with chef and owner Jess Gardiner finds Juanita in front of Jess’s stove serving up home cookin’ that lures the townsfolk like a magic spell. And suddenly Juanita, who was just passin’ through, now has a job by popular demand.

Out here in this wide-open space, Juanita’s heart can no longer hide, especially when she sees herself through the eyes of the wonderful and eccentric people of this down-to-earth town. She’s happy in Paper Moon; she’s found a home, but can she stay? And then there’s Jess. She has always dreamed of romance, but she never planned on falling in love.

Thai Williams is walking a thin line between two worlds. On one side he has his job as a filing clerk for the Washington, D.C., Department of Public Works, his girlfriend Sierra, and his plans for going to college. But on the other, darker side there are his friends Snowflake and Ray Ray, men who run the neighborhood streets dodging the dangers of the criminal life and its after-effects. But that thin line disappears when Thai walks in on Sierra with another man, whom he eventually kills in a haze of jealousy and confusion. From there Thai finds himself on the run and away from the five-block stretch where he’s lived for all his life. He finds his way to Charlotte, where Enrique, his closest friend of all, has moved in search of a better life. In the course of the week that follows, Thai encounters a series of men and women who show him aspects of life he never dreamed of in his narrow ghetto existence. All of them are looking for answers, but it is Thai who must find his own path out of the dark and into the clear light of moral responsibility and repentance for his actions.

In his first novel, Kenji has written a haunting portrait of his own urban generation, shadowed (and often erased) by violence, but determined to make their own mark on the world.

Jealous of the constant attention her baby brother gets, Phyllis Mae’s mother decides to set a special day aside for her daughter where being a daughter is celebrated all day long.

"A magnificent starting place for any reader interested in becoming part of the collective enterprise of discovering and uncovering the silent, forgotten, and underrated voices of black women."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
From all over the world and through the ages, here is a dazzling collection of two hundred women writers of African descent, showcased as never before, including:
Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Childress, Maryse Conde, Aldo do Espirito Santo, Marita Golden, Pilar Lopez Gonzales, June Jordan, Terry McMillan, Queen of Sheba, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Phillis Weatley, and many, many others.

Poetry and portraits of young black children reveal all the beauty in children’s wishes, yearnings, and memories. “"Greenfield and Feelings have unquestionably worked together in harmony to create their sensitive portrayals of black boys and girls.”—Publishers Weekly.

"Touching and courageous…All of it—the man, the life, the book—is rare and beautiful."
COSMOPOLITAN
DAYS OF GRACE is an inspiring memoir of a remarkable man who was the true embodiment of courage, elegance, and the spirit to fight: Arthur Ashe—tennis champion, social activist, and person with AIDS. Frank, revealing, touching—DAYS OF GRACE is the story of a man felled to soon. It remains as his legacy to us all….
AN ALTERNATE SELECTION OF THE BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB

Three black soldiers are dishonorably discharged from the Vietnam War due to a mutinous fragging incident. They return home resolved to take on the world, but ambition and poverty begin to dissolve their precious brotherhoodo forged in the trenches of Southeast Asia. To counter this growing fragmentation, the hero prophet of the group, Tucept Highjohn, inspired by a set of mystical bones passed onto him by a dying brother in Vietnam, undergoes ‘hoodoo’ in his isolated house on stilts in a wilderness park in Memphis. His new self mastery enables him to relive his memories of Vietnam and to rally his ex companions in arms with a vision of the triumph of black people everywhere.

This rich first novel about the Vietnam inheritance of three black combat veterans, written in an original rhythmic prose, marks the debut of a gifted young black novelist.

From the award-winning author of Medical Apartheid, an exposé of the rush to own and exploit the raw materials of life—including yours.
 
Think your body is your own to control and dispose of as you wish? Think again. The United States Patent Office has granted at least 40,000 patents on genes controlling the most basic processes of human life, and more are pending. If you undergo surgery in many hospitals you must sign away ownership rights to your excised tissues, even if they turn out to have medical and fiscal value. Life itself is rapidly becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the medical-industrial complex.
 
Deadly Monopolies is a powerful, disturbing, and deeply researched book that illuminates this “life patent” gold rush and its harmful, and even lethal, consequences for public health. Like the bestselling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, it reveals in shocking detail just how far the profit motive has encroached in colonizing human life and compromising medical ethics.

"Pearl Cleage breaks down for sisters all the old rules and unspoken taboos. She tells us the truths our mothers are still afraid to confront, the essential wisdom we need to stay alive. Her book mourns and rages all in one breath."

BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL

Author of YOUR BLUES AIN’T LIKE MINE

Dead-on, to the point, fearless. A third-generation black nationalist feminist, Pearl Cleage recognizes the pure power of telling the uncompromising truth—about African-American life and about the fate of the race in racist America. Whether she’s writing about her—and her sisters’—defenition of good brother, or why she’s so mad at Miles Davis, DEALS WITH THE DEVIL is filled with Pearl’s most provactive, fascinating, and outrageous insights.

Delivered in Young’s classic bluesy tone, this powerful collection of poems about the American family, smoky Southern food, and the losses that time inevitably brings “bristles with life, nerve and, best of all, wit” (San Francisco Chronicle).

From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today—written as a letter to a friend.

A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie’s letter of response.
     Here are fifteen invaluable suggestions—compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive—for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and sexuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can "allow" women to have full careers, Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century. It will start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.

"Raw and gripping." —Jason Reynolds, New York Times bestselling coauthor of All American Boys

A must-read!” —Angie Thomas, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Hate U Give

Raw, captivating, and undeniably real, Nic Stone joins industry giants Jason Reynolds and Walter Dean Myers as she boldly tackles American race relations in this stunning debut.

Justyce McAllister is top of his class and set for the Ivy League—but none of that matters to the police officer who just put him in handcuffs. And despite leaving his rough neighborhood behind, he can’t escape the scorn of his former peers or the ridicule of his new classmates.

Justyce looks to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for answers. But do they hold up anymore? He starts a journal to Dr. King to find out.

Then comes the day Justyce goes driving with his best friend, Manny, windows rolled down, music turned up—way up, sparking the fury of a white off-duty cop beside them. Words fly. Shots are fired. Justyce and Manny are caught in the crosshairs. In the media fallout, it’s Justyce who is under attack.

Dear Mary, Dear Luther reveals through letters the emotional track of a 1930s courtship that leads to a lasting, loving marriage. Luther is the pursuer, always being honest with Mary about where she stands. Step by step, he proclaims his feelings as he progresses from attraction to love. The media often portray African American males as brutes, lacking feelings and deep emotions. Luther’s authentic expressions of romantic love will be a revelation for many.

Mary-sassy, feisty and mercurial-is a very smart young lady. She continues to date others until Luther makes it clear she is the only one. She accepts his evolving emotional state, never pushing for a greater commitment than he’s ready to make. It is wonderful to witness this couple’s burgeoning relationship over a period of three and one-half years. Gradually, their intimacy deepens until they reach a point when they both know they’re ready to become man and wife.

These letters prove that a great love is attainable by everyone regardless of color or class. We need only the courage to patiently let it bloom.

In this scorching, mournful, often explicit, and never less than moving literary novel by the famed creator of the Easy Rawlins series, Debbie Dare, a black porn queen, has to come to terms with her sordid life in the adult entertainment industry after her tomcatting husband dies in a hot tub. Electrocuted. With another woman in there with him. Debbie decides she just isn't going to "do it anymore." But executing her exit strategy from the porn world is a wrenching and far from simple process.

Millions of men (and no doubt many women) have watched famed black porn queen Debbie Dare—she of the blond wig and blue contacts-"do it" on television and computer screens every which way with every combination of partners the mind of man can imagine. But one day an unexpected and thunderous on-set orgasm catches Debbie unawares, and when she returns to the mansion she shares with her husband, insatiable former porn star and "film producer" Theon Pinkney, she discovers that he's died in a case of hot tub electrocution, "auditioning" an aspiring "starlet." Burdened with massive debts that her husband incurred, and which various L.A. heavies want to collect on, Debbie must reckon with a life spent in the peculiar subculture of the pornography industry and her estrangement from her family and the child she had to give up. She's done with porn, but her options for what might come next include the possibility of suicide. Debbie . . . is a portrait of a ransacked but resilient soul in search of salvation and a cure for grief.

What Nia Simon Bijou desires, she works hard to achieve. Her accomplishments as a respected writer have not only brought her to Hollywood, but she’s now poised for worldwide success, and pursued and desired by Prada, a man of international power and wealth. With everything Nia has, she remains restless and on a journey to quell her inner storm. Then someone introduces her to a place called Decadence…

In this intimately private club, Nia submits to an abundance of sensual experiences she previously could only have imagined. As secret desires become reality, Nia’s ability to distinguish truth from fantasy becomes increasingly blurred. Seduced into the extremes of Decadence, Nia soon discovers that abandoning all caution in pursuit of your hedonistic fantasies can carry a devastating price…

Decoded is a book like no other: a collection of lyrics and their meanings that together tell the story of a culture, an art form, a moment in history, and one of the most provocative and successful artists of our time.

“Hip-hop’s renaissance man drops a classic. . . . Heartfelt, passionate and slick.”— Kirkus, starred review

Edited and with a Preface by Toni Morrison, this posthumous collection of short stories, essays, and interviews offers lasting evidence of Bambara’s passion, lyricism, and tough critical intelligence. Included are tales of mothers and daughters, rebels and seeresses, community activists and aging gangbangers, as well as essays on film and literature, politics and race, and on the difficulties and necessities of forging an identity as an artist, activist, and black woman. It is a treasure trove not only for those familiar with Bambara’s work, but for a new generation of readers who will recognize her contribution to contemporary American letters.

In the early ‘80s, the music industry wrote off hip-hop as a passing fad. Few could or would have predicted that the improvised raps and raw beats busting out of New York City’s urban underclass would one day become a multimillion-dollar business and one of music’s most lucrative genres.

Among those few were two visionaries: Russell Simmons, a young black man from Hollis, Queens, and Rick Rubin, a Jewish kid from Long Island. Though the two came from different backgrounds, their all-consuming passion for hip-hop brought them together. Soon they would revolutionize the music industry with their groundbreaking label, Def Jam Records.

Def Jam, Inc. traces the company’s incredible rise from the NYU dorm room of nineteen-year-old Rubin (where LL Cool J was discovered on a demo tape) to the powerhouse it is today; from financial struggles and scandals–including The Beastie Boys’s departure from the label and Rubin’s and Simmons’s eventual parting–to revealing anecdotes about artists like Slick Rick, Public Enemy, Foxy Brown, Jay-Z, and DMX.

Stacy Gueraseva, former editor in chief of Russell Simmons’s magazine, Oneworld, had access to the biggest players on the scene, and brings you real conversations and a behind-the-scenes look from a decade–and a company–that turned the music world upside down. She takes you back to New York in the ‘80s, when late-night spots such as Danceteria and Nell’s were burning with young, fresh rappers, and Simmons and Rubin had nothing but a hunch that they were on to something huge.

Far more than just a biography of the two men who made it happen, Def Jam, Inc. is a journey into the world of rap itself. Both an intriguing business history as well as a gritty narrative, here is the definitive book on Def Jam–a must read for any fan of hip-hop as well as all popular-culture junkies.

In 1977, Randall Robinson founded TransAfrica, the first organization to lobby for the interests of African and Caribbean peoples, and it became the galvanizing force behind the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa, spearheaded efforts to secure the release of Nelson Mandela, and mobilized the fight to reinstate President Aristide and restore democracy in Haiti. Defending the Spirit tells the story of Robinson’s rise from childhood in the segregated South to his role as a Washington power figure. A stunning and uplifting memoir, it also offers stinging commentary on American policies in Africa and the Caribbean, where racism still plays an unfortunate role. Impassioned, charismatic, and unwavering in his convictions, Robinson emerges as an inspiring and empowering example of a great American leader.

• A behind-the-scenes look at some of the most significant moments in recent American and world history.
• Randall Robinson candidly discusses such prominent figures as Jesse Helms, Bob Dole, Charles Rangel, Nelson Mandela, Roger Wilkins, and his famed newscaster brother, Max Robinson.
• Published to coincide with Black History Month.
• As an active public speaker, Robinson appears all over America.
• Randall Robinson is a prominent African-American political figure and a model for the black community.

A powerful polemic on the state of black America that savages the idea of a post-racial society
 
America’s great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. From the murders of black youth by the police, to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, to the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession, it is clear that black America faces an emergency—at the very moment the election of the first black president has prompted many to believe we’ve solved America’s race problem.
 
Democracy in Black is Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s impassioned response. Part manifesto, part history, part memoir, it argues that we live in a country founded on a “value gap”—with white lives valued more than others—that still distorts our politics today. Whether discussing why all Americans have racial habits that reinforce inequality, why black politics based on the civil-rights era have reached a dead end, or why only remaking democracy from the ground up can bring real change, Glaude crystallizes the untenable position of black America—and offers thoughts on a better way forward. Forceful in ideas and unsettling in its candor, Democracy In Black is a landmark book on race in America, one that promises to spark wide discussion as we move toward the end of our first black presidency.

In his major bestseller, Race Matters, philosopher Cornel West burst onto the national scene with his searing analysis of the scars of racism in American democracy. Race Matters has become a contemporary classic, still in print after ten years, having sold more than four hundred thousand copies. A mesmerizing speaker with a host of fervidly devoted fans, West gives as many as one hundred public lectures a year and appears regularly on radio and television. Praised by The New York Times for his "ferocious moral vision" and hailed by Newsweek as "an elegant prophet with attitude," he bridges the gap between black and white opinion about the country’s problems.In Democracy Matters, West returns to the analysis of the arrested development of democracy-both in America and in the crisis-ridden Middle East. In a strikingly original diagnosis, he argues that if America is to become a better steward of democratization around the world, we must first wake up to the long history of imperialist corruption that has plagued our own democracy. Both our failure to foster peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the crisis of Islamist anti-Americanism stem largely from hypocrisies in our dealings with the world. Racism and imperial expansionism have gone hand in hand in our country’s inexorable drive toward hegemony, and our current militarism is only the latest expression of that drive. Even as we are shocked by Islamic fundamentalism, our own brand of fundamentalism, which West dubs Constantinian Christianity, has joined forces with imperialist corporate and political elites in an unholy alliance, and four decades after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insidious racism still inflicts debilitating psychic pain on so many of our citizens.But there is a deep democratic tradition in America of impassioned commitment to the fight against imperialist corruptions-the last great expression of which was the civil rights movement led by Dr. King-and West brings forth the powerful voices of that great democratizing tradition in a brilliant and deeply moving call for the revival of our better democratic nature. His impassioned and provocative argument for the revitalization of America’s democracy will reshape the terms of the raging national debate about America’s role in today’s troubled world.

In his major bestseller, Race Matters, philosopher Cornel West burst onto the national scene with his searing analysis of the scars of racism in American democracy. Race Matters has become a contemporary classic, still in print after ten years, having sold more than four hundred thousand copies. A mesmerizing speaker with a host of fervidly devoted fans, West gives as many as one hundred public lectures a year and appears regularly on radio and television. Praised by The New York Times for his "ferocious moral vision" and hailed by Newsweek as "an elegant prophet with attitude," he bridges the gap between black and white opinion about the country’s problems.

In Democracy Matters, West returns to the analysis of the arrested development of democracy-both in America and in the crisis-ridden Middle East. In a strikingly original diagnosis, he argues that if America is to become a better steward of democratization around the world, we must first wake up to the long history of imperialist corruption that has plagued our own democracy. Both our failure to foster peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the crisis of Islamist anti-Americanism stem largely from hypocrisies in our dealings with the world. Racism and imperial expansionism have gone hand in hand in our country’s inexorable drive toward hegemony, and our current militarism is only the latest expression of that drive. Even as we are shocked by Islamic fundamentalism, our own brand of fundamentalism, which West dubs Constantinian Christianity, has joined forces with imperialist corporate and political elites in an unholy alliance, and four decades after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insidious racism still inflicts debilitating psychic pain on so many of our citizens.

