3 Books Published by The Overlook Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Rereleased in time for its first Broadway run, Jitney is the seventh in Wilson’s 10-play cycle on the black experience in 20th century AmericaOnly one of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson’s plays in the author’s masterful The American Century Cycle has never been seen on Broadway€•until now. A major work by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner August Wilson. A thoroughly revised version of a play August Wilson first wrote in 1979, Jitney was produced in New York for the first time in the spring of 2000, winning rave reviews and the accolade of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best play of the year. Set in the 1970s in Pittsburghs Hill District, and depicting gypsy cabdrivers who serve black neighborhoods, Jitney is the seventh in Wilsons 10-play cycle (one for each decade) on the black experience in twentieth century America. He writes not about historical events or the pathologies of the black community, but, as he says, about the unique particulars of black culture… I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us… through profound moments in our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves.”

Dust jacket notes: "This provocative first collection of essays by Armond White, America’s only nationally recognized Black film critic, tracks a recent phenomenon in pop music, videos, and film he calls ’the resistance’ - a politically motivated body of work reflecting a new consciousness about race, history, and sexuality. From the rise of Black independent filmmakers to the appropriation by the mainstream of hip-hop culture, White’s essays chronicle the complex changes in popular expression over the past decade, blurring the boundaries between high and low culture in a stimulating new way. Whether writing about Madonna singing with Black gospel choirs, racism in Hollywood movies, the justified arrogance of Spike Lee or the calculated rage of Ice-T, Armond White is never afraid to go against the grain. With sting and style to rival Camille Paglia, Armond White applies ’the resistance’ to his writing in order to counter the existing system of privilege and oppression that controls most journalism. He reports from the vanguard of popular culture, and the result is the documentary of a movement, a vital body of essays that records a new wave of change as it happens."

The acclaimed novel of Caribbean magic and language. A mysterious child, half human, half-frog, is born on the island of Corpus Christi in the West Indies. Its mother becomes Magdalena Divina, patron saint of the island, worshipped by Hindu and Muslim Cast Indians, Africans, Catholics and indigenous Indians alike. The frogchild, allegedly drowned in a pot of callaloo by the wife of the man who sired it, becomes the focus of an evolving legend as Johnny Domingo hears this story, about his family from different people and tries, impossibly, to piece it together into one coherent and true account.