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After
After Marita Golden Excerpt The bullets discharge from the muzzle of officer Carson Blake’s sixteen round Beretta with the tinny explosive popping sound of a toy gun. He will not remember exact...
Zone One: A Novel
Zone One: A Novel Colson Whitehead Excerpt A 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominated Book He always wanted to live in New York. His Uncle Lloyd lived downtown on Lafayette, and in the long s...
Street Sweeper
Street Sweeper Ronin Ro Excerpt I was trying to get him to look me in the eye. But he wouldn’t. Not even when I got one inch from his nose. Nothing. No reaction. That’s the thing abou...
A Day Late and a Dollar Short
A Day Late and a Dollar Short Terry McMillan Excerpt Way I see it can’t nobody tell me nothing I don’t already know. At least not when it comes to my kids. They all grown, but in a whol...
The Colored Garden
The Colored Garden O.H. Bennett Excerpt From Chapter One: Meeting the Gardener In the middle of Kentucky farmland where a cornfield of withered brown stalks meets the grass of a cow pasture there ...
Overtime
Overtime Connie Barrett Excerpt Chapter One:With one foot lodged in her house shoe, Toi searched in vain for the other, all the while fighting the urge to roll back into the warm covers that invi...
The Secret Lives of the Four Wives
The Secret Lives of the Four Wives Lola Shoneyin Excerpt Chapter One – Polygamist I didn’t just happen upon this room; I dreamed of the pale green walls before I arrived. Now the built...
Forbidden Fruit
Forbidden Fruit Stanley Gazemba Excerpt The air over the village that evening was pregnant with tension. A thick dark cloud loomed heavy above the grey colored thatch huts that dotted the steep green...
Fifteen Years Delayed
Fifteen Years Delayed Angelia Vernon Menchan Excerpt Prologue Damn… there she is after fifteen years, still, even button-upped, a living breathing wet dream in the flesh. Feeling breath o...
Juneteenth
Juneteenth Ralph Ellison Excerpt After Ellison’s death on April 16, 1994, speculation about the existence of the second novel reignited. In an article in the New York Times, William Grimes asse...