But there is a deep democratic tradition in America of impassioned commitment to the fight against imperialist corruptions-the last great expression of which was the civil rights movement led by Dr. King-and West brings forth the powerful voices of that great democratizing tradition in a brilliant and deeply moving call for the revival of our better democratic nature. His impassioned and provocative argument for the revitalization of America’s democracy will reshape the terms of the raging national debate about America’s role in today’s troubled world.

The great Kenyan writer and Nobel Prize nominee Ng?g? wa Thiong’o’s powerful fictional critique of capitalism

One of the cornerstones of Ng?g? wa Thiong’o’s fame, Devil on the Cross was written in secret, on toilet paper, while Ng?g? was in prison. It tells the tragic story of Wariinga, a young woman who moves from a rural Kenyan town to the capital, Nairobi, only to be exploited by her boss and later by a corrupt businessman. As she struggles to survive, Wariinga begins to realize that her problems are only symptoms of a larger societal malaise and that much of the misfortune stems from the Western, capitalist influences on her country. An impassioned cry for a Kenya free of dictatorship and for African writers to work in their own local dialects, Devil on the Cross has had a profound influence on Africa and on post-colonial African literature.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From the author of All Souls’ Rising which The Washington Post called “A serious historical novel that reads like a dream,” comes a powerful new novel about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most reviled, celebrated, and legendary, of Civil War generals.

With the same eloquence, dramatic energy, and grasp of history that marked his previous works, Madison Smartt Bell gives us a wholly new vantage point from which to view this complicated American figure. Considered a rogue by the upper ranks of the Confederate Army, who did not properly use his talents, Forrest was often relegated to small-scale operations.

In Devil’s Dream, Bell brings to life an energetic, plainspoken man who does not tolerate weakness in himself or in those around him. We see Forrest on and off the battlefield, in less familiar but no less revealing moments of his life: courting the woman who would become his wife; battling a compulsion to gamble; overcoming his abhorrence of the army bureaucracy to rise to its highest ranks. We see him treating his slaves humanely even as he fights to ensure their continued enslavement, and in battle we see his knack for keeping his enemy unsettled, his instinct for the unexpected, and his relentless stamina.

As Devil’s Dream moves back and forth in time, providing prismatic glimpses of Forrest, a vivid portrait comes into focus: a rough, fierce man with a life fill of contradictions.

Best possible copy of this book. Brand new condition hardcover book in its also mint condition decorative dustjacket. An archival quality mylar cover has been professionally added to make it even nicer. Enjoy being the first to read this book!

In Dhalgren, perhaps one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel “ to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s— (Jonathan Lethem). Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there. The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man “poet, lover, and adventurer”known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.

With winning detail and infectious humor, award-winning poet and essayist Patricia Storace magically conjures up noisy, anarchist cities and quiet, idyllic towns and harbors where the unseen worlds of the pastthe Roman, the Byzantine, the Ottomancontinuing to make thier presence felt.

The nine vividly rendered stories of place and character in Discerner of Hearts are set in Jamaica, both rural and urban, some present-day, others looking back several decades. Senior’s gift for fine characterization, for recreating the music of everyday speech, pervades these tales, which explore notions of home and exile as well as the intricate realm of the human spirit – its fallible nature, its indomitable strength against the sometimes downward pull of fate.

From American Book Award-winning author Elizabeth Nunez, a powerful novel that explores an intricate lovers’ triangle, the human thirst for passion, and the myriad ways desire can betray those who have fallen under its spell.

Descended from warriors and raised by missionaries, Oufoula is a diplomat whose wealth and charm make him both publicly admired and envied. From a tragic childhood he emerged a man who leads a disciplined life of respect, married to Nerida, a woman he did not want to deceive. But the beautiful Marguerite, a Jamaican-born artist living in New York, makes him question what ideals he can live by, and which values he can betray.

For twenty years, Oufoula has carried a secret in his heart, a secret of his love for Marguerite. Though they have been separated for two decades by Marguerite’s call for propriety, Oufoula refuses to let his desire wane. When the lovers are at last reunited, the rekindling of their passion forces Oufoula to come to terms with the core of his character: Is he willing to sacrifice his marriage, his career, and the very foundations of the life he has struggled to create, all for the love of one woman?

Oufoula’s confession is adorned with the literature of his European education, and shrouded by the spirits and responsibilities of Africa. Caught between myth and reason, Oufoula reveals himself to be a soul trapped in every way, who, like Faust, would bargain with the devil for fulfillment . . . but was never offered any choice.

This is the portrait of a man who cannot be forgotten. A gripping, masterfully crafted tale of love, deceit, and the human compulsion for power, Discretion forces us to reconsider that ever-compelling question: At what price passion?


From the Hardcover edition.

DK’s acclaimed Biography line shine the spotlight on sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Includes detailed sidebars, handy vocabulary, and a visual timeline. Supports the Common Core State Standards.

Harlem’s supersleuth Mali Anderson is back on the case in the fourth installment of Grace Edwards’s beautifully rendered and critically acclaimed Mali Anderson mystery series.

All of the characters Edwards’s fans love are back. This time Mali and company take to the high seas for a brief trip aboard the QE2. When they return to Harlem, they discover that the singer in Dad’s jazz band has been murdered—her throat slit from ear to ear, and her shirtsleeve ripped to expose faded track marks. The girl’s father, also a member of Dad’s band, is devastated. Out of a sense of duty, responsibility, and loyalty to her father and his grieving friend, Mali sets out to find the murderer and slips in and out of the "three B’s" of Harlem—the beauty shops, barbershops, and bars—with her signature grace and grit.

A spectacularly drawn Harlem—the good, the bad, and the ugly—comes vividly to life in Do or Die, which has all the charm and chutzpah Edwards’s fans have grown to expect. Readers will take delicious pleasure not only in Mali’s struggle to find the culprit before he strikes again; they will cheer her on as she fights for her jaw-droppingly gorgeous (and sensitive) man, Tad Honeywell, when he becomes the target of a sexpot’s advances.

Zena (short for Zenobia) Lawson honors all things African—art, culture, history. So when fortune hands her a twenty-year-old Nigerian girl in need of temporary housing, Zena and her husband, Lucius, jump at the chance to help. To Zena, Ifa Olongo is an exotic beauty with enough haughtiness and grace for three royal families. Not to mention the daughter she never had. But as Zena’s best friend, Vy, keeps reminding her, Ifa is no girl. Crackling with wit, intelligence, and hard-earned wisdom, Do Unto Others turns political correctness and Afrocentricity upside down, reminding us that there is only one golden rule.

Since rising out of the New York City streets over twenty-five years ago, Russell Simmons has helped create such groundbreaking ventures as Def Jam Records, Phat Farm, and Def Comedy Jam. Russell might have helped introduce hip-hop to the world, but he credits his success to his belief in a strong set of principles—or laws. In twelve straightforward steps, Russell reveals a path that can be followed by anyone struggling to realize their dreams.

Russell’s laws stem from the belief that it’s impossible to receive any sort of lasting success from the world without giving something of lasting value to the world first. Blending business insight, universal spiritual truths, and an inspired sense of purpose, Do You! crosses the lines of age, race, and background, with wisdom that will lift you up and motivate you to pursue your vision.

Clear. Natural. Poignant. These words accurately describe Alberto O. Cappas’ work.Cappas understands the suffering and struggles of Puerto Ricans living in Mainland America as well as in Puerto Rico. His poetry traces their hopes, problems, and misconceptions from the island to the mainland where they discover that dreams do die hard.In the poem ’Suicide of a Puerto Rican Jibaro,’ one need not be Puerto Rican to identify with the alienation faced when entering a cold, foreign, and jungle-like world. Cappas successfully explores what such a drastic change can mean for a Puerto Rican away from his island, where he is the majority. In ’…Jibaro,’ for the Puerto Rican man who emigrates to the United States, ’A million times his body was raped by the unfriendly cold… to pursue the American Dream…’Cappas is a relentless observer and commentator of what happens when a people leave their homeland, or forget where they come from, to pursue the uncertainties of the American Dream. His poetry, ironic at times, questions whether this dream does exist. In ’A Spoken Secret,’ ’Light skin Puerto Ricans forget to speak Spanish… and dark skin Puerto Ricans adopt hot combs to straighten their hair.’ In ’Doa Julia,’ a woman is trapped like a mouse in America and so commits suicide as a last attempt to return to her homeland. And in ’Maria,’ a young girl sits patiently thinking about her experiences in New York since leaving Puerto Rico and now waits ’for the overdose (of a drug) to take effect.’Of course this is not to say that all Puerto Ricans who emigrate to the United States end up killing themselves but it does show that Cappas is keenly aware of a sort of cultural and spiritual death that happens to Puerto Ricans and other Latinos when they leave the tropical scenes and adopt certain American values. In the ironic humorous poem, ’Her Boricua,’ a woman buys the Moon, tax-free, and invites her relatives and friends on weekend nights to ’admire the beauty of her new possessio

A rousing polemic in defense of the written word by the New York Times bestselling author of Losing the Race and the widely acclaimed history of language The Power of Babel.

Critically acclaimed linguist John McWhorter has devoted his career to exploring the evolution of language. He has often argued that language change is inevitable and in general culturally neutral-languages change rapidly even in indigenous cultures where traditions perpetuate; and among modernized peoples, culture endures despite linguistic shifts. But in his provocative new book, Doing Our Own Thing, McWhorter draws the line when it comes to how cultural change is turning the English language upside down in America today, and how public English is being overwhelmed by street English, with serious consequences for our writing, our music, and our society.

McWhorter explores the triumph of casual over formal speech-particularly since the dawn of 1960s counterculture-and its effect on Americans’ ability to write, read, critique, argue, and imagine. In the face of this growing rift between written English and spoken English, the intricate vocabularies and syntactic roadmaps of our language appear to be slipping away, eroding our intellectual and artistic capacities. He argues that "our increasing alienation from ’written language’ signals a gutting of our intellectual powers, our self-regard as a nation, and thus our very substance as a people."

Timely, thought-provoking, and compellingly written, Doing Our Own Thing is sure to stoke many debates about the fate of our threatened intellectual culture, and the destiny of our democracy.

In Doing What’s Right, Tavis Smiley shows how each one of us can battle complacency and fight for the causes we support. Smiley is the host of "Black Entertainment Television Tonight with Tavis Smiley," a one-hour nightly talk show that reaches fifty-five million households, and his political and social commentary is heard daily on "The Tom Joyner Morning Show," a national radio program with a listenership of seven million. "The Smiley Report," his monthly newsletter, has a circulation of three to four million readers.

Smiley’s career was inspired by his lifelong determination to make a difference. Through the media, he has helped to galvanize public opinion and initiate national grassroots campaigns on everything from corporate responsibility to voter turnout. In Doing What’s Right, Smiley urges everyone to become involved and presents a practical and motivating gameplan for making it happen.

For those wishing to fight ignorance with intelligence and racism with facts, information from government sources and published studies point out discrepancies in assumed beliefs—such as that blacks are the main welfare recipients and drug users—and major fallacies.

From lead singer with the Blue Belles in the ’60s to Grammy Award winner in the ’90s, the enduring career of Patti LaBelle is one for the books. In Don’t Block the Blessings, Patti reveals the exciting story of her rise to fame, describes how she overcame serious career setbacks, and writes frankly about her own personal tragedies.

From the author of Like No Other, the novel Entertainment Weekly calls "One of the most poignant and star-crossed love stories since The Fault in Our Stars": What if the last hope to save your family is the person who broke it up to begin with?

"Fans of John Green, Rainbow Rowell, and Sharon Flake will find much to love in [Don’t Fail Me Now]." 
—School Library Journal
 
Michelle and her little siblings Cass and Denny are African-American and living on the poverty line in urban Baltimore, struggling to keep it together with their mom in jail and only Michelle’s part-time job at the Taco Bell to sustain them.
 
Leah and her stepbrother Tim are white and middle class from suburban Maryland, with few worries beyond winning lacrosse games and getting college applications in on time.
 
Michelle and Leah only have one thing in common: Buck Devereaux, the biological father who abandoned them when they were little.
 
After news trickles back to them that Buck is dying, they make the uneasy decision to drive across country to his hospice in California. Leah hopes for closure; Michelle just wants to give him a piece of her mind.
 
Five people in a failing, old station wagon, living off free samples at food courts across America, and the most pressing question on Michelle’s mind is: Who will break down first—herself or the car? All the signs tell her they won’t make it. But Michelle has heard that her whole life, and it’s never stopped her before….
 
Una LaMarche triumphs once again with this rare and compassionate look at how racial and social privilege affects one family in crisis in both subtle and astonishing ways.

View our feature on Tyler Perry’s Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings.

In 2005, Tyler Perry took Hollywood by storm. The movie he wrote, produced, and starred in, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, opened number one at the box office and went on to gross more than $50 million. In its first week on sale, the DVD sold 2.4 million copies. At the same time, Perry was starring nightly across the country in a soldout stage show he’d also written, produced, and scored-Madea Goes to Jail-even as another one of his productions, Meet the Browns, was touring nationally. Every week in 2005, 35,000 people saw a Tyler Perry production. His second feature film, Madea’s Family Reunion, opens in theaters in February 2006. Now, this triple-threat actor/playwright/director, has written his first book, and it features his most beloved, most irreverent creation: sixty-eight-year-old grandmother Madea Simmons.

Madea is at the center of all of Tyler Perry’s work, and she’s always unfailingly outspoken, dead-on, and hilarious. But in Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings, Madea shares more than she ever has before- about herself, and about what she thinks of everyone around her. The topics inimitably covered by Madea (a term of endearment for "Mother Dear") include love and marriage, child-rearing, etiquette and neighborliness, beauty tips, health tips, financial tips, the Bible and the church, and, of course, gun care. She’s brazen, feisty, and never at a loss for words, but at the heart of everything she says- and at the heart of all of Perry’s work-is a resounding message of faith and forgiveness.

Shockingly hilarious, surprisingly moving, and as rousing and inspiring as a great gospel show, Madea’s words of wisdom, memories, and straight-up in-your-face advice will be cherished by Perry’s numerous fans- and it all comes just in time for Mother’s Day. Tyler Perry is about to take the publishing world by storm.

“Don’t play in the sun. You’re going to have to get a light-skinned husband for the sake of your children as it is.”

In these words from her mother, novelist and memoirist Marita Golden learned as a girl that she was the wrong color. Her mother had absorbed “colorism” without thinking about it. But, as Golden shows in this provocative book, biases based on skin color persist–and so do their long-lasting repercussions.

Golden recalls deciding against a distinguished black university because she didn’t want to worry about whether she was light enough to be homecoming queen. A male friend bitterly remembers that he was teased about his girlfriend because she was too dark for him. Even now, when she attends a party full of accomplished black men and their wives, Golden wonders why those wives are all nearly white. From Halle Berry to Michael Jackson, from Nigeria to Cuba, from what she sees in the mirror to what she notices about the Grammys, Golden exposes the many facets of "colorism" and their effect on American culture. Part memoir, part cultural history, and part analysis, Don’t Play in the Sun also dramatizes one accomplished black woman’s inner journey from self-loathing to self-acceptance and pride.

Nine-and-a-half-year-old Russell James finds that "a hard head makes a soft behind" when he tries to catch a catfish by hand. A giant glob of Gurdy’s Greasy Grape Groaners Gum attacks eleven-year-old Shaniqua Godette, who learns the hard way that you should "never leave your pocketbook on the floor. " And when twelve-year-old height-challenged Tucker Willis saves a life with the help of a ghost, he proves that "big things come in small packages. " A celebration of storytelling and folk wisdom, this is a perfect collection for sharing and reading aloud. Notes at the end explain the origins of the proverbs and the background of the stories.

