“An intense, provocative, and vital crime story that excavates paradoxical dimensions of race, class, sexism, family bonds, and social obligation while seeking the deepest meaning of the law." — Booklist

Originally published posthumously by his daughter and literary executor Julia Wright, A Father’s Law is the novel Richard Wright, acclaimed author of Black Boy and Native Son, never completed. Written during a six-week period prior to his death in Paris in 1960, it offers a fascinating glimpse into the writer’s process as well as providing an important addition to Wright’s body of work.

In rough form, Wright expands the style of a crime thriller to grapple with themes of race, class, and generational conflicts as newly appointed police chief Ruddy Turner begins to suspect his own son, Tommy, a student at the University of Chicago, of a series of murders in Brentwood Park. Under pressure to solve the killings and prove himself, Turner spirals into an obsession that forces him to confront his ambivalent relationship with a son he struggles to understand.

Prescient, raw, and powerful, A Father's Law is the final gift from a literary giant.

The only collaboration between the two brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance—Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes

In 1930, two giants of African American literature joined forces to create a lively, insightful, often wildly farcical look inside a rural Southern black community—the three-act play Mule Bone. In this hilarious story, Jim and Dave are a struggling song-and-dance team, and when a woman comes between them, chaos ensues in their tiny Florida hometown. This extraordinary theatrical work broke new ground while triggering a bitter controversy between the collaborators that kept it out of the public eye for sixty years.

This edition of the rarely seen stage classic features Hurston's original short story, "The Bone of Contention," as well as the complete recounting of the acrimonious literary dispute that prevented Mule Bone from being produced or published until decades after the authors' deaths.

A master chronicler of the African-American experience, Richard Wright brilliantly expanded his literary horizons with Pagan Spain, originally published in 1957. An amalgam of expert travel reportage, dramatic monologue, and arresting sociological critique, Pagan Spain serves as a pointed and still-relevant commentary on the grave human dangers of oppression and governmental corruption.

The Spain Richard Wright visited in the mid-twentieth century was not the romantic locale of song and story, but a place of tragic beauty and dangerous contradictions. The portrait he offers in Pagan Spain is a blistering, powerful, yet scrupulously honest depiction of a land and people in turmoil, caught in the strangling dual grip of cruel dictatorship and what Wright saw as an undercurrent of primitive faith.

Here are over 800 haiku by Richard Wright, one of the early forceful and eloquent spokesmen for black Americans, author of the acclaimed Native Son and Black Boy.

Wright discovered the haiku in the last eighteen months of life. He attempted to capture, through his sensibility as an African-American, the elusive Zen discipline and beauty in depicting man’s relationship, not only to his fellow man as he had in the raw and forceful prose of his fiction, but to the natural world. In all, he wrote over 4,000 haiku.

Here are the 817 he personally chose; Wright’s haiku, disciplined and steeped in beauty, display a universality that transcends both race and color without ever denying them. Wright wrote his haiku obsessively—in bed, in cafes, in restaurants, in both Paris and the French countryside. They offered him a new form of expression and a new vision: with the threat of death constantly before him, he found in them inspiration, beauty, and insights.

Fighting illness and frequently bedridden, deeply upset by the recent loss of his mother, Ella, Wright continued, as his daughter notes in her introduction, “to spin these poems of light out of the gathering darkness.”

From Richard Wright, one of the most powerful, acclaimed, and essential American authors of the twentieth century, comes a compelling story of one man's attempt to escape his past and start anew in Harlem.

Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself--a man of superior intellect who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes. The Outsider is an important work of fiction that depicts American racism and its devastating consequences in raw and unflinching terms. Brilliantly imagined and frighteningly prescient, it is an epic exploration of the tragic roots of criminal behavior.

"A bombastic coming-of-age novel....The White Boy Shuffle has the uncanny ability to make readers want to laugh and cry at the same time."--Los Angeles Times

The first novel from National Book Critics Circle Award and Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sellout

Paul Beatty's hilarious and scathing debut novel is about Gunnar Kaufman, an awkward, black surfer bum who is moved by his mother from Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles. There, he begins to undergo a startling transformation from neighborhood outcast to basketball superstar, and eventually to reluctant messiah of a "divided, downtrodden people."

From Paul Beatty, the author of the Man Booker Prize winner The Sellout, comes Tuff, a novel as fast-paced and hard-edged as the Harlem streets it portrays.

