All Books

  • Return of the Sistah Samurai (The Champloo Mixes, Mix #2)

    Tatiana Obey

    $15.99

    Afro Samurai meets The Boondocks in this anime-inspired novel

    I've wanted nothing more than to become a Sistah Samurai. When I was expelled from the training academy for sneaking in my stupid ex-boyfriend, I still had hope that I could cry enough to convince them to take me back. Then, demons invaded the capital and decimated the clan, and there went my dreams of ever naming my own pair of pink swords.

    Until I heard a rumor of one last Sistah Samurai. I packed my favorite outfits and my trusty teddy bear, and recruited my forever bestie to help me find her. If we could manage not to interrupt her lunch, maybe we could convince her to train us? We were ready to do whatever she asked, even if that meant confronting old flames and taking down the patriarchy.

    As long as we looked good while doing it.

    The sequel of Sistah Samurai is an Action Fantasy novella that is an homage to the anime, Afro Samurai. Both works feature a feudal Japan-inspired setting that is rife with anachronisms. In the words of Samuel L. Jackson, “Is that a motherf—ing RPG?”

  • PRE-ORDER: Love Story

    Afsana Mousavi

    $17.95

    PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: February 10, 2025

    This gorgeous debut follows a young transsexual’s feverish passage through the envies and dreams that lace her initiation into New York City’s underground nightlife as she attempts to reconcile its predatory yet deeply salvational euphorias.

    She moves to New York for whatever reasons. Then she starts hormones and steps out at night. Everything else falls away. How had it never not been this?

    Quickly, Io—freshly feminized and hardly clothed—is yanked into the glamor and vagaries of her times by her obsessive parasocial relationship with a fellow trans woman and renowned DJ. In nightlife she quickly discovers the stakes of living so close to cultural production—fashion, art, literature, it all flashes and dies as her bank account stays empty and her health waxes and wanes.

    The lines between transition and cultural capital begin to blur and the currency of femininity demands to sell or be sold. Io must decide how far she will go to attain the dreams of upward mobility free-wheeling through the cloaca of the City.

  • Flying Home

    by Ralph Ellison

    $21.00

    *Use discount code: SALE at check out for 30% off*

    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.

  • Cuba: A Brief History

    by Sergio Guerra Vilaboy

    $15.95

    A Spanish-language edition of a concise, engaging, and thoroughly revised overview of Cuba written by Cubans for anyone interested in quickly understanding the island country’s turbulent history.

    Un conciso, ameno resumen de Cuba para cualquiera interesado en comprender rápidamente la turbulenta historia de este país insular.


    Cuba: A Brief History covers the pre-Hispanic period, through Cuba’s struggle to maintain the revolution in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the period after Fidel Castro’s decision to step down from office, to the 2014 opening to Cuba by the Obama Administration, the retirement of Raul Castro and his replacement as president in 2018 by Miguel Diaz Canal, and finally to the reversal of Washington’s engagement with Cuba under President Trump. This slim volume provides the reader with an overview of the history and politics of the tiny Caribbean island that continues to appear at the center of world events.

    Featuring a presentation and analysis of US intervention on the island, Cuba: A Brief History also includes footnotes and a bibliography for further reading. This is an essential introduction to Cuba for students, visitors, and others looking for a bird’s eye view of the turbulent history of the island that has captivated and enthralled its northern neighbors for decades.

    Cuba: Una Breve Historia abarca el período prehispánico, la lucha de Cuba por mantener viva la revolución en los años siguientes al colapso de la Unión Soviética, el período luego de la decisión de Fidel Castro de ceder su puesto, la apertura de Cuba en el 2014 a la Administración de Obama, la jubilación de Raúl Castro y su reemplazo por Miguel Díaz-Canel como presidente en el 2018, y la revocación de parte del presidente Trump del compromiso de Washington con Cuba. Este corto volumen provee al lector con un pantallazo de la historia y la política de la pequeña isla caribeña que continúa siendo el foco de sucesos mundiales.

