All Books

  • Detective Beans: Adventures in Cat Town

    Li Chen

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    The world's cutest cat detective is back on the case in this indie bestselling series. Li Chen's newest Detective Beans adventures are a must-read for anyone who loves mystery stories, cute animals, and hilarious original storytelling.

    Detective Beans is back on the case! In this series of mysteries and adventures, the world's cutest cat detective comes to the aid of her fellow villagers, searching for a cooky thief (with surprising results!), aiding a deceptive duck in the recovery of lost goods, and even doing his best to help a confused bear prove that the moon is made of cheese. In addition to these small capers, Adventures in Cat Town features behind-the-scenes footage of the crime-solving documentary directed by Beans best friend, Biscuits, as well as comics, stories, and even horoscopes illustrated by Beans himself. Called a "must-read" by School Library Journal and "absurdly funny and clever" by Kirkus, it's no mystery why this new series is such a hit!

  • The Truths We Hold: An American Journey

    by Kamala Harris

    $20.00

    Vice President Kamala Harris’s commitment to speaking truth is informed by her upbringing. The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents—an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India—met as activists in the civil rights movement.

    Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and when she became a deputy district attorney out of law school, she quickly established herself as one of the most innovative change agents in American law enforcement. She progressed rapidly to become the elected District Attorney for San Francisco, and then the chief law enforcement officer of California as a whole. Known for bringing a voice to the voiceless and championing the middle class, she took on the big banks during the foreclosure crisis and won a historic settlement for California’s working families. Her hallmarks were applying a holistic, data-driven approach to many of California’s thorniest issues; neither “tough” nor “soft” but smart on crime became her mantra.

    Being smart means learning the truths that can make us better as a community, and supporting those truths with all our might. That has been the pole star that is guiding Harris now as a transformational United States Senator, grappling with an array of complex issues that affect her state, our country, and the world, from health care to immigration, national security, the opioid crisis, and accelerating inequality.

  • Take Back the Block

    by Chrystal D. Giles

    $8.99

    Wes Henderson has the best style in sixth grade. That—and hanging out with his crew (his best friends since little-kid days) and playing video games—is what he wants to be thinking about at the start of the school year, not the protests his parents are always dragging him to.

    But when a real estate developer makes an offer to buy Kensington Oaks, the neighborhood Wes has lived his whole life, everything changes. The grownups are supposed to have all the answers, but all they’re doing is arguing. Even Wes’s best friends are fighting. And some of them may be moving. Wes isn’t about to give up the only home he’s ever known. Wes has always been good at puzzles, and he knows there has to be a missing piece that will solve this puzzle and save the Oaks. But can he find it…before it’s too late?

    Exploring community, gentrification, justice, and friendship, Take Back the Block introduces an irresistible 6th grader and asks what it means to belong—to a place and a movement—and to fight for what you believe in.

  • Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation

    by Octavia E. Butler

    $19.99

    More than 35 years after its release, Kindred continues to draw in new readers with its deep exploration of the violence and loss of humanity caused by slavery in the United States, and its complex and lasting impact on the present day. Adapted by celebrated academics and comics artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings, this graphic novel powerfully renders Butler’s mysterious and moving story, which spans racial and gender divides in the antebellum South through the 20th century.

    Butler’s most celebrated, critically acclaimed work tells the story of Dana, a young black woman who is suddenly and inexplicably transported from her home in 1970s California to the pre–Civil War South. As she time-travels between worlds, one in which she is a free woman and one where she is part of her own complicated familial history on a southern plantation, she becomes frighteningly entangled in the lives of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder and one of Dana’s own ancestors, and the many people who are enslaved by him.