Age nineteen and weighing in at 320 pounds, Winston “Tuffy” Foshay is an East Harlem denizen who breaks jaws and shoots dogs and dreams of earning millions from his idea for Cap’n Crunch: The Movie, starring Danny DeVito. His best friend is a disabled Muslim who wants to rob banks, his guiding light is an ex-hippie Asian woman who worked for Malcolm X, and he married his wife, Yolanda, over the phone from jail.

He’s funny and fierce, frustrated and feared. And when Tuff decides to run for City Council, this dazzling novel goes from astoundingly funny to acerbically sublime. By turns profound and irreverent, and populated with a hilarious supporting cast, Paul Beatty's Tuff is satire at its razor-sharp best.

“An extravagant, satirical cri de couer...Beatty’s blunt, impious, streetwise eloquence has a kind of transfixing power.” ―The New York Times Book Review

“Masterfully conceived and highly entertaining...Richly textured and unforgettable.”―The Boston Globe

A new collection of the seminal writings and speeches of a legendary writer, orator, and civil rights leader
 
This compact volume offers a full course on the remarkable, diverse career of Frederick Douglass, letting us hear once more a necessary historical figure whose guiding voice is needed now as urgently as ever. Edited by renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Pulitzer Prize–nominated historian John Stauffer, The Portable Frederick Douglass includes the full range of Douglass’s works: the complete Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, as well as extracts from My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; The Heroic Slave, one of the first works of African American fiction; the brilliant speeches that launched his political career and that constitute the greatest oratory of the Civil War era; and his journalism, which ranges from cultural and political critique (including his early support for women’s equality) to law, history, philosophy, literature, art, and international affairs, including a never-before-published essay on Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture.
 
The Portable Frederick Douglass is the latest addition in a series of African American classics curated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. First published in 2008, the series reflects a selection of great works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by African and African American authors introduced and annotated by leading scholars and acclaimed writers in new or updated editions for Penguin Classics. In his series essay, “What Is an African American Classic?” Gates provides a broader view of the canon of classics of African American literature available from Penguin Classics and beyond. Gates writes, “These texts reveal the human universal through the African American particular: all true art, all classics do this; this is what ‘art’ is, a revelation of that which makes each of us sublimely human, rendered in the minute details of the actions and thoughts and feelings of a compelling character embedded in a time and place.”
 
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

At the beginning of this masterpiece of African literature, Clarence, a white man, has been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa. Flush with self-importance, he demands to see the king, but the king has just left for the south of his realm. Traveling through an increasingly phantasmagoric landscape in the company of a beggar and two roguish boys, Clarence is gradually stripped of his pretensions, until he is sold to the royal harem as a slave. But in the end Clarence’s bewildering journey is the occasion of a revelation, as he discovers the image, both shameful and beautiful, of his own humanity in the alien splendor of the king.

“Grand, robust, a rich and big novel.”—Alice Walker, The New York Times Book Review

“In [Jane Pittman], Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure. . . . Gaines’s novel brings to mind other great works: The Odyssey, for the way his heroine’s travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn, for the clarity of [Pittman’s] voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story of it all.”—Newsweek

Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. 
 
A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane’s eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.

The widely praised New York Times bestseller, and Mosley's first new series since his acclaimed Easy Rawlins novels...

Leonid McGill is an ex-boxer and a hard drinker looking to clean up his act. He's an old-school P.I. working a New York City that's gotten a little too fancy all around him. But it's still full of dirty secrets, and as McGill unearths them, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be tested to the limit...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author, rapper, and activist--Sister Souljah uses her passionate voice to deliver what is at once a fiercely candid autobiography and a survival manual for any Black woman determined to keep her heart open and her integrity intact in modern America.

Each chapter of No Disrespect is devoted to someone who made a difference in Sister Souljah's life--from the mother who raised her to the men who educated (and mis-educated) her about love--and each bares a controversial truth about the Black condition in America: the disintegration of families; the unremitting combat between the sexes; and the thousand and one ways in which racism continues to circumscribe how Black people see themselves and treat one another.

The result is an outspoken and often courageous rejoinder to the pieties of race, class, and gender by a writer who is at once wise, bawdy, brutally funny, and as sensitive a lightning rod in a thunderstorm.

With the same intellectual incisiveness and supple, stylish prose he brought to his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His range is virtuosic, encompassing Mark Twain and Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, The Birth of a Nation and the Dante-esque landscape of Harlem—“the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.” Throughout, he gives us what amounts to an episodic autobiography that traces his formation as a writer as well as the genesis of Invisible Man.

