In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP’s increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. Exploring how musicians, producers, and other industry professionals navigated these dynamics, Mueller contends that the practice of making LPs significantly changed how jazz was created, heard, and understood in the 1950s and beyond. By attending to the details of audio production, he reveals how Black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus worked to redefine prevailing notions of race and cultural difference within the United States. Mueller demonstrates that the LP emerges as a medium of sound and culture that maps onto the more expansive sonic terrain of Black modernity in the 1950s.

Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C., his only companions two fellow African immigrants who share his bitter nostalgia and longing for his home continent. Years ago and worlds away Sepha could never have imagined a life of such isolation. As his environment begins to change, hope comes in the form of a friendship with new neighbors Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter. But when a series of racial incidents disturbs the community, Sepha may lose everything all over again.

Watch a QuickTime interview with Dinaw Mengestu about this book.

An essential exploration of the overlooked impact of disordered eating among Black women—and a prescriptive road map to returning to peace and wholeness within our bodies, from the clinical therapist who founded Black and Embodied Counseling and Consulting PLLC

Food has always been a political tool for the oppressor. And the body, especially the Black body, has always been one of its many battlegrounds.

Licensed mental health therapist, somatic healer, and eating disorder specialist Alishia McCullough understands that for far too many Black women, the myriad effects of racial trauma have disrupted their most essential relationship: the one they have with their bodies—and by extension, with their food. African Americans are disproportionately impacted by disordered eating behaviors, yet their experiences are frequently overlooked by doctors and mental health experts. As a result, entire communities—our most vulnerable communities—are forced to navigate systems that are already primed to dismiss their needs, leaving them without proper care, or often even the language they need to identify what’s wrong.

McCullough’s groundbreaking work radically validates the lived experiences and generational traumas of BIPOC communities. As part of a steadily growing movement among clinicians to “decolonize therapy,” McCullough rejects the patriarchal, white supremacist mindset that has dominated the field, and instead embraces a more integrated approach that seeks to understand disordered eating patterns by examining the psychological wounds left by centuries of racism.

Weaving together crucial history, compelling client stories, guided practice, and McCullough’s own experiences with disordered eating behaviors, Reclaiming the Black Body is a revealing, potentially life-saving book that illuminates the way home, back to the safety and comfort found within our bodies.

Travel with Ugandan American designer Nasozi Kakembo as she explores iconic home goods—from Malian mudcloth to Moroccan rugs—at the source and offers thoughtful guidance on collecting and decorating with traditional African treasures

In The African Decor Edit, author Nasozi Kakembo shares her deep knowledge of ethically sourced and aesthetically elevated heritage wares. Through xN Studio, her interior design and product design practice, Nasozi collaborates with artisans throughout Africa, and hers is the rare design book that delves into the origin and meaning behind the furnishings and accessories shown. Each chapter presents artisans in their home countries, telling their stories in their own words. The book also demonstrates the beauty of African decor, with a collection of inspiring, layered interiors from all over the world. The African Decor Edit is a must-have for all who admire African wares and wish to decorate with them in a thoughtful and ethical way.

As Udonwa grows, her hidden family history changes her forever.

Let me tell you a story. It’s about a war. This war is not the type fought with guns and machetes. It is a family type. A silent war. The type fought in the heart. It began long before I was formed.

Udonwa’s family is at war ― a war of relationships, played out under the tyranny of a monster dad. Age twelve, Udonwa has a peculiar love for her father, Reverend Leonard Ilechukwu, who favours her but beats his wife and his other children. She sees his good side: after all, he pays the school fees, and tells her that she, named “the peaceful child,” is the one most likely to become a doctor.

When her newly married eldest sister suddenly takes her from their family compound in Iruama, Nigeria, to live with her in Awka, Udonwa experiences violence first-hand. Later, pieces of a sinister picture emerge that shake her life to the core.

No longer the person she thought she was, Udonwa launches into a period of extreme change, and parts of her life spiral into chaos as she finds herself torn between her love for her father and an underlying need to free herself. This vivid family saga is engrossing, deeply unsettling, and finally uplifting.

Following the tradition of Nikky Finney, Krista Franklin, and Morgan Parker, Good Dress documents the extravagant beauty of Black relationships, language, and community.

