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  • I'll Have What He's Having

    by Adib Khorram

    $17.99

    A smart, sexy "perfect romance" about mistaken identities, a no-strings fling, and the way one night—and one person—can change your life forever from the bestselling author of Darius the Great Is Not Okay (Julie Murphy & Sierra Simone, bestselling co-authors of A Merry Little Meet Cute)

    When it comes to love, substitute teacher Farzan Alavi is a disaster. Newly heartbroken—again—he’s drowning his sorrows at Kansas City’s newest wine bar. Only instead of being crowded between strangers, he’s escorted to a VIP table for one. There, the hot sommelier does more than treat him to the meal of his life. The way he flirts with Farzan ignites instant sparks. 
     
    There’s just one problem: David Curtis thinks Farzan is Kansas City’s most influential food critic. The truth only comes out after the two spend an unforgettably hot night together. Good news—both think the mix-up is hilarious. Bad news—David is studying to become a master sommelier and has no interest in a relationship. 
     
    Neither expects their paths to cross again . . . until Farzan inherits his family’s bistro. The two agree to a friends-sans-benefits exchange: David will share his industry knowledge, and Farzan will help David study. Only business turns to pleasure when neither can ignore the attraction still sizzling between them. But with David set on moving cross-country after his test, and Farzan committed to his family’s restaurant, how can their relationship last past the expiration date?

  • Be with Me (Strickland Sisters #3)

    by Alexandria House

    $24.99
    Former career student, Nicole Strickland, is smart, spoiled, loud, irreverent, and flagrantly promiscuous. Her greatest desire is to live a life of leisure, and Attorney Travis McClure is just the man to make her dreams come true.Entrepreneur Damon Davis is Nicole's best friend, has been since they crossed paths in second grade, and has loved her for as long as he's known her. And the truth of the matter is, Nicole cares for him, too. There's not much Damon doesn't know about Nicole and he accepts her, all of her, as is. The only thing keeping these two apart is a past hurt Nicole can't seem to let go of. Oh, and her engagement to Travis.Damon wants his rightful place in her heart.Nicole wants to protect her heart from the only man with the power to break it.In the end, will Nicole give Damon what he's craved his whole life, the chance to be with her?

    ***Note: Be with Me is an unconventional romance with an atypical hero and heroine. It contains acts of infidelity, profanity, and strong sexual content. If you do not like these elements included in your romantic reads, this is not the book for you.***
  • The Queer Arab Glossary

    by Marwan Kaabour and Haitham Haddad

    $22.95

    *ships or ready for pick up in 7 - 10 business days*

    A groundbreaking survey of the language used around queerness in the Arab world, with contributions by leading Arab queer writers, thinkers and activists, The Queer Arab Glossary is a first-of-its-kind survey of the linguistic landscape surrounding queerness in the Arab world. 

    It brings together more than 300 words and terms used to refer to queer people across the spoken Arabic dialects, ranging from the humorous to the harrowing, serious to tongue-in-cheek, pejorative to endearing.

    Featuring anecdotes and fascinating historical facts, the bilingual glossary paints a linguistic picture of how queer bodies are perceived within the Arab region. 

    It includes insightful essays by eight leading Arab queer artists, academics, activists and writers, which situate the glossary in a modern social and political context.

    With beautiful, witty illustrations by Haitham Haddad, The Queer Arab Glossary is a powerful response to myths about queer people in the Arab world. It is proof that the LGBTQI+ Arab community is alive and thriving.

  • The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963

    Christopher Paul Curtis

    $8.99

    During one of the most important times in the civil rights movement, one unforgettable family goes on a road trip in this Newbery and Coretta Scott King Honoree, from author Christopher Paul Curtis, recipient of the Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement.

    When the Watson family—ten-year-old Kenny, Momma, Dad, little sister Joetta, and brother Byron—sets out on a trip south to visit Grandma in Birmingham, Alabama, they don’t realize that they’re heading toward one of the darkest moments in America’s history. The Watsons’ journey reminds us that even in the hardest times, laughter and family can help us get through anything.
     
