Winner of the Hurston/Wright Crossover Award

Prince Shakur’s debut memoir brilliantly mines his radicalization and self-realization through examinations of place, childhood, queer identity, and a history of uprisings.

After immigrating from Jamaica to the United States, Prince Shakur’s family is rocked by the murder of Prince’s biological father in 1995. Behind the murder is a sordid family truth, scripted in the lines of a diary by an outlawed uncle hell-bent on avenging the murder of Prince’s father. As Shakur begins to unravel his family’s secrets, he must navigate the strenuous terrain of coming to terms with one’s inner self while confronting the steeped complexities of the Afro-diaspora.

When They Tell You to Be Good charts Shakur’s political coming of age from closeted queer kid in a Jamaican family to radicalized adult traveler, writer, and anarchist in Obama and Trump’s America. Shakur journeys from France to the Philippines, South Korea, and elsewhere to discover the depths of the Black experience, and engages in deep political questions while participating in movements like Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock. By the end, Shakur reckons with his identity, his family’s immigration, and the intergenerational impacts of patriarchal and colonial violence.

Examining a tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, When They Tell You to Be Good shines a light on what we all must ask of ourselves—to be more than what America envisions for the oppressed—as Shakur compels readers to take a closer, deeper look at the political world of young, Black, queer, and radical millennials today.

Love is the trickiest spell of all.
 
Lucinda Caraway loves living in Freya Grove, the mystic seaside town where charms, hexes, and magical beings of all kinds are the norm. She spends her days teaching high school history and her nights reading tea leaves and tending to her conjure garden. It’s a good life . . . but she can’t stop wishing for more.

Until one night, that wish turns into a spell, and suddenly Lucy can’t say no. Not to a public karaoke performance. Not to running a 10K. And, most alarmingly, not to her high school crush, Alexander Dwyer, who needs her help unjinxing his new house—which just happens to be right across the street from hers.

Alex has spent the last ten years traveling the world on adventures Lucy has only ever dreamed of, and he’s planning to leave again as soon as his house is safe to sell. But until Lucy can unhex herself, she and Alex are stuck together. And with so much magic in the air, maybe the next spell Lucy casts will be the one that convinces him to stay.

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This dazzling debut middle grade novel in verse is a riveting journey toward self-acceptance for fans of Genesis Begins Again. Thirteen-year-old Rain must overcome sadness after her all-star brother is badly beaten up at a white frat party. Eventually, Rain finds hope again and helps her family heal. 

I feel like Rain.

Rain rising through the unexpected.

Gentle and a force like Mom says.

I feel like me.

Rain is keeping a big secret from everyone around her: She's sad. All the time.

Xander, her older brother, is an all-star student athlete and a superhero to Rain since their dad is not around. But even he can’t help Rain with her dark thoughts. Rain hates the way she looks, and she feels inferior to her best friend, Nara, who’s skinny and got more money, lighter skin, and hair that curls.

When Xander is the victim of a hate crime, things take a turn for the worse. Xander stops speaking to everyone, including Rain, whose dark thoughts turn into action.

Rain’s secret battle puts her life on the line. But when her favorite teacher invites her to an after-school circle group, Rain finds friends and the courage to help herself and her family heal. Like the rain, she is both gentle and a force, and though she faces many storms in her life, she finds the strength to rise again. 

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A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow–era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy, from a renowned legal scholar.

If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn’t lynching the law?

In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period?and through to today.

Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard.

An expanded edition of Parks’ classic account of race relations in America, with previously unpublished images and texts

This expanded edition of Gordon Parks: Segregation Story includes around 30 previously unpublished photographs, as well as enhanced reproductions created from Parks’ original color transparencies; newly discovered descriptions Parks wrote for the photographs; a manuscript of film-developing instructions and captions Parks authored with Samuel F. Yette; previously published texts by the late art historian Maurice Berger and the esteemed journalist and civil rights activist Charlayne Hunter-Gault; and a new essay by artist Dawoud Bey.
After the photographs were first presented in a 1956 issue of Life magazine, the bulk of Parks’ assignment was thought to be lost. In 2011, five years after Parks’ death, the Gordon Parks Foundation found more than 200 color transparencies belonging to the series. In 2014 the series was first published as a book, and since then new photographs have been uncovered.
In the summer of 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to Alabama to document the daily realities of African Americans living under Jim Crow laws in the rural South. The resulting color photographs are among Parks’ most powerful images, and, in the decades since, have become emblematic representations of race relations in America. Pursued at grave danger to the photographer himself, the project was an important chapter in Parks’ career-long endeavor to use the camera as a weapon for social change.
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant laborer, he worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. He evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. The first African American director to helm a major motion picture, he helped launch the blaxploitation genre with his film Shaft (1971). Parks died in 2006.