    Incluye una presentación y análisis de la intervención estadounidense en la isla, Cuba: Una Breve Historia también incluye notas al pie y una bibliografía de lecturas complementarias. Esta es una introducción esencial a Cuba para estudiantes, turistas y todo aquel que desea un vistazo de pájaro de la turbulenta historia de la isla que ha cautivado y fascinado a sus vecinos del norte hace décadas.

  • Link + Hud: Heroes by a Hair

    by Jarrett Pumphrey

    Sold out

    Meet Link and Hud—brothers causing chaos in the first of a new middle grade series from real-life brothers Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey.

    Lincoln and Hudson Dupré are brothers with what grown-ups call “active imaginations.” Link and Hud hunt for yetis in the Himalayas and battle orcs on epic quests. Unfortunately, their imaginary adventures wreak havoc in their real world. Dr. and Mrs. Dupré have tried every babysitter in the neighborhood and are at their wits’ end.

    Enter Ms. Joyce. Strict and old-fashioned, she proves to be a formidable adversary. The boys don’t like her or her rules and decide she’s got to go. Through a series of escalating events—told as high-action comic panel sequences—the brothers conspire to undermine Ms. Joyce and get her fired. When they go so big that even Ms. Joyce can’t fix it, suddenly she’s out. Finally, success! Or is it?

    With warm and authentic humor, Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey have blended prose and graphic novel-style illustrations to craft a unique and subversive new series full of brotherly mischief and mayhem.

  • Black. Queer. Southern. Women. : An Oral History

    by E. Patrick Johnson

    Sold out
    An intimate study of black women who love women

    Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities.

    At once transcendent and grounded in place and time, these narratives raise important questions about queer identity formation, community building, and power relations as they are negotiated within the context of southern history. Johnson uses individual stories to reveal the embedded political and cultural ideologies of the self but also of the listener and society as a whole. These breathtakingly rich life histories show afresh how black female sexuality is and always has been an integral part of the patchwork quilt that is southern culture.
  • Laws of Wrath

    by Eriq La Salle

    $16.99

    There are those who fight the devil within them. And those who worship it.

    When the butchered body of a cross-dresser is found in a dumpster, it’s up to Detective Phee Freeman to solve the crime. But this case is personal. The victim is Freeman’s brother.

    At first, the slaying looks like the random act of a vicious killer, but Freeman, his partner Quincy Cavanaugh, and FBI agent Janet Maclin soon discover this is something much more sinister. Similar ritualistic murders are taking place across the city. They’re willing to do whatever it takes to stop the massacres—even if that means that have to join forces with The Dr. Daria Zibik, a brilliant but deranged cult leader. But what if the evil they are hunting and the sociopath they are trusting are one in the same?

  • Laws of Depravity

    by Eriq La Salle

    $16.99

    A Martyr Maker Novel 

    30 years. 36 priests butchered. Can they stop him before he strikes again?

    New York City. Fall 2011. A priest is found murdered in the most gruesome of crime scenes. The brutal slaying is the work of "The Martyr Maker," a serial killer that for the past 30 years has left behind a legacy of torture and fear around the U.S. Every ten years, he butchers 12 clergymen in twisted scenes reflecting the martyrdom of Jesus and his disciples. NYPD detectives Quincy Cavanaugh and Phee Freeman, along with FBI agent Janet Maclin, know that they have very little time to catch this monster before he completes his final cycle of killing and disappears forever. But the investigation is made even more difficult when they discover that the seemingly unrelated clergymen are anything but the symbols of godliness they would have their community believe.

  • Rashid Johnson

    edited by Claudia Rankine, Sampada Aranke & Akili Tommasino

    Sold out

    The most comprehensive publication to date on widely celebrated artist Rashid Johnson

    ‘Johnson is a leading voice of his generation.’ – New York Times

    The most comprehensive publication to date on widely celebrated artist Rashid Johnson

    Working with a variety of media that includes painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance, Rashid Johnson has created a nuanced and iconographic body of work that connects literature, music, and art. Personal references and pervasive cultural narratives are interweaved with the legacy of modernist abstraction, producing what critics have labelled ‘conceptual post-black art’. A precocious talent (his work was included in the seminal ‘Freestyle’ exhibition in New York in 2001), Johnson received the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Prize, which honours contributions in the field of African-American art.

