A collectible hardcover edition of our greatest African American poet's award-winning first novel, about a black boy's coming-of-age in a largely white Kansas town, featuring an introduction by National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy

A Penguin Vitae Edition

When first published in 1930, Not Without Laughter established Langston Hughes as not only a brilliant poet and leading light of the Harlem Renaissance but also a gifted novelist. In telling the story of Sandy Rogers, a young African American boy in small-town Kansas, and of his family--his mother, Annjee, a housekeeper for a wealthy white family; his irresponsible father, Jimboy, who plays the guitar and travels the country in search of employment; his strong-willed grandmother Hager, who clings to her faith; his Aunt Tempy, who marries a rich man; and his Aunt Harriet, who struggles to make it as a blues singer--Hughes gives the longings and lineaments of black life in the early twentieth century an important place in the history of racially divided America.

Penguin Vitae--loosely translated as “Penguin of one’s life”--is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

A startling new dream-like vision of Jamaica―a work of surreal poetic fiction, lavishly studded with ecological prayers, drawings, and footnotes about healing herbs, disappearing flora-fauna, and buried herstories―by Whiting Award winner Marcia Douglas

Zooming into tight focus on present-day life and dashing deep into the past in turns, the pace is fast and fierce in The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive, which continues Marcia Douglas’ “speculative ancestral project” (The Whiting Foundation) begun with The Marvellous Equations of the Dread. Her new poetic and eco-spiritual book carries further the cultural preservation so central to Douglas’ vision. TheShante Dream Arkive brings alive a mosaic of characters―all searching through history for something or someone lost to the island: a mother searches for her missing child through time and space; an undocumented migrant’s struggles with loss while living in the US; a youth wanders through dream-gates seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself. And one key to the whole is Zora Neale Hurston’s left-behind camera. Each chapter/poem opens like an aperture onto another aspect of the dream story. And, each and every potent dream story contains the spirit, beauty, and riddim of Jamaica:

For after three hundred years of slaughter, monk seals know better than to reveal themselves to humans. These days, they stay low, adapting to below surface conditions and establishing habitat with the underwater spirits of drowned horses and slaves disappeared overboard. For things happen below sea that have never been told. There is wheelin there and turnin; and far-far down past brochure azure, cerulean and indigo, there is a vast dark ink and vortices of voices caught up in such a trumpet of rah- &-glory bottomsea sound as to move earth’s axis. And after that, more ink blue, and cobalt and sapphire and a calm-calm wata― velvet and kin to the moon brand new. The monk seals dare not go this far. But the spirits do.

PROSE Award- Music and Performing Arts Category Winner

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

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

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

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

A techno-horror portrait of the fears and desires of six young artists whose lives are upended by a controversial video game, from National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda.

Six young artists share an apartment in Barcelona: Kiki Ortega, a researcher writing a pornographic novel; Iván Herrera, a writer whose prose reveals a deeply conflicted relationship with his body; three siblings, Irene, Emilio, and Cecilia, who quietly search for ways to transcend their abuse as children; and El Cuco Martínez, a video-game designer whose creations push beneath the substrate of the digital world. All of them are connected in different ways to Nefando, a controversial cult video game whose purpose remains a mystery. In the parallel reality of the game, players found relief from the pain of past trauma and present shame, but also a frighteningly elastic sense of self and ethics. Is Nefando a game for horror enthusiasts, a challenge to players' morals, or a poetic exercise? What happens in a virtual world that admits every taboo?

Unsparing, addictive, and perverse, Nefando takes us to the darkest corners of the web, revealing the inevitable entanglement of digital and physical worlds, and of technology and horror.

The country is changing, and her own world is being turned upside down. Nothing—and no one—will ever be the same.

Georgia, 1962. Rose Perkins Bourdon returns home to Parsons, GA, without her husband and pregnant with another man’s baby. After tragedy strikes her husband in the war overseas, a numb Rose is left with pieces of who she used to be and is forced to figure out what she is going to do with the rest of her life. Her sister introduces her to members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—young people are taking risks and fighting battles Rose has only seen on television. Feeling emotions for the first time in what feels like forever, the excited and frightened Rose finds herself becoming increasingly involved in the resistance efforts. And of course, there is also the young man, Isaac Weinberg, whose passion for activism stirs something in her she didn’t think she would ever feel again.