    "A modern classic." —NPR

    “Marvelous . . . both comic and deeply moving.” —The New York Times

    "One of the best novels EVER." —Jacqueline Woodson, Newbery Honor and National Book Award–winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming
     
    Bonus Content
    • New foreword and afterword from the author
    • Map of the Watsons’ journey
    • Original manuscript pages and letter from the Newbery committee
    • Personal essays celebrating the book’s legacy by award-winning authors: Elizabeth Acevedo, Chris Crutcher, Kate DiCamillo, Varian Johnson, David Barclay Moore, Jason Reynolds, Jerry Spinelli, Vince Vawter, Rita Williams-Garcia, and Jacqueline Woodson

  • Universality: A Novel

    Natasha Brown

    $24.00

    Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of power.

    “Original, vital, and unputdownable.”—Tess Gunty, National Book Award–winning author of The Rabbit Hutch

    Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.

    An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic newspaper columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers. Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, Universality focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

    A thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.

  • Oshún and Me: A Story of Love and Braids

    Adiba Nelson and Alleanna Harris

    $18.99

    Tenderly illustrated by Alleanna Harris, Adiba Nelson's debut picture book Oshún and Me is a heartwarming ode to family, identity, and the beauty of braided hair. Also available in Spanish!

    It’s Sunday, and that means it’s Hair Day! As Mami weaves gold and cowrie shells into Yadira’s hair, she tells her the story of the goddess Oshún, showing Yadi how her Afro Latin heritage is lovingly tucked into each braid and shell.

    The next day, Yadi arrives for her first day at a new school. She's nervous about making friends, but with her beautiful braids, the click-clack of the cowrie shells, and a little guidance from Oshún, she finds she has everything she needs to be her best, most authentic self.

    A letter from the author and visual examples of different kinds of braided hairstyles are included in the back of the book.

  • New and Collected Hell: A Poem

    Shane McCrae

    $28.00

    Shane McCrae, “peer to the peerless” (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.

    Of death the muse is death the muse of Hell
    Is death the muse of Heaven I don’t know
    O muse of where howcan I hope to go
    To where I pray I’ll go sing at least tell

    Shane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, “McCrae’s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice.” Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae’s work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.

  • Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 50th Anniversary Edition (4th Edition)

    Paulo Freire

    $28.95
    Paulo Freire outlines the revolutionary principles behind the educational methods that made him one of the 20th century's most influential education theorists.

    First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing.

    This 50th anniversary edition includes an updated introduction by Donaldo Macedo, a new afterword by Ira Shor and interviews with Marina Aparicio Barberán, Noam Chomsky, Ramón Flecha, Gustavo Fischman, Ronald David Glass, Valerie Kinloch, Peter Mayo, Peter McLaren and Margo Okazawa-Rey to inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.

  • A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925-2025

    Kevin Young

    $50.00

    Edited by the magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, a celebratory selection from one hundred years of influential, entertaining, and taste-making verse in The New Yorker

    Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar: these stellar names make up just a fraction of the wonderfulness that is present in this essential anthology.

    The book is organized into sections honoring times of day (“Morning Bell,” “Lunch Break,” “After-Work Drinks,” “Night Shift”), allowing poets from different eras to talk back to one another in the same space, intertwined with chronological groupings from the decades as they march by: the frothy 1920s and 1930s (“despite the depression,” Young notes), the more serious ’40s and ’50s (introducing us to the early greats of our contemporary poetry, like Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich), the political ’60s and ’70s, the lyrical ’80s and ’90s, and then the 2000s’ with their explosion of greater diversity in the magazine, greater depth and breadth. Inevitably, we see the high points when poems spoke directly into, about, or against the crises of their times—the war poetry of W. H. Auden and Karl Shapiro; the remarkable outpouring of verse after 9/11 (who can forget Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”?); and more recently, stunning poems in response to the cataclysmic events of COVID and the murder of George Floyd.

    The magazine’s poetic influence resides not just in this historical and cultural relevance but in sheer human connection, exemplified by the passing verses that became what Young calls “refrigerator poems”: the ones you tear out and affix to the fridge to read again and again over months and years. Our love for that singular Billy Collins or Ada Limón poem—or lines by a new writer you’ve never heard of but will hear much more from in the future—is what has made The New Yorker a great organ for poetry, a mouthpiece for our changing culture and way of life, even a mirror of our collective soul.

