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  • stay up: racism, resistance, and reclaiming Black freedom

    by Khodi Dill

    $14.99

    An incisive, innovative, and inviting take on fighting oppression and fighting for racial justice.

    Racism is a real and present danger. But how can you fight it if you don’t know how it works or where it comes from? Using a compelling mix of memoir, cultural criticism, and anti-oppressive theory, Khodi Dill breaks down how white supremacy functions in North America and gives readers tools to understand how racism impacts their lives. From dismantling internalized racism, decolonizing schools, joining social justice movements and more, Dill lays out paths to personal liberation and social transformation.

    Vibrant, dramatic collages by stylo starr complement Dill’s propulsive voice. Fueled by joy and hope as much as by rage and sorrow, this groundbreaking book empowers racialized young people to be confident in their identities and embrace the fullness of their futures.

  • Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology

    by Alexander Ghedi Weheliye

    $27.95

    Alexander Ghedi Weheliye traces R&B music’s continued relevance for Black life since the late 1970s, showing how it remains a thriving venue for the continued expression of Black thought and life and a primary archive of the contemporary moment.

    In Feenin, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye traces R&B music’s continuing centrality in Black life since the late 1970s. Focusing on various musical production and reproduction technologies such as auto-tune and the materiality of the BlackFem singing voice, Weheliye counteracts the widespread popular and scholarly narratives of the genre’s decline and death. He shows how R&B remains a thriving venue for the expression of Black thought and life and a primary archive of the contemporary moment. Among other topics, Weheliye discusses the post-disco evolution of house music in Chicago and techno in Detroit, Prince and David Bowie in relation to the appropriations of Blackness and Euro-whiteness in the 1980s, how the BlackFem voice functions as a repository of Black knowledge, the methods contemporary R&B musicians use to bring attention to Black Lives Matter, and the ways vocal distortion technologies such as the vocoder demonstrate Black music’s relevance to discussions of humanism and posthumanism. Ultimately, Feenin represents Weheliye’s capacious thinking about R&B as the site through which to think through questions of Blackness, technology, history, humanity, community, diaspora, and nationhood.

  • Fall

    by Tracy Clark

    Sold out

    In the second book in the Detective Harriet Foster thriller series, author Tracy Clark weaves a twisted journey into the underbelly of Chicago as Harriet and her team work to unmask a serial killer stalking the city’s aldermen.

    The Chicago PD is on high alert when two city aldermen are found dead: one by apparent suicide, one brutally stabbed in his office, and both with thirty dimes left on their bodies—a betrayer’s payment. With no other clues, the question is, Who else has a debt to pay?

    Detective Harriet Foster is on the case before the killer can strike again. But even with the help of her partner, Detective Vera Li, and the rest of their team, Harriet has little to go on and a lot at risk. There’s no telling who the killer’s next target is or how many will come next.

    To stop another murder, Harriet and her officers will have to examine what the victims had going on behind the scenes to determine who could be tangled up in this web of betrayal…and who could be out for revenge.

  • The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s

    by Emily J. Lordi

    Sold out
    Examining the work of Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Solange Knowles, Flying Lotus, and others, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of soul, showing how it came to signify a belief in black resilience enacted through musical practices.

    In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship and thus helped to galvanize black communities in an era of peril and promise. Their soul legacies were later reanimated by such stars as Prince, Solange Knowles, and Flying Lotus. Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role played by black women in this musical-intellectual tradition.
  • Love at the Icicle Café

    Denise N. Wheatley

    Sold out
    Can an icicle-themed festival thaw the most unlikely hearts?

    California lawyer Mina Richards spent her childhood helping her mom bake at their winter-themed café in the snowy village of Gosberg, Germany. When her retired parents want to sell The Icicle Café, Mina returns to facilitate the sale. She needs this to go right—she’ll fly in, finalize the deal and fly out to rescue her once high-powered career. But faced with Scott, her childhood friend and crush who doesn’t want to sell, Mina’s plan quickly falls apart.

    Rising chef Scott Dawson has turned The Icicle Café into a destination restaurant. His parents and their partners want to sell the café to a hotel chain, and Scott can't meet their price. When Mina arrives—more beautiful and determined than ever—he sees the possibility of a new future for the business and the town he loves. He just needs to change her mind…about more than selling the café.

    When Scott asks Mina to help with the café’s annual Icicle Fest, their icy relationship warms. Can these former friends find a future together in the snowy village of their past?
  • In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America

    by Kabria Baumgartner

    Sold out
    Uncovers the hidden role of girls and women in the desegregation of American education

    The story of school desegregation in the United States often begins in the mid-twentieth-century South. Drawing on archival sources and genealogical records, Kabria Baumgartner uncovers the story’s origins in the nineteenth-century Northeast and identifies a previously overlooked group of activists: African American girls and women.

    In their quest for education, African American girls and women faced numerous obstacles—from threats and harassment to violence. For them, education was a daring undertaking that put them in harm’s way. Yet bold and brave young women such as Sarah Harris, Sarah Parker Remond, Rosetta Morrison, Susan Paul, and Sarah Mapps Douglass persisted.