Stanley Crouch’s gloriously bold first novel provides an intimate and epic portrait of America that breaks all the rules in crossing the boundaries of race, sex, and class. Blonde Carla from South Dakota is a jazz singer who has been around the block. Almost suddenly, she finds herself fighting to hold on to Maxwell, a black tenor saxophonist from Texas. Their red-hot and sublimely tender five-year union is under siege. Those black people who oppose such relatonships in the interest of romantic entitlement or group solidarity are pressuring Maxwell, and he is wavering. As Carla battles to save the deepest love of her life, her past plays out against the present, vividly bringing forth a startlingly fresh range of characters in scenes that are as accurately drawn as they are unpredictable and innovatively conceived.

Until her birthday a young girl is convinced everyone makes promises to her that only she remembers.

Collects over one hundred and twenty southern style recipes and cooking secrets, from adding barbeque sauce to spaghetti and nachos to molasses-baked beans and a kitchen sink omelet.
Title: Down Home With the Neelys
Author: Neely, Patrick/ Neely, Gina/ Disbrowe, Paula
Random House Inc
2009/05/12
Number of 278
Binding Type: HARDCOVER
Library of Congress: 2008054393

Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas’s plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery—a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop.

As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author’s voice. Thirty years after its first appearance, this classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendence is available in an anniversary edition with a new Introduction by the author.

A bulletproof, step-by-step plan for turning your business brainstorm into a money-making reality

At age fifty-two , after years of working her way up the corporate ladder, Clara Villarosa found herself out of a job. But she didn’t let that get her down. Instead, she put her gifts to the test and started her own business, which became one of the country’s best-known independent specialty bookstores-The Hue- Man Bookstore. Now, twenty years and two successful stores later, Clara is a highly sought-after business coach and expert in the industry.

Down to Business expands on Villarosa’s proven "First 10 Steps to Entrepreneurship for Women" to offer women everywhere a targeted plan to help them launch the small business of their dreams. This book includes advice on:

?How to develop realistic business ideas by researching the industry

?Analyzing a competitor’s marketing approach and attracting your ideal customer

? Accumulating the start-up funds you need, from recruiting investors to using loans wisely

?Scouting the ideal location

? Creating a sound business plan-and beyond-with a simple, step-by-step strategy

Packed with stories of businesswomen at all stages of the game-from a beer connoisseur-turned-brewer to an avid reader-turned-literary agent-Villarosa brings together inspiring, real-life stories with her award-winning business savvy. Encouraging and empowering, Down to Business will get you motivated to dust off your dream and get your plan into action.

The dragon’s out of the bag in this diverse, young urban fantasy from an award-winning author!

When Jaxon is sent to spend the day with a mean old lady his mother calls Ma, he finds out she’s not his grandmother—but she is a witch! She needs his help delivering baby dragons to a magical world where they’ll be safe. There are two rules when it comes to the dragons: don’t let them out of the bag, and don’t feed them anything sweet. Before he knows it, Jax and his friends Vikram and Kavita have broken both rules! Will Jax get the baby dragons delivered safe and sound? Or will they be lost in Brooklyn forever?

Shock jock extraordinaire Wendy Williams lets loose with the first in a series of novels based on her alter ego, the divalicious radio DJ Ritz Harper. Ritz puts the s in shock and the g in gossip, and Drama is her middle name.

Ritz is a suburban girl on the outside, but inside she’s a hustler’s hustler who’s masterfully maneuvered her way into the spotlight after ruining the career of a well-respected newswoman (and former college friend). Ritz’s “exclusive” rockets her to the top of the ratings, and she’s rewarded with her very own show. Like a talking Venus flytrap, she verbally seduces her on-air guests, only to have them for lunch as she spews gossip about their lives.

Ritz becomes the darling of the station’s afternoon slot. But what happens when Ritz goes from drive-time diva to drive-by victim? Has Ritz bad-mouthed the wrong person? Has her signature cat-and-mouse “bomb drop” been dropped on her instead?

As Ritz lies crumpled on a city sidewalk, all she can think as she struggles to maintain consciousness is “Who did this to me? Who?”

Readers will salivate as they try to figure out where the fictional Ritz ends and the real-life Wendy begins. Wendy will involve her millions of listeners by asking them what should happen to Ritz, which will be revealed at the beginning of the next novel, scheduled to be published in fall of 2006 for Christmas.

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).

Obama, the son of a white American mother and a black African father, writes an elegant and compelling biography that powerfully articulates America's racial battleground and tells of his search for his place in black America.

By the world-renowned novelist, playwright, critic, and author of Wizard of the Crow, an evocative and affecting memoir of childhood.
 
Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 in rural Kenya to a father whose four wives bore him more than a score of children. The man who would become one of Africa’s leading writers was the fifth child of the third wife. Even as World War II affected the lives of Africans under British colonial rule in particularly unexpected ways, Ngugi spent his childhood as very much the apple of his mother’s eye before attending school to slake what was then considered a bizarre thirst for learning.
 
In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngugi deftly etches a bygone era, capturing the landscape, the people, and their culture; the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war; and the troubled relationship between an emerging Christianized middle class and the rural poor. And he shows how the Mau Mau armed struggle for Kenya’s independence against the British informed not only his own life but also the lives of those closest to him.
 
Dreams in a Time of War speaks to the human right to dream even in the worst of times. It abounds in delicate and powerful subtleties and complexities that are movingly told.

Chosen by John Updike as a Today Show Book Club Pick.Already an award-winning writer, ZZ Packer now shares with us her debut, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decides where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream.With penetrating insight that belies her youth she was only nineteen years old when Seventeen magazine printed her first published story ZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking performance—fresh, versatile, and captivating. It introduces us to an arresting and unforgettable new voice.

Dickey’s tenth novel is packed with twists and turns, filled with titillations and poignancy. Drive Me Crazy is the latest example that "Dickey is an excellent writer at the top of his game." (Chicago Defender) After his blockbuster holiday novel, Naughty or Nice, New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey is serving up his new novel with style, sexiness, and a bit of grit. "Driver" is an ex-con trying to make his life right but who shares an expensive secret and a past affair with his boss’s wife-a woman who is nothing but trouble. Dickey’s rich characters jump off the page, making readers feel as if they are present in the hustle-filled pool hall, the bedroom, and the Lincoln Town Car that Driver chauffeurs his wealthy and notorious clients around in. Dickey’s millions of readers will be happy to see the reappearance of a femme fatale from Thieves’ Paradise, who adds spice and surprises every time she turns up. This is Dickey writing at his best-a fast-paced novel of raw emotions, softened as always with his incomparable humor and characters you will always remember.

From the beloved and award-winning author Junot Díaz, a spellbinding saga of a family’s journey through the New World.
 
A coming-of-age story of unparalleled power, Drown introduced the world to Junot Díaz’s exhilarating talents. It also introduced an unforgettable narrator— Yunior, the haunted, brilliant young man who track his family’s precarious journey from the barrios of Santo Domingo to the tenements of industrial New Jersey, and their epic passage from hope to loss to something like love. Here is the soulful, unsparing book that made Díaz a literary sensation.

A major new biography of Duke Ellington from the acclaimed author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

  Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of the twentieth century and an impenetrably enigmatic personality whom no one, not even his closest friends, claimed to understand. The grandson of a slave, he dropped out of high school to become one of the world’s most famous musicians, a showman of incomparable suavity who was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the nightclubs where he honed his style. He wrote some fifteen hundred compositions, many of which, like “Mood Indigo” and “Sophisticated Lady,” remain beloved standards, and he sought inspiration in an endless string of transient lovers, concealing his inner self behind a smiling mask of flowery language and ironic charm.

  As the biographer of Louis Armstrong, Terry Teachout is uniquely qualified to tell the story of the public and private lives of Duke Ellington. Duke peels away countless layers of Ellington’s evasion and public deception to tell the unvarnished truth about the creative genius who inspired Miles Davis to say, “All the musicians should get together one certain day and get down on their knees and thank Duke.”

A Washington Post Notable Book

When a young man is gunned down in the streets of Nairobi, his grief-stricken father and sister bring his body back to their crumbling home in the Kenyan drylands. But the murder has stirred up memories long since buried, precipitating a series of events no one could have foreseen. As the truth unfolds, we come to learn the secrets held by this parched landscape, hidden deep within the shared past of a family and their conflicted nation. Spanning Kenya’s turbulent 1950s and 1960s, Dust is spellbinding debut from a breathtaking new voice in literature.

The next installment in the bold and sexy series by the fearless New York Times bestselling author.

Sleeping with Strangers and Waking with Enemies "[left] Dickey fans wanting more"(Ebony). Now, with Dying for Revenge, he returns to that adrenaline- fueled underworld.

Gideon, a professional assassin, is convinced that an old score with a former client from Detroit was settled a long time ago. But the lady from Detroit has never forgotten-or forgiven-Gideon, and with a crack team of hit-men, she’s not letting him out of her sight. Now, Gideon’s on the run again, embarking on a global chase that takes him from London to Nashville, and back to the Caribbean where those on both sides of this battle are dying for revenge.

International hit man Gideon never misses his target, but when a job in Detroit goes bad, he should have killed his client – a cold-blooded woman who hired him to kill her husband – when he had the chance. Now the city’s mayor and with money and power to spare, this woman will stop at nothing to see that Gideon gets what he deserves. Gideon soon finds himself in the crosshairs of two hired assassins: a seasoned killer known as El Matador and his voluptuous but ruthless wife, who dons Manolo Blahniks for even the dirtiest jobs. But when Gideon proves himself an impossible target, the lady from Detroit sets her sights on those closest to him. On the exotic island of Antigua, Gideon enlists the help of his friend and fellow assassin Hawks to square off against his deadliest adversary yet. Amid palm trees and white sands, sparks and bullets fly as Gideon must outsmart and defeat his pursuers before it’s too late. Featuring Dickey’s trademark blend of passion and suspense, Dying for Revenge is a pulse-pounding and deliciously sexy thrill-ride through a Caribbean island paradise.

Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Tamara Hayle mystery series featuring Newark, New Jersey’s number one private investigator are loved for their smart, sexy protagonist who “has a way with a wisecrack that is positively lethal” (Washington Post). Now in Dying in the Dark, Hayle is entrenched in a sinister investigation that will demand her best detective work yet.

Tamara Hayle’s past has come back to haunt her–literally. She’s been plagued by terrifying dreams about Celia Jones, an old friend whose walk on the wild side led her to a horrible death. Celia’s teenage son, Cecil, begs Tamara to find his mother’s killer . . . only to end up dead himself, stabbed through the heart.

The search for Celia and her son’s killer pulls Tamara deep into her friend’s troubled love life, where everyone adored her but somebody held a murderous  grudge. There’s her bullying thug of an ex-husband; a handsome ex-lover who woos Tamara with charm and lies; and an angry, jealous woman who claims that Celia broke her heart. And those were just the obvious people with axes to grind.

Despite her better judgment and the admonitions of the police department, Tamara refuses to back away from the mystery surrounding her old friend’s death and the tragedy that met her son. All clues lead to the past Tamara shared with Celia Jones, and Tamara fears that that past will threaten her own son. But she uncovers more than she bargained for–and unearths secrets someone would kill to keep in the shadows.

Each kindness makes the world a little better

This unforgettable book is written and illustrated by the award-winning team that created The Other Side and the Caldecott Honor winner Coming On Home Soon. With its powerful anti-bullying message and striking art, it will resonate with readers long after they've put it down.

Chloe and her friends won't play with the new girl, Maya. Every time Maya tries to join Chloe and her friends, they reject her. Eventually Maya stops coming to school. When Chloe's teacher gives a lesson about how even small acts of kindness can change the world, Chloe is stung by the lost opportunity for friendship, and thinks about how much better it could have been if she'd shown a little kindness toward Maya.

Explains how easy it is to start and run a business. List many businesses to start with little or no money. Shows how to turn those arts and crafts items into a business. Very informative for men and women.

“You done lived a tough life, boy, and I know I’m part responsible for that. I ain’t askin’ you to excuse me or forgive me. Just know I did the best I knew to do. I was just tryin’ to make you tough enough to deal with the world. To stand tall among men, I knew you had to be strong and have yo’ own mind.”

“You were preparing me for war, Grandfather.”

Guy Johnson, the author of the critically acclaimed debut Standing at the Scratch Line, continues the Tremain family saga.

Jackson St. Clair Tremain hasn’t spoken to his grandfather King in nearly twenty years. Disgusted by the violence and bloodlust that seemed to be his grandfather’s way of life, Jackson chose to distance himself from King and live a simpler life. But now King is gravely ill, and his impending death places Jackson’s life—as well as those of his family and friends—in jeopardy. Reluctantly, Jackson travels to Mexico to see King. But after a brief reconciliation, his grandfather is assassinated, and Jackson suspects that his grandmother Serena may have had a hand in it. Jackson takes control of King’s organization, and as he does, he reflects on the summers he spent in Mexico as a child and the lessons he learned there at the knee of his strong-willed, complex grandfather.

In Echoes of a Distant Summer, Guy Johnson introduces us to a new hero, Jackson St. Clair Tremain, who learns that, like his grandfather, he must be willing to protect those he loves—at all costs.

A black teen-ager tries valiantly to keep her family together but sees her world collapse as her younger sisters reject her inept mothering.

A young girl learns a new meaning for freedom during the time of Reconstruction

Ellen always knew the broom resting above the hearth was special. Before it was legal for her mother and father to officially be married, the broom was what made them a family anyway. But now all former slaves who had already been married in their hearts could register as lawful husband and wife.

When Ellen and her family make the long trip to the courthouse dressed in their best, she brings the broom her parents had jumped so many years before. Even though freedom has come, Ellen knows the old traditions are important too. After Mama and Papa's names are recorded in the register, Ellen nearly bursts with pride as her parents jump the broom once again.

Ellen is a wonderfully endearing character whose love for her family is brought to life in Daniel Minter's rich and eye-catching block print illustrations.

All the boys in EllRay’s third-grade class have something they can brag about. Corey’s on the swim team, Kevin is super tall, Jared’s dad has an ATV. But EllRay’s dad is a geologist - not much to brag about. After all, rocks are boring. Then EllRay sees the crystals in his dad’s office, and they are really cool looking. If EllRay just "borrows" them to show his classmates, he knows they’d be impressed. And his dad will never have to know. It’s a perfect plan . . . until things go awry.

Examines the sex lives of African American women in their own words and explores the sexual relationships of Black men and women

Half a century after brave Americans took to the streets to raise the bar of opportunity for all races, Juan Williams writes that too many black Americans are in crisis—caught in a twisted hip-hop culture, dropping out of school, ending up in jail, having babies when they are not ready to be parents, and falling to the bottom in twenty-first-century global economic competition.

In Enough, Juan Williams issues a lucid, impassioned clarion call to do the right thing now, before we travel so far off the glorious path set by generations of civil rights heroes that there can be no more reaching back to offer a hand and rescue those being left behind.

Inspired by Bill Cosby’s now famous speech at the NAACP gala celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision integrating schools, Williams makes the case that while there is still racism, it is way past time for black Americans to open their eyes to the “culture of failure” that exists within their community. He raises the banner of proud black traditional values—self-help, strong families, and belief in God—that sustained black people through generations of oppression and flowered in the exhilarating promise of the modern civil rights movement. Williams asks what happened to keeping our eyes on the prize by proving the case for equality with black excellence and achievement.

He takes particular aim at prominent black leaders—from Al Sharpton to Jesse Jackson to Marion Barry. Williams exposes the call for reparations as an act of futility, a detour into self-pity; he condemns the “Stop Snitching” campaign as nothing more than a surrender to criminals; and he decries the glorification of materialism, misogyny, and murder as a corruption of a rich black culture, a tragic turn into pornographic excess that is hurting young black minds, especially among the poor.

Reinforcing his incisive observations with solid research and alarming statistical data, Williams offers a concrete plan for overcoming the obstacles that now stand in the way of African Americans’ full participation in the nation’s freedom and prosperity. Certain to be widely discussed and vehemently debated, Enough is a bold, perceptive, solution-based look at African American life, culture, and politics today.