In her debut poetry collection, Brittany Rogers explores the audacity of Black Detroit, Black womanhood, class, luxury and materialism, and matrilineage. A nontraditional coming-of-age, Good Dress witnesses a speaker coming into her own autonomy and selfhood as a young adult, reflecting on formative experiences.

With care and incandescent energy, the poems engage with memory, time, interiority, and community. The collection also nudges tenderly toward curiosity: What does it mean to belong to a person, to a city? Can intimacy and romance be found outside the heteronormative confines of partnership? And in what ways can the pursuit of pleasure be an anchor that returns us to ourselves?

People of African descent were some of Galveston's earliest residents, and although they came to the island enslaved, they retained mastery of their culinary traditions. As Galveston's port prospered and became the "Wall Street of the South,'? better job opportunities were available for African Americans who lived in Galveston and for those who migrated to the island city after emancipation, with owner-operated restaurants being one of the most popular enterprises. Staples like Fease's Jambalaya Café, Rose's Confectionery and the Squeeze Inn anchored the island community and elevated its cuisine. From Gus Allen's business savvy to Eliza Gipson's oxtail artistry, the Galveston Historical Foundation's African American Heritage Committee has gathered together the stories and recipes that preserve this culinary history for the enjoyment and enrichment of generations, and kitchens, to come.

In the 19th century, Galveston shores were a gateway for immigrants to Texas and destinations beyond. Slaves, the forced immigrants, were brought to Galveston as property for sale. The largest slave trade operation in Galveston was implemented by Jean Laffite, a pirate. His slave trade business began around 1818. However, for the most part, slaves entering the port of Galveston were destined for other Texas cities and other states. Images of America: African Americans of Galveston presents the community life and accomplishments of Galveston slaves, the descendants of slaves, and descendants of those who migrated to Galveston after the Civil War. The book celebrates Galveston's African American culture from the 1840s to the 1960s.

Tommy J. Curry’s provocative book The Man-Not is a justification for Black Male Studies. He posits that we should conceptualize the Black male as a victim, oppressed by his sex. The Man-Not, therefore,is a corrective of sorts, offering a concept of Black males that could challenge the existing accounts of Black men and boys desiring the power of white men who oppress them that has been proliferated throughout academic research across disciplines.

Curry argues that Black men struggle with death and suicide, as well as abuse and rape, and their genred existence deserves study and theorization. This book offers intellectual, historical, sociological, and psychological evidence that the analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism (including Black feminism) does not yet fully understand the role that homoeroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability play in the deaths and lives of Black males. Curry challenges how we think of and perceive the conditions that actually affect all Black males.

In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.

This powerful collection of articles, essays, and letters spans the period between Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon’s landmark manifesto on the psychology of the colonized and the means of empowerment necessary for their liberation. These pieces display the genesis of some of Fanon’s greatest ideas — ideas that became so vital to the leaders of the American civil rights movement.

From Andrea Williams, the bestselling author of We Are Family with LeBron James, comes Inside the Park, the story of a young baseball fan’s misadventures after getting locked inside a pro baseball stadium on the eve of the biggest game of the season.

In this all-new, hilarious, action-packed middle grade tale, Timothy “Pumpsie” Strickland, a baseball-loving twelve-year-old, is about to step up to the plate for the biggest swing of his life.

Pumpsie needs a win. Or to be more precise, he needs the Nashville Wildcats to win. Pumpsie’s been waiting his entire life—twelve whole years!—for his favorite team to make it to the playoffs. And this year—finally!—they’re just one win away.

But when Pumpsie accidentally gets trapped in Lookout Field the night before the last game of the season, with only a lost dog named Campy for company, he may have accidentally stumbled into the best night of his life. For a baseball fan like Pumpsie, using the pro batting cages, running the bases, playing with the public address system, eating all the concession-stand junk food he can find is a dream come true . . . until he realizes he’s not alone in the stadium. Foul plots are brewing beneath Lookout Field, and now it’s on Pumpsie to swallow his fears, gum up his courage, and swing for the fences if he wants to save the Wildcats’ postseason chances.

Inside the Park is a fun-filled, action-packed slice of wish fulfillment that’s perfect for fans of Mike Lupica and Tim Green or any kid who’s ever closed their eyes and imagined stepping up to the plate with the game tied and the season on the line.