  • Bibliophile: Diverse Spines

    by Jamise Harper

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    This richly illustrated and vastly inclusive collection uplifts the works of authors who are often underrepresented in the literary world. Using their keen knowledge and deep love for all things literary, coauthors Jamise Harper (founder of the Diverse Spines book community) and Jane Mount (author of Bibliophile) collaborated to create an essential volume filled with treasures for every reader:


    • Dozens of themed illustrated book stacks—like Classics, Contemporary Fiction, Mysteries, Cookbooks, and more—all with an emphasis on authors of color and authors from diverse cultural backgrounds
    • A look inside beloved bookstores owned by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color
    • Reading recommendations from leading BIPOC literary influencers

    Diversify your reading list to expand your world and shift your perspective. Kickstart your next literary adventure now!

  • The Color Purple by Alice Walker
    $32.00

    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Alice Walker’s iconic modern classic, now in a beautiful 40th anniversary Penguin Vitae edition with a foreword by Kiese Laymon

    A Penguin Classic Hardcover


    A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker’s epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey toward redemption and love.

  • No Name in the Street

    by James Baldwin

    $15.95
    An extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies that displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works, and powerfully speaks to contemporary conversations around racism.

    "It contains truth that cannot be denied.” — The Atlantic Monthly

    In this stunningly personal document, James Baldwin remembers in vivid details the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness and the later events that scored his heart with pain—the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his retum to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.
  • Young Gifted & Black: A New Generation of Artists

    edited by Antwaun Sargent

    $49.95

    What’s new, now and next from contemporary Black artists

    This book surveys the work of a new generation of Black artists, and also features the voices of a diverse group of curators who are on the cutting edge of contemporary art. As mission-driven collectors, Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi have championed emerging artists of African descent through museum loans and institutional support. But there has never been an opportunity to consider their acclaimed collection as a whole until now.

    Edited by writer Antwaun Sargent (author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion), Young, Gifted and Black draws from this collection to shed new light on works by contemporary artists of African descent. At a moment when debates about the politics of visibility within the art world have taken on renewed urgency, and establishment voices such as the New York Times are declaring that “it has become undeniable that African American artists are making much of the best American art today,” Young, Gifted and Black takes stock of how these new voices are impacting the way we think about identity, politics and art history itself.

    Young, Gifted and Black contextualizes artworks with contributions from artists, curators and other experts. It features a wide-ranging interview with Bernard Lumpkin and Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and an in-depth essay by Antwaun Sargent situating Lumpkin in a long lineage of Black art patrons. A landmark publication, this book illustrates what it means (in the words of Nina Simone) to be young, gifted and Black in contemporary art.

    Artists include: Mark Bradford, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton, Pope.L, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Henry Taylor, Mickalene Thomas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Sadie Barnette, Kevin Beasley, Jordan Casteel, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Bethany Collins, Noah Davis, Cy Gavin, Allison Janae Hamilton, Tomashi Jackson, Samuel Levi Jones, Deana Lawson, Norman Lewis, Eric N. Mack, Arcmanoro Niles, Jennifer Packer, Christina Quarles, Jacolby Satterwhite, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sable Elyse Smith, Chanel Thomas, Stacy Lynn Waddell, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Brenna Youngblood, and more.

  • Patsy

    by Nicole Dennis-Benn

    $16.95

    A beautifully layered portrait of motherhood, immigration, and the sacrifices we make in the name of love from award-winning novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn.

    Heralded for writing “deeply memorable . . . women” (Jennifer Senior, New York Times), Nicole Dennis-Benn introduces readers to an unforgettable heroine for our times: the eponymous Patsy, who leaves her young daughter behind in Jamaica to follow Cicely, her oldest friend, to New York. Beating with the pulse of a long-withheld confession and peppered with lilting patois, Patsy gives voice to a woman who looks to America for the opportunity to love whomever she chooses, bravely putting herself first. But to survive as an undocumented immigrant, Patsy is forced to work as a nanny, while back in Jamaica her daughter, Tru, ironically struggles to understand why she was left behind. Greeted with international critical acclaim from readers who, at last, saw themselves represented in Patsy, this astonishing novel “fills a literary void with compassion, complexity and tenderness” (Joshunda Sanders, Time), offering up a vital portrait of the chasms between selfhood and motherhood, the American dream and reality.