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Award-winning author Renée Watson continues her charming Ramona-esque series starring spirited Ryan Hart and her loving family.

Ryan Hart is caught in the middle. She has an older brother and a baby sister, and she’s in a friendship tug-of-war with KiKi and Amanda who are both vying to be her best best friend. With all that’s going on, Ryan still finds a way to see the bright side of things. But it’s terribly hard to be cheery when her brother, Ray, pulls a prank and ruins her latest baking project. And who can think about being kind to a classmate who is relentless with his teasing? But Ryan is determined not to let anything ruin her mood, and to find a way to always find a way to share her bright spirit.

With more challenges, change, and more lessons learned, book three of the Ryan Hart Series has even more humor, more love, and more sunshine.

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From superstar athlete, record breaker, entrepreneur, philanthropist (and mama) Serena Williams, comes a magical picture book in which a little girl learns to believe in herself with the help of her doll and best friend, Qai Qai.

“Don’t be scared, Best Friend! I’m right here with you, always!”

“But what if I’m not good enough?”

“Girl!” Qai Qai answered. “You’re already good enough when you walk in the door! Come on, let me show you.”

Baby Girl has a dance recital coming up, and she can't help but worry. She's practiced and practiced, but what if something goes wrong? What if she forgets the steps or freezes up during her solo?

Luckily, her best friend Qai Qai the doll has her back! When Qai Qai comes to life, they go on a magical journey that shows Baby Girl that she’s ready for the stage.

This heartwarming picture book from beloved athlete Serena Williams shows readers the power of believing -in your best friend and in yourself.

From award-winning creators Renée Watson and Bryan Collier comes a stunningly crafted picture book chronicling the life of poet and activist Maya Angelou.

Maya’s momma was right.

Maya was a preacher, a teacher.

A Black girl whose voice

chased away darkness, ushered in light.

This unforgettable picture book introduces young readers to the life and work of Maya Angelou, whose words have uplifted and inspired generations of readers. The author of the celebrated autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya was the first Black person and first woman to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration, and her influence echoes through culture and history.

Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Author Award winner Renée Watson uses Angelou’s beloved medium of poetry to lyrically chronicle her rich life in a deeply moving narrative. Vivid and striking collage art by Caldecott Honor recipient and Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award winner Bryan Collier completes this unforgettable portrait of one of the most important American artists in history.

The voice of Bad Feminist meets the lessons of The Sum of Us in this timely and biting deep dive from the former Senior Campaign Director at Color of Change about the growing undercurrent of disillusionment in Black voters, culture, and even herself.

Brandi Collins-Dexter had spent her career fighting for racial justice, progressive politics, and the Democratic party. And so in the aftermath of the 2016 election, questions swirled in Brandi’s mind. How had it come to this? And, most pressing, Who had voted for him?

Many white voters, as we now know. But talking with loved ones, Brandi began to notice something baffling: dozens of them, all Black, had also voted for Trump. Brandi was shocked. She had always assumed that Black Americans would vote Democrat--an alliance she had long taken for granted.

Thus began the origins of BLACK SKINHEAD, as Brandi realized she needed to reconsider every assumption she had about Black political identity. In this eye-opening book, Brandi dives headfirst into the growing phenomenon of Black voters moving away from the Democratic party, embarking on a strange and unexpected journey to understand them. It’s a journey that takes her through niche subcultures, dark corners of the internet, and even Kanye West, and leads Brandi to uncover what she deems the Black Skinhead: disillusioned, Black outsiders in politics and culture who have turned from the political party they feel has failed them. It’s a journey that flips all of Brandi’s assumptions and eventually leads her to reconsider her own politics, history, and relationship to Blackness.

In BLACK SKINHEAD, through essays that span the political, cultural, and deeply personal, Brandi seeks to understand the fraying bonds between Black voters and the Democratic party, ultimately painting a portrait of decades of Black disillusionment that can be mapped as much through hip hop lyrics as it can through voting statistics.