On every page, Ellison reveals his idiosyncratic and often contrarian brilliance, his insistence on refuting both black and white stereotypes of what an African American writer should say or be. The result is a book that continues to instruct, delight, and occasionally outrage readers.

Ralph Ellison is justly celebrated for his epochal novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and has become a classic of American literature. But Ellison’s strange inability to finish a second novel, despite his dogged efforts and soaring prestige, made him a supremely enigmatic figure. Arnold Rampersad skillfully tells the story of a writer whose thunderous novel and astute, courageous essays on race, literature, and culture assure him of a permanent place in our literary heritage. Starting with Ellison’s hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma and his ordeal as a student in Alabama, Rampersad documents his improbable, painstaking rise in New York to a commanding place on the literary scene. With scorching honesty but also fair and compassionate, Rampersad lays bare his subject’s troubled psychology and its impact on his art and on the people about him.This book is both the definitive biography of Ellison and a stellar model of literary biography.

A finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes’s background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes’s award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.

A compelling novel of a man brought to reckon with his buried past...

In St. Adrienne, a small black community in Louisiana, Reverend Phillip Martin—a respected minister and civil rights leader—comes face to face with the sins of his youth in the person of Robert X, a young, unkempt stranger who arrives in town for a mysterious "meeting" with the Reverend.  

In the confrontation between the two, the young man's secret burden explodes into the open, and Phillip Martin begins a long-neglected journey into his youth to discover how destructive his former life was, for himself and for those around him.

“…on every page there's an authentic moment, or a dead-right knot of conversation, or a truer-than-true turn of phrase…”—Kirkus Reviews

From the author of the classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth is a powerful and brilliantly crafted tale that explores themes of identity, race, and ambition.

"[A] stunning achievement. . . . Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary composition of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Time

The story follows Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator, whose life takes an unexpected turn when he calls for Alonzo Hickman, an old Black minister, to be by his side as he faces a mortal wound. As the two men intimately share their stories and memories, the true shape and substance of the past begin to emerge. 

Here is Ellison, a virtuoso of American vernacular—the preacher’s hyperbole and the politician’s rhetoric, the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech—at the height of his powers, telling a moving, evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century. 

With an introduction and additional notes by John F. Callahan, who first compiled Juneteenth out of thousands of manuscript pages in 1999, and a preface by National Book Award-winning author Charles R. Johnson.

“Beautifully written and imaginatively conceived, Juneteenth, like Invisible Man, deserves to be read and reread by generations.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The work of one of the most formidable figures in American intellectual life."

-- Washington Post Book World

The seventeen essays collected in this volume prove that Ralph Ellison was not only one of America's most dazzlingly innovative novelists but perhaps also our most perceptive and iconoclastic commentator on matters of literature, culture, and race. In Going to the Territory, Ellison provides us with dramatically fresh readings of William Faulkner and Richard Wright, along with new perspectives on the music of Duke Ellington and the art of Romare Bearden. He analyzes the subversive quality of black laughter, the mythic underpinnings of his masterpiece Invisible Man, and the extent to which America's national identity rests on the contributions of African Americans. Erudite, humane, and resounding with humor and common sense, the result is essential Ellison.

A powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man--set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s.

The Village Voice called A Gathering of Old Men "the best-written novel on Southern race relations in over a decade."

Readers and critics alike can’t resist New York Times bestselling author Kimberla Lawson Roby’s beloved Reverend Curtis Black series. Now the classic novel that introduced the trials and triumphs of a church family and their congregation is available in a beautiful new edition—and includes a letter from the author.
 
Tanya Black has everything a woman could want: a fulfilling career, a beautiful daughter, an elegant home, and a handsome, charismatic husband who is pastor of a prominent Baptist church. And yet, none of it can hide the growing turbulence in her marriage.
 
Her husband, Reverend Curtis Black, once a loving, devoted, and passionate partner, has grown remote, and Tanya is thrown into doubt about what she once cherished. When she uncovers disturbing truths, confirming scandalous rumors about Curtis, she questions all that she’s ever believed in.
 
But it is when Tanya is dealt the worst kind of betrayal a woman can face that her life is changed forever. Plunged into a bittersweet journey of discovery, she finds herself learning painful new lessons about love, loyalty—and sensual temptation—and is forced to make some very hard decisions for her daughter, herself, and her future.
 