A controversial look at the most renowned person of African descent in the eighteenth century In this widely aclaimed biography, historian Vincent Carretta gives us the authoritative portrait of Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–1797), the former slave whose 1789 autobiography quickly became a popular polemic against the slave trade and a literary classic. Sailor, entrepreneur, and adventurer, Equiano is revealed here as never before, thanks to archival research on an unprecedented scale—some of which even indicates that Equiano may have lied about his origins to advance the antibondage struggle with which he became famously identified. A masterpiece of scholarship and writerly poise, this book redefines an extraordinary man and the turbulent age that shaped him.

A collective work of art whose time has come. Of lasting value for all lovers of literature and the erotic, this is a glorious, groundbreaking celebration of black sensuality, including works by Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and many more.

A play that depicts Frederick Douglas overcoming his beginnings as a slave to becoming the first African American man to hold a diplomatic office.

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY DWIGHT GARNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle | NPR | The Root | The Telegraph | The Globe and Mail

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • FINALIST, PHILLIS WHEATLEY BOOK AWARD • TEJU COLE WAS NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL AFRICANS OF THE YEAR BY NEW AFRICAN MAGAZINE

For readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Michael Ondaatje, Every Day Is for the Thief is a wholly original work of fiction by Teju Cole, whose critically acclaimed debut, Open City, was the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by more than twenty publications.
 
Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud.
 
A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the “yahoo yahoo” diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet café, longs after a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused of stealing at a local market.
 
Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—and slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself.
 
In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven with original photos by the author, Every Day Is for the Thief—originally published in Nigeria in 2007—is a wholly original work of fiction. This revised and updated edition is the first version of this unique book to be made available outside Africa. You’ve never read a book like Every Day Is for the Thief because no one writes like Teju Cole.
 
Praise for Every Day Is for the Thief

“A luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and return . . . extraordinary.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Cole is following in a long tradition of writerly walkers who, in the tradition of Baudelaire, make their way through urban spaces on foot and take their time doing so. Like Alfred Kazin, Joseph Mitchell, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (with whom he is often compared), Cole adds to the literature in his own zeitgeisty fashion.”—The Boston Globe
 
“Crisp, affecting . . . Cole constructs a narrative of fragments, a series of episodes that he allows to resonate.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Hugely rewarding . . . both a celebration of one of the world’s most vibrant cities and a lament over what can be one of the most frustrating and difficult places to live. It is also a story of family breakup and an uneasy homecoming—the narrator has been away for fifteen years and must relearn how to navigate a place that was once home.”—NPR

“[Every Day Is for the Thief has] a restraint that allows [Cole] to slip in these exquisitely rendered observations on life, love, art that leave you feeling richer and more attuned to your own reality once you’ve finished reading.”—Dinaw Mengestu, The Atlantic

White kids from the ’burbs are throwing up gang signs. The 2001 Grammy winner for best rap artist was as white as rice. And blond-haired sorority sisters are sporting FUBU gear. What is going on in American culture that’s giving our nation a racial-identity crisis?

Following the trail blazed by Norman Mailer’s controversial essay “The White Negro,” Everything but the Burden brings together voices from music, popular culture, the literary world, and the media speaking about how from Brooklyn to the Badlands white people are co-opting black styles of music, dance, dress, and slang. In this collection, the essayists examine how whites seem to be taking on, as editor Greg Tate’s mother used to tell him, “everything but the burden”–from fetishizing black athletes to spinning the ghetto lifestyle into a glamorous commodity. Is this a way of shaking off the fear of the unknown? A flattering indicator of appreciation? Or is it a more complicated cultural exchange? The pieces in Everything but the Burden explore the line between hero-worship and paternalism.

Among the book’s twelve essays are Vernon Reid’s “Steely Dan Understood as the Apotheosis of ‘The White Negro,’” Carl Hancock Rux’s “The Beats: America’s First ‘Wiggas,’” and Greg Tate’s own introductory essay “Nigs ’R Us.”

Other contributors include: Hilton Als, Beth Coleman, Tony Green, Robin Kelley, Arthur Jafa, Gary Dauphin, Michaela Angela Davis, dream hampton, and Manthia diAwara.

Madeline Whittier is allergic to the outside world. So allergic, in fact, that she has never left the house in all of her seventeen years. She is content enough—until a boy with eyes the color of the Atlantic Ocean moves in next door. Their complicated romance begins over IM and grows through a wunderkammer of vignettes, illustrations, charts, and more.

Everything, Everything is about the thrill and heartbreak that happens when we break out of our shell to do crazy, sometimes death-defying things for love.

PRAISE FOR EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING

• #1 New York Times Bestselling debut
• New York Times, Sunday Book Review
• School Library Journal, Best Book of 2015
• Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
• School Library Journal, Starred Review
• School Library Journal, Starred Review for Audiobook
• Book Expo America Young Adult Buzz Panel selection (2015)
• Indies Introduce Debut selection
• #2 Indie Next Autumn 2015 selection
• American Library Association - 2016 Best Fiction for Young Adults selection
• American Library Association - 2016 Top 10 Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers selection

Condoleezza Rice has excelled as a diplomat, political scientist, and concert pianist.  Her achievements run the gamut from helping to oversee the collapse of communism in Europe and the decline of the Soviet Union, to working to protect the country in the aftermath of 9-11, to becoming only the second woman - and the first black woman ever — to serve as Secretary of State.
 
But until she was 25 she never learned to swim.
 
Not because she wouldn’t have loved to, but because when she was a little girl in Birmingham, Alabama, Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor decided he’d rather shut down the city’s pools than give black citizens access.
 
Throughout the 1950’s, Birmingham’s black middle class largely succeeded in insulating their children from the most corrosive effects of racism, providing multiple support systems to ensure the next generation would live better than the last.  But by 1963, when Rice was applying herself to her fourth grader’s lessons, the situation had grown intolerable.  Birmingham was an environment where blacks were expected to keep their head down and do what they were told — or face violent consequences. That spring two bombs exploded in Rice’s neighborhood amid a series of chilling Klu Klux Klan attacks.  Months later, four young girls lost their lives in a particularly vicious bombing.
 
So how was Rice able to achieve what she ultimately did?
 
Her father, John, a minister and educator, instilled a love of sports and politics.  Her mother, a teacher, developed Condoleezza’s passion for piano and exposed her to the fine arts.  From both, Rice learned the value of faith in the face of hardship and the importance of giving back to the community.  Her parents’ fierce unwillingness to set limits propelled her to the venerable halls of Stanford University, where she quickly rose through the ranks to become the university’s second-in-command.  An expert in Soviet and Eastern European Affairs, she played a leading role in U.S. policy as the Iron Curtain fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated.  Less than a decade later, at the apex of the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, she received the exciting news – just shortly before her father’s death – that she would go on to the White House as the first female National Security Advisor. 
 
As comfortable describing lighthearted family moments as she is recalling the poignancy of her mother’s cancer battle and the heady challenge of going toe-to-toe with Soviet leaders, Rice holds nothing back in this remarkably candid telling. This is the story of Condoleezza Rice that has never been told, not that of an ultra-accomplished world leader, but of a little girl – and a young woman — trying to find her place in a sometimes hostile world and of two exceptional parents, and an extended family and community, that made all the difference.

   Shakespeare called Othello "an extravagant and wheeling stranger/Of here and every where." In this exciting anthology, Caryl Phillips has collected writings by thirty-nine extravagant strangers: British writers who were born outside of Britain and see it with clear and critical eyes.  These eloquent and incisive voices prove that English literature, far from being pure or homogenous, has in fact been shaped and influenced by outsiders for over two hundred years.

   Here are slave writers, such as Ignatius Sancho, an eightieth century African who became a friend to Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne; writers born in the colonies such as Thackeray, Kipling, and Orwell; "subject writers," such as C.L.R. James and V.S. Naipaul; foreign émigrés, such as Joseph Conrad and Kazuo Ishiguro; and postcolonial observers of the British scene, such as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and Anita Desai.  With the eloquent and often inspiring collection, Phillips proves, if proof be needed, that the greatest literature is often born out of irreconcilable tensions between a writer and his or her society.

The 25th-anniversary edition of Juan Williams’s celebrated account of the tumultuous early years of the civil rights movement

From the Montgomery bus boycott to the Little Rock Nine to the Selma–Montgomery march, thousands of ordinary people who participated in the American civil rights movement; their stories are told in Eyes on the Prize. From leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., to lesser-known figures such as Barbara Rose John and Jim Zwerg, each man and woman made the decision that somethinghad to be done to stop discrimination. These moving accounts and pictures of the first decade of the civil rights movement are a tribute to the people, black and white, who took part in the fight for justice and the struggle they endured.

Book by Yerby, Frank

The first volume of a new series follows the adventures of four girls at their first year at a performing arts junior high school, during which Jessie, a spirited young African-American girl, explores racial differences and hides a painful secret. Original.

In this wise, beguiling, beautiful novel set in the era of the Civil War, an award-winning playwright and author paints a haunting portrait of a woman named Always, born a slave, and four generations of her African-American family.

The fire and rescue squad from Los Angeles County’s Fire Department Station Twenty-seven’s “C-Shift” was a rock-solid team. The camaraderie among them was only made stronger by the fact that they were all minority. But when their unit becomes the prey of a perverse trickster, their loyalties to one another are deepened to the core.

Someone on the inside is trying to sabotage C-Shift, and Jerome White and his longtime mentor, Capt. Lloyd Frederickson, are certain it’s racially motivated. When the Fire Department chief balks at an internal investigation, Lloyd and Jerome have no choice but to take matters into their own hands.

Jerome and Lloyd’s personal problems further complicate their lives. After thirty years of marriage, Lloyd’s wife, Nellie, wants a divorce, even though their sex life is still deliciously hot. And while Jerome and Nicolle are deeply in love, Mychel Hernandez, a Hispanic bombshell at the station, has set her sights on Jerome. But his attentions soon turn to a horrific car accident involving Nicolle. As Jerome is thrown headfirst into this nightmare, he must face life as a single father, a critically ill spouse, Mychel turning up the heat with her advances, and an overwhelming sense of fear and apprehension about where the menace will next strike.

From the #1 bestselling author Parry “EbonySatin” Brown comes her anticipated hardcover debut—a fast-paced, multilayered story of extraordinary characters grappling with issues of race, family, love, and deceit. In Fannin’ the Flames, she brings readers to the forefront of the lives of our most revered men—and the women they love.


From the Hardcover edition.

Stuff doesn’t know anyone when he first moves to 116th Street. But all of that changes when he meets Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Gloria. Stuff and the gang grow close that eventful year, and nothing is ever like it again. That’s the year modern science gets them all in jail; Stuff falls in love and is unfaithful; and Cool Clyde and Fast Sam win the dance contest-almost.

Denzel Watson is a fast talker with a system, and it’s made him valedictorian. But when he goes to a summer program at Princeton, he takes a fall. How can he tell his proud family that he won’t be able to cut it in the Ivy League? Instead, he spends the rest of the summer selling candy, up against "Top Man" Mello, a drop-out with a police record. For the first time, Denzel is forced to take a hard look at himself — and how much further he could fall."Williams-Garcia confronts some crucial issues that are generally ignored in YA fiction: issues of class and race, friendship and competition, identity and failure." — Booklist"Teens everywhere will be able to identify and commiserate with Denzel." School Library Journal, starred review

With resonant artistry and unflagging directness, Wideman examines the tragedy of race and the gulf it cleaves between black fathers and black sons. He does so chiefly through the lens of his own relations with his remote father, producing a memoir that belongs alongside the classics of Richard Wright and Malcolm X.

FDR’S New Deal, which followed the 1929 stock market crash, was a hugely influential moment in the history of the United States, encompassing everything from the arts to finance, labor to legislation, and some think it helped bring the country out of the Great Depression. Here, Tonya Bolden, writing in her trademark accessible style, creates a portrait of a time that changed American history both then and now.

FDR’s First 100 Days and how the United States was changed by it then are closely examined, especially now. The 2009 financial situation is eerily mirrored by that of the late 1920s, and this is a perfect book to help teens understand history and its lasting impact on current events.

From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays

Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.

Arranged into five sections—In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free—this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network—and Facebook itself—really about? "It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes—and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat."

Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith’s own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive—and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.

 The 1987 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for DramaFrom August Wilson, author of The Piano Lesson and the 1984-85 Broadway season’s best play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, is another powerful, stunning dramatic work that has won him numerous critical acclaim including the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. The protagonist of Fences (part of Wilson’s ten-part “Pittsburgh Cycle” plays), Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive.  Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s… a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can…a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less…

It’s almost summer in New York City, and the heat is breaking records on the street and between the sheets in Geneva Holliday’s beyond-sexy follow-up to Groove. When Geneva, Crystal, Chevy, and Noah get hot and bothered, they get way more than they ever bargained for…

Geneva is busy caring for her daughter—and robbing the cradle with her son’s business manager. Chevy is working for a diva who requires assistance that’s way too personal for Chevy’s liking. Crystal is in for the surprise of her life when her mom (!) conspires to get Crystal’s engine purring like a kitten again. And Noah hears everyone’s secrets, miles away in London, but with these friends, secrets don’t stay secret for long! After all, what are friends for?

So slip into something slinky and get ready to catch the Fever!

By turns subtle and intense, disturbing and elusive, the stories in this collection are ultimately connected by themes of memory and loss, reality and fabrication, and by a richless of language that rests lightly on its carefully foundation.

MORE THAN 100 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY IS NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

Daunted by the singular tastes and dark secrets of the beautiful, tormented young entrepreneur Christian Grey, Anastasia Steele has broken off their relationship to start a new career with a Seattle publishing house. 
 
But desire for Christian still dominates her every waking thought, and when he proposes a new arrangement, Anastasia cannot resist. They rekindle their searing sensual affair, and Anastasia learns more about the harrowing past of her damaged, driven and demanding Fifty Shades.
 
While Christian wrestles with his inner demons, Anastasia must confront the anger and envy of the women who came before her, and make the most important decision of her life.

This book is intended for mature audiences.

When literature student Anastasia Steele goes to interview young entrepreneur Christian Grey, she encounters a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating. The unworldly, innocent Ana is startled to realize she wants this man and, despite his enigmatic reserve, finds she is desperate to get close to him. Unable to resist Ana’s quiet beauty, wit, and independent spirit, Grey admits he wants her, too—but on his own terms. Shocked yet thrilled by Grey’s singular erotic tastes, Ana hesitates. For all the trappings of success—his multinational businesses, his vast wealth, his loving family—Grey is a man tormented by demons and consumed by the need to control. When the couple embarks on a daring, passionately physical affair, Ana discovers Christian Grey’s secrets and explores her own dark desires.

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY IS NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
Now available as a three-volume paperback boxed set, E L James’s New York Times #1 bestselling trilogy has been hailed by Entertainment Weekly as being “in a class by itself.” Beginning with the GoodReads Choice Award Romance Finalist Fifty Shades of Grey, the Fifty Shades Trilogy will obsess you, possess you, and stay with you forever.
 
This boxed set includes the following novels:
 
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY: When college student Anastasia Steele goes to interview young entrepreneur Christian Grey, she encounters a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating.  The unworldly Ana realizes she wants this man, and Grey admits he wants her, too—but on his own terms. When the couple embarks on a daring, passionately physical affair, Ana discovers Christian’s secrets and explores her own desires.
 
FIFTY SHADES DARKER: Daunted by Christian’s dark secrets and singular tastes, Ana has broken off their relationship to start a new career. But desire for Christian still dominates her every waking thought. They rekindle their searing sensual affair, and while Christian wrestles with his inner demons, Ana is forced to make the most important decision of her life.
 
FIFTY SHADES FREED: Now, Ana and Christian have it all—love, passion, intimacy, wealth, and a world of possibilities for their future. But Ana knows that loving her Fifty Shades will not be easy, and that being together will pose challenges that neither of them would anticipate. Just when it seems that their strength together will eclipse any obstacle, misfortune, malice, and fate conspire to turn Ana’s deepest fears into reality.

This book is intended for mature audiences.

The African-American contribution to winning World War II has never been celebrated as profoundly as in Fighting for America. In this inspirational and uniquely personal tribute, the essential part played by black servicemen and -women in that cataclysmic conflict is brought home.