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The author of the “brazenly hilarious, tell-it-like-it-is first novel” (Oprah Daily) Queenie returns with another witty and insightful novel about the power of family—even when they seem like strangers.

If you could choose your family...you wouldn’t choose the Penningtons.

Dimple Pennington knows of her half siblings, but she doesn’t really know them. Five people who don’t have anything in common except for faint memories of being driven through Brixton in their dad’s gold jeep, and some pretty complex abandonment issues. Dimple has bigger things to think about.

She’s thirty, and her life isn’t really going anywhere. An aspiring lifestyle influencer with a terrible and wayward boyfriend, Dimple’s life has shrunk to the size of a phone screen. And despite a small but loyal following, she’s never felt more alone in her life. That is, until a dramatic event brings her half siblings Nikisha, Danny, Lizzie, and Prynce crashing back into her life. And when they’re all forced to reconnect with Cyril Pennington, the absent father they never really knew, things get even more complicated.

From an author with “a flair for storytelling that appears effortlessly authentic” (Time), People Person is a vibrant and charming celebration of discovering family as an adult.

A Geisel Award Honor Book– winning series! Join Ty on an imaginative adventure to the North Pole in this My First ICR featuring rhythmic text by Kelly Starling Lyons and joyful, bright art by Nina Mata.

Experience the magic of Ty’s big imagination! After seeing the North Pole in his snow globe, Ty and Momma embark on a wonderful trip to the North Pole. Ty sees amazing things like a sparkling Christmas tree, waving snowmen, and even a singing polar bear. Will Ty’s wish to see Santa come true? Beginning readers will enjoy this irresistible, charming My First winter wonderland adventure. Readers who loved Ty's Travels: All Aboard! and Ty's Travels: Beach Day! will be excited to dive back into Ty’s limitless imagination for the holiday season.

Ty’s Travels: Winter Wonderland, a My First I Can Read! book, is carefully crafted using basic language, word repetition, sight words, and sweet illustrations—which means it's perfect for shared reading with emergent readers.

Surviving landmines of racism and sexism while moving from the South Bronx projects to the investment Pit, at 19-years old Cin Fabré, ran with the wolves of Wall Street.

Cin Fabré didn’t learn about the stock market growing up, but from her neighborhood and her immigrant parents, she learned how to hustle. She knew that her hustle was the only way she could help her mother; her only ticket out of poverty and away from her abusive father. Shortly after graduating from high school, she applied her energy to selling overpriced eyewear in an optical store making more in commissions than she’d ever seen until one day a woman came in and spent thousands on new glasses without batting an eye. Without hesitation, Cin asked the woman what she did for a living and when she responded “Oh, I’m a stockbroker,” Cin saw this as an omen and vowed that she would become one too. At only nineteen years old, she pushed herself into brokerage firm VTR Capital, which was run by brokers who'd worked at Stratton Oakmont, where Jordan Belfort had reigned. She was shocked to find an army of young, mostly Black and Brown workers like her sitting at phones. She was a witness to a little-known secret in the brokerage system: Latinx and Black employees were forced to do the drudge work of finding investment leads for white male brokers, with no real prospects for promotion.

Most of us are familiar with the excesses of 90s Wall street—the spending, the sex, and the drugs—but the drug coursing through Cin Fabré’s veins was the energy of the trading Pit. “It was palpable the second she walked into the building—the air itself was electrified with frenetic action and the thrill of making money.”

However, during her ascent from cold caller to stockbroker—the only Black woman to do so at the firm—Cin endured constant sexual harassment and racism. Being a broker offered financial gain but no protection as Fabré continued to face propositions from other brokers and clients who believed that their investment money was a down payment on her body.

In Wolf Hustle the author examines her years spent trading frantically—and hustling successfully—Fabré grapples with what is most meaningful in life, ultimately beating Wall Street at its own game.

From prizewinning author De’Shawn Charles Winslow, a sweeping and unforgettable novel of a Black community reeling from a triple homicide, and the secrets the killings reveal.

In the still-segregated town of West Mills, North Carolina in 1976, Marian, Marva, and Lazarus Harmon—three enigmatic siblings—are found shot to death in their home. The people of West Mills—on both sides of the canal that serves as the town’s color line—are in a frenzy of finger-pointing, gossip, and wonder. The crime is the first reported murder in the area in decades, but the white authorities don’t seem to care and the sheriff quickly closes the case.