A powerful, incisive reckoning with the impacts of school desegregation that traces four generations of the author’s family to show how the implementation of integration decimated Black school systems and did much of the Black community a disservice

On May 17, 1954 the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education determined that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Heralded as a massive victory for civil rights, the decision's goal was to give Black children equitable access to educational opportunities and clear a path to a better future. Yet in the years following the ruling, schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods were shuttered or saw their funding dwindle, Black educators were fired en masse, and Black children faced discrimination and violence from their white peers as they joined resource-rich schools that were ill-prepared for the influx of new students.

Award-winning interdisciplinary scholar of education and Black history Noliwe Rooks weaves together sociological data and cultural history to challenge the idea that integration was a boon for Black children. She tells the story of her grandparents, who were among the thousands of Black teachers fired following the Brown decision; her father, who was traumatized by his experiences at an almost exclusively-white school; her own experiences moving from a flourishing, racially diverse school to an underserved inner-city one; and finally her son and his Black peers, who over half-century after Brown still struggle with hostility and prejudice from white teachers and students alike. She also shows how present-day discrimination lawsuits directly stem from the mistakes made during integration.

At once assiduously researched and deeply engaging, Integrated tells the story of how education has remained both a tool for community progress and a seemingly inscrutable cultural puzzle. Rooks' deft hand turns the story of integration's past and future on it's head, and shows how we may better understand and support generations of students to come.

*Use discount code SALE at checkout for 30% *

This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin’s 100th-year anniversary, revealing and critiquing the realities of Black life in mid-century US

Originally published in Notes of a Native Son, the essays "The Harlem Ghetto," "Journey to Atlanta," and "Notes of a Native Son" will appeal to those interested in the personal and political turmoil of Baldwin's life.

“The Harlem Ghetto” introduces readers to the extremities of life in Baldwin’s native city. “Journey to Atlanta” depicts the faulty relationship between the Black community and the politician, following a quartet called The Melodeers on a trip to Atlanta under the auspices of the Progressive Party. Baldwin concludes this collection with “Notes of A Native Son,” a powerful autobiographical essay about his fractured relationship with his father.

The Harlem Ghetto: Essays explores the American condition through a mix of analytic and autobiographical essays. This second collection in the Baldwin centennial anniversary series is Baldwin’s most personal as he grapples with his childhood and his own affinity with Blackness.

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age

Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman’s inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical prose.

This novel tells the deeply charged story of a woman’s life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own.

Kincaid takes us from Xuela’s childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela’s is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness, and her deep sympathy for those who share her history. But underlying all is “the black room of the world” that is Xuela’s motherlessness and barrenness.

A daughter’s investigation into her family history threatens to destroy their legacy in a gripping novel about power, money, and secrets by the author of Token Black Girl.

On their Martha’s Vineyard estate, the Carter family prepares to celebrate. But when the billionaire patriarch dies right before his seventieth birthday, the media is quick to question the future of the multi-industry conglomerate that makes the Carters living legends. Amid the succession crisis, his daughter, Kennedy, is questioning her father’s past.

Kennedy is an aspiring filmmaker, and the documentary she’d planned to present at her father’s party begins an inquest into the life of a man she never really knew. A thoughtful outlier in an elite and fiercely guarded dynasty, she’s not interested in keeping up the appearances that define her impeccably poised mother or in the capitalist games her ruthless brother plays. Kennedy wants only to understand the origins of their empire, and the lethally ambitious man behind it. That understanding comes at a cost.

As a twisted history emerges, the fault lines in the family grow. Torn between morality and the promise of maintaining wealth, Kennedy must decide what’s most important―the Carter legacy or exposing the shocking truth of how it was built.

Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. It is populated by sartorial impresarios such as Julius Soubise, a freed slave who sometimes wore diamond-buckled, red-heeled shoes as he circulated through the social scene of eighteenth-century London, and Yinka Shonibare, a prominent Afro-British artist who not only styles himself as a fop but also creates ironic commentaries on black dandyism in his work. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora.