Here are letters, photographs, oral histories, and rare documents, collected by historian Christopher Moore, the son of two black WWII veterans. Weaving his family history with that of his people and nation, Moore has created an unforgettable tapestry of sacrifice, fortitude, and courage. From the 1,800 black soldiers who landed at Normandy Beach on D-Day, and the legendary Tuskegee Airmen who won ninety-five Distinguished Flying Crosses, to the 761st Tank Battalion who, under General Patton, helped liberate Nazi death camps, the invaluable effort of black Americans to defend democracy is captured in word and image.

Readers will be introduced to many unheralded heroes who helped America win the war, including Dorie Miller, the messman who manned a machine gun and downed four Japanese planes; Robert Brooks, the first American to die in armored battle; Lt. Jackie Robinson, the future baseball legend who faced court-martial for refusing to sit in the back of a military bus; an until now forgotten African-American philosopher who helped save many lives at a Japanese POW camp; even the author’s own parents: his mother, Kay, a WAC when she met his father, Bill, who was part of the celebrated Red Ball Express.

Yet Fighting for America is more than a testimonial; it is also a troubling story of profound contradictions, of a country still in the throes of segregation, of a domestic battleground where arrests and riots occurred simultaneously with foreign service–and of how the war helped spotlight this disparity and galvanize the need for civil rights. Featuring a unique perspective on black soldiers, Fighting for America will move any reader: all who, like the author, owe their lives to those who served.


From the Hardcover edition.

A professional job turns personal for jet-setting contract killer Gideon in this sexy, thrilling page-turner by New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey. 

As a hit man from the time he was very young, money, women, and danger have always ruled Gideon’s life; but for the first time, the job is taking its toll. Neither Gideon nor the city of Buenos Aires has recovered from the mayhem caused during Gideon’s last job. But before the dust has settled and the bodies have been buried, Gideon calls in backup—including the lovely Hawks, with whom Gideon has heated memories—to launch his biggest act of revenge yet…one he believes will destroy his adversary, Midnight, once and for all.

Yet Midnight and his second-in-command, the beautiful and ruthless Señorita Raven, are launching their own revenge, assembling a team of mercenaries the likes of which the world has never seen… and Gideon isn’t their only target. Gideon will need all of his skills if he is to save not only his team, but his family as well.

Dickey’s new novel stirs up a whirlwind of sex and violence that spans the globe…and leaves no moral boundary uncrossed.

In this elegant book of photographs, personal narrative, memories, and fascinating historical detail, bestselling author Jill Nelson conveys the special magic of Martha’s Vineyard and the African Americans who have summered or lived there for generations.

Jill Nelson has been a summer and occasional year-round resident of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard for nearly fifty years. It was where she learned to swim and ride a bike, first kissed a boy, became a writer, and, during twenty-eight summers, raised her own daughter. In Finding Martha’s Vineyard, Nelson offers a lively, intimate portrait of a place that has provided respite and rejuvenation, community and contemplation for generations of African Americans.

Part memoir, part history, Finding Martha’s Vineyard describes the various groups that settled on the Vineyard and in Oak Bluffs; slaves and their descendants; devout Methodists and Baptists; African Americans “in service” who accompanied their white employers to the island and over the years established a haven and a community; the black middle-class families who came each summer to escape the heat, hostility, and racial tension of their hometowns; and generations of African American professionals—doctors, presidential advisors, writers, academics and artists—who visit or live on the Vineyard today. Nelson interviews the Cottagers, the proud owners of Oak Bluffs’ famous Gingerbread cottages; members of the Polar Bear Club, a die-hard group that swims together every summer morning at 7:30 A.M.; and such famous residents as Vernon Jordan, Bebe Moore Campbell, and Stephen Carter.

Finding Martha’s Vineyard is about the power of place in our lives. A rich treasury of reminiscences, excerpts from news articles and documents from the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, recipes, and glorious photographs, it brings the sights, sounds, celebrations, and social importance of the island community brilliantly to life.

Finding Oprah’s Roots will not only endow readers with a new appreciation for the key contributions made by history’s unsung but also equip them with the tools to connect to pivotal figures in their own past. A roadmap through the intricacies of public documents and online databases, the book also highlights genetic testing resources that can make it possible to know one’s distant tribal roots in Africa.
For Oprah, the path back to the past was emotion-filled and profoundly illuminating, connecting the narrative of her family to the larger American narrative and “anchoring” her in a way not previously possible. For the reader, Finding Oprah’s Roots offers the possibility of an equally rewarding experience.

Winner of the 2015 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award
In her debut picture book, Misty Copeland tells the story of a young girl--an every girl--whose confidence is fragile and who is questioning her own ability to reach the heights that Misty has reached. Misty encourages this young girl's faith in herself and shows her exactly how, through hard work and dedication, she too can become Firebird.

Lyrical and affecting text paired with bold, striking illustrations that are some of Caldecott Honoree Christopher Myers's best work, makes Firebird perfect for aspiring ballerinas everywhere.

Derived from interviews with a wide range of  people who experienced or observed New York’s 1991  Crown Heights racial riots, Fires In The  Mirror is as distinguished a work of  commentary on black-white tensions as it is a  work of drama.  In August 1991 simmering tensions in the racially polarized Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood of Crown Heights exploded into riots after a black boy was killed by a car in a rabbi’s motorcade and a Jewish student was slain by blacks in retaliation.  Fires in the Mirror is dramatist Anna Deavere Smith’s stunning exploration of the events and emotions leading up to and following the Crown Heights conflict.  Through her portrayals of more than two dozen Crown eights adversaries, victims, and eyewitnesses, using verbatim excerpts from their observations derived from interviews she conducted, Smith provides a brilliant, Rashoman-like documentary portrait of contemporary ethnic turmoil.

Humorous, “feel good” new fiction from James McBride, the first since The Good Lord Bird, one of the bestselling, most critically acclaimed books on AALBC.com.

The previously unpublished stories in Five-Carat Soul spring from the place where identity, humanity, and history converge. They’re funny and poignant, insightful and unpredictable, imaginative and authentic—all told with McBride’s unrivaled storytelling skill and meticulous eye for character and detail. McBride explores the ways we learn from the world and the people around us. An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. And members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives.

As McBride did in his National Book award-winning The Good Lord Bird and his bestselling The Color of Water, he writes with humor and insight about how we struggle to understand who we are in a world we don’t fully comprehend. The result is a surprising, perceptive, and evocative collection of stories that is also a moving exploration of our human condition.

From the gifted author of A Little Piece of Sky: The poignant tale of a young woman who must come to terms with her biracial identity.

Shana Washington is the product of two very different worlds. Her white mother is a socialite with an Ivy League education; Shana’s black father has a weakness for whiskey and can’t stay faithful to any woman, but when his daughter is in peril, he always finds a way to rescue her. Hauntingly evoking the worlds represented by these three characters, Floating follows the life of Shana as she seeks acceptance—and wholeness—from white and black communities that both turn her away. When she begins a college romance with Lionel, a handsome track star with bronze-colored skin, her dreams of finding a soulmate seem tantalizingly close to coming true. Yet Lionel’s childhood demons are even more vicious than Shana’s, threatening the fragile love they can’t admit to needing.

Tracing the themes of identity, healing, and self-acceptance that won such acclaim for her debut novel, Nicole Bailey-Williams now shares a provocative new storyline for anyone who has faith in the power of self-discovery.

Written between 1937 and 1954 and now available in paperback for the first time, these thirteen stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison. Six of them remained unpublished during Ellison’s lifetime and were discovered among the author’s effects in a folder labeled "Early Stories." But they all bear the hallmarks—the thematic reach, musically layered voices, and sheer ebullience—that Ellison would bring to his classic Invisible Man.

The tales in Flying Home range in setting from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlor, from the hobo jungles of the Great Depression to Wales during the Second World War. By turns lyrical, scathing, touching, and transcendently wise, Flying Home and Other Stories is a historic volume, an extravagant last bequest from a giant of our literature.

Whether it is basketball dreams, family fiascos, first crushes, or new neighborhoods, this bold anthology—written by the best children’s authors—celebrates the uniqueness and universality in all of us.
 
In a partnership with We Need Diverse Books, industry giants Kwame Alexander, Soman Chainani, Matt de la Peña, Tim Federle, Grace Lin, Meg Medina, Walter Dean Myers, Tim Tingle, and Jacqueline Woodson join newcomer Kelly J. Baptist in a story collection that is as humorous as it is heartfelt. This impressive group of authors has earned among them every major award in children’s publishing and popularity as New York Times bestsellers. From these distinguished authors come ten distinct and vibrant stories.

“There’s plenty of magic in this collection to go around.” —Booklist, Starred

“A natural for middle school classrooms and libraries.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred

“Inclusive, authentic, and eminently readable.” —School Library Journal, Starred

“Thought provoking and wide-ranging . . . should not be missed.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred

“Read more books by these authors.” —The Bulletin, Starred

The four most powerful African American women in politics share the story of their friendship and how it has changed politics in America.The lives of black women in American politics are remarkably absent from the shelves of bookstores and libraries. For Colored Girls Who Have Consider Politics is a sweeping view of American history from the vantage points of four women who have lived and worked behind the scenes in politics for over thirty years?Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore?a group of women who call themselves The Colored Girls. Like many people who have spent their careers in public service, they view their lives in four-year waves where presidential campaigns and elections have been common threads. For most of the Colored Girls, their story starts with Jesse Jackson’s first campaign for president. From there, they went on to work on the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Over the years, they’ve filled many roles: in the corporate world, on campaigns, in unions, in churches, in their own businesses and in the White House. Through all of this, they’ve worked with those who have shaped our country’s history?US Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, well-known political figures such as Terry McAuliffe and Howard Dean, and legendary activists and historical figures such as Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, and Betty Shabazz. For Colored Girls Who Consider Politics is filled with personal stories that bring to life heroic figures we all know and introduce us to some of those who’ve worked behind the scenes but are still hidden. Whatever their perch, the Colored Girls are always focused on the larger goal of “hurrying history” so that every American ? regardless of race, gender or religious background ? can have a seat at the table. This is their story.

The award-winning “lively and excellent collection” (Los Angeles Times) about the South and its legacy, about African-American griefs and passages, from the author of Jelly Roll and Black Maria, a poet who has “set himself apart from his peers with his supple, variable, blues-inflected lines” (Publishers Weekly).

From an acclaimed, award-winning novelist comes this brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact: the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak resoundingly to the problem of race in British society.

With his characteristic grace and forceful prose, Phillips describes the lives of three very different men: Francis Barber, “given” to the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson, whose friendship with Johnson led to his wretched demise; Randolph Turpin, a boxing champion who ended his life in debt and decrepitude; and David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949 and whose death at the hands of police twenty years later was a wake up call for the entire nation. As Phillips weaves together these three stories, he illuminates the complexities of race relations and social constraints with devastating results.

The high priestess of the hood, Nikki Turner, is back with the novel fans have been feenin’ for: the sequel to her #1 bestselling novel, A Hustler’s Wife.

Des, Virginia’s slickest gangsta, is about to become a dad when he is charged with the murder of his own attorney. But with Yarni, his gorgeous wife (and a brilliant lawyer), now calling the shots, Des isn’t going back to the slammer without a fierce fight. Even with the heat on, Des manages to take his game to the next level and finds a new hustle, one that will allow him to possess the three things all major players desire: money, power, and respect. He becomes a preacher. Reluctantly, Yarni stands by her man as he trades in his triple beam scale for a Bible and a Bentley and makes his Church of the Good Life Ministry a welcoming place for all sinners to step up to the altar.

But when Des’s nephew is killed in the high-stakes heroin trade and Des learns that someone close to him okayed the hit, the dyed-in-the-wool gangsta sets aside the Bible for the gospel of the streets–even if it means risking the one person who’s always had his back.

Get fit like 50 Cent: The phenomenally fit superstar rapper reveals his strategic six-week workout plan for achieving a ripped body and developing the mental toughness to stay in shape for a lifetime.

Survival is a recurring theme of 50 Cent’s lyrics, and his life. That’s why, with obesity rates soaring and fitness levels declining, he wants to give everyone an all-access pass to his premium plan for lifelong fitness. In Formula 50, the mega-successful entertainer and entrepreneur unleashes the power of metabolic resistance training (MRT), the key ingredient that has helped him achieve the famously buff physique that makes his music videos sizzle.

Through MRT, 50 Cent’s fitness plan breaks down the barriers between traditional weight training and cardio workouts, accelerating fat loss while building muscle and improving overall fitness. Designed for a six-week rollout for total mind-body transformation, the Formula 50 regimen builds willpower while it builds physical power. In addition to motivation, nutrition is another key element; readers will discover the unique dietary combinations that fuel 50 Cent’s workouts. Coauthored with Jeff O

Connell, health journalist and editor-in-chief at Bodybuilding.com (the world’s largest fitness website), the book delivers a payoff that goes beyond six-pack abs and flab-free pecs: This is a fitness plan that boosts energy, endurance, flexibility, and mobility. The result is a body you

ve always dreamed of and the mindset to attain the rest of your dreams.

From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry their talent built.

Provocative and controversial, Rhoden’s $40 Million Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of black athletes in the United States, from the plantation to their beginnings in nineteenth-century boxing rings to the history-making accomplishments of notable figures such as Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, and Willie Mays. Rhoden reveals that black athletes’ “evolution” has merely been a journey from literal plantations—where sports were introduced as diversions to quell revolutionary stirrings—to today’s figurative ones, in the form of collegiate and professional sports programs. He details the “conveyor belt” that brings kids from inner cities and small towns to big-time programs, where they’re cut off from their roots and exploited by team owners, sports agents, and the media. He also sets his sights on athletes like Michael Jordan, who he says have abdicated their responsibility to the community with an apathy that borders on treason.

The power black athletes have today is as limited as when masters forced their slaves to race and fight. The primary difference is, today’s shackles are often the athletes’ own making.

From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry their talent built.

Provocative and controversial, Rhoden’s $40 Million Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of black athletes in the United States, from the plantation to their beginnings in nineteenth-century boxing rings and at the first Kentucky Derby to the history-making accomplishments of notable figures such as Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, and Willie Mays. Rhoden makes the cogent argument that black athletes’ “evolution” has merely been a journey from literal plantations—where sports were introduced as diversions to quell revolutionary stirrings—to today’s figurative ones, in the form of collegiate and professional sports programs. Weaving in his own experiences growing up on Chicago’s South Side, playing college football for an all-black university, and his decades as a sportswriter, Rhoden contends that black athletes’ exercise of true power is as limited today as when masters forced their slaves to race and fight. The primary difference is, today’s shackles are often of their own making.

Every advance made by black athletes, Rhoden explains, has been met with a knee-jerk backlash—one example being Major League Baseball’s integration of the sport, which stripped the black-controlled Negro League of its talent and left it to founder. He details the “conveyor belt” that brings kids from inner cities and small towns to big-time programs, where they’re cut off from their roots and exploited by team owners, sports agents, and the media. He also sets his sights on athletes like Michael Jordan, who he says have abdicated their responsibility to the community with an apathy that borders on treason.

Sweeping and meticulously detailed, $40 Million Slaves is an eye-opening exploration of a metaphor we only thought we knew.

Another hip and hilarious, sexy and wise novel about relationships-from the Blackboard bestselling author of Good Peoples.

Best friends since their college days, Ibn, Colin, Michael, and Dexter share something unusual in common: Her name is Erika-"Bunches" to her friends. She’s the kid sister of a friend who died, and the four buddies have promised to look out for her. But now she’s all grown up-a twenty-four-year-old knockout of a medical student who’s arousing some not-so-sisterly feelings in the brothers.

When one of them acts on those feelings, they will all-including Erika-discover how far they’re willing to go in the name of friendship, loyalty, and love. The result is this savvy, entertaining novel filled with the wit, humor, and right-on observations about contemporary relationships that distinguished Good Peoples.

Four Guys and Trouble is the irresistible follow-up to Marcus Major’s acclaimed debut novel-and one certain to win this gifted author a wealth of captivated new readers.