  • High And Rising: A Book About De La Soul

    Marcus J. Moore

    $29.99

    A stunning cultural biography of De La Soul, the era-defining hip-hop trio that touched millions of lives and changed rap forever.

    De La Soul burst onto the scene with the release of their groundbreaking 1989 album 3 Feet High & Rising, an “anything goes” hip-hop masterpiece hailed as a new masterwork from a bygone era of Black experimentation.

    Formed in Long Island in 1988 by Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Maseo” Mason, De La Soul rebuked classification and appealed to the Black alternative. Their music was positive and psychedelic, their imagery full of flowers and peace signs. It was rap with a broad sonic palette which set the blueprint for an entire generation of artists who followed. But as quickly as De La ascended, they were faced with the pressures of a changing industry and bitter legal battles.

    Completed in the wake of Dave’s passing and the group’s arrival on streaming platforms after years in digital purgatory, High and Rising tells the story of one of the most influential rap groups of all time. In the process, acclaimed music journalist Marcus J. Moore braids in a deeply personal coming-of-age story about his journey through life with De La as a backdrop.

    The first book about De La Soul, High and Rising shows that De La Soul is Black history, American history, world history, our history. This is a tale about staying the course, and how holding true to your virtue can lead to dynamic results.

  • GATHER: 100 Seasonal Recipes that Bring People Together

    Chris Viaud

    $29.99

    From James Beard nominee and Top Chef contestant Chef Chris Viaud comes GATHER, featuring recipes that not only bring friends and family together but keep them at the table. Whether you’re hosting a cookbook club night in, or offering a housewarming gift to new neighbors, this mouth-watering cookbook will satisfy all cravings.

    To Chef Chris Viaud, food is a shared language that allows us to communicate with complete strangers, create lasting memories with friends and family, and get in touch with ourselves. It is the best way to nourish and expand a community. GATHER is a celebration of food’s magical capacity to connect and transform. Featuring 100 recipes that focus on the innovative, accessible, and seasonal cuisine that earned Viaud a James Beard nomination and wowed the judges on Top Chef, this cookbook is centered around the incredible potential in gatherings of all sizes.

    Inside you’ll find:

    * 100 seasonal appetizers
    * Bold and wholesome family-style entrees
    * Unique, eye-catching cocktails perfect for entertaining
    * Elegant desserts for all cravings
    * Stunning original photography
    * Tips and techniques that promise to revolutionize your approach in the kitchen

    GATHER is perfect gift for:

    * Mother’s day or Father’s day for the chefs in your life
    * Host or hostess who enjoy entertaining
    * Housewarming or new homeowners
    * Christmas, birthdays, or other holidays

    Easy to assemble and satisfying to serve, this repertoire is made for the heart of your home. Foster a deeper appreciation for every aspect of a meal, from those who cultivated the ingredients to the ones who sit beside us at the table. Feel good about what you put on your plate with GATHER.

  • Trippy : The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics

    Ernesto Londoño

    $18.99

    A riveting look at the tremendous promise and inherent risks of the use of psychedelics in mental health treatment through the lens of a New York Times reporter whose journalistic exploration of this emerging field began with a personal crisis.

    • NOW IN PAPERBACK WITH NEW ORIGINAL MATERIAL -- Since the initial publication, there will undoubtedly be further decriminalization and therapeutic uses for psychedelics for mental health. We will update book accordingly in new Readers Group Guide material.
    • Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Londoño ascended to the top echelons of American journalism at an early age. He covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the Washington Post and later joined the New York Times, where he served on the editorial board and as Brazil bureau chief. As a trilingual, bicultural narrator, Londoño writes poignantly about the role of psychedelics in healing his depression and changing his outlook on the intergenerational mental health battles within his own family.
    • The therapeutic potential of psychedelics is widely regarded as a potential game changer in mental health treatment. The Food and Drug Administration is widely expected to approve the use of MDMA-assisted therapy in 2024. Two states (Colorado and Oregon) and several cities have recently decriminalized psychedelics as their recreational and therapeutic use grows.
    • Takes readers behind the scenes of the first MDMA trial conducted at a Veterans Affairs hospital, which marked the first time the federal government administered psychedelics as an experimental medicine since the 1960s. It also sheds new light on the decades-long quest to use religious freedom laws to expand access to illegal drugs in spiritual settings. Trippy will be the most thorough examination to date of the emerging field of therapeutic psychedelics.
    • The book was acquired with both the author and The New York Times, who will promote it heavily through advertising (on site and email newsletters) and earned media. The #1 NYT bestseller THE 1619 PROJECT by Nikole Hannah-Jones was a similar arrangement.