    In Pursuit of Knowledge argues that African American girls and women strategized, organized, wrote, and protested for equal school rights—not just for themselves, but for all. Their activism gave rise to a new vision of womanhood: the purposeful woman, who was learned, active, resilient, and forward-thinking. Moreover, these young women set in motion equal-school-rights victories at the local and state level, and laid the groundwork for further action to democratize schools in twentieth-century America. In this thought-provoking book, Baumgartner demonstrates that the confluence of race and gender has shaped the long history of school desegregation in the United States right up to the present.
  • Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance

    by Moya Bailey

    $21.00

    Where racism and sexism meet—an understanding of anti-Black misogyny

    When Moya Bailey first coined the term misogynoir, she defined it as the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces. She had no idea that the term would go viral, touching a cultural nerve and quickly entering into the lexicon. Misogynoir now has its own Wikipedia page and hashtag, and has been featured on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time. In Misogynoir Transformed, Bailey delves into her groundbreaking concept, highlighting Black women’s digital resistance to anti-Black misogyny on YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and other platforms.

    At a time when Black women are depicted as more ugly, deficient, hypersexual, and unhealthy than their non-Black counterparts, Bailey explores how Black women have bravely used social-media platforms to confront misogynoir in a number of courageous—and, most importantly, effective—ways. Focusing on queer and trans Black women, she shows us the importance of carving out digital spaces, where communities are built around queer Black webshows and hashtags like #GirlsLikeUs.

    Bailey shows how Black women actively reimagine the world by engaging in powerful forms of digital resistance at a time when anti-Black misogyny is thriving on social media. A groundbreaking work, Misogynoir Transformed highlights Black women’s remarkable efforts to disrupt mainstream narratives, subvert negative stereotypes, and reclaim their lives.

  • PRE-ORDER: Kandis Williams

    by Kandis Wiliams

    $35.00

    Pre-order: on Sale September 27, 2022

    The inaugural volume in a new series of books, Kandis Williams documents the Los Angeles–based artist’s exhibition A Line. Interrogating issues of race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism, her topical work is made across collage, sculpture, and video.

    Williams draws on her background in dramaturgy to envision a space that accommodates the biopolitical economies that inform how movement might be read. Looking at the interconnections between popular culture and myth, she relates in her work anatomy, regions of Black diaspora, and communication and obfuscation. Williams’s body of work shapes an alternative language that examines how Black moving bodies are regarded. Williams continues to make visible the inexpressible violence Black bodies have been subjected to in dance and beyond.

    Featuring contributions by the curator of 52 Walker—a David Zwirner gallery space—Ebony L. Haynes and the artist and writer Hannah Black, and a stirring conversation between Williams and the choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, the book serves as an extension of the exhibition. Included are high-quality illustrations of the artworks alongside rich archival materials.

    Kandis Williams (b. 1985) was born in Baltimore and received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York in 2009. She is the founder of the publishing and educational platform Cassandra Press. In addition to her visual arts practice, for which she has been exhibited internationally, Williams’s performances have been mounted in institutions across the world. She is the recipient of the 2021 Grants to Artists award, presented by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, and the 2020 Mohn Award for artistic excellence, presented by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Williams is represented by Night Gallery and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

  • PRE-ORDER: Athlete Activists

    by Stephanie Ready

    $16.99

    PRE-ORDER: Item will ship on 11/15/2022

    From Muhammad Ali and Billie Jean King to Colin Kaepernick and Lebron James, superstar athletes have leveraged their fame and platforms to make the world a better place.

    This compulsively readable book explores dozens of incredible men and women whose astonishing athleticism is matched by their bravery and selflessness. Icons like Roberto Clemente, Bruce Lee and Jackie Robinson, as well as contemporary trailblazers including Venus Williams, Maya Moore, and Patrick Mahomes represent every sport and a broad range of causes. A section on Fearless Firsts provides a parallel history of civil and women's rights. And special sections explore organized group efforts—such as the NBA bubble protest in support of Black Lives Matter. Packed with graphic novel-style illustrations and thoroughly researched and reported, this is a must-read for young sports fans, activists—and anyone who appreciates a powerful story.

    Stephanie Ready hosts The Warmup on NBA TV and The Bounce on the Yahoo sports app and has served as a sideline reporter for TNT and ESPN. She was the first woman to serve as a full-time NBA game analyst and the first female coach of a men's professional league team.

  • Flying Home

    by Ralph Ellison

    $16.00
    Written between 1937 and 1954 and now available in paperback for the first time, these thirteen stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison. Six of them remained unpublished during Ellison's lifetime and were discovered among the author's effects in a folder labeled "Early Stories." But they all bear the hallmarks--the thematic reach, musically layered voices, and sheer ebullience--that Ellison would bring to his classic Invisible Man.

    The tales in Flying Home range in setting from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlor, from the hobo jungles of the Great Depression to Wales during the Second World War. By turns lyrical, scathing, touching, and transcendently wise, Flying Home and Other Stories is a historic volume, an extravagant last bequest from a giant of our literature.
  • Praisesong for the Widow

    by Paule Marshall

    $16.00
    From the acclaimed author of Daughters and Brown Girl, Brownstones comes a “work of exceptional wisdom, maturity, and generosity, one in which the palpable humanity of its characters transcends any considerations of race or sex”(Washington Post Book World).

    Avey Johnson—a black, middle-aged, middle-class widow given to hats, gloves, and pearls—has long since put behind her the Harlem of her childhood. Then on a cruise to the Caribbean with two friends, inspired by a troubling dream, she senses her life beginning to unravel—and in a panic packs her bag in the middle of the night and abandons her friends at the next port of call. The unexpected and beautiful adventure that follows provides Avey with the links to the culture and history she has so long disavowed.

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