  • The Perseverance

    Raymond Antrobus

    $16.95

    Featured on NPR's Morning Edition

    A Best Book of the Year at The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Poetry School, New York Public Library, and Entropy Magazine


    Winner of the Ted Hughes Award, Rathbones Folio Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award; finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and Reading the West Book Award


    In the wake of his father’s death, the speaker in Raymond Antrobus’ The Perseverance travels to Barcelona. In Gaudi’s Cathedral, he meditates on the idea of silence and sound, wondering whether acoustics really can bring us closer to God. Receiving information through his hearing aid technology, he considers how deaf people are included in this idea. “Even though,” he says, “I have not heard / the golden decibel of angels, / I have been living in a noiseless / palace where the doorbell is pulsating / light and I am able to answer.”

    The Perseverance is a collection of poems examining a d/Deaf experience alongside meditations on loss, grief, education, and language, both spoken and signed. It is a book about communication and connection, about cultural inheritance, about identity in a hearing world that takes everything for granted, about the dangers we may find (both individually and as a society) if we fail to understand each other.

  • All The Names Given: Poems

    Raymond Antrobus

    $16.95

    A Guardian Best Book of the Year

    Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize and The Costa Poetry Award

    “Exquisite.” ―The New York Times Book Review


    “Brave, tender and generous. . . . A haunting study of what we can find in the silences of history when history is recognized as more than a noun, when recognized as something alive and kinetic.” ―Camonghne Felix, author of Build Yourself a Boat

    On the heels of his much-lauded debut collection, Raymond Antrobus continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory in All The Names Given, while simultaneously breaking new ground in both form and content. 

    The collection opens with poems about the author’s surname―one that shouldn’t have survived into modernity―and examines the rich and fraught history carried within it. As Antrobus outlines a childhood caught between intimacy and brutality, sound and silence, and conflicting racial and cultural identities, the poem becomes a space in which the poet reckons with his own ancestry, and bears witness to the indelible violence of the legacy wrought by colonialism. The poems travel through space―shifting fluidly between England, South Africa, Jamaica, and the American South―and brilliantly move from an examination of family history into the wandering lust of adolescence and finally, vividly, into a complex array of marriage poems―matured, wiser, and more accepting of love’s fragility. Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, in which the art of writing captions attempts to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems as well as moments inside and outside of them. 

    Formally sophisticated, with a weighty perception and startling directness, All The Names Given is a timely, tender book full of humanity and remembrance from one of the most important young poets of our generation.

  • Do What Godmother Says

    by L.S. Stratton

    $18.99

    A modern-day writer and a Harlem Renaissance artist are connected by a painting with a deadly secret in this gripping dual-timeline gothic thriller. 
     
    Shanice Pierce knows better than to heed bad omens. But she has a hard time ignoring the signs when she finds herself newly single and out of a job on the same seemingly cursed day.

    Then, while cleaning out her grandmother’s house, Shanice comes across a painting she hasn’t seen in years. Drawn to the haunting portrait in a way she can't explain, Shanice accepts her grandmother’s offer to keep the family heirloom.

    She soon uncovers the story of the artist, a Harlem Renaissance painter named Estelle Johnson. The young woman was taken under wing by the wealthy art patron Maude Bachmann—or “Godmother” as she insisted her artists call her—and vanished shortly after Bachmann’s brutal murder a century ago.

    As Shanice digs deeper, a paranoia that’s haunted her for years returns. She becomes convinced she’s being stalked, and that the deaths happening around her are connected to the staggering offer she turned down for the painting.

    But the truth hiding in plain sight is even more shocking—and deadly—than Shanice could possibly have imagined . . .

  • Futureland: The Architect Games

    H.D. Hunter

    $17.99

    Mazes and mind games await in this epic third book about the theme park of your dreams, where Cam Walker goes head-to-head with the villains who have been after Futureland from the start. An electrifying illustrated series for fans of Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

    "Hold on tight, Futureland will be the ride of your life . . . and maybe the last!" —Kwame Mbalia, #1 New York Times bestselling author

    Team Futureland. Their archenemies. A showdown in spectacularly futuristic Egypt.