    "New York Times correspondent Londoño debuts with an arresting survey of the “medicinal psychedelic field” and where it’s headed...a scrupulous study of a fascinating development in mental health care.”
    Publishers Weekly, starred review

    “Blending solid research and personal experience, the author points to a new frontier for trauma treatment.”
    —Kirkus

    “An engaging memoir…Trippy is a fascinating account of the world of medicinal psychedelics.”
    —LA Times

    “A moving, tender and thoughtful exploration of a complicated subject. If you want to understand psychedelics better, this is a great place to start.”
    —Johann Hari, New York Times bestselling author of Stolen Focus and Lost Connections

    "A compulsively readable romp through a burgeoning scene that has immense potential for both harm and healing."
    —Dan Harris, New York Times bestselling author of 10% Happier and host of the Ten Percent Happier podcast (1/7/2025)

  • Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

    Mark Anthony Neal

    Sold out

    PROSE Award- Music and Performing Arts Category Winner

    A framework for understanding the deep archive of Black performance in the digital era

    In an era of Big Data and algorithms, our easy access to the archive of contemporary and historical Blackness is unprecedented. That iterations of Black visual art, such as Bert Williams’s 1916 silent film short “A Natural Born Gambler” or the performances of Josephine Baker from the 1920s, are merely a quick YouTube search away has transformed how scholars teach and research Black performance.

    While Black Ephemera celebrates this new access, it also questions the crisis and the challenge of the Black musical archive in a moment when Black American culture has become a global export. Using music and sound as its primary texts, Black Ephemera argues that the cultural DNA of Black America has become obscured in the transformation from analog to digital. Through a cross-reading of the relationship between the digital era and culture produced in the pre-digital era, Neal argues that Black music has itself been reduced to ephemera, at best, and at worst to the background sounds of the continued exploitation and commodification of Black culture. The crisis and challenges of Black archives are not simply questions of knowledge, but of how knowledge moves and manifests itself within Blackness that is obscure, ephemeral, fugitive, precarious, fluid, and increasingly digital.

    Black Ephemera is a reminder that for every great leap forward there is a necessary return to the archive. Through this work, Neal offers a new framework for thinking about Black culture in the digital world.

  • A Raisin in the Sun: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay

    Lorraine Hansberry

    $9.99

    Under the editorship of the late Robert Nemiroff, with a provocative and thoughtful introduction by preeminent African-American scholar Margaret B. Wilkerson and a commentary by Spike Lee, this completely restored screenplay is the accurate and authoritative edition of Lorraine Hansberry's script and a testament to her unparalled accomplishment as a Black artist.

    The 1961 film version of A Raisin in the Sun, with a screenplay by the author, Lorraine Hansberry, won an award at the Cannes Film Festival even though one-third of the actual screenplay Hansberry had written had been cut out. The film did essentially bring Hansberry's extraordinary play to the screen, but it failed to fulfill her cinematic vision.

    Now, with this landmark edition of Lorraine Hansberry's original script for the movie of A Raisin in the Sun that audiences never viewed, readers have at hand an epic, eloquent work capturing not only the life and dreams of a Black family, but the Chicago—and the society—that surround and shape them.

    Important changes in dialogue and exterior shots, a stunning shift of focus to her male protagonist, and a dramatic rewriting of the final scene show us an artist who understood and used the cinematic medium to transform a stage play into a different art form—a profound and powerful film.

  • The First Twenty-Five: An Oral History of the Desegregation of Little Rock’s Public Junior High Schools

    LaVerne Bell-Tolliver

    Regular price$26.95 Sale price$24.95

    “It was one of those periods that you got through, as opposed to enjoyed. It wasn’t an environment that . . . was nurturing, so you shut it out. You just got through it. You just took it a day at a time. You excelled if you could. You did your best. You felt as though the eyes of the community were on you.”—Glenda Wilson, East Side Junior High

    Much has been written about the historical desegregation of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American students in 1957. History has been silent, however, about the students who desegregated Little Rock’s five public junior high schools—East Side, Forest Heights, Pulaski Heights, Southwest, and West Side—in 1961 and 1962.