Frankie’s Angels will become the next "Waiting to Exhale". This one comes with a Maze Concert. Cynthia Harris Casteel tells the story of five women who call themselves "Frankie’s Angels". Their love for Frankie Beverly and Maze has helped them endure the joys and pains of life. They discovered their common denominator on the Maze website and now they are on their way to Washington D.C. to meet at the first Angel Convention and a Maze concert. Some are actually expecting a surprise visit by Mr. Beverly. Before they get to the convention and concert, their life stories are revealed. The reader gets to understand why a Maze Concert is a necessity for these ladies. Frankie’s Angels are deeply in need of a spiritual healing and only Maze featuring Frankie Beverly can be the "fix". Although this work is fiction, Cynthia incorporates real facts about their favorite singer, Frankie Beverly. The reader gets a taste of facts mixed with a toss of fiction. Your imagination will take you along with them to a Maze concert. If you have never attended a Maze concert, this book will take you there and if you have had the fortune of attending a Maze concert, you’ll understand exactly what they feel. Though the name "Frankie’s Angels" gives the angels an angelic tone, you’ll be shocked to know the real deal about some of the angels from their past to the present. Come meet, Candice, Tish, Twana, Mozelle and Ernestine….divine messengers of light. Be prepared to laugh and cry as you travel on the wings of "Frankie’s Angels". Happy Feelings!

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle

€¢ The Plain Dealer The inspiring true story of a group of young men whose lives were changed by a visionary mentor

  On April 4, 1968, the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., shocked the nation. Later that month, the Reverend John Brooks, a professor of theology at the College of the Holy Cross who shared Dr. King’s dream of an integrated society, drove up and down the East Coast searching for African American high school students to recruit to the school, young men he felt had the potential to succeed if given an opportunity. Among the twenty students he had a hand in recruiting that year were Clarence Thomas, the future Supreme Court justice; Edward P. Jones, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature; and Theodore Wells, who would become one of the nation’s most successful defense attorneys. Many of the others went on to become stars in their fields as well.

  In Fraternity, Diane Brady follows five of the men through their college years. Not only did the future president of Holy Cross convince the young men to attend the school, he also obtained full scholarships to support them, and then mentored, defended, coached, and befriended them through an often challenging four years of college, pushing them to reach for goals that would sustain them as adults.

  Would these young men have become the leaders they are today without Father Brooks’s involvement? Fraternity is a triumphant testament to the power of education and mentorship, and a compelling argument for the difference one person can make in the lives of others.

In spare, elegant stories reminiscent of the writings of Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West, Anika Nailah illuminates the emotional, spiritual, and social realities that shape–and sometimes destroy–the lives and dreams of ordinary African Americans.

The stories in Free offer a moving, strikingly original perspective on how cultural experiences and social assumptions impact our lives. The characters include young children trying to cope with the mysteries of adult behavior, adults striving to define themselves in a society unwilling to accept who and what they are, and elderly people looking back on the often difficult choices they have made. They all share a yearning to be free of the ties imposed by others, ties that bind their bodies, minds, or spirits.

"Trudy" depicts a battle of wills between a black salesclerk and a white customer, shining a harsh light on the bigotry of the 1950s. In "My Side of the Story," a little boy struggles to understand why his mother has abandoned him despite her claims that she loves him. “All These Years” is a touching vignette about a couple married for fifty-four years who reminisce about the attraction they felt at their very first meeting and realize that the magic still remains. In the aptly titled "Inside Out," a man who has adopted all the trappings of the white world–the hair, the clothes, the speech, the attitudes–finds himself still ostracized in his office and gently mocked at home by a wife who embraces her blackness with pride.

In probing the interior landscapes behind the everyday faces her characters assume, Anika Nailah brilliantly exposes the injustices and struggles African Americans confront, the skills they develop in order to survive, and the psychological and spiritual costs of survival.

“History happens one person at a time.”
–Patricia Stephens Due

Patricia Stephens Due fought for justice during the height of the Civil Rights era, surrendering her very freedom to ensure that the rights of others might someday be protected. Her daughter, Tananarive, grew up deeply enmeshed in the values of a family committed to making right whatever they saw as wrong. Together, they have written a paean to the movement–its struggles, its nameless foot-soldiers, and its achievements–and an incisive examination of the future of justice in this country. Their mother-daughter journey spanning the struggles of two generations is an unforgettable story.

In 1960, when she was a student at Florida A&M University, Patricia and her sister Priscilla were part of the movement’s landmark “jail-in,” the first time during the student sit-in movement when protestors served their time rather than paying a fine. She and her sister, and three FAMU students, spent forty-nine days behind bars rather than pay for the “crime” of sitting at a Woolworth lunch counter. Thus began a lifelong commitment to human rights. Patricia and her husband, civil rights lawyer John Due, worked tirelessly with many of the movement’s greatest figures throughout the sixties to bring about change, particularly in the Deep Southern state of Florida.

Freedom in the Family chronicles these years with fascinating, raw power. Featuring interviews with civil rights leaders like Black Panther Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and ordinary citizens whose heroism has been largely unknown, this is a sweeping, multivoiced account of the battle for civil rights in America. It also reveals those leaders’ potentially controversial feelings about the current state of our nation, a country where police brutality and crippling disparities for blacks and whites in health care, education, employment, and criminal justice still exist today.

A mother writes so that the civil liberties she struggled for are not eroded, so that others will take up the mantle and continue to fight against injustice and discrimination. Her daughter, as part of the integration generation, writes to say thank you, to show the previous generation how very much they’ve done and how much better off she is for their effort–despite all the work that remains. Their combined message is remarkable, moving, and important. It makes for riveting reading.

Patricia Stephens Due fought for justice during the height of the Civil Rights era. Her daughter, Tananarive, grew up deeply enmeshed in the values of a family committed to making right whatever they saw as wrong. Together, in alternating chapters, they have written a paean to the movement—its hardships, its nameless foot soldiers, and its achievements—and an incisive examination of the future of justice in this country. Their mother-daughter journey spanning two generations of struggles is an unforgettable story.

Patricia Stephens Due fought for justice during the height of the Civil Rights era, surrendering her very freedom to ensure that the rights of others might someday be protected. Her daughter, Tananarive, grew up deeply enmeshed in the values of a family committed to making right whatever they saw as wrong. Together, they have written a paean to the movement'its struggles, its nameless foot-soldiers, and its achievements'and an incisive examination of the future of justice in this country. Their mother-daughter journey spanning the struggles of two generations is an unforgettable story.

Patricia Stephens Due was a civil rights activist with CORE while attending Florida A&M University. In 1960, based on her nonviolent stand during a landmark jail-in, she received the prestigious Gandhi Award. She is married to a civil rights lawyer, has three daughters, and continues to work for change in America. Over the years, she has conducted civil rights workshops and re-enactments for colleges, public schools, civic groups, and churches. She lives in Miami, Florida, with her husband, John Due. Photo: Troy Johnson

In 1960, when she was a student at Florida A&M University, Patricia and her sister Priscilla were part of the movement's landmark 'jail-in,' the first time during the student sit-in movement when protestors served their time rather than paying a fine. She and her sister, and three FAMU students, spent forty-nine days behind bars rather than pay for the 'crime' of sitting at a Woolworth lunch counter. Thus began a lifelong commitment to human rights. Patricia and her husband, civil rights lawyer John Due, worked tirelessly with many of the movement's greatest figures throughout the sixties to bring about change, particularly in the Deep Southern state of Florida.

Freedom in the Family chronicles these years with fascinating, raw power. Featuring interviews with civil rights leaders like Black Panther Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and ordinary citizens whose heroism has been largely unknown, this is a sweeping, multivoicedaccount of the battle for civil rights in America. It also reveals those leaders' potentially controversial feelings about the current state of our nation, a country where police brutality and crippling disparities for blacks and whites in health care, education, employment, and criminal justice still exist today.

A mother writes so that the civil liberties she struggled for are not eroded, so that others will take up the mantle and continue to fight against injustice and discrimination. Her daughter, as part of the integration generation, writes to say thank you, to show the previous generation how very much they've done and how much better off she is for their effort'despite all the work that remains. Their combined message is remarkable, moving, and important. It makes for riveting reading.

Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins

Ric Murphy’s award-winning book, Freedom Road: An American Family Saga from Jamestown to World War is an historic account of the oldest recorded African American family, and their participation and rich contributions to American history over a four hundred year period. It is a compilation of well-documented individual stories that begins in Africa in 1483, and from there, spans over fifteen generations and three continents, and definitively changes our understanding of American history, showcasing the significant role that one African American family has played from colonial American history to present day.

Freedom Road is an exciting and compelling American saga that captivates readers with the story of the enslavement of John Gowen, one of the first Africans brought to America, and the first to be set free; the story of Thomas and Rebecca Cornell, forced to leave England because of their religious beliefs, and how they became known as the family of Presidents; and the story of the daring escape of Othello and Thomas Fraction from their cruel, vindictive slave master, himself the brother of a Confederate Senator and the son of a Virginia governor.

Freedom Road is enthralling, resounding, and evocative; it challenges the reader to have a better understanding of American history, and inspires them to learn about their own family history. If you like history, family sagas or intrigue, Freedom Road is a must read.

A majestic history of the summer of ’64, which forever changed race relations in America

In the summer of 1964, with the civil rights movement stalled, seven hundred college students descended on Mississippi to register black voters, teach in Freedom Schools, and live in sharecroppers’ shacks. But by the time their first night in the state had ended, three volunteers were dead, black churches had burned, and America had a new definition of freedom.

This remarkable chapter in American history, the basis for the controversial film Mississippi Burning, is now the subject of Bruce Watson’s thoughtful and riveting historical narrative. Using in- depth interviews with participants and residents, Watson brilliantly captures the tottering legacy of Jim Crow in Mississippi and the chaos that brought such national figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Pete Seeger to the state. Freedom Summer presents finely rendered portraits of the courageous black citizens-and Northern volunteers-who refused to be intimidated in their struggle for justice, and the white Mississippians who would kill to protect a dying way of life. Few books have provided such an intimate look at race relations during the deadliest days of the Civil Rights movement, and Freedom Summer will appeal to readers of Taylor Branch and Doug Blackmon.

In partnership with We Need Diverse Books, thirteen of the most recognizable, diverse authors come together in this remarkable YA anthology featuring ten short stories, a graphic short story, and a one-act play from Walter Dean Myers never before in-print.

Careful—you are holding fresh ink. And not hot-off-the-press, still-drying-in-your-hands ink. Instead, you are holding twelve stories with endings that are still being written—whose next chapters are up to you.

Because these stories are meant to be read. And shared.

Thirteen of the most accomplished YA authors deliver a label-defying anthology that includes ten short stories, a graphic novel, and a one-act play. This collection will inspire you to break conventions, bend the rules, and color outside the lines. All you need is fresh ink.

Tracie Howard is back with all of the Gucci, glitz, and glamour in this steamy follow-up to her smash hit Gold Diggers!
Gillian Tillman learned all about landing a wealthy man from her globe-trotting mother, Imelda, but this second-generation gold digger has a style all her own. With big dreams of becoming a huge star, she slept her way right into the million-dollar mansion of her now-husband, star-producer Brandon Russell. He not only launched Gillian’s film career, but landed her the starring and Oscar-nominated role in the hit film Gold Diggers. But all that glitters may not be gold. Gillian wrestles with the real possibility that Brandon may be a mob-connected money launderer, and worse yet, may have had a hand in the murder of her friend Paulette. When pictures of her naked surface on the Internet, both Gillian’s Oscar dreams and her marriage are threatened, even though she swears they aren’t of her. Meanwhile her best friends are struggling with issues of their own. Reese’s beloved son falls ill and she’s forced to decide between spilling a long-kept secret and saving his life, and Lauren’s hard-won happiness is threatened by a shocking betrayal.
Buckle your seatbelt as the lives of these larger-than-life characters intersect in a wild, page-turning romp.

Written with complete conviction from a woman’s point of view, Nuruddin Farah’s spare, shocking first novel savagely attacks the traditional values of his people yet is also a haunting celebration of the unbroken human spirit. Ebla, an orphan of eighteen, runs away from her nomadic encampment in rural Somalia when she discovers that her grandfather has promised her in marriage to an older man. But even after her escape to Mogadishu, she finds herself as powerless and dependent on men as she was out in the bush. As she is propelled through servitude, marriage, poverty, and violence, Ebla has to fight to retain her identity in a world where women are "sold like cattle."

From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean is about 30 million people scattered across an arc of islands — Jamaica, Haiti, Barbados, Antigua, Martinique, Trinidad, among others-separated by the languages and cultures of their colonizers, but joined together, nevertheless, by a common heritage. For whether French, English, Dutch, Spanish, Danish, or-latterly-American, the nationality of their masters has made only a notional difference to the peoples of the Caribbean. The history of the Caribbean is dominated by the history of sugar, which is inseparable from the history of slavery; which was inseparable, until recently, from the systematic degradation of labor in the region. Here, for the first time, is a definitive work about a profoundly important but neglected and misrepresented area of the world.

This is the dramatic, exciting, authoritative story of the experiences of African Americans from the time they left Africa to their continued struggle for equality at the end of the twentieth century.

Since its original publication in 1947, From Slavery to Freedom has stood as the definitive his-tory of African Americans. Coauthors John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., give us a vividly detailed account of the journey of African Americans from their origins in the civilizations of Africa, through their years of slavery in the New World, to the successful struggle for freedom and its aftermath in the West Indies, Latin America, and the United States.

This eighth edition has been revised to include expanded coverage of Africa; additional material in every chapter on the history and current situation of African Americans in the United States; new charts, maps, and black-and-white illustrations; and a third four-page color insert. The authors incorporate recent scholarship to examine slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the period between World War I and World War II (including the Harlem Renaissance).

From Slavery to Freedom describes the rise of slavery, the interaction of European and African cultures in the New World, and the emergence of a distinct culture and way of life among slaves and free blacks. The authors examine the role of blacks in the nation’s wars, the rise of an articulate, restless free black community by the end of the eighteenth century, and the growing resistance to slavery among an expanding segment of the black population.

The book deals in considerable detail with the period after slavery, including the arduous struggle for first-class citizenship that has extended into the twentieth century. Many developments in recent African American history are examined, including demographic change; educational efforts; literary and cultural changes; problems in housing, health, juvenile matters, and poverty; the expansion of the black middle class; and the persistence of discrimination in the administration of justice.

All who are interested in African Americans’ continuing quest for equality will find a wealth of information based on the recent findings of many scholars. Professors Franklin and Moss have captured the tragedies and triumphs, the hurts and joys, the failures and successes, of blacks in a lively and readable volume that remains the most authoritative and comprehensive book of its kind.

Three-time Newbery Honor author Jacqualine Woodson explores race and sexuality through the eyes of a compelling narrator

Melanin Sun has a lot to say. But sometimes it’s hard to speak his mind, so he fills up notebooks with his thoughts instead. He writes about his mom a lot—they’re about as close as they can be, because they have no other family. So when she suddenly tells him she’s gay, his world is turned upside down. And if that weren’t hard enough for him to accept, her girlfriend is white. Melanin Sun is angry and scared. How can his mom do this to him—is this the end of their closeness? What will his friends think? And can he let her girlfriend be part of their family?

In this bold collection of hard-hitting urban erotic quickies, Noire, the undisputed Queen of Urban Erotica, brings you eleven authors who explore, without apology or restraint, street sagas of sexual pleasure.

Boasting an all-star lineup of some of today’s hottest authors–and sprinkled with heat from some fresh new talent too–this collection from Noire thoroughly lives up to her credo of giving her fans just what they like: street drama with a sheet-drenching erotic twist.

Here you’ll find sexy tales from fan favorites K’wan, Joy, Thomas Long, Jamise L. Dames, Andrea Blackstone, Gerald Malcom, Euftis Emory, Kweli Walker, and Erick Gray, along with two hot new voices: Aretha Temple and Plea$ure. Noire even supplies her own juicy addition to the hard-body lineup.