    After Futureland emerges from back-to-back scandals, Cam Walker and his family are ready to confront the people who keep targeting their flying park. A group called the Architects has been after them since Futureland made its Atlanta stop, and the Walkers have had enough.

    To settle things, the Architects propose the very first Architect Games, where the Walkers and the Architects will battle in a series of challenges. If the Walkers win, then the Architects will leave them alone once and for all. But if Cam and his family lose, they will lose everything—including Futureland and its prized tech.

    The Architects can't be trusted, but Cam doesn't have a choice. If he can lead his team to victory, his family and friends will be free. Otherwise, there's no telling what the Architects will do once they get their hands on Futureland. . . .

  • Prince of the Palisades

    by Julian Winters

    $12.99

    Young Royals meets Red, White, and Royal Blue in this heart-pumping romance by award-winning author Julian Winters!

    When roguish Prince Jadon of Îles de la Rêverie is left in America to clean up his image after a horribly public break-up gone viral, romance is not on the table. Carefully planned photo ops with puppies? Yes. Scheduled appearances with the Santa Monica elite? Absolutely. Rendezvous with a pink-haired, film-obsessed hottie from the private school where he’s currently enrolled? Uhhhh… Together with his entourage—a bitingly witty royal guard, Rêverie’s future queen (and Jadon’s brilliant older sister), and a quirky royal liaison—Jadon’s on a mission to turn things around and show his parents, and his country, that he’s more than just a royal screw-up. If he doesn’t prove that he’s the prince Rêverie deserves? Well, he may not be allowed home… But falling for a not-so-royal American boy has Jadon redefining what it means to be a leader. If he can be someone’s Prince Charming just by being himself, maybe that’s all it takes to win over a nation. Or at least a prince can dream…

  • Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry & Poetics of Lucille Clifton

    by Kazim Ali

    $23.00

    This long-awaited and much-needed volume shines new light on one of America’s most beloved, and profound, poets—Lucille Clifton.

    Black Buffalo Woman is a deep, comprehensive dive into Clifton’s work through the eyes of celebrated poet and scholar, Kazim Ali. 

    Collecting chapters of Clifton’s early manuscripts, late drafts, and integrating her books of children’s literature, Ali’s meticulously researched volume provides a brilliant and fresh perspective on Clifton’s life and work.

    Various chapters examine Clifton’s treatment of the body as a site of both joy and danger, spirituality, and an interrogation of American history, politics, and popular culture. The result of Ali’s scholarship and care highlights a dazzling array of Clifton’s poetic techniques and forms that will continue to inspire poets, readers, and Lucille Clifton fans—past, present and future—for decades to come.

  • Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation

    Kwasi Konadu

    $28.95

    Kofi Dᴐnkᴐ was a blacksmith and farmer, as well as an important healer, intellectual, spiritual leader, settler of disputes, and custodian of shared values for his Ghanaian community. In Our Own Way in This Part of the World Kwasi Konadu centers Dᴐnkᴐ's life story and experiences in a communography of Dᴐnkᴐ's community and nation from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth, which were shaped by historical forces from colonial Ghana's cocoa boom to decolonization and political and religious parochialism. Although Dᴐnkᴐ touched the lives of thousands of citizens and patients, neither he nor they appear in national or international archives covering the region. Yet his memory persists in his intellectual and healing legacy, and the story of his community offers a non-national, decolonized example of social organization structured around spiritual forces that serves as a powerful reminder of the importance for scholars to take their cues from the lived experiences and ideas of the people they study.

  • PRE-ORDER: Self Made, 2nd Edition: The definitive guide to business startup success

    Bianca Miller-Cole & Byron Cole

    $19.99

    This authoritative, focused and bestselling guide by two of the UK's brightest young entrepreneurs - The Apprentice runner-up, Bianca Miller-Cole and serial entrepreneur, Dr Byron Cole - is a comprehensive toolkit for anyone who wants to make a success of running their own business. Featuring interviews with well known entrepreneurs, entertainers and industry experts, the book covers every tier of the business development process, from start-up to exit, offering practical, implementable and global advice on the start up process.