Homeward follows Rose’s path toward self-discovery and growth as she becomes involved in the Civil Rights Movement, finally becoming the woman she has always dreamed of being.

Praise for Homeward:

"This is a harrowing novel about the push and pull of fidelity, family, and faith under the crush of history. Angela Jackson-Brown has written a deeply emotional novel that feels timeless while also speaking to the particularly troubled times in which we live."

—Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of When Ghosts Come Home

* A stirring tale of one woman’s experience in the Civil Rights movement that changed a nation, written from Angela Jackson-Brown’s experience of being born and raised in the rural South.
* Stand-alone novel
* Includes Discussion Questions for book clubs

Home is not a place—it’s a feeling.

Casey Black needs an escape. When her picture-perfect vow renewal ceremony ends in her being left at the altar, the former model turned social media influencer has new fame—the kind she never wanted. An embarrassing viral video has cost her millions of followers, and her seven-year marriage is over. With her personal and business lives in shambles, Casey runs from New York City to South Carolina’s Lowcountry hoping to find long-lost family. Family who can give her more answers about her past than her controlling mom-slash-manager has ever been willing to share.

What Casey doesn’t expect is a postcard-worthy property on a three-hundred-acre farm, history, culture, and a love of sweet tea. She spends her days caring for the land and her nights cooking much needed Southern comfort foods. She also meets Nigel, the handsome farm manager whose friendship has become everything she’s never had. And then there are the secrets her mother can no longer hide.

Through the pages of her great-grandmother’s journals, Casey discovers her roots run deeper than the Lowcountry soil. She learns that she has people. A home. A legacy to uphold. And a great new love story—if only she is brave enough to leave her old life behind.

“. . . a beautifully written story about family, self-discovery, secrets, and forgiveness.” —Kimberla Lawson Roby, New York Times bestselling author

* Inspiring contemporary fiction
* Stand-alone novel
* Book length: approximately 100,000 words
* Includes discussion questions for book clubs

From Charlamagne Tha God, host of the morning radio phenomenon The Breakfast Club, and founder and CEO of iHeartRadio’s Black Effect Podcast Network, a rundown on how small talk from small minds have taken over our world, and the BIG conversations needed to climb our way back.

For over a decade, Charlamagne Tha God has cohosted iHeartRadio’snationally syndicated morning radio show The Breakfast Cluband has proven his power as a culture mover and thought leader, by being his completely authentic self on-air. From his famous “You ain't black” moment with President Biden, to heartfelt chats with cultural icons like Sean “Jay-Z” Carter and Judy Blume, to viral classics with Kamala Harris and Soulja Boy, his incredible reach and impact on American culture continues to grow.

In Get Honest or Die Lying: Why Small Talk Sucks, Charlamagne takes full command of his new perch, broadening his scope and embracing his life roles as a cultural curator, social commentator, job-creator, mental health advocate, and Girl Dad in ways we’ve never seen before. In his signature irreverent style, he looks at the world through his own lens, concluding that many of our divisions, our unhappiness, and our dissatisfactions stem from our failure to have meaningful conversations with each other. With lessons pulled from his past, and an eye on the future, Get Honest or Die Lying: Why Small Talk Sucks makes us laugh, cry, and think as Charlamagne shares his thoughts on growth, empowerment, and evolution in our fast-changing world. In short—it’s time to stop lying to each other, and ourselves.

Fame, money, social media, politics, hip-hop culture, and fatherhood, he takes it all on here. This master of seeing through the BS even calls it on himself, as he delivers his most insightful and heartfelt work yet—his call to stop the insanity while we still can.

If Junot Diaz’s critically acclaimed collection Drown and Janet Mock’s Emmy-winning series Pose produced offspring, Alejandro Heredia’s Loca would be their firstborn.

It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.

Loca follows one daring year in the lives of young people living at the edge of their own patience and desires. With expansive grace, it reveals both the grueling conditions that force people to migrate and the possibility of friendship as home when family, nations, and identity groups fall short.

Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka's debut novel tells the story of a group of friends facing political corruption and cultural uncertainty in post-independence Nigeria.

Friends since high school, Egbo, Bandele, Sagoe, Sekoni and Kola have returned to Lagos after studying abroad. As they navigate wild parties, affairs of the heart, philosophical debates, and professional dilemmas, they struggle to reconcile the cultural traditions and Western influences that have shaped them – and that still divide their country.

In The Interpreters, Soyinka deftly weaves memories of the past through scenes of the present as the friends move toward an uncertain future. The result is a vividly realised fictional world rendered in prose that pivots easily from satire to tragedy.

'No other writer has Soyinka's unique positioning in the political and cultural life of his nation.' Ben Okri
'Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian icon.' Guardian
'Elaborately, strikingly and indeed often beautifully written.' The Times

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

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

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

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

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

Two estranged sisters with a past as complicated as their present acrimoniously reunite in 1990s Cuba to confront the riddle of family amidst the scars of political upheaval

In the summer of 1993, Yuri, a teenage orphan, lives with her strict, religious Aunt Ruth in a Havana suburb when Mariela, a thirty-four-year-old artist, arrives from the U.S. with a shocking revelation. She claims to be Yuri's sister, insisting that she and Yuri share a mother and that Ruth is nothing more than Mariela's "kidnapper." Mariela has spent the past three decades in American orphanages and has returned to Cuba to reclaim her roots and culture, make art, and perhaps seek vengeance on Ruth for sending her to America through Operation Pedro Pan. Yuri is both fascinated and repulsed by the young, glamourous, and aggrieved Mariela. When Ruth is jailed for unknown charges, Yuri falls further into Mariela's mercurial orbit.

Through Yuri's reminiscent narration (from Havana, to NYC, to Miami, and back to Havana), The Tilting House explores the riddles of identity and family loyalty, the effects of losing one's mother and motherland, the scars of political and historical upheaval, and an immigrant's complex quest both to return "home" and to be free from the past. Through her long journey, Yuri comes to understand that the past cannot be fully recovered, or fully escaped, and she approaches the possibility of compassion for Mariela, for Ruth, for others, and for herself.

A charming and touching romantic comedy about two best friends, a marriage-of-convenience, and taking a leap of faith to land exactly where you’re meant to be.

Miz is not the marrying kind. She's more of the no-strings-attached kind. No labels, only fun. So, when she finds a diamond ring in her casual-but-very-hot hook-up’s gym bag, she immediately ends things and runs.

Kal is one of Miz's best friends, an aspiring actor who moved to Toronto from Ethiopia and is on the brink of his big break. But when he's suddenly at risk of losing his work visa—which would mean leaving Toronto forever—Miz panics. What will she do without him? What if she never sees him again?

There's only one solution: Miz will marry Kal to become his spousal sponsor. He'll get to keep pursuing his acting career, and she'll get to keep her best friend in the city. It'll be a quick, short only-on-paper marriage between friends, followed by a quick, easy divorce. What could possibly go wrong?

The highly anticipated sequel to NUBIA: REAL ONE highlights the importance of self-acceptance and the enduring power of true friendship!

After a turbulent school year, Nubia is both thrilled and anxious as she embarks on a transformative summer training with the Amazons on Themyscira! Amid the mounting pressure of expectations, she grapples with feeling like an outsider, letting the weight of her self-doubt strain her most important relationships.

Just when she thought her life couldn’t get more complicated, her biggest fear threatens the safety of everyone on Paradise Island. Will Nubia rise above the chaos and embrace her true self as the hero she was destined to be?

From critically acclaimed author L.L McKinney and brought to life with delightful, vivid art by Robyn Smith, NUBIA: TOO REAL follows Nubia as she explores her Amazonian identity, navigates her friendships, and learns how to love herself.

One of the Gardin women must navigate a season rich with unexpected challenges in the follow-up to The Gardins of Edin, a heartwarming story about love, forgiveness, new beginnings, and what it takes to get there.