So beware: The heat and the drama between these pages are not fairy tales for the desperate housewife. Ride hard with Noire as her authors get their grind on and take it to the limits in From the Streets to the Sheets.

Inside Out and Back Again meets One Crazy Summer and Brown Girl Dreaming in this novel-in-verse about fitting in and standing up for what’s right

It’s 1969, and the Apollo 11 mission is getting ready to go to the moon. But for half-black, half-Japanese Mimi, moving to a predominantly white Vermont town is enough to make her feel alien. Suddenly, Mimi’s appearance is all anyone notices. She struggles to fit in with her classmates, even as she fights for her right to stand out by entering science competitions and joining Shop Class instead of Home Ec. And even though teachers and neighbors balk at her mixed-race family and her refusals to conform, Mimi’s dreams of becoming an astronaut never fade—no matter how many times she’s told no.

This historical middle-grade novel is told in poems from Mimi’s perspective over the course of one year in her new town, and shows readers that positive change can start with just one person speaking up.

Her man demanded loyalty, but her body wouldn’t obey.

Have you ever rolled over in the middle of the night and realized you were doing things you swore you’d never do? Sexing brothers you vowed you’d never touch? Bending backwards and stooping lower than you ever thought you’d stoop? Well if you can feel me even a little bit, then let me hit you with a story that just might blow your mind. . . .

Nineteen-year-old Juicy Stanfield is the sexy young girlfriend of Granite “G” McKay, owner of Harlem’s notorious G-Spot Social Club. A drug dealer with a lethal streak, he runs Harlem with an iron fist. But even the cash and the bling can’t keep Juicy from getting restless, and while G fulfills her every material desire, she’s burning up with unrequited sexual energy. To cheat on him would mean a death sentence; so Juicy finds pleasure in secret ways: fantasizing on crowded subways or allowing her eyes to hungrily take in the male dancers on the club’s ladies night.

But as Juicy’s sexual cravings grow stronger, one thing becomes frighteningly clear: She’s a virtual prisoner in G’s dangerous world. As G begins to suspect her of playin’ him, he pulls the reins he keeps on her even tighter. If she’s ever to escape and get a life of her own she must find a way to start stashing away some of G’s cash. But doing that under G’s watchful eye is a challenge she might not live up to–especially when her appetite tempts her with the deadliest desire of all: G’s very own son. . . .

David Anthony Durham makes his literary debut with a haunting novel which, in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, views the American West through a refreshingly original lens.

Set in the 1870s, the novel tells the tale of Gabriel Lynch, an African American youth who settles with his family in the plains of Kansas. Dissatisfied with the drudgery of homesteading and growing increasingly disconnected from his family, Gabriel forsakes the farm for a life of higher adventure. Thus begins a forbidding trek into a terrain of austere beauty, a journey begun in hope, but soon laced with danger and propelled by a cast of brutal characters.

Durham’s accomplishment is not solely in telling one man’s story. He also gives voice to a population seldom included in our Western lore and crafts a new poetry of the American landscape. Gabriel’s Story is an important addition to the mosaic of our nation’s mythology.

Gather Together in My Name continues Maya Angelou’s personal story, begun so unforgettably in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The time is the end of World War II and there is a sense of optimism everywhere. Maya Angelou, still in her teens, has given birth to a son. But the next few years are difficult ones as she tries to find a place in the world for herself and her child. She goes from job to job–and from man to man. She tries to return home–back to Stamps, Arkansas–but discovers that she is no longer part of that world. Then Maya’s life takes a dramatic turn, and she faces new challenges and temptations.

In this second volume of her poignant autobiographical series, Maya Angelou powerfully captures the struggles and triumphs of her passionate life with dignity, wisdom, humor, and humanity.

Eric Jerome Dickey, the six-time New York Times bestselling author of Drive Me Crazy, returns with a sizzling new novel of romance and betrayal.

Just how well do we ever really know the person sleeping next to us?

Sometimes we know everything.
Sometimes we can never know enough.

In Genevieve, Eric Jerome Dickey has crafted a masterfully twisted tale of intrigue, hidden identities, and self-discovery. It’s the tale of a man torn between the love of his beautiful wife and the sudden arrival of his wife’s sister—a mysterious and provocative woman who offers him the passion he craves, but at a steep price. Both women harbor secrets, the answers to which appear to lie in a small Southern town filled with darkness, danger, and the promise of pain. Soon nothing is as it seems and no one is who they claimed to be, including the man caught in the middle. As the truth bubbles closer to the surface, everyone’s world threatens to fall apart. In a story packed with revelations at every turn, Eric Jerome Dickey takes us on a journey filled with deception, careening down a highway bound for destiny . . . and disaster.

Raised by a single parent in the impoverished south side of Chicago as the youngest of five children, Farrah Gray defied the odds to become a millionaire at the age of fourteen. He made his second million by sixteen and now inspires thousands through his speeches, writing, and consulting. His recipe for success: attitude, hustle, and an emphatic rejection of the most pervasive lies most of us believe about money and success. In Get Real, Get Rich, Farrah breaks down those seven lies one by one. Have you ever thought to yourself I’ll never be rich because I wasn’t born with connections, or a special talent? That’s The Born Lucky Lie. The truth is this: Luck is about showing up. And Farrah will help you move beyond the lottery mentality. If you’ve convinced yourself that you must first have money to make money, then you’ve fallen prey to The Money Lie. In the real world, the path to millions starts with just one dollar, and Farrah can help you find that first one. Perhaps you recognize yourself in one of these other misconceptions: I have to hit it big in entertainment or sports to be rich (The Celebrity Lie). I have to work hard and make sacrifices to be rich (The Work Hard Lie). I have to have zero debt to be rich (The Debt Lie). I have to be super smart or invent something the world relies on to be rich (The Google and Gates Lie). I have to know a lot about the stock market or work on the Street to be rich (The Wall Street Lie). In seven simple and provocative chapters blending inspiration and an actionable wealth building plan, Farrah lays out your road map to a richer life. “Too many of us live paycheck to paycheck and pray that those compilations of books and CDs and DVDs will somehow lead us to ‘automatic wealth.’ News flash: There’s no such thing as automatic wealth - at least not in the real world. In this book, I’m not only going to share the mind-set you need to achieve all that you dream, but also the specific strategies that accompany that state of mind. I want to help you marshal out your own wealth potential, which relates to everything about you - not just your bank account.”

Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s wildly original debut novel, Getting Mother’s Body, follows pregnant, unmarried Billy Beede and her down-and-out family in 1960s Texas as they search for the storied jewels buried—or were they?

Violet, Lilly, and Rose know how it feels to be black women trying to find their place in a changing white world. Violet, the eldest, grows up believing in the myth of the southern belle-only to discover that good manners and genteel charm aren’t going to bring her acceptance from a closed-minded society…or a philandering husband. Lilly is an ex-Black Panther and writer caught up in the stormy aftermath of the sixties; she shuts out this new world of confusion and pain with the heroin that can never give her peace-or salvation. Rose is the youngest, a sculptor who has shaped herself in the image of an independent black woman grounded in the political movements of her time. But she carries a secret heartache that will resonate in the life of her daughter, Imani, who grows up searching for the daddy she longs to know.

Earthy, evocative, rich in the atmosphere and emotional turmoil of the times, Getting Our Breath Back is a story of struggle and forgiveness, of separation and reconciliation…of women who must reinvent themselves if they are to survive, to heal, and to flourish.

An exuberant return to the four unforgettable heroines of Waiting to Exhale—the novel that changed African American fiction forever. Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale was more than just a bestselling novel—its publication was a watershed moment in literary history. McMillan’s sassy and vibrant story about four African American women struggling to find love and their place in the world touched a cultural nerve, inspired a blockbuster film, and generated a devoted audience. Now, McMillan revisits Savannah, Gloria, Bernadine, and Robin fifteen years later. Each is at her own midlife crossroads: Savannah has awakened to the fact that she’s made too many concessions in her marriage, and decides to face life single again—at fifty-one. Bernadine has watched her megadivorce settlement dwindle, been swindled by her husband number two, and conned herself into thinking that a few pills will help distract her from her pain. Robin has an all-American case of shopaholism, while the big dream of her life—to wear a wedding dress—has gone unrealized. And for years, Gloria has taken happiness and security for granted. But being at the wrong place at the wrong time can change everything. All four are learning to heal past hurts and to reclaim their joy and their dreams; but they return to us full of spirit, sass, and faith in one another. They’ve exhaled: now they are learning to breathe.

Kweku Sai is dead. A renowned surgeon and failed husband, he succumbs suddenly at dawn outside his home in suburban Accra. The news of Kweku’s death sends a ripple around the world, bringing together the family he abandoned years before. Ghana Must Go is their story. Electric, exhilarating, beautifully crafted, Ghana Must Go is a testament to the transformative power of unconditional love, from a debut novelist of extraordinary talent.

  Moving with great elegance through time and place, Ghana Must Go charts the Sai’s circuitous journey to one another. In the wake of Kweku’s death, his children gather in Ghana at their enigmatic mother’s new home. The eldest son and his wife; the mysterious, beautiful twins; the baby sister, now a young woman: each carries secrets of his own. What is revealed in their coming together is the story of how they came apart: the hearts broken, the lies told, the crimes committed in the name of love. Splintered, alone, each navigates his pain, believing that what has been lost can never be recovered until, in Ghana, a new way forward, a new family, begins to emerge.

  Ghana Must Go is at once a portrait of a modern family, and an exploration of the importance of where we come from to who we are. In a sweeping narrative that takes us from Accra to Lagos to London to New York, Ghana Must Go teaches that the truths we speak can heal the wounds we hide.

The reigning queen of hip-hop lit, Nikki Turner, takes on the music biz in this tale of a young woman who risks everything to be a superstar.

Fabiola Mays was born to sing. She has a voice like honey and a body to match, but one heartbreaking setback after another threatens to derail her dreams of a recording deal. To make matters worse, it’s Christmastime, rent is past due, and the cops intend to kick her tight-knit family to the curb–until a small-town gangster comes to the rescue and offers them a place to stay.
Years pass, and Fabiola continues to play gigs and travel around the country hoping for another shot at fame. She’s long forgotten the gangster named Casino who bailed out her family once upon a time. But when Casino is shot, Fabiola feels that she must help the man who helped her family during their lowest point.

As Fabiola climbs the ladder of success, she is pulled between the spotlight and the street, trying to resist industry moguls who find the allure of fresh meat irresistible and the thugs from the shadowy side of the ghetto who threaten to keep her close.

From the Introduction:

ghet-to n. (Merriam-Webster dictionary) Italian, from Venetian dialect ghèto island where Jews were forced to live; literally, foundry (located on the island), from ghetàr, to cast; from Latin jactare to throw
1: a quarter of a city in which Jews were formerly required to live
2: a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure
3a: an isolated group b: a situation that resembles a ghetto especially in conferring inferior status or limiting opportunity

ghet-to adj. (twenty-first-century everyday parlance)
1a: behavior that makes you want to say “Huh?” b: actions that seem to go against basic home training and common sense
2: used to describe something with inferior status or limited opportunity. Usually used with “so.” ;
3: a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure.
4: common misusage: authentic, Black, keepin’ it real

As current and all-consuming as “ghetto” is in these days of gold teeth, weaves (blond and red), Pepsi-filled baby bottles, and babymamas, ghetto has a long history. The original ghetto was in the Jewish quarter of Venice, a Catholic city. Before it became the Jewish quarter, this area contained an iron foundry or ghèto, hence the name. These days, ghetto no longer refers to where you live, but to how you live. It is a mindset, and not limited to a class or a race. Some things are worth repeating: ghetto is not limited to a class or a race. Ghetto is found in the heart of the nation’s inner cities as well as the heart of the nation’s most cherished suburbs; among those too young to understand (we hope) and those old enough to know better; in little white houses, and all the way to the White House; in corporate corridors, Ivy League havens, and, of course, Hollywood. More devastating, ghetto is also packaged in the form of music, TV, books, and movies, and then sold around the world. Bottom line: ghetto is contagious, and no one is immune, no matter how much we like to suck our teeth and shake our heads at what we think is only happening someplace else…From an award-winning journalist and cultural commentator comes a provocative examination of the impact of “ghetto” mores, attitudes, and lifestyles on urban communities and American culture in general.

Cora Daniels takes on one of the most explosive issues in our country today in this thoughtful critique of America’s embrace of a ghetto persona that demeans women, devalues education, celebrates the worst African American stereotypes, and contributes to the destruction of civil peace. Her investigation exposes the central role of corporate America in exploiting the idea of ghetto-ness as a hip cultural idiom, despite its disturbing ramifications, as a means of making money. She showcases Black rappers raised in privileged families who have taken on the ghetto persona and sold millions of albums, and non-Black celebrities, such as Paris Hilton, who have adopted ghetto attitudes and styles in pursuit of attention and notoriety. She explores, as well, her own relationship to the ghetto and the ways in which she is both part of and outside the Ghettonation.

Infused with humor and entertaining asides—including lists of events and people that the author nominates for the Ghetto Hall of Fame, and a short section written entirely in ghetto slang—Ghettonation is a timely and engrossing report on a controversial social phenomenon. Like Bill Cosby’s infamous, much-discussed comments about the problems within the Black community today, it is sure to trigger widespread interest and heated debate.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE,

USA TODAY,

AND CHICAGO TRIBUNE

A masterly work of literary journalism about a senseless murder, a relentless detective, and the great plague of homicide in America NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST

NAMED

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review The Washington Post The Boston Globe

The Economist The Globe and Mail

BookPage

Kirkus Reviews On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes. But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift. Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly ignored, American murder—a ghettoside killing, one young black man slaying another—and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs. Ghettoside is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in our cities—and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped. Praise for Ghettoside A serious and kaleidoscopic achievement… [Jill

Leovy is] a crisp writer with a crisp mind and the ability to boil entire skies of information into hard journalistic rain.—Dwight Garner,

The New York Times Masterful… gritty reporting that matches the police work behind it.—Los Angeles Times Moving and engrossing.—San Francisco Chronicle Penetrating and heartbreaking…

Ghettoside

points out how relatively little America has cared even as recently as the last decade about the value of young black men’s lives.—USA Today Functions both as a snappy police procedural and—more significantly—as a searing indictment of legal neglect… Leovy’s powerful testimony demands respectful attention.—The Boston Globe Gritty, heart-wrenching… Everyone needs to read this book.—Michael Connelly Ghettoside is remarkable: a deep anatomy of lawlessness.—Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal [Leovy writes] with grace and artistry, and controlled—but bone-deep—outrage in her new book.…

The most important book about urban violence in a generation.—The Washington Post Riveting… This timely book could not be more important.—Associated Press Leovy’s relentless reporting has produced a book packed with valuable, hard-won insights—and it serves as a crucial, 366-page reminder that ‘black lives matter.’ —The New York Times Book Review A compelling analysis of the factors behind the epidemic of black-on-black homicide… an important book, which deserves a wide audience.—Hari Kunzru, The Guardian

Gifts is a beguiling tale of a Somali family, its strong matriarch, Duniya, and its past wounds that refuse to heal. As the story unfolds, Somalia is ravaged by war, drought, disease, and famine, prompting industrialized nations to offer monetary aid—"gifts" to the so-called Third World. Farah weaves these threads together into a tapestry of dreams, memories, family lore, folktales, and journalistic accounts.

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

In an elegant gift-book, the circle of African-American women featured in In the Company of My Sisters offers inspiring, street-wise sayings, prayers, and affirmations on such everyday subjects as self-esteem, looks, family, sex, and money. 75,000 first printing. Tour.

Twelve stories by the internationally renowned novelist which recreate with energy and authenticity the major social and political issues that confront contemporary Africans on a daily basis.

“We didn’t know then that the dramas we imagined weren’t even warm-ups for what real life held for us.”

From the fifth grade to their fifth decade, Vaughn, Reenie, Susan, and Audrey share secrets and dreams–their lives connected like silk threads through rich fabric, pulling but never breaking at life’s unexpected twists and turns. Meet the girls most likely

TO WRITE THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: Vaughn has a flair for words that makes her the unofficial diplomat of the foursome. She’s great at keeping it together for everybody–but herself.