Dandyism was initially imposed on black men in eighteenth-century England, as the Atlantic slave trade and an emerging culture of conspicuous consumption generated a vogue in dandified black servants. “Luxury slaves” tweaked and reworked their uniforms, and were soon known for their sartorial novelty and sometimes flamboyant personalities. Tracing the history of the black dandy forward to contemporary celebrity incarnations such as Andre 3000, Miller explains how black people became arbiters of style and how they have historically used the dandy’s signature tools—clothing, gesture, and wit—to break down limiting identity markers and propose new ways of fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic world. With an aplomb worthy of her iconographic subject, she considers the black dandy in relation to nineteenth-century American literature and drama, W. E. B. Du Bois’s reflections on black masculinity and cultural nationalism, the modernist aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance, and representations of black cosmopolitanism in contemporary visual art.

In this riveting domestic thriller for readers of Jeneva Rose, Kimberly McCreight, Kimberly Belle, and Shanora Williams, one woman’s seemingly perfect marriage is shattered by a shocking revelation. Now, how far will she go to learn the whole truth—and will it be enough to outrun the lethal consequences?

Growing up as a foster child, Brooke Perry has known more than her share of hard times. Securing a successful financial career and marrying Andre, a wealthy businessman, is far more than she ever dreamed she could achieve. And though she's suffered two miscarriages—losses that shook her and Andre to their core—she's content to create the happiest of futures . . .

. . . Until a mysterious other woman, Erika Jones, swears Andre fathered her baby, claimed the child was dead—and made her disappear. Brooke refuses to believe her—until Erika is killed in a sudden, extremely suspicious house fire. Then Brooke discovers Andre's first wife didn't in fact die from an illness.

Now Brooke is determined to uncover the truth, no matter the cost. Even if it means lying to the police—and facing arrest. Even if it takes all her courage to go up against Andre's formidable—and ruthless—mother. And as more of Andre's secrets and double life surface, Brooke will piece together a nightmare beyond mere lies and betrayal, a lethal hall of mirrors where she can believe nothing . . . and the stakes are higher, and deadlier, than she ever imagined.

In the critical essays collected in Black Looks, bell hooks interrogates old narratives and argues for alternative ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness. Her focus is on spectatorship―in particular, the way blackness and black people are experienced in literature, music, television, and especially film―and her aim is to create a radical intervention into the way we talk about race and representation. As she describes: "the essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert." As students, scholars, activists, intellectuals, and any other readers who have engaged with the book since its original release in 1992 can attest, that's exactly what these pieces do.

What are the conditions needed for our nation to bridge cultural and racial divides? By "writing beyond race," noted cultural critic bell hooks models the constructive ways scholars, activists, and readers can challenge and change systems of domination.

In the spirit of previous classics like Outlaw Culture and Reel to Real, this new collection of compelling essays interrogates contemporary cultural notions of race, gender, and class. From the films Precious and Crash to recent biographies of Malcolm X and Henrietta Lacks, hooks offers provocative insights into the way race is being talked about in this "post-racial" era.

A vibrant, deeply researched biography of A’Lelia Walker—daughter of Madam C.J. Walker and herself a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance—written by her great-granddaughter.

Dubbed the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s” by poet Langston Hughes, A’Lelia Walker, daughter of millionaire entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker and the author’s great-grandmother and namesake, is a fascinating figure whose legendary parties and Dark Tower salon helped define the Harlem Renaissance.

After inheriting her mother’s hair care enterprise, A’Lelia would become America’s first high profile black heiress and a prominent patron of the arts. Joy Goddess takes readers inside her three New York homes—a mansion, a townhouse, and a pied-a-terre—where she entertained Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, James Weldon Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, W.E.B. DuBois, and other cultural, social and intellectual luminaries of the Roaring Twenties.

Now, based on extensive research and Walker’s personal correspondence, her great-granddaughter creates a meticulous, nuanced portrait of a charismatic woman struggling to define herself as a wife, mother, and businesswoman outside her famous mother’s sphere. In Joy Goddess, A’Lelia’s radiant personality and impresario instincts—at the center of a vast, artistic social world where she flourished as a fashion trendsetter and international traveler—are brought to vivid and unforgettable life.

A young girl contemplates the passing of time and changing of seasons as she looks out on the world from her favorite chair in this heartwarming picture book by award-winning poet and New York Times bestselling author Rio Cortez.