 
 “Roby writes with high-octane levels of emotion.” —USA Today
 
“Roby is the queen of redemption.” —RT Book Reviews

How Stella Got Her Groove Back is full of Terry McMillan's signature humor, heart, and insight. More than a love story, it is ultimately a novel about how a woman saves her own life—and what she must risk to do it.

Stella Payne is forty-two, divorced, a high-powered investment analyst, mother of eleven-year-old Quincy- and she does it all. In fact, if she doesn't do it, it doesn't get done, from Little League carpool duty to analyzing portfolios to folding the laundry and bringing home the bacon. She does it all well, too, if her chic house, personal trainer, BMW, and her loving son are any indication. So what if there's been no one to share her bed with lately, let alone rock her world? Stella doesn't mind it too much; she probably wouldn't have the energy for love—and all of love's nasty fallout—anyway.

But when Stella takes a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Jamaica, her world gets rocked to the core—not just by the relaxing effects of the sun and sea and an island full of attractive men, but by one man in particular. He's tall, lean, soft-spoken, Jamaican, smells of citrus and the ocean—and is half her age. The tropics have cast their spell and Stella soon realizes she has come to a cataclysmic juncture: not only must she confront her hopes and fears about love, she must question all of her expectations, passions, and ideas about life and the way she has lived it.

“ I mean to live and die by my own mind,” Zora Neale Hurston told the writer Countee Cullen. Arriving in Harlem in 1925 with little more than a dollar to her name, Hurston rose to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, only to die in obscurity. Not until the 1970s was she rediscovered by Alice Walker and other admirers. Although Hurston has entered the pantheon as one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, the true nature of her personality has proven elusive.

Now, a brilliant, complicated and utterly arresting woman emerges from this landmark book. Carla Kaplan, a noted Hurston scholar, has found hundreds of revealing, previously unpublished letters for this definitive collection; she also provides extensive and illuminating commentary on Hurston’s life and work, as well as an annotated glossary of the organizations and personalities that were important to it.

From her enrollment at Baltimore’s Morgan Academy in 1917, to correspondence with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Langston Hughes, Dorothy West and Alain Locke, to a final query letter to her publishers in 1959, Hurston’s spirited correspondence offers an invaluable portrait of a remarkable, irrepressible talent.

This Library of America volume, with its companion, brings together for the first time all of the best writing of Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most significant twentieth-century American writers, in one authoritative set.

“Folklore is the arts of the people,” Hurston wrote, “before they find out that there is any such thing as art.” A pioneer of African-American ethnography who did graduate study in anthropology with the renowned Franz Boas, Hurston devoted herself to preserving the black folk heritage. In Mules and Men (1935), the first book of African-American folklore written by an African American, she returned to her native Florida and to New Orleans to record stories and sermons, blues and work songs, children’s games, courtship rituals, and formulas of voodoo doctors. This classic work is presented here with the original illustrations by the great Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias.

Tell My Horse (1938), part ethnography, part travel book, vividly recounts the survival of African religion in Jamaican obeah and Haitian voodoo in the 1930s. Keenly alert to political and intellectual currents, Hurston went beyond superficial exoticism to explore the role of these religious systems in their societies. The text is illustrated by twenty-six photographs, many of them taken by Hurston. Her extensive transcriptions of Creole songs are here accompanied by new translations.

A special feature of this volume is Hurston’s controversial 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. With consultation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it is presented here for the first time as she intended, restoring passages omitted by the original because of political controversy, sexual candor, or fear of libel. Included in an appendix are four additional chapters, one never published, which represent earlier stages of Hurston’s conception of the book.

Twenty-two essays, from “The Eatonville Anthology” (1926) to “Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix” (1955), demonstrate the range of Hurston’s concerns as they cover subjects from religion, music, and Harlem slang to Jim Crow and American democracy.

The chronology of Hurston’s life prepared for this edition sheds fresh light on many aspects of her career. In addition, this volume contains detailed notes and a brief essay on the texts.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Toni Morrison, ganadora del Premio Nobel de Literatura 1993, parte de la realidad de una chiquilla desgraciada para tratar temas como el concepto de belleza impuesto, la voz femenina o la infancia truncada, y lo consigue con una historia dura y deliciosa al mismo tiempo.

Pecola es una niña pequeña que vive con sus padres y tiene una prima que se llama Claudia. Le gustan las muñecas y las caléndulas, que no le gustan a nadie excepto a ella. Pecola es negra y cree que es fea porque no se parece a Shirley Temple. Y tiene un truco para desaparecer cuando sus padres se pelean o su padre la molesta por las noches: piensa que tiene unos preciosos ojos azules, que todo el mundo admira su belleza y que las otras niñas la envidian. Pero ese sueño nunca se convertirá en realidad y Pecola seguirá atrapada en la triste vida que le ha tocado en suerte.