    The First Twenty-Five gathers the personal stories of these students some fifty years later. They recall what it was like to break down long-standing racial barriers while in their early teens—a developmental stage that often brings emotional vulnerability. In their own words, these individuals share what they saw, heard, and felt as children on the front lines of the civil rights movement, providing insight about this important time in Little Rock, and how these often painful events from their childhoods affected the rest of their lives.

  • Through Many Dangers, Toils and Snares: Black Leadership in Texas, 1868-1898 (Sara and John Lindsey Series in the Arts and Humanities)

    Merline Pitre

    Sold out

    Through Many Dangers, Toils and Snares, originally published in 1985, was the first book to make an in-depth examination of the cadre of African American lawmakers in Texas after the Civil War. Those few books that addressed the subject at all treated black legislators en masse and offered little or nothing about their individual histories. Early scholars tended to present isolated events of the violence and political deterrents inflicted upon black voters but said very little about how these obstacles affected black lawmakers.

    Author Merline Pitre has departed from this traditional method and relied upon the untapped original materials found on these black lawmakers. This third edition features a new preface and extended, updated appendixes, ensuring that this study will remain useful to political scientists, sociologists, and historians of Texas political history, Afro-American history, and revisionists of Reconstruction.

  • Race and the Houston Police Department, 1930–1990: A Change Did Come (Volume 102) (Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University)

    Dwight D. Watson

    Sold out

    In Houston, as in the rest of the American South up until the 1950s, the police force reflected and enforced the segregation of the larger society. When the nation began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, this guardian of the status quo had to change, too. It was not designed to do so easily.

    Dwight Watson traces how the Houston Police Department reacted to social, political, and institutional change over a fifty-year period—and specifically, how it responded to and in turn influenced racial change.

    Using police records as well as contemporary accounts, Watson astutely analyzes the escalating strains between the police and segments of the city’s black population in the 1967 police riot at Texas Southern University and the 1971 violence that became known as the Dowling Street Shoot-Out. The police reacted to these events and to daily challenges by hardening its resolve to impose its will on the minority community.

    By 1977, the events surrounding the beating and drowning of Jose Campos Torres while in police custody prompted one writer to label the HPD the “meanest police in America.” This event encouraged Houston’s growing Mexican American community to unite with blacks in seeking to curb police autonomy and brutality.

    Watson’s study demonstrates vividly how race complicated the internal impulses for change and gave way through time to external pressures—including the Civil Rights Movement, modernization, annexations, and court-ordered redistricting—for institutional changes within the department. His work illuminates not only the role of a southern police department in racial change but also the internal dynamics of change in an organization designed to protect the status quo.

  • Black Dixie: Afro-Texan History and Culture in Houston (Volume 41) (Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University)

    Howard Beeth

    Sold out

    An innovative contribution to the growing body of research about urban African-American culture in the South, Black Dixie is the first anthology to track the black experience in a single southern city across the entire slavery/post-slavery continuum. It combines the best previously published scholarship about black Houston and little-known contemporary eyewitness accounts of the city with fresh, unpublished essays by historians and social scientists.

    Divided into four sections, the book covers a broad range of both time and subjects. The first section analyzes the development of scholarly consciousness and interest in the history of black Houston; slavery in nineteenth-century Houston is covered in the second section; economic and social development in Houston in the era of segregation are looked at in the third section; and segregation, violence, and civil rights in twentieth-century Houston are dealt with in the final section.

    Collectively, the contents of Black Dixie utilize the full range of primary sources available to scholars studying the black South. These include such traditional material as newspapers and diaries as well as newer techniques involving quantification and statistical analysis. The editors' remarks relate the individual essays to one another as well as placing them within the context of scholarly literature on the subject. Hence Black Dixie will serve both as a resource and as a model for the study of black urban culture in Texas and throughout the South.

  • Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Black Food Justice)

    Bobby J. Smith II

    Sold out

    This book unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Bobby J. Smith II re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions. For decades, white economic and political actors used food as a weapon against Black sharecropping communities in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, but members of these communities collaborated with activists to transform food into a tool of resistance. Today, Black youth are building a food justice movement in the Delta to continue this story, grappling with inequalities that continue to shape their lives.