Martha Gardin is a mess. And everyone in the Gardin family knows it. A successful physician, Martha is usually the source of the Gardin family drama, but her heart is in the right place… sometimes. So, the Gardins are pleasantly surprised when Martha mellows out after she begins dating Oji Greenwald, one of the most eligible bachelors in town.

As Martha’s relationship with Oji deepens, she thinks she’s finally about to have the life she’s always wanted. But when Martha attempts to intervene in a health crisis in Oji’s family, she draws the ire of Oji’s mother, Eve Greenwald, which jeopardizes everything. Suddenly, Martha finds herself on a journey full of challenges that force her to deal with her previous mistakes, reconcile her past, and forge a path forward.

Will she be able to look beyond the superficial to find what she’s really needed all along?

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.

A city is always a cemetery.

A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”

The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.

Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.

For fans of Behold the Dreamers, comes a compelling novel about a tightly bound Nigerian family living in Florida and the wounds that get passed down from generation to generation, from the author of the acclaimed Mr. and Mrs. Doctor.

When 276 schoolgirls are abducted from their school in Nigeria, Fidelis Ewerike, a Florida-based barrister, poet, and former POW of the Nigerian Civil War, begins to go mad, consumed by memories of his younger sister Ugochi, who went missing during that conflict. Consumed by survivor’s guilt and fearful that the same fate awaits Amara, his sixteen-year-old daughter who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ugochi, Fidelis locks her in her bedroom, offering no words of explanation, only lovingly—if poorly—made meals and sweets.

Amid that singular action, the Ewerike family spirals into chaos: After unsuccessful attempts to free her daughter from her room, his wife Adaobi seeks the counsel of a preacher, praying for spiritual liberation from the curse she is certain has plagued her family since leaving Nigeria. Fourteen-year-old Chuk, beset by his own war with the neighborhood boys, receives a painful education on force, masculinity, and his tenuous position within his family. And rebellious, resentful Amara is hungry for her life to be hers, so the moment she is able to escape her imprisonment, she falls in love—not with the Aba-born engineer-in-training her mother envisages, but with Maksym Kostyk, the son of the town drunk. Before long, the two have concocted a plan to run away from the trappings of their familial traumas.

Perfect for readers of Sing, Unburied, Sing, Julie Iromuanya's A Season of Light is an all-consuming masterpiece. To peer into the window of the Ewerike family’s lives is a gift.

A powerful and revealing history of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), which have been essential for empowering Black citizens and for the ongoing fight for democracy in the US.

From their founding, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) educated as many as 90 percent of Black college students in the United States. Although many are aware of the significance of HBCUs in expanding Black Americans' educational opportunities, much less attention has been paid to the vital role that they have played in enhancing American democracy.

In The Power of Black Excellence, Deondra Rose provides an authoritative history of HBCUs and the unique role they have played in shaping American democracy since 1837. Drawing on over six years of deep research, Rose brings into view the historic impact that government support for HBCUs has had on the American political landscape, arguing that they have been essential for not only empowering Black citizens but also reshaping the distribution of political power in the United States. Rose challenges the conventional wisdom that, prior to the late twentieth century, the federal government took a laissez-faire approach to education. Instead, governmental action contributed to the expansion of HBCUs in an era plagued by racist policies and laws. Today, HBCUs remain extremely important, as evidenced by the outsized number of black political leaders--including Kamala Harris--who attended them. Rose stresses that policymakers promote democracy itself when they support HBCUs and their unique approach to postsecondary education, which includes a commitment to helping students develop politically empowering skills, promoting political leadership, and fostering a commitment to service.

A fresh look into the relationship between education and democracy, The Power of Black Excellence is essential reading for anyone interested not just in HBCUs, but the broader trajectory of Black citizenship in American history.

Referencing everything from Erykah Badu to ancient Egyptian deities, Jamea Richmond-Edwards creates a brilliant multimedia panorama of Black history

Detroit–based artist Jamea Richmond-Edwards (born 1982) creates work in dialogue with Afrofuturism, mythology, history and Black fashion. Her vibrantly colored canvases take inspiration from the AfriCOBRA collective and are layered with collage and portraiture. This catalog follows her largest solo museum exhibition to date, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and features a monumental painting, several large-scale paintings and a newly commissioned film. Using glitter, fabric and soft sculpture, these paintings depict the artist and her family reimagined as Egyptian deities, encountering dragons and paying homage to Indigenous leaders. The film Ancient Future uses a majorette performance superimposed against the cosmos activated by an experimental jazz soundtrack in collaboration with Richmond-Edwards’ son. The catalog features a selection of stills from the film and a gatefold of the new monumental work.