Reseñas:
«Una exploración de la raza y el género de la ganadora del Nobel, todo un clásico estadounidense. Con su exploración de las dinámicas entre el racismo interiorizado y la autoestima, [...] Morrison reflexiona sobre cómo la sociedad ensalza todo lo relacionado con los blancos #asociados con la belleza, la pureza y la inocencia#, algo que puede hacer mella en la autoestima de una persona y llevarla por la senda de la destrucción.»
Freddie Braun, Vogue ("6 novelas fundamentales de autores negros que deberías añadir a tu lista de lecturas"

«Toni Morrison se ha convertido en la D. H. Lawrence de la psique negra, transformando individuos en fuerzas, idiosincrasias en inevitabilidad.»
New York Magazine

An award-winning play from one of America’s most brilliant writers about a murder in a small Southern town, loosely based on the 1955 killing of Emmett Till. • "A play with fires of fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes, a roar of protest in its throat." —The New York Times

James Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated—and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion. 

In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence, James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race.

For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a "boy" like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In “one of Morrison’s most haunting works” (The New York Times),the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the story of a mother and a daughter—a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A New York Times Notable Book • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: an emotional powerhouse of a novel about a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America mined with lethal pitfalls for an unwary Black man

When Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war, he journeys to his native Georgia with a renewed sense of purpose in search of his sister, but it becomes clear that their troubles began well before their wartime separation. Together, they return to their rural hometown of Lotus, where buried secrets are unearthed and where Frank learns at last what it means to be a man, what it takes to heal, and—above all—what it means to come home.

La obra maestra de la premio Nobel de Literatura Toni Morrison, «la mejor novela norteamericana de los últimos cincuenta años» según The New York Times, ganadora del Premio Pulitzer y del American Book Award

«No puedo imaginar la literatura norteamericana sin esta novela.»
John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

Para escribir esta magnífica historia, merecedora del Premio Pulitzer, Toni Morrison se inspiró en la vida real de una esclava afroamericana, Margaret Garner, que en 1856 escapó de una plantación en Kentucky y consiguió llegar al estado libre de Ohio. A punto de ser recapturada, Margaret tomó la trágica decisión de sacrificar a su hija para salvarla de una vida en cautiverio.

En estas páginas, Sethe es la esclava prófuga que vendió su cuerpo para grabar el nombre de su hija muerta en la lápida: diez minutos por «Beloved», veinte por «Querida Beloved». Muchos años después, Sethe vive en Ohio con Denver, su hija adolescente, y Paul D., un viejo amigo que también fue esclavo. Todos intentan prosperar y olvidar el pasado, hasta que un día aparece una joven que dice llamarse Beloved. Tiene la edad que tendría su hija si viviese y sabe ciertas cosas que sugieren que podría serlo.

Beloved se convirtió de inmediato en un clásico cuando se publicó en 1987. El crítico John Leonard escribió en Los Angeles Times: «No concibo la literatura norteamericana sin esta novela». Casi dos décadas después, The New York Times la eligió como la mejor novela norteamericana de los últimos cincuenta años.

Reseñas:
«Uno de los libros por lo que vale la pena volver a la biblioteca (aunque sea virtual). Obra esencial de la Premio Nobel de Literatura.»
Begoña Alonso, Elle

«Imbricando un realismo desabrido con una poderosa imaginación fantástica, [...] Beloved se convirtió de inmediato en un clásico».
Zenda

«Toni Morrison fue un gigante de su época y de la nuestra. Todo el mundo debería

leer Beloved.»
Margaret Atwood, The New York Times

«Beloved es la gran novela norteamericana no escrita del siglo XIX, trata de cosas sobre las que jamás se escribió y que laten sin embargo en el fondo de novelas sí escritas, por Melville, por Poe.»
A. S. Byatt

«Una maravillosa artesana a la que la gente tiende a pasar por alto. Es tan genial e innovadora como Faulkner, García Márquez y Woolf.»
The New York Times

«La mejor obra de Toni Morrison. [...] Muestra su prodigioso talento.»
Chicago Sun-Times

«Si hay una novela con la que empezar a leer a Toni Morrison, es Beloved. [...] Morrison es un tesoro norteamericano.»
Biblioteca Pública de Nueva York