    Drawing on multiple disciplines including critical food studies, Black studies, history, sociology, and southern studies, Smith makes critical connections between civil rights activism and present-day food justice activism in Black communities, revealing how power struggles over food empower them to envision Black food futures in which communities have the full autonomy and capacity to imagine, design, create, and sustain a self-sufficient local food system.

  • Our South: Black Food Through My Lens

    Ashleigh Shanti

    $40.00

    Raised in Appalachia, native daughter Ashleigh Shanti, a queer Black woman and acclaimed chef, knows Southern Black cooking means more than we’ve come to believe. While hot buttered cast-iron-pan cornbread and crunchy, juicy, lard-fried chicken have their roles to play, they are far from the entire story. 

    The key to understanding how Black influence has defined foodways and cultures in the South is to explore its microregions, each with its own distinct flora and fauna, dialects, traditions, and dishes. In Our South, Ashleigh takes you through the five regions closest to her heart, beginning with a glimpse of mountain life in the Backcountry through recipes like Fish Camp Hush Puppies and quail spiked with black pepper. A swing over to the coastal Lowcountry fills your plate with smoky grilled oysters and benne seed–topped crab toasts. Seasonal produce shines in the Midlands, where bountiful stone fruits enrich dishes from shortcakes to salads. Lowlands nods to the diversity of food cultures that meet in the region, where Ashleigh grew up eating noodle dishes like Virginia yock alongside Southern classics like Brunswick stew. The book culminates in Homeland, with foods that share what it’s like to cook—and live—as a Black Southern chef now.

    Long before competing on Top Chef and earning a coveted James Beard Award Rising Star Chef nomination for her cooking at Asheville, North Carolina’s Benne on Eagle, Ashleigh shelled boiled peanuts and coveted the jars of pickles in her great-aunt Hattie Mae’s larder. In high school, she pored over food and travel magazines and marveled at how her mother never failed to put a hot meal on the table, whether instant grits or slowly cooked celebration dishes. After spending a gap year in Nairobi and graduating from culinary school, Ashleigh entered the restaurant world, bartending, catering, teaching, and staging. She rekindled her connection to the cuisine of her roots before opening her own restaurant, Good Hot Fish, named for a phrase her ancestors would shout to draw in customers.

    Our South takes readers on a mouthwatering journey through Appalachia and beyond, revealing the depth and diversity of Southern cooking through the eyes of a rising culinary star. Perfect for fans of other regional Southern cookbooks like the Mosquito Supper Club cookbook or soul food cookbooks like Jubilee, Our South stands as a testament to the rich tapestry of Black culinary traditions, offering a contemporary exploration of Black Southern foodways that's both personal and universal.

  • Glorious

    Bernice L. McFadden

    $19.95

    Award-winning novelist Bernice McFadden's highly anticipated new historical novel set amidst the Harlem Renaissance.

    ―Glorious was a finalist for the 2011 NAACP Image Award for Fiction.

    “McFadden’s lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth. . . . McFadden has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos.” ―New York Times Book Review

    “Bernice L. McFadden’s novel Glorious, which starts with a bang-up prologue, has a strong main character (based in part on Zora Neale Hurston), hard-driving prose, and historic sweep of several decades, including the years of the Harlem Renaissance, which has always fascinated me.” ―Jane Ciabattari, National Book Critics Circle President

    Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era. Blending fact and fiction, Glorious is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and ultimately revival offers a candid and true portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.

    It is a novel informed by the question that is the title of Langston Hughes’s famous poem Harlem: "What happens to a dream deferred?" Based on years of research, this heart-wrenching fictional account is given added resonance by factual events coupled with real and imagined larger-than-life characters. Glorious is an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption.

  • A Kids Book About First Generation Immigrants

    Travis Mien Hsing Chen

    $19.99

    Every first-generation immigrant has a unique story to tell – and is part of a large community that knows just what it’s like, too.

    This is a kids’ book about first-generation immigrants. When you're a first-generation immigrant, a lot of things feel different from what you know: a new place to live, a new school, new foods, new smells, new noises.