Fortunately, one person is determined to do more than talk. Ms. Jo Wright has just moved back to West Mills from New York City to retire and marry a childhood sweetheart, Olympus “Lymp” Seymore. When she discovers that the murder victims are Lymp’s half-siblings, and that Lymp is one of West Mills’s leading culprits, she sets out on a transformative manhunt to prove his innocence.
As Jo begins to investigate those who might know the most about the Harmons’ deaths, she starts to discover darker secrets than she’d ever imagined, and a pattern of cover-ups—of racial incidents, homophobia, and medical misuse—that could upend the reputations of many.
For readers of Bluebird, Bluebird and American Spy, Decent People is a powerful new novel about shame, race, money, and the reckoning required to heal a fractured community.

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One of our preeminent historians of race and democracy argues that the period since 2008 has marked nothing less than America’s Third Reconstruction

In The Third Reconstruction, distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol.

America’s first and second Reconstructions fell tragically short of their grand aims. Our Third Reconstruction offers a new chance to achieve Black dignity and citizenship at last—an opportunity to choose hope over fear.

The third book in the hit Young Prince series from Ronald L. Smith, recipient of the 2016 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award.

When T’Challa gets special permission to have his friends from America, Sheila and Zeke, come to Wakanda, he can’t wait to show them his home for a change. But their tour is brought to a halt when one of T’Challa’s peers, Tafari, summons dark forces in order to return Wakanda to the “old ways” before Vibranium was discovered. Tafari manages to banish the King and Queen along with all the tribal elders to an alternate dimension in exchange for the Originator’s release, leaving Wakanda vulnerable and unprotected.

Can T’Challa and his friends stop Tafari before the leaders of Wakanda are trapped forever?

Best-selling author Rick Riordan presents best-selling YA author Roseanne A. Brown's middle grade debut about a pre-teen vampire slayer with a strong helping of Ghanaian folklore.

For most kids, catching fireflies is a fun summer activity. For twelve-year-old Serwa Boateng, it's a matter of life and death.

That's because Serwa knows that some fireflies are really adze, shapeshifting vampires from the forests of Southeastern Ghana. Adze prey on the blood of innocents, possessing their minds and turning them into hulking monsters, and for generations, slayers like Serwa and her parents have protected an unknowing public from their threats.

Serwa is the best adze slayer her age, and she knew how to use a crossbow before she could even ride a bike. But when an obayifo (witch) destroys her childhood home while searching for a drum, do Serwa's parents take her with them on their quest to defeat her? No. Instead, they dump Serwa with her hippie aunt and cryptic-obsessed cousin in the middle of Nowheresville, Maryland "for her own safety." Now, instead of crossbows and battle armor, she's dealing with mean girls and algebra, and for the first time in her life she doesn't have to carry a staff everywhere she goes, which is . . . kind of nice, actually.

Just as Serwa starts to get the hang of this whole normal girl who doesn't punch vampires every day thing, an adze infiltrates her school. It's up to her to whip some of her classmates into monster-fighting shape before all of them become firefly food. And when she uncovers a secret that upends everything she thought she knew about her family's role in the slayer vs. adze war, Serwa will have to decide which side of herself--normal girl or slayer--is the right one.

After all, seventh grade is hard enough without adding vampires to the mix.

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When a personal trainer agrees to fake date her client, all rules are out the window in this "fun, heartfelt, and totally relatable" romantic comedy named one of the best of the year by USA Today, NPR, and Entertainment Weekly (Abby Jimenez, NYT bestselling author of Life's Too Short).

When it comes to personal training, Taylor Powell kicks serious butt. Unfortunately, her bills are piling up, rent is due, and the money situation is dire. Taylor needs more than the support of her new best friends, Samiah and London. She needs a miracle.

And Jamar Dixon might just be it. The oh-so-fine former footballer wants back into the NFL, and he wants Taylor to train him. There's just one catch—no one can know what they're doing. But when they're accidentally outed as a couple, Taylor's game plan is turned completely upside down. Is Jamar just playing to win . . . or is he playing for keeps?

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A profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time

Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom.

Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra’s 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar “speculations” of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.

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In an inspiring follow-up to her critically acclaimed, #1 bestselling memoir Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama shares practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today’s highly uncertain world.
 