In the morning, a young child opens her eyes, and, after one biiiiig streeeeetch, heads straight for her favorite place in the house: the blue velvet chair. Perched from the chair set by the living room window, the child daydreams about each season of the year and the changes that come with them. A now-snowy roof was once pelted by the slick rain of spring showers. Icy windows will once again transform into conveyors of sunshine and warmth against her skin.

And just as the seasons change, the child will continue to change too. But one thing will always remain the same: the coziness of the blue velvet chair.

"Do You Take This Man has one of the steamiest, most addictive, most satisfyingly hard-earned happily-ever-after I’ve read in ages!"—Ali Hazelwood, New York Times bestselling author of Love on the Brain

A wedding officiant who doesn't believe in love and an event planner who's been burned agree to say "I do" to being enemies with benefits.

Divorce attorney RJ would never describe herself as romantic. But when she ends up officiating an unplanned wedding for a newly engaged couple in a park, her life is turned upside down. The video of the ceremony goes viral, and she finds herself in the unlikely position of being a sought-after local wedding officiant. Spending her free time overseeing “I dos” isn’t her most strategic career move, but she enjoys it, except for the type A dude-bro wedding planner she’s forced to work with.
 
Former pro-football event manager Lear is a people person, but after his longtime girlfriend betrayed him, he isn’t looking for love. He knows how to execute events and likes being in control, so working with an opinionated and inflexible officiant who can’t stand him is not high on his list. He’s never had trouble winning people over, but RJ seems immune to his charms.
 
Surrounded by love at every turn, their physical attraction pulls them together despite their best efforts to stay an arm’s length apart. Lear refuses to get hurt again. RJ refuses to let herself be vulnerable to anyone. But when it comes to happily ever after, their clients might not be the only ones saying “I do.”

In the tradition of Michelle Alexander, an unflinching reckoning with the impact of 40 years of racist public school policy on generations of Black lives

In Punished for Dreaming, Dr. Bettina Love argues that Reagan’s presidency ushered in a War on Black Children. New policies punished schools with policing, closure, and loss of funding in the name of reform, as white-savior egalitarian efforts increasingly allowed private interests to infiltrate the system. These changes implicated children of color, and Black children in particular, as low performing, making it all too easy to turn a blind eye to their disproportionate conviction and incarceration. This book examines how decades of racist education policies have paved the way for the current structural overhaul of American schools. In this prequel to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Dr. Love serves up a blistering account of four decades of educational reform through the lens of the people who lived it. Then with input from leading U.S. economists, Dr. Love offers a road map for repair, arguing for reparations with transformation for all children at its core.

Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Fall 2024 Poetry Books

From Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, a stunning collection of early works—both polished poems andraw, unfinished, works-in-progress written from 1921-1927—curated by award winning poet and National Book Award finalist, Danez Smith.

Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was an eighteen-year-old on a train to Mexico City, seeking funds to pursue his passion. His early poems see Hughes finding his voice and experimenting with style and form. Beloved verses like “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” were written without formal training, often on the back of napkins and envelopes, and were inspired by the sights and sounds of Black working-class people he encountered in his early life. 

Blues in Stereo is a collection of select early works, all written before the age of twenty-five, in which we see Langston Hughes with fresh eyes. From the intimate pages of his handwritten journals, you will travel with Hughes outside of Harlem as he ventures to the American South and Mexico, sails through the Caribbean, and becomes the only Harlem renaissance poet to visit Africa. His poems and journal entries celebrate love as a tool of liberation. His songs showcase the musicality of verse poetry. And the collection even includes a play he cowrote with Duke Ellington with a full score that experiments with rhythm and structure.

Blues in Stereo portrays a young man coming of age in a changing world. Page by page, a young, fresh-faced Hughes contends with matters beyond his years with raw talent. And by keeping his original, handwritten notations found in archival material, we get to witness a genius’s earliest thought process in real time. National Book Award-nominated poet Danez Smith offers their insight and notes on themes, challenges, and obsessions that Hughes early work contains. Beautifully rendered and thoughtfully curated, Blues in Stereo foreshadows a master poet that will go on to define literature for centuries to come.

The re-issue of a remarkable first novel by a young, gay, black author who fashioned a deeply moving and compelling coming of age story out of the highly controversial issues of bisexuality and AIDS.