    This fully updated new edition will de-code the jargon that is prevalent in business circles today, providing straightforward advice on converting an innovative business concept into a commercially viable proposition. It will help you to avoid the costly common mistakes of many who have gone before you, and create a sustainable enterprise that will flourish. Fully updated and expanded to make it more timely, more international, more practical and more inspiring, it will be a vital tool for Entrepreneurs both inside and outside of the author's hugely motivated network.

  • One Way Witch

    Nnedi Okorafor

    $23.00

    *Use discount code SALE at checkout for 30% off*

    Set in the universe Africanfuturist luminary Nnedi Okorafor first introduced in the World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death, One Way Witch is the second in the She Who Knows trilogy

    The world has forgotten Onyesonwu.

    As a teen, Najeeba learned to become the beast of wind, fire and dust: the kponyungo. When that took too much from her, including the life of her father, she let it all go, and for a time, she was happy — until only a few years later, when the small, normal life she’d built was violently destroyed.

    Now in her forties and years beyond the death of her second husband, Najeeba has just lost her beloved daughter. Onyesonwu saved the world. Najeeba knows this well, but the world does not. This is how the juju her daughter evoked works. One other person who remembers is Onyesonwu’s teacher Aro, a harsh and hard-headed sorcerer. Najeeba has decided to ask him to teach her the Mystic Points, the powerful heart of sorcery. There is something awful Najeeba needs to kill and the Mystic Points are the only way. Najeeba is truly her daughter’s mother.

    When Aro agrees to help, Najeeba is at last ready to forge her future. But first, she must confront her past — for certain memories cannot lie in unmarked graves.

  • Tío and Tío: The Ring Bearers

    Ross Mathews & Dr. Wellinthon García-Mathews & Tommy Doyle & Drew Barrymore

    $18.99

    From Ross Mathews (The Drew Barrymore Show and RuPaul’s Drag Race) and his husband, Dr. Wellinthon García-Mathews, comes a heartwarming and humorous tale of love and family as two young boys travel to Mexico to be ring bearers in their uncles’ wedding.

    From Emmy-winning TV host and producer Ross Mathews (The Drew Barrymore Show and RuPaul’s Drag Race) and Dr. Wellinthon García-Mathews comes a heartwarming and humorous tale of family, friendship, and love inspired by their real-life wedding.

    Evan and Andy are excited to visit Mexico for their uncles’ wedding—and their parents are excited that the boys will have a chance to experience the culture, practice their Spanish, and learn responsibility as ring bearers in the ceremony. Once they arrive, Evan and Andy just want to play soccer, swim, and eat all the great food. However, once the festivities are in full swing and the boys witness the love and happiness between their two tíos, they quickly embrace their role in their uncles’ very special day.

    This debut picture book written by Ross Mathews and Dr. Wellinthon García-Mathews, and illustrated by Tommy Doyle, reminds us about the importance of love, family, and embracing one’s cultural identity.

  • Sam Gilliam

    Ishmael Reed

    $150.00

    As featured in The Wall Street Journal’s 2024 Holiday Gift Books: Fine Art

    The definitive monograph of Sam Gilliam one of the great innovators in post-war American painting

    An African American artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights movement, Sam Gilliam blazed a trail with his singular artistic vision. Gilliam emerged from the Washington, DC art scene in the mid 1960s with works that disrupted established artistic norms and styles.

    Relentlessly experimental and inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, Gilliam’s lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.

    This book, made in close collaboration with the Sam Gilliam Foundation, is the first to comprehensively survey the breadth of his extraordinary career, and features never-before-seen archival materials an insightful newly commissioned texts that shine light on the artist, his life, and his work, together with examples of Gilliam's work spanning five decades.

  • Doggerel: Poems

    Reginald Dwayne Betts

    $26.99

    Doggerel is a revelatory meditation on Blackness, masculinity, and vulnerability from one of poetry’s boldest voices.

    Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American life. In Doggerel, Betts examines this subject through a more prosaic―but equally rich―lens: dogs. He reminds us that, as our lives are broken and put back together, the only witness often barks instead of talks. In these poems, which touch on companionship in its many forms, Betts seamlessly and skillfully deploys the pantoum, ghazal, and canzone, in conversation with artists such as Freddie Gibbs and Lil Wayne.

