Pleasure refers to the freedom to pursue a desire, deliberately sought in order to satisfy the self. Putting pleasure first is liberating. During their extraordinary lives, Lena Horne, Moms Mabley, Yolande DuBois, and Memphis Minnie enjoyed pleasure as they gave pleasure to both those in their lives and to the public at large. They were Black women who, despite their public profiles, whether through Black society or through the world of entertainment, discovered ways to enjoy pleasure.They left home, undertook careers they loved, and did what they wanted, despite perhaps not meeting the standards for respectability in the interwar era. See Me Naked looks at these women as representative of other Black women of the time, who were watched, criticized, and judged by their families, peers, and, in some cases, the government, yet still managed to enjoy themselves. Among the voyeurs of Black women was Langston Hughes, whose novel Not Without Laughter was clearly a work of fiction inspired by women he observed in public and knew personally, including Black clubwomen, blues performers, and his mother. How did these complicated women wrest loose from the voyeurs to define their own sense of themselves? At very young ages, they found and celebrated aspects of themselves. Using examples from these women’s lives, Green explores their challenges and achievements.

Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction

Daddy Issues is a collection of moving and complex—yet simply and directly told—stories of queer Asian American experiences in Los Angeles. In many of these stories, the protagonists are artists and writers and other creative thinkers living on the fringe of survival, attempting to align a life of the imagination with the practical considerations of career, income, and family: a gay father who hasn’t come out to his young son; a social worker, numbed by the destitution of his clients, who finds himself lost in self-destruction; a trans man who returns home to a father with dementia to help his family pack as they are pushed out by gentrification; a husband who can only stand aside as his wife heals from a miscarriage; and a broke writer who learns to love his stories again.

The stories in Daddy Issues offer different contemplations on solitude—the good and the bad of it. Ultimately, this collection by Eric C. Wat is full of hope, and it shows how we can find the connections we need once we allow ourselves to become vulnerable.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Rap Year Book and Basketball (and Other Things), a clever and inventive examination of some of basketball's most iconic players, moments, games, and more.

Everything in basketball is measured. Everything in basketball is counted, and quantified, and computed. And yet, no matter how expansive the list of various pinpoint-specific statistical categories gets, some basketball things remain uncountable, and unquantifiable.

Some moments are more poetry than calculation; more art than numerical value; more feeling than data processing. And thus: Expensive Basketball.

From the final 196 seconds of Kobe Bryant’s playing career to the Sue Bird backpedal, from the erosive terror of Tim Duncan to the Larry Bird memory carousel, Expensive Basketball is an affirmation of feelings.

It’s an affirmation of basketball as virtuosity. 

It’s an affirmation of how sometimes you watch a person perform on the basketball court and it feels the same way it does when you lie in the grass at night and stare up at the moon for long enough that you start to think about how incredible it is that you really, truly, honestly, actually exist.

Martha’s Daughter is the brilliant and influential author David Haynes’s first short story collection and the first time that Haynes’s stories have ever been assembled in one volume. Steeped in everyday gossip and lives, this collection ranges from the magically real life of a city’s crumbling superhero to a rundown motel whose long-term guests are lucky to call home. In the titular novella the first hours are chronicled after Cynthia finds out her mother has died. What we learn is that Cynthia is a woman who has been bullied by her mother’s overbearing opinions, her disdain for difference, her respectability politics, and her outdated beliefs about how men and women should relate to one another. Martha’s death is less a catalyst for Cynthia’s grief than an opportunity to free herself of a burden too long endured.

The sixth in McSweeney’s Of the Diaspora series, Martha’s Daughter is another record in David’s oeuvre, of the people and places he’s been recording since the beginning of his career, some thirty years ago. With its full-circle connection to Haynes’s previous novels, Martha’s Daughter is guaranteed to enthrall longtime fans and new readers alike.

A young adult anthology featuring fictional stories of everyday resistance.