  • The Amazing Adventures of Aya & Pete in London!

    by Serena Minott & Asha Gore

    $17.99
    Aya & Pete travel to London for Spring holidays and there's lots to see in the home of the Queen. In the second book of The Amazing Adventures of Aya & Pete book series, Aya and Pete take a tour of Buckingham Palace, sample traditional British foods, ride the London Eye and sing along during an exciting boat ride on the River Thames. Perfectly sized for travel or story time, "The Amazing Adventures of Aya & Pete in London" is a must-have in the Aya & Pete collection. Ships in a sturdy corrugated flat-pack book box.
  • Black Skin, White Masks (Revised)

    by Frantz Fanon

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    Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon, and Black Skin, White Masks  represents some of his most important work. Fanon’s masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers.

    A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.
  • Beautiful, Still.

    by Colby Deal

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    Beautiful, Still is the first monograph from photographer Colby Deal, documenting the people, objects, and environments of everyday life in the Third Ward neighbourhood in Houston, Texas, where the artist grew up. In this ongoing project, currently consisting of over a thousand negatives, Deal sets out to provide a visual record of overlooked communities and the cultural characteristics gradually being erased by gentrification, as well as a depiction of communities of colour whose members are often portrayed with negative connotations. Through these instinctive black-and-white photographs, Deal's down-to-earth approach to his subjects is made apparent; at times candid and blurred, other times poised and sharply focussed, the series builds to convey the dynamism and vibrancy of family, community, and individual life in the Third Ward. The scratches and dust left on the negatives reflect the marks of lived life and simultaneously suggest the fragility of these documents and the corresponding precarity of the fabrics of social life they often depict. Deal's almost conversational tone - the anthesis of media portrayals of the neighbourhood - invites his viewers in with a sense of joy and intuitive playfulness. From these alternately staged and documentary images, a new narrative emerges about a reductively and oppressively narrativized place, celebrating the agency and freedom that the photographic medium can offer.
  • Black Trans Feminism

    by Marquis Bey

    $28.95
    Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each, conceiving of black trans feminism as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power.

    In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each. Theorizing black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, Bey articulates blackness as a mutiny against racializing categorizations; transness as a nonpredetermined, wayward, and deregulated movement that works toward gender’s destruction; and black feminism as an epistemological method to fracture hegemonic modes of racialized gender. In readings of the essays, interviews, and poems of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jayy dodd, and Venus Di’Khadijah Selenite, Bey turns black trans feminism away from a politics of gendered embodiment and toward a conception of it as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power. Together, blackness and transness actualize themselves as on the run from gender. In this way, Bey presents black trans feminism as a mode of enacting the wholesale dismantling of the world we have been given.
  • Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors

    by Rue Mapp

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    An exquisite combination of beautiful photography and compelling stories, this book from Outdoor Afro founder, Rue Mapp, celebrates Black joy in nature.

    Filled with breathtaking photography, inspiring stories, profiles, and spotlights from Outdoor Afro group members, prominent Black leaders in outdoor spaces, and other organizations, this book inspires Black communities to reclaim their place in the natural world. Interspersed throughout are essays from Mapp on the rich history of Black involvement in the outdoors, activism, and conservation, as well as resources for readers who want to deepen their own connection with the elements. A perfect blend of gorgeous photographs, awe-inspiring stories, and Black history, this collection is the perfect gift for anyone looking to heal in these sacred natural spaces.

    INCREDIBLE ORGANIZATION: Outdoor Afro is a leading organization in the promotion of Black involvement and interaction with the outdoors. Their powerful work is leaving positive, lasting effects on the Black community and broader conservation community.

    ACCOMPLISHED AUTHOR: Rue Mapp's rich involvement in the outdoors and her connections with like-minded individuals and organizations offer a unique approach to educating, motivating, and encouraging Black connection with nature.

    INSPIRATIONAL AND UNIQUE: This book showcases Black joy and strength in spaces from which they have either historically been excluded, or less represented, and makes for an inventive and uplifting celebration of Black joy in nature.