    Simultaneously philosophical and playful, Doggerel is a meditation on family, falling in love, friendship, and those who accompany us on our walk through life. Balancing political critique with personal experience, Betts once again shows us “how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)―and, in doing so, reveals the world anew.

    “. . . every story becomes a multiplication,

    If the naming is filled less with names than

    With the best parts, the barking & everything

    Else, because who among us hasn’t been

    As mangy as a rescue, even on our best

    Days, desiring mostly to be loved.”

    ―from “Rings”

  • Notes from the Field

    Anna Deavere Smith

    $18.00

    *Use discount code: SALE at check out for 30% off*

    "Smith’s powerful style of living journalism uses the collective, cathartic nature of the theater to move us from despair toward hope.” —The Village Voice 

    Anna Deavere Smith’s extraordinary form of documentary theater shines a light on injustices by portraying the real-life people who have experienced them. "One of her most ambitious and powerful works on how matters of race continue to divide and enslave the nation” (Variety). 

    Smith renders a host of figures who have lived and fought the system that pushes students of color out of the classroom and into prisons. (As Smith has put it: “Rich kids get mischief, poor kids get pathologized and incarcerated.”)

    Using people’s own words, culled from interviews and speeches, Smith depicts Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant, who eulogized Freddie Gray; Niya Kenny, a high school student who confronted a violent police deputy; activist Bree Newsome, who took the Confederate flag down from the South Carolina State House grounds; and many others. Their voices bear powerful witness to a great iniquity of our time—and call us to action with their accounts of resistance and hope.

  • House Arrest and Piano: Two Plays

    Anna Deavere Smith

    $20.00

    *Use discount code: SALE at check out for 30% off*

    From the award-winning actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, two teeming, pungent cross-sections of the American experience.

    In the provocative and at times bitterly funny play House Arrest, Smith examines the relationships between a succession of American presidents and their observers in and out of the press. Arcing from Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to Jefferson and Sally Hemings and alive with the voices of such real-life figures as Ed Bradley, George Stephanopoulos, Anita Hill, and Abraham Lincoln, the result is a priceless examination of the intersection of public power and private life.

    In Piano, Smith casts her gaze back a century as she follows the tangled lines of race, sex, and exploitation in a prosperous Cuban household on the eve of the Spanish-American War. Deftly and suspensefully, Smith tells a story of ruptured allegiances and ramifying deceptions in which no one—master or servant, friend or enemy—is what he or she pretends to be. Together these two plays are further proof that Anna Deavere Smith is one of the most searing and revelatory voices in the American theater.

  • Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America

    Sean Anderson

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    How American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism: a creative challenge in 10 case studies

    A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2021

    Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that have, for generations, embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States.

    The architects, designers, artists and writers who were invited to contribute to this book―and to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art for which it serves as a “field guide”―reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in 10 American cities (Atlanta; Brooklyn, New York; Kinloch, Missouri; Los Angeles; Miami; Nashville; New Orleans; Oakland; Pittsburgh; and Syracuse) and celebrate the ways individuals and communities across the country have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, care and refusal.

    A broad range of essays by the curators and prominent scholars from diverse fields, as well as a portfolio of new photographs by the artist David Hartt, complement this volume’s richly illustrated presentations of the architectural projects at the heart of MoMA’s groundbreaking exhibition.

  • Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing and Liberation

    Carolyn Ureña

    $29.95

    Decolonizing Bodies offers novel theorizations of how racial capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchal violence erode the bodily schema and experiences of racialized and colonized populations, profoundly constraining their being in the world. The book invigorates embodiment studies by centering the experiences and struggles of Black, Indigenous, colonized, disabled, queer, and racialized subjects, showing how they live these displacements and disintegrations.

    The volume powerfully demonstrates how racism and colonialism sediment in bodily and habitual registers that are active, ongoing, made and remade. Bodies, the contributors argue, powerfully register the impacts of colonial and racialized violence, but through practices of embodiment, they also digest, expel, and transform them. In centering non-normative subjective experiences and making space for different kinds of embodied knowledge, Decolonizing Bodies also takes a step toward decolonizing academic knowledge.