TO MARRY A PRINCE: Sassy Reenie can break hearts as easily as she can take out a bully without breaking a nail. But her live-for-today attitude leads to a tragic mistake that will haunt the girls for years.

TO BE FAMOUS: From the ashes of a ravaged home life, amid rumors and bad feelings, Susan rises to fame as a glamorous network anchorwoman, proving that success is the best revenge. But forgiveness is another matter.

TO RUN THE WORLD: Audrey is the ultimate overachiever, but this takes a devastating toll on her health, her career, and her family. Perfection is a race where the finish line keeps moving. What will she sacrifice to win?

Girls Most Likely is an emotional, uplifting, often hilarious glimpse into the lives of today’s ever-changing African American women, sustained by love, laughter, and sisterhood.

Don’t miss the reading group guide in the back of the book.

Ann Michelle is tired of her boring, sheltered life. She longs for something real. Then she meets Raquel Marissa Diaz-Raq for short. Sassy, streetwise, and totally fearless, Raq is everything Ann Michelle isn’t. She has a voice to die for and the attitude to go with it, and she’ll stop at nothing to be a star. All Ann Michelle wants is to go along for the ride. Even if that means leaving home to go on the road with Piper, both girls’ favorite hip-hop artist. And shedding her identity along the way to become Glitz, a bolder- but not necessarily better-version of herself.

Crackling with authenticity, energy, and heart, Philana Marie Boles’s first young adult novel is about the true meaning of friendship and the pitfalls of fame.

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The personal memoirs of controversial figure Reverend Al Sharpton follow the tragedy that tore his family apart, his childhood ordination, his civil rights efforts, the Berhard Goetz subway incident, and more. 100,000 first printing. $100,000 ad/promo. Tour.

“Mountain,” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” Go Tell It on the Mountain, originally published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery one Saturday in March of 1935 of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child is a searing tale about the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult. At the center: a woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life; but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love until she told a lie that ruined the life of an innocent woman, a lie whose reverberations refuse to diminish . . . Booker, the man Bride loves and loses, whose core of anger was born in the wake of the childhood murder of his beloved brother . . . Rain, the mysterious white child, who finds in Bride the only person she can talk to about the abuse she's suffered at the hands of her prostitute mother . . . and Sweetness, Bride's mother, who takes a lifetime to understand that "what you do to children matters. And they might never forget."

Introduced by Maya Angelou, the inspiring sermon-poems of James Weldon Johnson 

James Weldon Johnson was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of the most revered African Americans of all time, whose life demonstrated the full spectrum of struggle and success. In God’s Trombones, one of his most celebrated works, inspirational sermons of African American preachers are reimagined as poetry, reverberating with the musicality and splendid eloquence of the spirituals. This classic collection includes "Listen Lord (A Prayer)," "The Creation," "The Prodigal Son," "Go Down Death (A Funeral Sermon)," "Noah Built the Ark," "The Crucifixion," "Let My People Go," and "The Judgment Day."

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Generations of children have read, re-read, and loved Ezra Jack Keats?s award-winning, classic stories about Peter and his neighborhood friends. Now, for the first time, Peter?s Chair, A Letter to Amy, and Goggles! are available in paperback exclusively from Puffin.?A well-loved character, a familiar childhood situation, and an urban setting are the components of this winning picture book, one of Keats?s best.? — BooklistEzra Jack Keats (1916?1983) was the beloved author and/or illustrator of over eighty-five books for children.

From the author of The Middle Sister comes a heartwarming tale of second chances and the unparalleled love between mothers and daughters.

When fifteen-year-old Olivia Jean finds herself in the “family way,” her mother, Daisy, who has never been very maternal, springs into action. Daisy decides that Olivia Jean can’t stay in New York and whisks her away to her grandmother’s farm in Alabama to have the baby–even though Daisy and her mother, Birdie, have been estranged for years. When they arrive, Birdie lays down the law: Sure, her granddaughter can stay, but Daisy will have to stay as well. Though Daisy is furious, she has no choice.

Now, under one little roof in the 1960s Deep South, three generations of spirited, proud women are forced to live together. One by one, they begin to lose their inhibitions and share their secrets. And as long-guarded truths emerge, a baby is born–a child with the power to turn these virtual strangers into a real, honest-to-goodness family.

Praise for Going Down South:

“Long live Olivia Jean, Daisy, and Birdie! These three daughters, mothers, and women are smart, feisty, and funny. Their stories will break your heart in the very best way. I absolutely loved Going Down South!”
—Carleen Brice, author of Orange Mint and Honey

""There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.” The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.

By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying—and informed throughout by Baldwin’s uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators—Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.

ENTER THE WORLD OF “GUCCI, GLITZ, AND GLAMOUR”* IN THIS DELICIOUSLY DECADENT LOOK INTO THE LIVES OF THE YOUNG, THE RICH, THE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE CONNIVING

Paulette, Gillian, and Reese are three gold diggers who have dollar signs in their eyes and gold digging in their DNA. Lauren is Paulette’s pampered cousin who never fails to remind Paulette of how different their lives have always been—Lauren the daughter of wealthy black urbanites and Paulette the daughter of the family black sheep who married “beneath her family pedigree.” Paulette will stop at nothing—not even sleeping with her cousin Lauren’s husband—to gain the social status she feels she rightfully deserves. Gillian is a second-generation gold digger and, having learned from the best, strategically sleeps her way to Hollywood—but does she have the talent to be a lasting star? Reese is a career basketball groupie turned NBA trophy wife, and she wears it well, taking advantage of everything her new position affords; but when she finds out that DL may be more than just her husband’s best friend’s initials, she may be forced to realize that all that glitters isn’t gold. The stunningly beautiful, well-bred, but naïve Lauren is the secret envy of her friends. She seems to have all the creature comforts money can buy, but when she’s confronted with a crisis of her own, just how will she respond?

Thirteen-year-old Habo has always been different—light eyes, yellow hair and white skin. Not the good brown skin his family has and not the white skin of tourists. Habo is strange and alone. His father, unable to accept Habo, abandons the family; his mother can scarcely look at him. His brothers are cruel and the other children never invite him to play. Only his sister Asu loves him well. But even Asu can’t take the sting away when the family is forced from their small Tanzanian village, and Habo knows he is to blame. 

Seeking refuge in Mwanza, Habo and his family journey across the Serengeti. His aunt is glad to open her home until she sees Habo for the first time, and then she is only afraid. Suddenly, Habo has a new word for himself: Albino. But they hunt Albinos in Mwanza because Albino body parts are thought to bring good luck. And soon Habo is being hunted by a fearsome man with a machete. To survive, Habo must not only run, but find a way to love and accept himself.

Goony Goo-Goo and Ga-Ga Too! is a whimsical tale of two sisters, Selena and Celeste who are less than enthusiastic about their new baby brother. They plot and plan to communicate with him in a secret baby language in order to get the baby to do what THEY want! They tell the baby boy he has to earn his keep by doing some of their dirty work like taking out the trash! That is until mom figures out their presumptuous plot! The results are hilarious! But the sisters also learn to love and accept their new sibling—even if it means they can’t get their way. Children of all ages will enjoy the cadence, rhythm and rhyme of this book and soon you’ll find your child chanting Goony Goo-Goo and Ga-Ga Too!

In these fifteen superb stories, written in a style at once ineffable and immediately recognizable, Toni Cade Bambara gives us compelling portraits of a wide range of unforgettable characters, from sassy children to cunning old men, in scenes shifting between uptown New York and rural North CaroLina. A young girl suffers her first betrayal. A widow flirts with an elderly blind man against the wishes of her grown-up children. A neighborhood loan shark teaches o white social worker a lesson in responsibility. And there is more. Sharing the world of Toni Cade Bambara’s "straight-up fiction" is a stunning experience.

Justin Peters is a Harvard-educated professor of British and classic literature who reads Shakespeare to his four-year-old daughter, Giselle. A native of Trinidad and the product of a strict, English-style education, Justin and his focus on the works of “Dead White Men” receive little professional respect at the public Brooklyn college where he teaches. But whatever troubles he might have at work are eclipsed when he realizes his wife, Sally, has begun to pull away from him, both physically and emotionally.

Harlem-born Sally Peters, a mother on the verge of turning forty, is a primary school teacher who believes that joy is a learned skill, and that it takes strength to be happy. After a life of tragic losses, Sally thought she had finally found that strength when she met Justin.

But now, Sally wants something more. And Justin is angered by her uncertainty about their life and frightened by the thought that perhaps Sally never stopped loving the ex-boyfriend for whom she wrote fierce poems. Is he, Justin wonders, responsible for helping Sally find meaning in her life—a life that seems to him most fortunate? If Sally and Justin’s union is to survive, both must face the crippling echoes of their own pasts before those memories forever cloud and alter their future.

Set in a snow-covered Brooklyn, Grace is a thoughtful and lovely meditation on trust, redemption, and family. Elizabeth Nunez’s delicate prose brings the struggles, aches, and tender moments of this contemporary urban love story into vivid focus.


From the Hardcover edition.

Spend the day with Mimi and her granddaughter in this charming picture book about the magic found in Mimi’s favorite accessory, perfect for readers who love How to Babysit a Grandma!

When Grandma Mimi comes to visit, she always brings warm hugs, sweet treats…and her purse. You never know what she’ll have in there—fancy jewelry, tokens from around the world, or something special just for her granddaughter. It might look like a normal bag from the outside, but Mimi and her granddaughter know that it’s pure magic!

In this adorable, energetic ode to visits from grandma, beloved picture book creator Vanessa Brantley Newton shows how an ordinary day can become extraordinary.

"Brantley-Newton creates a whimsical interplay of patterns, rich color, and her trademark lively expressions—a beautiful visual mélange. The magic of grandparents is undeniable, and this book is an excellent treat for grandkids to share with their own grandmas and grandpas, or the other way around."—Kirkus

When Rhondy can’t seem to cheer Grandmama up with a song, a dance, or a gift from the backyard, she tries the one thing she’s sure will work. Rhondy reminds Grandmama what she said about her when they first came to live together: "That’s my joy, that’s Grandmama’s joy. Long as I got my joy, I’ll be all right." "As sometimes happens, the child is more resourceful than the adult.This is the portrait of a relationship, revealed less as a story than as the unfolding of love." — Booklist "A sensitive story that shows the loving relationship between Grandmama and Rhondy." — School Library Journal

This picture book tells the reassuring story of family love and the special bond between a grandparent and grandchild. The little girl knows her grandfather’s expressions until one day she sees him practising for the theatre, his appearance frightens her.

Angered by the racism he witnessed on Martinique during the Second World War, Fanon here examines the roles of class, culture and violence, and expresses his profound alienation from the idea of colonialism and its bloodshed. More than four decades on, Fanon’s work still inspires liberation movements today. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Thirty thousand years ago, in the heart of the African continent and in the shadow of the largest freestanding mountain in the world, lived the Ibandi. For countless generations they nurtured their ancient tradition, and met survival’s daily struggle with quiet faith in their gods. But when brutal intruders arrived from the south, a few brave souls dared the ultimate quest–to climb the Great Mountain, seeking answers and a way into the future.

In this breathtaking blend of imagination, anthropology, and sheer storytelling magic, Steven Barnes takes us to the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro and into the realm of our own ancestors, who lived, hunted, celebrated, and died side by side with roaming herds of wild animals and great golden clouds of migrating butterflies. A people whose skin was the color and smell of the earth itself, the Ibandi formed a hierarchy based on strength of limb and spirit. In this extraordinary novel, we follow the adventures of two of the Ibandi’s chosen ones: T’Cori, an abandoned girl raised by the powerful and mysterious medicine woman Stillshadow, and Frog Hopping, a boy possessing a gift that is also a curse.

Though the live in different encampments, Frog and T’Cori are linked through the revered and powerful Stillshadow, who has sensed in them a destiny apart from others’.

Through the years, and on their separate life paths, T’Cori’s and Frog’s fates entwine as an inevitable disaster approaches from the south–from the very god they worship. For as long as there have been mountain, sky, and savannah, there has been a home for the Ibandi. Now, in the face of an enemy beyond anything spoken of even in legend, they must ask their god face-to-face: Do we remain or do we depart?

Great Sky Woman not only brings to life the world of prehistoric man but also shines a brilliant light on humanity itself. For here is a story of rivalries and alliances, of human fear and desire, of faith and betrayal . . . and, above all, a story of how primitive man, without words or machines, set in motion civilization’s long, winding journey to the present.

Geneva Holliday’s juicy novel brings a lighter touch to African American erotica, setting the sexual escapades amid the real-life folly and drama of four very different friends during one incredibly hot summer in New York City. This funny, sexy book has something for everyone!

Overview
The stories I’m about to tell you are true to the best of my ability—actually they’re true to the best of my memory. I’ve purposely included events only as far as my short-term memory goes. Yes, I know I seem to be going around in circles, but I can assure you that some of my stories can be considered as pure fiction. That could mean that I filled in the blanks with a reasonable facsimile of the truth, or that I simply fabricated my tales to liven up my life’s adventures. Of course the part about growing up in the nation’s capital is true because I am indeed a Washingtonian.

I’m going to tell you about my childhood. The places are real, but some of the characters’ names have been changed to protect myself. I certainly know my Miranda rights, and I readily acknowledge that anything I say can, and most certainly will be used against me. But I’ll remind you that most of my tales took place when we were merely innocent kids, just doing what kids do. You’ll be served up the most unimaginable deeds that any rag-tag gang could conjure up for your pleasure. Enjoy!

Greetings my friends, welcome back

Greetings to my new readers, to my family and to my “old” friends
(no pun intended), I’m sending a hearty welcome back to all of you.

Introduction

I am a native Washingtonian, but I did not “live” where most people want to go when they “visit” the nation’s capital. I’m hoping that in “my story” I can take you far beyond the ordinary tourist junkets and historic exhibits and include a taste of the world-famous eateries that salt and pepper the Washington, D.C. area. Actually, deep down inside, I believe that I can give you more than that. I hope that the combination of where I grew up, my childhood haunts and the places where I “hung out” and visited as a young girl will provide a unique perspective of my hometown. I’ll offer you the same magnificence I savored with my friends and family during field trips and cultural excursions. These scenic treasures were an intimate part of my learning experiences when I was growing up and they are what I lived and loved as a child. This is the Washington and these are the unforgettable pictures that I want to share with you.

As a child I lived within my own little comfort zone surrounded by African Americans and all of my activities and interactions took place among them. My Washington was segregated along very specific lines and we blacks had our way of life, our associations, communities and our own systems of protection. We did not have to compete with the white population for anything. We established our own infrastructure that was comfortable, efficient and self-sustaining. We operated our own shopping areas and hubs of communication. Everything we needed (I didn’t say everything we wanted) in our daily lives was available. I must admit I was somewhat shielded from the darker aspects of social life and didn’t really experience the full brunt of segregation. At any rate, although segregation and racial discrimination existed in my childhood, they were not severe enough to destroy my lovely childhood memories.

My goal and the purpose of this book are to share my childhood with you, to let you feel the pulse of that environment and to let you experience the good and the bad of growing up in survival mode. I also want to show you that even the meekest and poorest people on earth can come through rough times and thorny patches and can actually bloom into a garden of beautiful flowers. The ultimate goal of the families and friends living in the 40’s and 50’s was essentially to survive and thanks to our loving village community, we did just that.

I can’t wait to tell you how it was to live in such a wonderful place in the 40’s. The city has indeed changed a lot since I hit the scene in 1941. There were some good things and some not so good, but because I came through it all relatively unscathed, I can still let you in on an unknown secret or two. You’ll read later on that I love secrets. I’ve always been proud of my ancestry. I love who I am. In fact, I really think that although I never saw any semblance of that silver spoon that some folks are born with, my inheritance has made me one of the richest souls on this earth. The best place to start my story is with the ancestors I knew and loved in my childhood. I am proud to introduce you to the people at the root of my life’s journey in the nation’s capital.