    A GREAT GIFT: Perfect for the outdoorsy person in your life, this book will make for an excellent boost of inspiration and encouragement all year round.

  • Like a Sister

    by Kellye Garrett

    $17.99

    When the body of reality TV star Desiree Pierce is found on a playground in the Bronx the morning after her twenty-fifth birthday party, the police and the media are quick to declare her death an overdose. A tragedy, certainly, but not a crime.

    Yet Columbia grad student Lena—principled, headstrong, and allergic to the spotlight—knows that can’t be the case. Despite the bitter truth that the two hadn’t spoken in two years, they were half-sisters. Lena knew Desiree. And Desiree would never travel above 125th Street. Something is very wrong with the facts. So why is no one listening?

    While the two sisters had been torn apart by Desiree’s partying and by their difficult father, Lena becomes determined to find justice for Desiree. Even if that means untangling her family’s darkest secrets—or ending up dead herself.

  • Ordinary Notes

    by Christina Sharpe

    $23.00

    The critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, "Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility" (Saidiya Hartman).

    A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages, sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.


    At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author’s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. “I learned to see in my mother’s house,” writes Sharpe. “I learned how not to see in my mother’s house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.” Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of "beauty as a method,” collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

  • The Sweet Life Portable Puzzle

    by Sacree Frangine

    $21.95

    Enjoy The Sweet Life with this portable puzzle in a pouch illustrated by best-friends-turned-creative-power-duo, Sacrée Frangine.

    Featuring a relaxing scene of sunbathing friends illustrated by Sacrée Frangine, this inviting modern jigsaw puzzle comes in a portable pouch for toting on adventures. 

    GREAT GIFT: This 500-piece puzzle is the perfect de-stressing activity that begs to be displayed when complete or reused again and again. Stored in a handy zippered bag, it makes a lovely birthday, Mother's Day, or special occasion gift for lovers of modern design, or a self-gift when you need a little mindful leisure time.

    REUSABLE CANVAS POUCH: All 500 pieces of this puzzle and an image guide fit neatly into this soft fabric pouch that's handy to store, pack in luggage, or toss in a tote—and can easily be reused for stashing pencils, cosmetics, or any small supplies.

    FUN FOR EVERYONE: This unique puzzle for adults makes excellent screen-free entertainment for solo fun or gatherings with friends and family, whether you're on a weekend getaway or stuck inside on a rainy day.

    ART SHOWCASE: Known for modern compositions with warm, inviting color palettes, French creative duo Sacrée Frangine have an iconic art style that has earned them a vast following online and an ever-growing list of collaborations that range from book covers and cosmetic packaging to homeware. Featuring an inviting composition of sunbathing friends, this puzzle and its containing pouch make a delightful visual escape.

    Perfect for:

    • Puzzlers and game enthusiasts
    • Lovers of modern art and design
    • Adventurers, travelers, and free spirits
    • Fans of Sacrée Frangine and their collabs with such brands as Chilly's, H&M, Canon, Causebox, Sephora, and Anthropologie
    • Gift for moms, sisters, or girlfriends on birthdays, Mother's Day, Valentine's or Galentine's Day, graduation, holidays, or any special occasion
    • Pair with another item in the Sweet Life line—The Sweet Life Notebook Collection or The Sweet Life Notes—to create an extra-special present for someone close to your heart
  • Nigeria Jones: A Novel

    by Ibi Zoboi

    from $15.99

    *Use discount code SALE at checkout for 30% *

    From Ibi Zoboi, bestselling, award-winning author of American Street and co-author of Punching the Air, comes a bold new YA coming-of-age story, which explores race, feminism, and complicated family dynamics. The ideal next read for fans of Roxane Gay, Jacqueline Woodson, and Elizabeth Acevedo.

    Warrior Princess. That’s what Nigeria Jones’s father calls her. He has raised her as part of the Movement, a Black separatist group based in Philadelphia. Nigeria is homeschooled and vegan and participates in traditional rituals to connect her and other kids from the group to their ancestors. But when her mother—the perfect matriarch of their Movement—disappears, Nigeria’s world is upended. She finds herself taking care of her baby brother and stepping into a role she doesn’t want.