There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life’s big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with readers, considering the questions many of us wrestle with: How do we build enduring and honest relationships? How can we discover strength and community inside our differences? What tools do we use to address feelings of self-doubt or helplessness? What do we do when it all starts to feel like too much?

When Springville residents—at least the ones still alive—are questioned about what happened on prom night, they all have one explanation . . . Maddy did it.

An outcast at her small-town Georgia high school, Madison Washington has always been a teasing target for bullies. And she’s dealt with it since she had more pressing problems to manage. Until the morning a surprise rainstorm reveals her most closely kept secret: Maddy is biracial. She had been passing for white her entire life at the behest of her fanatical white father, Thomas Washington.

After a viral bullying video pulls back the curtain on Springville High’s racist roots, student leaders come up with a plan: host the first integrated prom as a show of unity. Popular white class president convinces her Black superstar quarterback boyfriend to ask Maddy to be his date, leaving Maddy wondering if it’s possible to have a normal life. But some of her classmates aren’t done with her just yet. And they don’t know that Maddy still has another secret . . . one that will cost them all their lives.

From Daniel Bernstrom, the acclaimed author of One Day in the Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus Tree, comes an entertaining and lyrical picture book about a young blind girl and her grandmother who experience the vibrant everyday music of their busy city.

Emmalene loves the sounds of her city—but Grandma Jean does not. She doesn’t consider it music. And she just doesn’t get it.

But when Emmalene encourages her to take a closer listen, Grandma Jean hears something beautiful. 

Song in the City is a rhythmic and lightly humorous tale that bridges the gap between generations of music and family while centering love, understanding, and joy.

An exuberant, opinionated, stereotype-busting portrait of contemporary Africa in all its splendid diversity, by one of its leading new writers.

So often, Africa has been depicted simplistically as a uniform land of famines and safaris, poverty and strife, stripped of all nuance. In this bold and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, weaving a vibrant tapestry of stories that bring to life Africa’s rich diversity, communities, and histories.

Starting with an immersive description of the lively and complex urban life of Lagos, Faloyin unearths surprising truths about many African countries’ colonial heritage and tells the story of the continent’s struggles with democracy through seven dictatorships. With biting wit, he takes on the phenomenon of the white savior complex and brings to light the damage caused by charity campaigns of the past decades, revisiting such cultural touchstones as the KONY 2012 film. Entering into the rivalries that energize the continent, Faloyin engages in the heated debate over which West African country makes the best jollof rice and describes the strange, incongruent beauty of the African Cup of Nations. With an eye toward the future promise of the continent, he explores the youth-led cultural and political movements that are defining and reimagining Africa on their own terms.

The stories Faloyin shares are by turns joyful and enraging; proud and optimistic for the future even while they unequivocally confront the obstacles systematically set in place by former colonial powers. Brimming with humor and wit, filled with political insights, and, above all, infused with a deep love for the region, Africa Is Not a Country celebrates the energy and particularity of the continent’s different cultures and communities, treating Africa with the respect it deserves.

The Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Award finalist and Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy Award-winning excavation of Lovecraftian mythos by Victor LaValle is given new life in brand-new hardcover edition.

People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there.

Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.

A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?

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From the bestselling author of Curls, Glow, and Bloom comes a board book that joyfully celebrates skin tone self-love with a mirror for little ones.

I love mine (mine)
she loves hers (hers)
he loves his (his)
I love theirs

Show young readers how to see themselves and others with confidence and love with this beautiful rhyming board book toddlers and parents alike will love.

A groundbreaking collection about Afropioneerism past and present from Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and New York Times bestselling author Rio Cortez

From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience, comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures. 
 
In poems that range from wry, tongue-in-cheek observations about contemporary life to more nuanced meditations on her ancestors—some of the earliest Black pioneers to settle in the western United States after Reconstruction—Golden Ax invites readers to re-imagine the West, Black womanhood, and the legacies that shape and sustain the pursuit of freedom. 

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From the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods comes the raucous, irreverent, and harrowing story of a trans woman's reentry into life on the outside after more than twenty years in prison, over one consequential Fourth of July weekend

Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she’d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary.

In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed New York City. Over a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.

Written with the same astonishing verve of Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and readers alike, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce’s Ulysses does through Dublin. The novel sings with brio and ambition, delivering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.