Law school, girlfriends, and career choices were all part of Raymond Tyler's life, but there were other, more terrifying issues for him to confront. Being black was tough enough, but Raymond was becoming more and more conscious of sexual feelings that he knew weren't "right." He was completely committed to Sela, his longtime girlfriend, but his attraction to Kelvin, whom he had met during his last year in law school, had become more than just a friendship.

Fleeing to New York to escape both Sela and Kelvin, Raymond finds himself more confused than ever before. New relationships--both male and female--give him enormous pleasure but keep him from finding the inner peace and lasting love he so desperately desires. The horrible illness and death of a friend eventually force Raymond, at last, to face the truth.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • The imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America—this "stunning [book] sheds light on all of the possible the New World exploration stories that didn’t make history” (Huffington Post).

In these pages, Laila Lalami brings us the invented memoirs Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico. The slave of a Spanish conquistador, Estebanico sails for the Americas with his master, Dorantes, as part of a danger-laden expedition to Florida. Within a year, Estebanico is one of only four crew members to survive.

As he journeys across America with his Spanish companions, the Old World roles of slave and master fall away, and Estebanico remakes himself as an equal, a healer, and a remarkable storyteller. His tale illuminates the ways in which our narratives can transmigrate into history—and how storytelling can offer a chance at redemption and survival.

Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Award and recognized as the best book of fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times, Edward P. Jones's The Known World is a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power and continues to show its importance to the American literary canon.

Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love under the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave “speculators” sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

An ambitious, courageous, luminously written masterwork, The Known World seamlessly weaves the lives of the freed and the enslaved—and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. The Known World not only marks the return of an extraordinarily gifted writer, it heralds the publication of a remarkable contribution to the canon of American classic literature.

A distinguished scholar presents a landmark historical perspective on parenthood in America. This trailblazing book suggests that behind the rhetoric of maternal responsibility are issues of power, resources, and control.

"Berry's book could be a significant impetus for corporate executives and political leaders, conservatives and liberals, and mothers and fathers to support parental involvement that is gender-free."--The Washington Post Book World.

The perfect introduction to one of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ‘30s, featuring a career-spanning collection of poems and three of his most powerful stories.

"Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature ... a powerful interpreter of the American experience." The Philadelphia Inquirer

Hughes's work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom.

Vintage Hughes includes the famed poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “I, Too,” “The Weary Blues,” “America,” “Let America Be America Again,” “Dream Variations,” “Young Sailor,” “Afro-American Fragment,” “Scottsboro,” “The Negro Mother,” “Good Morning Revolution,” “I Dream a World,” “The Heart of Harlem,” “Freedom Train,” “Song for Billie Holliday,” “Nightmare Boogie,” “Africa,” “Black Panther,” “Birmingham Sunday,” and “UnAmerican Investigators”; and three stories from the collection The Ways of White Folks: “Cora Unashamed,” “Home,” and “The Blues I’m Playing.”

Twelve-year-old Hoodoo Hatcher was born into a family with a rich tradition of practicing folk magic: hoodoo, as most people call it. But even though his name is Hoodoo, he can't seem to cast a simple spell.        Then a mysterious man called the Stranger comes to town, and Hoodoo starts dreaming of the dead rising from their graves. Even worse, he soon learns the Stranger is looking for a boy. Not just any boy. A boy named Hoodoo. The entire town is at risk from the Stranger’s black magic, and only Hoodoo can defeat him. He’ll just need to learn how to conjure first.        Set amid the swamps, red soil, and sweltering heat of small town Alabama in the 1930s, Hoodoo is infused with a big dose of creepiness leavened with gentle humor.

A spectacular musical and scientific journey from the Bronx to the cosmic horizon that reveals the astonishing links between jazz, science, Einstein, and Coltrane

More than fifty years ago, John Coltrane drew the twelve musical notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane put physics and geometry at the core of his music.

Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander follows suit, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe. Following the great minds that first drew the links between music and physics-a list including Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Rakim — The Jazz of Physics reveals that the ancient poetic idea of the "Music of the Spheres," taken seriously, clarifies confounding issues in physics.

The Jazz of Physics will fascinate and inspire anyone interested in the mysteries of our universe, music, and life itself.