    Nigeria’s mother had secrets. She wished for a different life for her children, which includes sending her daughter to a private Quaker school outside of their strict group. Despite her father’s disapproval, Nigeria attends the school with her cousin, Kamau, and Sage, who used to be a friend. ­There, she begins to flourish and expand her universe.

    As Nigeria searches for her mother, she starts to uncover a shocking truth. One that will lead her to question everything she thought she knew about her life and her family.

    From award-winning author Ibi Zoboi comes a powerful story about discovering who you are in the world—and fighting for that person—by having the courage to be your own revolution.

  • I Write What I Like: Selected Writings

    Steve Biko

    $28.00

    "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." Like all of Steve Biko's writings, those words testify to the passion, courage, and keen insight that made him one of the most powerful figures in South Africa's struggle against apartheid. They also reflect his conviction that black people in South Africa could not be liberated until they united to break their chains of servitude, a key tenet of the Black Consciousness movement that he helped found.

    I Write What I Like contains a selection of Biko's writings from 1969, when he became the president of the South African Students' Organization, to 1972, when he was prohibited from publishing. The collection also includes a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; an introduction by Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana, who were both involved with Biko in the Black Consciousness movement; a memoir of Biko by Father Aelred Stubbs, his longtime pastor and friend; and a new foreword by Professor Lewis Gordon.


    Biko's writings will inspire and educate anyone concerned with issues of racism, postcolonialism, and black nationalism.

  • Loving You Always

    by Kennedy Ryan

    $16.99

    Secrets emerge and romance sparks in this irresistible romance from the USA Today bestselling author Kennedy Ryan.

    Kerris Moreton should be the happiest woman in the world: She has a successful business and is about to start the family she's always wanted. But the man of her dreams--the one whose green eyes see straight into her soul and whose gentle hands make her body hum with pleasure--is not hers.

    Each secret moment with Walsh Bennett serves to remind Kerris of what she's missing. And every stolen hour makes it harder to see her future without him. But being with Walsh would betray a sacred promise and upend her perfect life. When tragedy strikes, the razor's edge between love and loyalty grows sharper than ever. And Kerris must decide where her heart will fall . . .

    Don't miss the beginning of Kerris and Walsh's story in When You Are Mine.

  • As the Wicked Watch: The First Jordan Manning Novel

    by Tamron Hall

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    The first in a thrilling new series from Emmy Award–winning journalist Tamron Hall, in which a reporter unravels the disturbing mystery around the deaths of two black girls, the work of a serial killer terrorizing Chicago.

    When crime reporter Jordan Manning leaves her hometown in Texas to take a job at a television station in Chicago, she’s one step closer to her a dream: a coveted anchor chair on a national network.

    Jordan is smart and aggressive, with unabashed star-power, and often the only woman of color in the newsroom. Her signature? Arriving first on the scene—in impractical designer stilettos. Armed with a master’s degree in forensic science and impeccable instincts, Jordan has thus far been able to balance her dueling motivations: breaking every big story—and giving voice to the voiceless.

    From her time reporting in Texas, she’s sure she has covered the vilest of human behaviors, but nothing has prepared her for Chicago. You see, Jordan is that rare breed of journalist who can navigate a crime scene as well as she can a newsroom—often noticing what others tend to miss. Again and again, she is called to cover the murders of black females, many of them sexually assaulted, most brutalized, and all of them quickly forgotten.

    All until Masey James—the story that Jordan just can’t shake, try as she might. A fifteen-year-old girl whose body was found in an abandoned lot, Masey has come to represent for Jordan all of the frustration that her job—with its required distance—often forces her to repress. Putting the rest of her workload and her (fraying) personal life aside, Jordan does everything she can to give the story the coverage it desperately requires, and that a missing black child would so rarely get. Three young boys are eventually charged with Masey’s murder, but Jordan remains unconvinced.

    There’s a serial killer on the loose, Jordan believes, and he’s hiding in plain sight.

  • Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

    edited by Nikki Giovanni

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    “Knowledge is what’s important, you know?  Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it.” — TONI MORRISON
     
    In this wide-ranging collection of thought-provoking interviews — including her first and last — Toni Morrison (whom President Barrack Obama called a “national treasure”) details not only her writing life, but also her other careers as a teacher, and as a publisher, as well as the gripping story of her family. In fact, Morrison reveals here that her Nobel Prize-winning novels, such as Beloved and Song of Solomon, were born out of her family’s stories — such as those of her great-grandmother, born a slave, or her father, escaping the lynch mobs of the South. With an introduction by her close friend, poet Nikki Giovani, Morrison hereby weaves yet another fascinating and inspiring narrative — that of herself.
  • Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' with Mother Nature

    by Dick Gregory & James R. McGraw

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    First published in 1974 and even more relevant today, a natural and whole foods guide the voice of black consciousness, cultural icon Dick Gregory, the incomparable satirist, human rights and environmental activist, health advocate, social justice champion, and author of the NAACP Image Award–winning Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies and the classic bestseller Nigger: An Autobiography.

    Written with Dick Gregory’s irreverent wit and informed by his deep intelligence, Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat is for real people who are concerned about their health and wellness. Gregory offers an enlightening introduction to natural foods, and offers a wickedly amusing and informative assessment of how our modern diet damages the human digestive tract, and raises our consciousness about the political power of food.

    Gregory argues that how you treat yourself and your body reflects how you treat others. He discusses various fasts and the ones he’s done for both political and health reasons, hunger in America, navy beans, and how Americans are changing the way they eat—the beginning of a movement in the 1970s that is still felt today. He offers suggestions on diets to help you gain or lose pounds and offers advice on natural substitutes for favorite alcoholic drinks. You are what you eat—with Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat you can laugh your way to better health. 

  • God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin

    edited by Hilton Als

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    Baldwin’s life and legacy as remembered by a pantheon of artists and writers: from Jamaica Kincaid and Barry Jenkins to Richard Avedon and Alice Neel

    When author James Baldwin died in 1987, he left behind an extraordinary body of work: novels, poems, film scripts and, perhaps most indelibly, essays. A friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, Baldwin was a critical voice in the civil rights movement. After reaching acclaim in his early career as a writer, he struggled to retain the author’s “I,” while taking on the “we” of the people.
    Edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hilton Als and growing out of his landmark exhibition at David Zwirner in 2019, God Made My Face brings together an impressive assembly of contributors, ranging from Baldwin biographer David Leeming to novelist Jamaica Kincaid and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, to create a memorial mosaic: one that not only mirrors Baldwin’s various tones but also closely examines his singular contributions to cinema, theater, the essay and Black American critical studies. These essays are illustrated by artwork from modern and contemporary artists who were either personal contemporaries of Baldwin or directly inspired by his work. In each piece assembled here, the authors speak from a personal, informed perspective, illuminating Baldwin’s deeply anguished and enlightened voice and his belief that, ultimately—because we are human—we share the potential to love, connect and live together in all our glory.
    Artists include: Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Richard Avedon, Don Bachardy, Alvin Baltrop, Anthony Barboza, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Beauford Delaney, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, George McCalman, Alice Neel, Elle Pérez, Cameron Rowland, Kara Walker, James Welling, Larry Wolhandler.
    Authors include:Stephen Best, Daphne A. Brooks, Teju Cole, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leeming, Darryl Pinckney.

  • Blackouts: A Novel

    by Justin Torres

    $20.00

    From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories—personal and collective.

    Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

    A book about storytelling—its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change—and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres’s Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.

  • It's Elementary

    by Elise Bryant

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    A fast-paced, completely delightful new mystery about what happens when parents get a little too involved in their kids' schools, from NAACP Image Award nominee Elise Bryant.