    This book was made to help kids aged 5-9 understand that they’re thankfully not alone in this experience. This author immigrated to a new country with his family when he was a kid. He has been there, understands, and wants you to know that all the experiences that make you who you are…are amazing!

    A Kids Book About First Generation Immigrants features:
    * A large and bold, yet minimalist font design that allows kids freedom to imagine themselves in the words on the pages.
    * A friendly, approachable, empowering, and child-appropriate tone throughout.
    * An incredible and diverse group of authors in the series who are experts or have first-hand experience of the topic.

    Tackling important discourse together!

    The A Kids Book About titles are best used when read together. Helping to kickstart important, challenging, and empowering conversations for kids and their grown-ups through beautiful and thought-provoking pages. The series supports an incredible and diverse group of authors, who are either experts in their field, or have first-hand experience on the topic.

    A Kids Co. is a new kind of media company enabling kids to explore big topics in a new and engaging way, with a growing series of books, podcasts, and blogs made to empower. Learn more about us online by searching for A Kids Co.

  • My Abuela Is a Bruja

    Mayra Cuevas

    $18.99

    From an award-winning author comes a vibrant and heartwarming story of the bond between grandmother and grandchild, with a touch of Puerto Rican magic!

    My abuela is a bruja.
    There is magic in everything she does.

    There is nothing more magical than a grandmother's love. But one lucky girl suspects her grandmother has actual magic. It's in the tun-tun-tun of the way she dances salsa, in the warmth of her hugs, and the delicious smell of her cooking. The granddaughter wonders: will I have magic of my own one day?

    Follow the magic in this heartfelt picture book that features extensive backmatter that includes two special recipes from Mayra Cuevas and uplifiting illustrations from Lorena Alvarez Gómez.

  • Hot Boy Summer

    Joe Jiménez

    Sold out

    Four gay teens in Texas have the summer of their lives while discovering important truths about realness, belonging, and friendship in this “explosive prose debut for the gays and theys growing up outside of the box” (Booklist, starred review).

    Mac has never really felt like he belonged. Definitely not at home—his dad’s politics and toxic masculinity make a real connection impossible. He thought he fit in on the baseball team, but that’s only because he was pretending to be someone he wasn’t. Finding his first gay friend, Cammy, was momentous; finally, he could be his authentic self around someone else. But as it turned out, not really. Cammy could be cruel, and his “advice” often came off way harsh.

    And then, Mac meets Flor, who shows him that you can be both fierce and kind, and Mikey, who is superhot and might maybe think the same about him. Over the course of one hot, life-changing summer, Mac will stand face-to-face with desire, betrayal, and letting go of shame, which will lead to some huge discoveries about the realness of truly belonging.

    Told in Mac’s infectious, joyful, gay AF voice, Hot Boy Summer serves a tale as important as hope itself: four gay teens doing what they can to connect and have the fiercest summer of their lives. New friendships will be forged, hot boys will be kissed…and girl, the toxic will be detoxed.

  • Great Black Hope: A Novel

    Rob Franklin

    $28.99

    A gripping, elegant debut novel about a young Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamour and tragedy, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest, from an electrifying new voice.

    An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not.

    It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous soul singer, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as lingering questions around how well he really knew his closest friend. He flees to his hometown of Atlanta, only to buckle under the weight of expectations from his family of doctors and lawyers and their history in America. But when Smith returns to New York, it’s not long before he begins to lose himself to his old life—drawn back into the city’s underworld, where his search for answers may end up costing him his freedom and his future.

    Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta’s Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiraling downward, and how to find a way back to hope.

  • A Beginner's Guide to the Roots of Yoga: How to create a more authentic practice

    Nikita Desai

    $24.00

    A practical and accessible guide to incorporating traditional yoga into a modern practice, by an Indian yoga teacher and educator.

    Yoga in its traditional form is a practice focused on inclusivity, inner work and peace. But the yoga that is practised today in the West has got a little lost along the way. In this accessible beginner's guide, Indian yoga teacher Nikita Desai brings us back to the authentic roots of this ancient practice.

    In A Beginner's Guide to the Roots of Yoga, Desai unpicks the complexities of the modern yoga space. Moving away from the focus on physical poses, expensive outfits and Instagram-perfect bodies, she delves into traditional resources to show how yoga can help your mental and spiritual wellbeing.