You might be the kind of person who stands up to online trolls.Or who marches to protest injustice.Perhaps you are #DisabledAndCute and dancing around your living room, alive and proud.Or perhaps you are the trans mentor that you wish you had when you were younger.Maybe you call out false allies, or stand up to loved ones. Maybe you speak your truth and drop the mic, or maybe you take it with you when you leave.This anthology features fictional stories--in poems, prose, and art--that reflect a slice of the varied and limitless ways that readers like you resist every day. Take the Mic's powerful collection of stories features work by literary luminaries and emerging talent alike, including Newbery-winner Jason Reynolds, New York Times bestseller Samira Ahmed, anthologist and contributor Bethany C. Morrow, Darcie Little Badger, Keah Brown, Laura Silverman, L.D. Lewis, Sofia Quintero, Ray Stoeve, Yamile Mendez, and Connie Sun, with cover and interior art by Richie Pope.

What began as an effort to prevent the neglect and potential loss of hundreds of African objects at the University of Texas at Austin has evolved into one of the most significant collections on campus. The art collections at Black Studies were born from the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies’ Art and Archive Initiative, under the leadership of Cherise Smith, Omi L. Jones, and Edmund T. Gordon.

Today Black Studies at the University of Texas boasts approximately 900 objects from sub-Saharan Africa, over 200 contemporary works from African American and Afro-Caribbean artists, and more than 100 pieces jointly held with other collecting entities on campus, adding a diverse richness to the overall collections. Collecting Black Studies gathers and presents these holdings—including costumes, jewelry, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photography—and prominently features five Black artists whose work is particularly significant. Scholars and curators examine how John Biggers, Michael Ray Charles, Christina Coleman, Angelbert Metoyer, and Deborah Roberts—artists with deep relationships to Texas—contributed to the Black Studies collections, to art history, and to the culture of our state and beyond.

“A profound poetic talent.”―Ada Limón

Blue Opening, Chet’la Sebree’s brilliant, illuminating poetry collection, grapples with origins―of illness, of language, of the universe―as the speaker contemplates whether she, too, can be a site of origin through motherhood. Navigating chronic health challenges alongside grief and questions about the nature of knowledge and religion, she searches personal history and the cosmos for answers to the unknowable.

With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, Blue Opening calls into question not only where to begin, but how to create, across thirty-two poems that press the fluid boundaries of form through sonnets, prose poems, odes, and two unforgettable poetic sequences. As the speaker traverses loss, possibility, and the choice, or often the lack of choice, in the direction of her future, she determines to press forward even as she is “unsure of what shape this language should take / and hulling, from blue rock, faith.”

From self-taught, award-winning director Morgan Stevenson Cooper comes a heartfelt picture book about a girl on a mission to make her first movie—and lift her grandpa's spirits along the way.

Norah Rose loves movies—action, comedy, drama—you name it! She dreams of becoming a director, but Hollywood feels a long way from home. When her grandpa falls ill, Norah decides to make a movie just for him, because no one loves a good story more than Grandpa. Armed with her mom’s phone, a head full of ideas, and the wide-open backdrop of Kansas City, Norah sets out to write, cast, shoot, and edit her very first film. There’s a lot of work ahead, but Norah’s sure of one thing: her movie is going to shine.

With a spirited how-to approach and lively artwork by Geneva Bowers, Morgan Stevenson Cooper shows young readers how creativity, heart, and a little hustle can turn any dream into a reality.

From the New York Times Bestselling author of Raising Fences and the award-winning illustrator of Mama Africa!, comes a moving and lyrical picture book about a girl navigating her parents' divorce, featuring a Black family, two homes, and whole lot of love.

Auset's parents tell her the divorce wasn't her fault, but she got split in two too. Now she has two homes, two rooms, two Christmases, and two birthday parties. It's tough to deal with her parents' divorce, but at least she has the songs of Sweet Honey and the Rock and Bob Marley to help her through. Plus, she has her therapist, and her stuffed animal Dolphie the Dolphin, who is an excellent listener.

With two loving parents doing their best, here is a look at Black families, divorce, and how difficult it is for kids to go through. But with time and support, and everyone doing their best to keep it real, there's healing and strength on the other side.