    Mavis Miller is not a PTA mom. She has enough on her plate with her feisty seven-year-old daughter, Pearl, an exhausting job at a nonprofit, and the complexities of a multigenerational household. So no one is more surprised than Mavis when she caves to Trisha Holbrook, the long-reigning, slightly terrifying PTA president, and finds herself in charge of the school’s brand-new DEI committee.

    As one of the few Black parents at this California elementary school, Mavis tries to convince herself this is an opportunity for real change. But things go off the rails at the very first meeting, when the new principal's plans leave Trisha absolutely furious. Later that night, when Mavis spies Trisha in yellow rubber gloves and booties, lugging cleaning supplies and giant black trash bags to her waiting minivan, it’s only natural that her mind jumps to somewhere it surely wouldn’t in the light of day.

    Except Principal Smith fails to show up for work the next morning, and has been MIA since the meeting. Determined to get to the bottom of things, Mavis, along with the school psychologist with the great forearms (look, it’s worth noting), launches an investigation that will challenge her views on parenting, friendship, and elementary school politics.

    Brilliantly written, It's Elementary is a quick-witted, escapist romp that perfectly captures just how far parents will go to give their kids the very best, all wrapped in a mystery that will leave you guessing to the very end.

  • How to Abolish Prisons : Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment

    by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché

    $18.95

    An incisive guide to abolitionist strategy, and a love letter to the movement that made this moment possible.

    Critics of abolition sometimes castigate the movement for its utopianism, but in
     How to Abolish Prisons, long-time organizers Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché reveal a movement that has made the struggle for abolition as real as the institutions they are fighting against.

    Drawing on extensive interviews with abolitionist crews all over North America, Herzing and Piché provide a collective reconstruction of what the grassroots movement to abolish prisons actually is, what initiatives it has launched, how it organizes itself, and how its protagonists build the day-to-day practice of politics. Readers sit in on the Winnipeg rideshares of Bar None and the meetings of the Chicago Community Bail Fund as they assess the utility of politicized mutual aid. They follow the campaigns and coalitions of Critical Resistance in Oakland and San Francisco and Survived and Punished in New York City, and learn about the prisoner correspondence projects that keep activists behind bars and outside them in constant coordination.

    Abolitionist campaigns are constructing on-the-ground initiatives across North America to deconstruct carceral society and build resistant communities.Through the words, deeds, and personalities of this beautifully peopled movement, How to Abolish Prisons emerges as a stunning snapshot of a movement’s thinking in motion.

  • Blood Justice

    Terry J. Benton-Walker

    $13.99
    The sequel to Terry J Benton-Walker's smash hit debut, Blood Debts, continues the story of powerful magical families, intergenerational curses, and deadly drama in New Orleans.

    Cristina and Clement Trudeau have conjured the impossible: justice.

    They took back their family’s stolen throne to lead New Orleans’ magical community into the brighter future they all deserve.

    But when Cris and Clem restored their family power, Valentina Savant lost everything. Her beloved grandparents are gone and her sovereignty has been revoked—she will never be Queen. Unless, of course, someone dethrones the Trudeaus again. And lucky for her, she’s not the only one trying to take them down.

    Cris and Clem have enemies coming at them from all directions: Hateful anti-magic protesters sabotage their reign at every turn. A ruthless detective with a personal vendetta against magical crime is hot on their tail just as Cris has discovered her thirst for revenge. And a brutal god, hunting from the shadows, is summoned by the very power Clem needs to protect the boy he loves.

    Cris’s hunger for vengeance and Clem’s desire for love could prove to be their family’s downfall, all while new murders, shocking disappearances, and impossible alliances are changing the game forever.

    Welcome back to New Orleans, where gods walk among us and justice isn’t served, it’s taken.

  • Miles Morales Untangles a Web (Marvel After-School Heroes)

    by Terrance Crawford and Dave Bardin

    Sold out

    Miles Morales is on the case in this original Marvel chapter book with black-and-white illustrations throughout!

    Miles Morales loves spending time at the new center that Tony Stark has just opened. There, he and other kids can take classes, play sports, and even work on art projects. Which is exactly what Miles is doing when he discovers that someone is trying to steal top-secret files from the Stark Center.