    This exciting and urgent book offers readers new ways of imagining, choreographing and enacting the body. Beyond connecting distant geographies of harm, it celebrates polymorphous decolonial repertoires that record, creatively narrate, and heal.

  • The Astrology of Healing: Unlocking Our Sacred Wounds with the Wisdom of the Stars

    Nada Yousif

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    The Astrology of Healing offers a spiritual map quest to our unfolding, a way to navigate tough times, knowing they will end and shift just as the planets do above us. Our ability to speak with the symbolism of the stars gives us the keys to unlock our full potential.

    There is a magical moment when you see your trauma embedded within your own birth chart. It's a come to God moment. When you realize the wounds you endured in your life were already written in the archetypal signature at the time you took your first breath. It was already there. Waiting for you to live through it, to alchemize into something more, because everything really does happen for a reason. Our most impactful events in our lives are packed into our birth charts.

    In The Astrology of Healing, author Nada Yousif shares her knowledge of the stars and how they impact the most significant events of our lives. She takes a scholarly approach, tying in history with astrological placements for a macro view of the world. But she also invites the reader to examine their own life events, traumas, and accomplishments through specific evaluations of birth charts and what each placement means.

    Astrology not only shows us all of our core wounds, but it gives context to why we need them and how we can work with them in this lifetime. It's alchemy at it's finest. Astrology gives our wounds the map to the integration of our special healing elixir that we are meant to offer back to the world around us. As within, so without… The Astrology of Healing says, “Not only was this meant to happen, but here's why.” That alone heals at a deeper level.

    Throughout the pages of this book, Yousif examines the charts of famous figures, both historical and modern and breaks down the events of their lives to show how astrology affects us all. The author also weaves in her personal story and shares how astrology changed her life. Then, she provides guidance to the reader, so they can use astrology to unlock their full potential, use the gifts they've been given, and heal the meaningful wounds within so they can fulfill their highest destinies.

    Astrology is like an ancient language. Once we remember this ancient language, we can begin to decipher what our own charts are trying to teach us. We can come to understand the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ to use these lessons and life experiences for our spiritual evolution. It’s an opportunity to shine the light on our innermost selves. Seeing our birth charts for the first time is like turning on a flashlight in a dark hidden room that’s been locked up our entire life. Suddenly we can see everything, each one of our traumas show up in a symbolic, energetic signature… our ‘Natal Promise’. It’s a worldview-changing moment for most, and gives credibility to the saying, “Everything happens for a reason." Our power is truly written in the stars.

  • The Book of James: The Power, Politics, and Passion of LeBron

    Valerie Babb

    $30.00

    *Use discount code SALE at checkout for 30% off*

    The unique social, cultural, and political life of the incomparable LeBron James
     
    LeBron James is the hero in two very American tales: one, a success story the nation loves; the other, the latest installment in an ongoing chronicle of American antiblackness. He’s the poor boy from a “broken” home who makes good. He’s also the poor Black boy from a “broken” home who makes good, then at the apex of his career finds “n*****” spray-painted across the gate to his home.
     
    James has lived in the public eye ever since high school when his extraordinary athletic skills subjected his every action, every statement, every fashion choice to intense public scrutiny that tells us less about James himself and more about a nation still wrestling with many social inequities. He uses his celebrity not to transcend Blackness, but to give it a place of cultural prominence, and the backlash he receives exposes the frictions between Blackness and a country not fully comfortable with its presence. As a result, James’s story is a revelatory narrative of how much Blackness is loved, hated, misunderstood, and just plain cool in an America that has changed and yet not changed at all.

  • A Lucky Man: Stories

    Jamel Brinkley

    $17.00

    *Use discount code: SALE at check out for 30% off*

    In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history.

    Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class―where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.

  • Redemption in Indigo: A Novel

    Karen Lord

    $18.99

    The enchanting tale of mischief and myth—inspired by West African folklore—that became a fantasy classic, from the award-winning author of The Blue, Beautiful World

    Paama is a marvelous cook who’s had the bad fortune to marry Ansige. He was the least eligible bachelor in his village: self-centered, foolish, and food-obsessed. Paama has had enough of this miserable life with her gluttonous husband, and so leaves him to return to her old life with her family.