A young girl growing up in an Afro-descendant community of Ecuador in the 1990s confronts familial secrets and the ever-present specter of male violence, set against the vibrant background of Carnaval

"In this wondrous novel, both life's potential for beauty and harshness sing together. Ortiz has written a story you will not forget." —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain Gang All-Stars

Ainhoa lives a protected life within the walls of her grandmother’s house in the neighborhood of Esmeraldas in Ecuador. Surrounded by a gaggle of aunts who love and teach her, Ainhoa narrates moments that evoke the powerful presence of music and dance in her daily life. Seen through Ainhoa’s innocent eyes, the difficult themes that have defined the South American country’s recent history, including economic hardship, migration, and upheaval, are but one side of an enormous cultural richness steeped in the joy, music, and vibrancy of this singular community of women.

Following the contours of the Carnaval season and sublimely translated by Madeleine Arenivar, Yuliana Ortiz Ruano’s sensorial and viscerally alive novel brims with poetry and exuberance, as well as the pain of an existence lived in the forgotten corners of the world. Carnaval Fever is the introduction of an important new voice in Latin American letters, available in English for the first time.

A haunting, powerful collection of stories spanning modern-day Pakistan and the diaspora in the United States, from a sparkling new literary talent.

In eight unflinching and stunningly crafted stories, Kanza Javed unspools the lives of characters desperately trying to forge a path for themselves on the margins of society. An addict teaches his young son to shoot feral dogs on the streets of Lahore. A Christian nurse gets drawn into a plan to trap the ghost of her patient’s former lover. A Pakistani student in a small Appalachian town grapples with a startling act of violence that shatters her illusions of safety and freedom. A lonely wife, trapped indoors by a harsh winter, becomes increasingly obsessed with a cloth worry doll left behind by a previous tenant.

Written with keen psychological insight and remarkable empathy, these stories reach across divides of class, gender, and religion as Javed deftly examines questions of identity and agency, belonging and loss. What Remains After a Fire is a moving portrayal of fiercely resilient characters who desire more than what their circumstances can offer them―and what these desires ultimately cost them.

Walter Rodney was a scholar, working class militant, and revolutionary from Guyana. Strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, he remains central to radical Pan-Africanist thought for large numbers of activists’ today. Rodney lived through the failed –though immensely hopeful -socialist experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, in Tanzania and elsewhere.

The book critically considers Rodney's contribution to Marxist theory and history, his relationship to dependency theory and the contemporary significance of his work in the context of movements and politics today. The first full-length study of Rodney’s life, this book is an essential introduction to Rodney's work.

The Black Condition ft. Narcissus is preemptive memoir, documenting the beginning of the author’s gender transition and paralleling the inauguration of our latest Administration. These poems speak to and from fears holed up inside while contextualizing the cosmic impacts of our political landscape. Ranging from autobiographic melancholy to rigorously meditative, here is a necessary voice to process the world, predicated on unknowable desire and blossoming tragedy. Winner of the 2019 San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award!

Porter's work analyzes the important developments and individuals in African American painting and sculpture from the pre-Civil War period to World War II. "James A. Porter was an art historian, educator, curator, and visual artist. He is first remembered by academics as an art historian who taught some of the best minds and visual artists who studied at Howard University during the span of his teaching career. "A pioneer in establishing the field of African American art history," writes Jeffreen M. Hayes, who rightly declares that:

James A. Porter was instrumental as the first scholar to provide a systematic, critical analysis of African American artists and their works of art. An artist himself, he provided a unique and critical approach to the analysis of the work. Dedicated to educating and writing about African American artists, Porter set the foundation for artists and art historians to probe and unearth the necessary skills essential to their artistic and scholarly endeavors. The canon is borne from Porter's determination to document and view African American art in the context of American art."

Inspired by the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood that the artist and her family have lived in for generations, Halsey’s expansive practice teems with the signs and symbols that populate that urban landscape and celebrates the community’s vitality and a creative form of resistance to advancing gentrification and the threat of erasure.