""Negro Legislators Of Texas And Their Descendants"" is a historical account of the role of African Americans in Texas politics during the period of Reconstruction to Disfranchisement. The book is written by John Mason Brewer and provides an in-depth look at the lives of prominent black legislators and their descendants who played a significant role in shaping Texas politics during this tumultuous period.The book begins by exploring the political landscape of Texas after the Civil War, where African Americans were granted the right to vote and hold public office for the first time. It then delves into the lives of notable black legislators, including Richard Allen, Norris Wright Cuney, and Matthew Gaines, who fought for civil rights and equality in a state that was still deeply divided by racial tensions.The book also examines the challenges faced by black legislators and their descendants, including the rise of Jim Crow laws and the eventual disenfranchisement of African American voters. Despite these obstacles, the book highlights the resilience and determination of black Texans who continued to fight for their rights and make significant contributions to Texas politics.Overall, ""Negro Legislators Of Texas And Their Descendants"" is a comprehensive and insightful account of the role of African Americans in Texas politics during a pivotal moment in the state's history.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Melvin Mitchell believes that the 2016 opening of the NMAAHC signals either a black architect renaissance or the demise of the black architect-practitioner corps in the U.S. by 2040 if not earlier…along with the demise of Black America’s cultural, political, and spatial beachheads in America’s big cities. He argues in this book that America’s perennial housing crisis - most acutely manifested in Black America’s accelerating displacement from America’s cities – must be countered by a new progressive 21st century movement that re-invents the revolutionary construction-based architecture modus operandi deployed 100 years ago by Booker T. Washington. Mitchell believes that Washington completed the build-out of the Tuskegee Institute campus as a counter to America’s building of the “White City” aka the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair-Columbian Exposition 600 miles to the north in Chicago, Illinois. Mitchell argues that the centerpiece of a new “architecture” must realign with the needs of Black America for majorincreases in home and business ownership and wealth creation. That requires a massive “Buy the Block”-type redevelopmentin urban Black America. Today that must entail nothing short of the literal building of at least one million newaffordable housing units in urban Black America by Black America between now and 2030. The means to accomplishsuch a moon shot are there in existing and emerging progressive legislation. The American Housing and Economic Mobility Act, the Green New Deal, and the Opportunity Zones Act must all beharnessed with the trillions of available public dollars, private equity funds, and black nouveau rich wealth to createand sustain an African American-dominated urban affordable housing industry. That may not be the answer but is mostcertainly one of several heretofore missing pieces.

In The Art of Remembering art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw explores African American art and representation from the height of the British colonial period to the present. She engages in the process of "rememory"—the recovery of facts and narratives of African American creativity and self-representation that have been purposefully set aside, actively ignored, and disremembered. In analyses of the work of artists ranging from Scipio Moorhead, Moses Williams, and Aaron Douglas to Barbara Chase-Riboud, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Deana Lawson, Shaw demonstrates that African American art and history may be remembered and understood anew through a process of intensive close looking, cultural and historical contextualization, and biographic recuperation or consideration. Shaw shows how embracing rememory expands the possibilities of history by acknowledging the existence of multiple forms of knowledge and ways of understanding an event or interpreting an object. In so doing, Shaw thinks beyond canonical interpretations of art and material and visual culture to imagine “what if,” asking what else did we once know that has been lost.

Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation.

Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Britain, and the United States, Quito Swan shows how liberation struggles in Oceania actively engaged Black internationalism in their diverse battles against colonial rule. Pasifika Black features as its protagonists Oceania's many playwrights, organizers, religious leaders, scholars, Black Power advocates, musicians, environmental justice activists, feminists, and revolutionaries who carried the banners of Black liberation across the globe. It puts artists like Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific’s Amelia Rokotuivuna, Samoa’s Albert Wendt, African American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, West Papua’s Ben Tanggahma, New Caledonia’s Déwé Gorodey, and Polynesian Panther Will ‘Ilolahia. In so doing, Swan displays the links Oceanic activists consciously and painstakingly formed in order to connect Black metropoles across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

Sex, vengeance, and betrayal in modern day Tehran—Navid Sinaki’s bold and cinematic debut is a queer literary noir following Anjir, a morbid romantic and petty thief whose boyfriend disappears just as they’re planning to leave their hometown for good

Anjir and Zal are childhood best friends turned adults in love. The only problem is they live in Iran, where being openly gay is criminalized, and the government’s apparent acceptance of trans people requires them to surgically transition and pass as cis straight people. When Zal is brutally attacked after being seen with another man in public, despite the betrayal, Anjir becomes even more determined to carry out their longstanding plan for the future: Anjir, who’s always identified with the mythical gender-changing Tiresias, will become a woman, and they’ll move to a new town for a fresh start as husband and wife.

Then Zal vanishes, leaving a cryptic note behind that sets Anjir on a quest to find the other man, hoping he will lead to Zal. Stalking and stealing his way through the streets, clubs, library stacks, hotel rooms, and museum halls of Tehran—where he encounters his troubled mother, addict brother, and the dynamic Leyli, a new friend who is undergoing a transition of her own—Anjir soon realizes that someone is tailing him too. It quickly becomes clear that more violence may be the fastest route to freedom, as Anjir’s morals and gender identity are pushed to new places in the pursuit of love, peace, and self-determination.

Steeped in ancient Persian and Greek myths, and brimming with poetic vulnerability, subversive bite, and noirish grit, Medusa of the Roses is a page-turning wallop of a story from a bright new literary talent.

On the heels of Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada’s new and irresistible Suggested in the Stars carries on her band of friends’ astonishing and intrepid adventures

It’s hard to believe there could be a more enjoyable novel than Scattered All Over the Earth―Yoko Tawada’s rollicking, touching, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship and climate change―but surprising her readers is what Tawada does best: its sequel, Suggested in the Stars, delivers exploits even more poignant and shambolic.

As Hiruko―whose Land of Sushi has vanished into the sea and who is still searching for someone who speaks her mother tongue―and her new friends travel onward, they begin opening up to one another in new and extraordinary ways. They try to help their friend Susanoo regain his voice, both for his own good and so he can speak with Hiruko―and amid many often hilarious misunderstandings (some linguistic in nature)―they empower each other against despair.  Coping with carbon footprint worries but looping singly and in pairs, they hitchhike, take late-night motorcycle rides, and hop on the train (learning about railway strikes but also packed-train-yoga) to convene in Copenhagen. There they find Susanoo in a strange hospital working with a scary speech-loss doctor.  In the half-basement of this weird medical center (with strong echoes of Lars von Trier’s 1990s TV series The Kingdom), they also find two special kids washing dishes. They discover magic radios, personality swaps, ship tickets delivered by a robot, and other gifts. But friendship―loaning one another the nerve and heart to keep going―sets them all (and the reader) to dreaming of something more... Suggested in the Stars delivers new delights, and Yoko Tawada’s famed new trilogy will conclude in 2025 with Archipelago of the Sun, even if nobody will ever want this “strange, exquisite” (The New Yorker) trip to end.

From the New York Times Notable author of The Old Woman with the Knife comes a bracingly original story of family, marriage and the cultural expectations of motherhood, about four women whose lives intersect in dramatic and unexpected ways at a government-run apartment complex outside Seoul

When Yojin moves with her husband and daughter into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, she’s ready for a fresh start. Located on the outskirts of Seoul, the experimental community is a government initiative designed to boost the national birth rate. Like her neighbors, Yojin has agreed to have at least two more children over the next ten years.

Yet, from the day she arrives, Yojin feels uneasy about the community spirit thrust upon her. Her concerns grow as communal child care begins and the other parents show their true colors. Apartment Women traces the lives of four women in the apartments, all with different aspirations and beliefs. Will they find a way to live peacefully? Or are the cultural expectations around parenthood stacked against them from the start?