    With a range of enlightening essays, she explores why change in the industry is vital, before centring key yogic texts, philosophy and history in a digestible manner to give us a basic understanding of the origins of yoga. Desai then guides us through integrating these foundations into our current practice both on and off the mat, so you can enjoy the benefits of the tradition while helping to make yoga today a more inclusive and diverse space.

    A Beginner's Guide to the Roots of Yoga is the perfect jumping off point for anyone wanting to make their practice more authentic.

  • Jordan's Perfect Haircut

    Sharee Miller

    $18.99

    Celebrate a Black boy's first haircut in this joyful book from the creator of the popular Princess Hair and Don't Touch My Hair!

    Jordan loves his hair: soft like a cloud, regal like a crown. He doesn't want a haircut to change all that.

    Jordan’s friends are getting new haircuts for picture day at school. Shape-ups, low fades, frohawks, and more—there are way too many styles to choose from. But when Mama brings Jordan to the barbershop, he sees everyone’s haircuts are like magic.

    Can Jordan find a style that’s just right for him?

    With her trademark bright colors and expressive characters, Sharee Miller teaches confidence and self-love through the timeless tradition of school picture day.

  • Blues Dancing

    Diane Mckinney-Whetstone

    $17.99

    From acclaimed writer Diane McKinney-Whetstone, a richly spun tale of love and passion, betrayal, redemption, and faith, set in contemporary Philadelphia.

    My aunt says if you smell butter on a foggy night you're getting ready to fall in love.

    For the last twenty years, the beautiful Verdi Mae has led a comfortable life with Rowe, the conservative professor who rescued her from addiction when she was an undergrad. But her world is about to shift when the smell of butter lingers in the air and Johnson—the boy from the back streets of Philadelphia who pulled her into the fire of passion and all the shadows cast from it—returns to town.

    In "this story of self-discovery that moves seamlessly between the early 1970s and early 1990s" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), McKinney-Whetstone takes readers into a world of erotic love, drugs, and political activism, and beautifully illustrates the struggle to reconcile passion with accountability and the redemptive powers of love's rediscovery.

    This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

  • Through the Ivory Gate: A novel

    Rita Dove

    $21.00

    A debut novel by the 1987 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, about an artist on a journey of self-discovery—navigating a family secret, racism, and the conflict between marriage and career.

    “Skillfully evokes the mood of a decade when social change seemed not only possible but imminent.” —Washington Post Book World

    When a woman returns to her Midwestern hometown as an artist-in-residence to teach puppetry to schoolchildren, her homecoming also means grappling with artistic ambition, memories of rejected love, and shocking truths about her family.

  • The Sobbing School (Penguin Poets)

    Joshua Bennett

    $20.00

    The debut collection from a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient whose “astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable” (Tracy K. Smith)
      
    The Sobbing School, Joshua Bennett’s mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.

  • Magical Negro

    Morgan Parker

    $16.95

    A National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award Winner!

    From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood.

    "Morgan Parker's latest collection is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read―both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest." ―TIME Magazine

    A Best Book of 2019 at TIME, Elle, BuzzFeed, the Star Tribune, AVClub, and more.

    A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, NYLON, BuzzFeed,Publishers Weekly, and more.

    Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics―of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present―timeless black melancholies and triumphs.

  • The Land (Logan Family Saga, 1)

    Mildred D. Taylor

    $10.99

    A stunning repackage of a companion to Mildred D. Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, with cover art by two-time Caldecott Honor Award winner Kadir Nelson!

    The son of a prosperous landowner and a former slave, Paul-Edward Logan is unlike any other boy he knows. His white father has acknowledged him and raised him openly-something unusual in post-Civil War Georgia. But as he grows into a man he learns that life for someone like him is not easy. Black people distrust him because he looks white. White people discriminate against him when they learn of his black heritage. Even within his own family he faces betrayal and degradation. So at the age of fourteen, he sets out toward the only dream he has ever had: to find land every bit as good as his father's, and make it his own. Once again inspired by her own history, Ms. Taylor brings truth and power to the newest addition to the award-winning Logan family stories.

    * "Readers...will grab this and be astonished by its powerful story."—Booklist, starred review

    * "Taylor's gift for combining history and storytelling is as evident here as in her other stories about the Logan family."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

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