The artist’s important work centers the on Black community, both aesthetically and materially. Halsey gathers icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience from local vernacular sources recontextualizing and reinterpreting them for her utopic fantasies of the city. Both celebrating Black cultural expressions and archiving them, her work—which includes wall works, massive multiroom installations, and immersive outdoor environments—is a potent reminder of the importance of community and home.

Beyond the signs and symbols of contemporary South Central, Halsey employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as a means to reclaim lost legacies, drawing inspiration from Afrofuturism—a transcultural movement blending science fiction with aspects of Black art and culture—and the utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio.

Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the "middle passage," but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, Middle Passages offers a unique perspective on African Americans' ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.

A new retrospective of a titan of LGBTQ literature, activism, and Black feminism

Award-winning poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke’s illustrious career has spanned more than four decades and culminates in Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, a long-awaited retrospective of the indelible work of a Black feminist, community and LGBTQ activist, and educator. This collection features carefully curated poems from Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (2006), By My Precise Haircut (2016), and Targets (2019). Together these works show a brilliant thinker who has profoundly impacted generations of writers and activists.

Clarke’s poetry and essays, centered around the Black, lesbian, feminist experience, have attracted an audience around the world. Her essays, “Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance” and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community” revolutionized the thinking about lesbians of color and the struggle against homophobia. Her poetry and non-fiction have been reprinted in numerous anthologies and assigned in women and sexuality courses globally. Having published since 1977, Clarke and her work have become a foundational part of LGBTQ literature and activism. Archive of Style is a celebration and homage to one of American literature’s Black Women literary warriors.

Whether infused by movement or stillness, Mlengeya's black-and-white portrait paintings radiate both power and peace

Born in 1991 in Dar es Salaam, Sungi Mlengeya captures the essence of Black womanhood in her haunting monochromatic acrylic portraits. The meticulously painted figures are set against a minimalist white background, creating a striking contrast that emphasizes skin texture and form. Her portraits, whether infused by movement or stillness, radiate both power and peace, offering the viewer intimate moments of strength and serenity. In this first monograph dedicated to Mlengeya, the curator Tandazani Dhlakama brilliantly analyzes how African, Black and feminist conditions are intertwined in her work, and the intimate conversation between Sungi and her model, Jemima Michael, takes us behind the scenes of a work in the making.

Redressing the woeful under-recognition of a pioneering Black queer architect and artist. This is an experimental illustrated reader exploring the work and legacy of American architect, educator and artist Amaza Lee Meredith (1895–1984), a trailblazer who was the first known Black queer woman to practice as an architect in the United States.
This book takes Meredith's expansive letter-writing practice as a conceptual framework for epistolary responses in the present, plotting Meredith's life and work within themes of placemaking, gender, sexuality and Black love, with a focus on how she built sanctuaries (homes, institutions and communities) for herself and other people of color to foster rigorous artistic pursuit, free of persecution.
The book features previously unpublished photos, blueprints, letters and scrapbooks from Meredith's archives and an annotated timeline of her life and work. Essays from architectural scholars and oral histories with former students, colleagues and friends explore her legacy in public education, the arts, modernist architecture and the built environment in the context of school desegregation, civil rights, and land and property rights. A diverse group of contemporary artists also respond to Meredith's legacy.

This book was published in conjunction with Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

In an other, Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE’s incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison’s A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett’s films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives.

A new novel about the enduring trauma of police brutality by the award-winning author of Mother Country

She’d gotten no trigger warning. And her entire life, she wanted to scream now, had deserved a trigger warning.

Early in life, Ruth survived a series of devastating events: Her little brother died from a childhood illness, her mother died of grief, and then her father was shot by the police right in front of their home. In the years following her father’s murder, Ruth pushes her past underground. She changes her name and moves to Kentucky, marries a man named Myron, and together they raise a kid. It’s been two decades, and she is, by outside measures, living a good life―but why doesn’t it feel good? When her marriage comes to a sudden end, their house burns down in the middle of the night, and she learns that her estranged sister has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Ruth is jolted back into action. She flees again, this time back to her home state of California, with her nonbinary teenager in tow, perhaps ready at last to face her pain and retrieve her former self.