    But Paama does not know that this is the beginning of a remarkable adventure. Because the Undying Ones are watching her. These spirits observe the follies of mortal life . . . and sometimes meddle and make mischief.

    One of these beings presents her with a magical artifact known as the Chaos Stick, which he says is “great for stirring things up.” As Paama gets to know the powers of this marvelous gift, she learns that the Chaos Stick was stolen from a rival spirit, who decides to stir up some trouble of his own.

    But mastering this magical artifact is only the beginning of Paama’s quest. Although Paama has been granted great power by the Undying Ones, her real journey is to find the magic that lies within herself.

  • The Seed of Cain: Book 2 in The Record Keeper series

    Agnes Gomillion

    Sold out

    Return to the startlingly original dystopian world of The Record Keeper in this stunning sequel. For readers of Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nnedi Okorafor and Tade Thompson comes this Afrofuturist tour de force.

    General Arika Cobane, beloved leader of the worker rebellion, makes a bold—but illegal—move to ensure the people’s freedom. When her scheme fails and her co-conspirator hangs for treason, Arika—overworked and overwrought—blacks out.

    When she awakens, everything has changed. She’s been stripped of her rank and power and the new leader of the Kongo, Kira Swan, is a charismatic traitor bent on consigning the Kongo under the guise of peace.

    Desperate, Arika reunites with Hosea Kahn and seeks treatment for her blackouts at the Compound, deep in the deadly Obi Forest. Arika is determined to regain her influence, stop Kira Swan, and continue leading the Kongo to freedom, but time is running out and she’s still unwell. Control is slipping from her fingers. When a new source of strength presents itself, an ancient authority reserved for the One destined to save the Kongo, Arika gives up everything, including Hosea Khan, to grasp the power, but—all alone, and sick and tired—can she muster the will to hold it?

  • Stereo(TYPE): Poems

    Jonah Mixon-Webster

    $18.00

    A radical, urgent collection of poems about Blackness, the self, and the dismantling of corrupt powers in the fight for freedom.

    A PEN America Literary Award Winner

    Jonah Mixon-Webster works at the intersections of space and the body, race and region, sexuality and class. Stereo(TYPE), his debut collection of poetry, is a reckoning and a force, a revision of our most sacred mythologies, and a work of documentary reporting from Mixon-Webster’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, where clean tap water remains an uncertainty and the aftermath of racist policies persist.

    Challenging stereotypes through scenes that scatter with satire, violence, and the extreme vagaries of everyday life, Mixon-Webster invents visual/sonic forms, conceptualizes poems as transcripts and frequently asked questions, and dives into dreamscapes and modern tragedies, deconstructing the very foundations America is built on. Interrogating language and the ways we wield it as both sword and shield, Stereo(TYPE) is a one-of-a-kind, rapturous collection of vital and beautiful poems.

  • One of the Good Ones (Inkyard Press / Harlequin Teen)

    Maika Moulite

    Sold out

    "One of the Good Ones is magic.” —Damon Young, author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker

    A shockingly powerful exploration of the lasting impact of prejudice and the indomitable spirit of sisterhood that will have readers questioning what it truly means to be an ally, from sister-writer duo Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite, authors of Dear Haiti, Love Alaine.

    ISN’T BEING HUMAN ENOUGH?

    When teen social activist and history buff Kezi Smith is killed under mysterious circumstances after attending a social justice rally, her devastated sister Happi and their family are left reeling in the aftermath. As Kezi becomes another immortalized victim in the fight against police brutality, Happi begins to question the idealized way her sister is remembered. Perfect. Angelic.

    One of the good ones.

    Even as the phrase rings wrong in her mind—why are only certain people deemed worthy to be missed?—Happi and her sister Genny embark on a journey to honor Kezi in their own way, using an heirloom copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book as their guide. But there’s a twist to Kezi’s story that no one could’ve ever expected—one that will change everything all over again.

    "Astonishing!" —Laura Ruby, two-time National Book Award finalist and author of Bone Gap
    "Brilliant" —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
    "Thrilling" —SLJ, starred review

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