«He terminado una segunda vuelta de Beloved, la misteriosa y tan fascinante novela de Toni Morrison, donde el mundo de los esclavos negros se vuelve un asunto íntimo y a la vez mágico. [...] Y las protagonistas son las mujeres, que todo lo desafían, y son ellas mismas la libertad.»
Sergio Ramírez, Babelia

«Su obra es un bello y significativo desafío a nuestras conciencias y nuestra imaginación moral.»
Barack Obama

«Beloved te hace sentir que todo lo que has escrito es aburrido y sin vida. El nivel de destreza, la perfección y la belleza de las oraciones, el alcance de la imaginación, el orden del lenguaje en torno al dolor indescriptible. Es buenísimo. Además, es nuestra historia de terror más estadounidense. [...] Sé que Morrison no escribía para mí, pero moldeó mi escritura y le estoy eternamente agradecida.»
Carmen María Machado

On the heels of the bestseller success of her  novel The Wedding, Dorothy West,  the last surviving member of the Harlem  Renaissance, presents a collection of essays and stories that  explore both the realism of everyday life, and the  fantastical, extraordinary circumstances of one  woman's life in a mythic time. Traversing the  universal themes and conflicts between poverty and  prosperity, men and women, and young and old, and  compiling writing that spans almost seventy years,  The Richer, The Poorer not only  affords an unparalleled window into the  African-American middle class, but also delves into the  richness of experience of "one of the finest writers  produced in this country during the Roaring  Twenties"(Book Page).

Rediscover America's most honored writer of children's literature in this deluxe collector's edition of her finest work: five classic novels about African American young people confronting the world and its many challenges

Playing out themes of memory, folklore, and tradition in enthralling, often wildly inventive stories, Virginia Hamilton transformed American children’s literature in the 1960s and 70s. Her award-winning novels brought Black characters center stage, creating a multifaceted portrait of African American life that she called “liberation literature.” This volume collects five of her best known and most beloved works.

In Zeely (1967), Geeder Perry and her brother, Toeboy, go to their uncle’s farm for the summer and encounter a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Watusi queen and a mysterious night traveler.

In the Edgar Award–winning The House of Dies Drear (1968), Thomas Small and his family move to a forbidding former waystation on the Underground Railroad—a house whose secrets Thomas must discover before it’s too late.

Junior Brown, a three-hundred-pound musical prodigy, plays a silent piano in The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), while his homeless friend Buddy Clark draws on all his New York City wit to protect Junior’s disintegrating mind.

In the National Book Award–winning M.C. Higgins, The Great (1974), Mayo Cornelius Higgins sits atop a forty-foot pole on the side of Sarah’s Mountain and dreams of escape. Poised above his family’s home is a massive spoil heap from strip-mining that could come crashing down at any moment. Can he rescue his family and save his own future? Must he choose?

And in Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982), fifteen-year-old Tree’s life revolves around her ailing brother, Dab, until she sees cool, handsome Brother Rush, an enigmatic figure who may hold the key to unlocking her family’s troubled past.

This Library of America edition contains twenty beautifully restored illustrations, ten in full color for the first time; a selection of writings in which Hamilton discusses her work; and a newly researched chronology of Hamilton’s life and career.

"Supremely humane.... Kay leaves us with a broad landscape of sweet tolerance and familial love." —The New York Times Book Review

In her starkly beautiful and wholly unexpected tale, Jackie Kay delves into the most intimate workings of the human heart and mind and offers a triumphant tale of loving deception and lasting devotion.

The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret, one that enrages his adopted son, Colman, leading him to collude with a tabloid journalist. Besieged by the press, his widow Millie flees to a remote Scottish village, where she seeks solace in memories of their marriage. The reminiscences of those who knew Joss Moody render a moving portrait of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, one that preserved a rare, unconditional love.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB 2.0 SELECTION • "A remarkable page-turner of a novel." —Chicago Tribune

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd, swept up by the tides of the Great Migration, flees Georgia and heads north. This "brutal, illuminating version of the twentieth century African-American experience belongs alongside those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston" (Newsday).

Full of hope, Hattie settles in Philadelphia to build a better life. Instead she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment, and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins are lost to an illness that a few pennies could have prevented.

Hattie gives birth to nine more children, whom she raises with grit, mettle, and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them to meet a world that will not be kind. Their lives, captured here in twelve luminous threads, tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage—and a nation's tumultuous journey.

Don't miss Ayana Matthis's new novel, The Unsettled coming soon!