Searing, surprisingly witty, and deeply human, Trigger Warning is a novel about the durational aftermath of anti-Black police violence. Through the perspectives of Ruth and Myron, and those of their friends and their child, Townsend explores divorce and desire, the heartbreaking brevity of parenting, the push and pull of old friendships, and the possibility, after incredible trauma, of reconnecting to what makes us feel alive.

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024. Winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries―tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light―in order to survive, and in order to live.

This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.

This captivating biography chronicles the remarkable journey of fashion legend André Leon Talley–from humble beginnings in rural North Carolina to the pinnacle of the international world of fashion.

Growing up in the Jim Crow South wasn't easy for young André. He escaped into the glimmering worlds he discovered inside magazines like Ebony and Vogue. He fell in love with all things French, and honed his taste for elegance and style in spite of those who judged and bullied him. Standing tall against all odds, André spun his hardships into a fashion fairytale of his own making.

With exuberant prose and luminous illustrations, this picture book biography shares the inspiring story of majestic icon André Leon Talley and his enduring legacy.

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.

If you knew the world was ending, who would you save? And would they let you?

Sixteen-year-old Winnie Bray is a liar. As the resident psychic at an oddities shop, Winnie truly can see the future. But her customers only want reassurance, and Winnie only wants their money. Favorable fortunes are a fast track to funding her way out of Buffalo, New York for good, after all.

But all of that changes when a vision sends her stalking in the remains of her family home that burned down in a fire 10 years ago. Among the ash and rubble, Winnie finds a box made of bone, untouched by flames and…whispering. At the touch of her finger, the box shows her a vision of death, chaos, and apocalypse, with her and rich kids Apollo and Cyrus Rathbun at the center.

Apollo knows their cousin is up to no good, and with the Rathbun family scattered to the wind, they know Cyrus is aiming to present himself as the new patriarch. Despite an initial attraction, Apollo is reluctant to believe Winnie. But soon it becomes clear that their family histories are intertwined, with the whispering, hungry box at the very center, and more than their lives are on the line. Together, they must discover the origins of the box and stop unforeseen forces from fulfilling the apocalyptic prophecy, or die trying.

From the author of I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast is Me comes a speculative thriller about the ties that bind us to places and people, perfect for fans of Andrew Joseph White and Tochi Onyebuchi.

A collection of exceptional new essays by one of the most significant contemporary writers on the world stage

Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We’re Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.

From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs.

Danticat is an irresistible presence on the page: full of heart, outrage, humor, clear thinking, and moral questioning, while reminding us of the possibilities of community. And so “we’re alone” is both a fearsome admission and an intimate invitation―we’re alone now, we can talk. We’re Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.

In this endearing picture book by superstar chef and beloved TV host Carla Hall, Carla’s grandmother helps her turn things around when a game of dress-up leads to a fancy tea party gone wrong.

Carla and her sister Kim love visiting their grandparents’ home, where they can always count on having something fun to get into, like Granny’s old chest full of treasures! Dressed up in mounds of beautiful dresses, sparkling jewels, and fancy gloves, Carla decides the day wouldn’t be complete without a tea party for the girls’ special guests, Granny and Doc.

But when Carla accidentally ruins her grandmother’s favorite quilt and famous pound cake, she fears that all the fun is spoiled. How can Carla and her family have a proper tea party without an elegant set up and delicious food? Then Carla’s grandmother steps in, sharing her recipe for a special cake. Will the secret ingredient help Carla save the day?

The murder of a police recruit pins a black LAPD detective in a deadly web where race, corruption, violence, and cover-ups intersect in this relevant, razor-sharp novel of suspense.

Black rookie cop Trevor “Finn” Finnegan aspires to become a top-ranking officer in the Los Angeles Police Department and fix a broken department. A fast-track promotion to detective in the coveted Robbery-Homicide Division puts him closer to achieving his goal.

Four years later, calls for police accountability rule the headlines. The city is teeming with protests for racial justice. When the body of a murdered black academy recruit is found in the Angeles National Forest, Finn is tasked to investigate.