    Luckily, King T’Challa and his sister Shuri are in New York, and Shuri is just the tech genius who can help Miles save the day. Can this team identify and capture the villain before the Stark Center is completely destroyed?

    Miles is determined to untangle this web in this chapter book that’s perfect for Marvel fans beginning to read on their own or for reading aloud!

    © 2024 MARVEL.™

  • The Contemporary Black Church: The New Dynamics of African American Religion (Religion and Social Transformation, 17)

    by Jason E. Shelton

    $32.00

    Charts the changing dynamics of religion and spirituality among African Americans

    Recent decades have ushered in a profound transformation within the American religious landscape, characterized by an explosion of religious diversification and individualism as well as a rising number of “nones.” The Contemporary Black Church makes the case that the story of this changing religious landscape needs to be told incorporating more data as it applies specifically to African Americans.

    Jason E. Shelton draws from survey data as well as interviews with individuals from a wide variety of religious backgrounds to argue that social reforms and the resulting freedoms have paved the way for a pronounced diversification among African Americans in matters of faith. Many African Americans have switched denominational affiliations within the Black Church, others now adhere to historically White traditions, and a record number of African Americans have left organized religion altogether in recent decades. These changing demographics and affiliations are having a real and measurable effect on American politics, particularly as members of the historic Black Church are much more likely than those of other faiths to vote and to strongly support government policies aimed at bridging the racial divide.

    Though not the first work to note that African Americans are not monolithic in their religious affiliation, or to argue that there is a trend toward secularism in Black America, this book is the first to substantiate these claims with extensive empirical data, charting these changing dynamics and their ramifications for American society and politics.

  • Puerto Rico: A National History

    Jorell Melndez-Badillo

    $29.95

    A panoramic history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian times to today

    Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Melndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago's people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today.

    In this masterful work of scholarship, Melndez-Badillo sheds light on the vibrant cultures of the archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus and captures the full sweep of Puerto Rico's turbulent history in the centuries that followed, from the first indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511-led by the powerful chieftain Ageyban II-to the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1952. He deftly portrays the contemporary period and the intertwined though unequal histories of the archipelago and the continental United States.

    Puerto Rico is an engaging, sometimes personal, and consistently surprising history of colonialism, revolt, and the creation of a national identity, offering new perspectives not only on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean but on the United States and the Atlantic world more broadly.

    Available in Spanish from our partners at Grupo Planeta

  • Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay

    Jordan Peele

    $19.95

    A masterpiece of identity horror and a dark reflection on America’s past and present, Us presents chilly atmospherics, psychological torment and old-world suspense-building plot twists. Whereas Get Out was considered more a mixture of drama and suspense, Peele leaned fully into the horror genre with his sophomore film, using urban legends such as doppelgangers to tease out the uniquely American perceptions of xenophobia and “othering.” Critic Monica Castillo wrote of the film: “Us is another thrilling exploration of the past and oppression this country is still too afraid to bring up. Peele wants us to talk, and he’s given audiences the material to think, to feel our way through some of the darker sides of the human condition.”
    Published in conjunction with the fifth anniversary of the critically acclaimed film’s release, this companion paperback features Oscar®-winning director Jordan Peele’s screenplay, alternate endings and deleted scenes, and is richly illustrated with over 150 stills from the motion picture. Specially commissioned annotations by hannah baer, Theaster Gates, Jamieson Webster, Jared Sexton, Mary Ping, Shana Redmond and Leila Taylor present a cosmology of images, definitions and inspirations that extend the themes of the film. Continuing in the legacy of 1960s paperbacks that documented the era’s most significant avant-garde films―such as Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Godard’s Masculin Féminin and Antonioni’s L’Avventura―Us is an indispensable guide to a deeper understanding of this important film.
    Jordan Peele (born 1979) is a writer, actor and filmmaker who rose to fame as half of the comedy duo Key & Peele. He has written and directed three feature films: Get Out (2017), Us (2019) and Nope (2022). He was the first Black screenwriter to win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

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