As pressure mounts to solve the crime and avoid a PR nightmare, Finn scours the underbelly of a volatile city where power, violence, and race intersect. But it’s Finn’s past experience as a beat cop that may hold the key to solving the recruit’s murder. The price? The end of Finn’s career…or his life.

From island life in the Caribbean to a new beginning in France, a young man comes of age in a sweeping and lyrical novel about family, loss, secrets, and finding freedom from the past.

Eighteen-year-old Salomon Destin graduates high school and anxiously trades life on Guadeloupe in the Caribbean for France to continue his studies.

Strasbourg is his new home. He’s carving out a promising new path for himself. And most of all, he’s left behind the disorder of so much family drama, including that of a dissolute father, a mother who turns a blind eye to the chaos, his troubled and aimless brother Junior, and Salomon’s inherited obligations as peacekeeper. Although one year away, in love for the first time, and an ocean safely separating his old life and new, Salomon is pulled back to the island by the news of a tragedy. As unexpectedly comforting as Guadeloupe is―the food, music, ocean, and sun stirring up beautiful island memories―the traumas of the past remain.

Years later, while facing the echoes of family demons in his own marriage and confronting the stunning secrets and revelations to come, Salomon, and everyone he loves, must find the strength to move forward once and for all. But will freedom come with a price?

From Amina Akhtar comes a viciously funny thriller about wellness―the smoothies, the secrets, and the deliciously deadly impulses.

Lifelong New Yorker Ronnie Khan never thought she’d leave Queens. She’s not an “aim high, dream big” person―until she meets socialite wellness guru Marley Dewhurst.

Marley isn’t just a visionary; she’s a revelation. Seduced by the fever dream of finding her best self, Ronnie makes for the desert mountains of Sedona, Arizona.

Healing yoga, transcendent hikes, epic juice cleanses…Ronnie consumes her new bougie existence like a fine wine. But is it, really? Or is this whole self-care business a little sour?

When the glam gurus around town start turning up gruesomely murdered, Ronnie has her answer: all is not well in wellness town. As Marley’s blind ambition veers into madness, Ronnie fears for her life.

A smash debut novel from rising star Yasmin Angoe, Her Name Is Knight features an elite assassin heroine on a mission to topple a human trafficking ring and avenge her family.

Stolen from her Ghanaian village as a child, Nena Knight has plenty of motives to kill. Now an elite assassin for a powerful business syndicate called the Tribe, she gets plenty of chances.

But while on assignment in Miami, Nena ends up saving a life, not taking one. She emerges from the experience a changed woman, finally hopeful for a life beyond rage and revenge. Tasked with killing a man she’s come to respect, Nena struggles to reconcile her loyalty to the Tribe with her new purpose.

Meanwhile, she learns a new Tribe council member is the same man who razed her village, murdered her family, and sold her into captivity. Nena can’t resist the temptation of vengeance―and she doesn’t want to. Before she can reclaim her life, she must leverage everything she was and everything she is to take him down and end the cycle of bloodshed for good.

She’s a new PI in a beautiful seaside town. It’s dirtier than it looks―and more dangerous too―in a twisting novel of suspense by the Anthony Award–nominated author of These Toxic Things.

After ten years on the force, LAPD cop Sonny Rush relocates with her elderly mother to peaceful Haven, California, to join her godfather’s burgeoning PI business. What crimes could possibly happen in a town nicknamed “Mayberry by the Sea”? Sonny’s first case: find Figgy, a missing goldendoodle last seen sporting a Versace collar. At least scouting out a dognapper gives Sonny a chance to get to know her new neighbors.

Forty-eight hours in town and Figgy’s disappearance entangles Sonny in an unwelcome reunion with her ex, one of Haven’s wealthiest citizens. And when the body of a teenage boy is found along a popular hiking trail, Sonny is drawn into a web of strange beyond anything she ever saw in LA.

Then comes a local’s warning: question everything. Haven hides secrets that could destroy its idyllic facade. Or destroy Sonny first.