A trenchant social novel from an award-winning author, Apartment Women incisively illuminates the unspoken imbalance of women’s parenting labor, challenging the age-old assumption that “it takes a village” to raise a child.

A riveting story about the Black Panther Party and the high cost that can come with revolution

Raised in Haiti by a father deeply embedded in activism, Nettie Boileau joins the Black Panthers’ Free Health Clinics in Oakland in 1968. She quickly becomes devoted to the cause and its dedication to helping people in a racially divided America—and gets swept up in an all-consuming love affair with Melvin Mosley, a defense captain of the Black Panther Party. But when Nettie and Melvin head to Chicago to help launch the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, they find themselves targets of J. Edgar Hoover’s famous covert campaigns against civil rights leaders. As she learns more about the inner workings of the Panthers—and her relationship with Melvin reveals its own fault lines—Nettie discovers that fighting for social justice may not always mean equal justice for women. She must figure out what is left for her within the movement, what she stands for, and whom she can count on.

For fans of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois and Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand, Fabienne Josaphat’s Kingdom of No Tomorrow takes readers inside the Black Panther movement in this timely story of self-determination and the importance of revolution amid injustice.

After reconnecting on a road trip, two friends must decide if love is the ultimate risk worth taking in this funny, emotional sapphic romance.

Nia and Jade had been inseparable ever since their best friend, Michal, introduced them at her tenth birthday party. But now it’s been three years since Michal died of cancer― since the brutal fight Nia and Jade had in the weeks after― and they're barely on speaking terms.

Until Nia reads a letter Michal wrote for her 29th birthday, asking her and Jade to go on the southern Jewish history road trip they'd planned before she died. To add to the complications, Michal's then-boyfriend and Jade's twin brother, Jonah, joins the trip. Despite the years apart and Jade and Jonah’s strained relationship, any awkwardness quickly disappears as it becomes clear how much Nia and Jade have missed each other.

Unfortunately, old issues soon arise. Nia has been in love with Jade since they were teenagers, and Jade has been so committed to their friendship that she never let herself consider something more. As the stops pass, tensions mount, running high until Nia and Jade are forced to confront what happened three years ago, their feelings for one another, and even their respective relationships with Jonah.

Rachel Runya Katz’s Whenever You’re Ready is about family, friendship, and the kind of first love that could last a lifetime―if only you are willing to take a chance.

"Poignant, tender, and swoony, Whenever You're Ready is an instant favorite from an auto-buy author." - Alison Cochrun, Lambda award-winning author of Kiss Her Once for Me and Here We Go Again

The second graphic novel in this original series inspired by the hit television show Are You Afraid of the Dark? features three chilling stories based on Ghanaian urban legends and folktales and written by New York Times bestselling author Roseanne A. Brown

Izzy’s sister has been acting strange. Izzy knows that something is going on with her twin, Grace; hurrying off to hang with other kids, avoiding her at school, and going to bed earlier than usual. When Izzy learns that her twin sister has been sneaking off at night to hang out with the mysterious Midnight Society, she surprises them at their night of storytelling and threatens to tell their parents about Grace’s new hobby. But in order to prevent Izzy from telling on her, the Midnight Society proposes a scare-off! If Izzy wins, Grace is booted from the Midnight Society. If Grace wins, Izzy won’t tell anyone about the Midnight Society. What follows are three terrifying tales that may determine the fate of not only the Midnight Society, but also the twins’ relationship.

In “The Tale of the Bushwalkers,” a girl who cheats in school discovers that monsters may be prowling her campus, ready to eat cheating students. In “The Tale of the Spirit Drum,” a young boy tests his luck when he comes into possession of a drum that can make his dreams come true. And in “The Tale of the Sinister Sisters,” two twins must survive the night by themselves as malignant spirits take their form to pit the twins agains each other.

Drawing from urban legends, folklores, and stories rooted from Ghana, New York Times bestselling author Roseanne A. Brown crafts all new stories inspired by the hit television series, brought to life by artists Shazleen Khan, Bill Masuku, and Gigi Murakami!

A classic and influential story centered on the cultural and political stakes of life in Marcos-era Philippines

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Welcome to Manila in the turbulent period of the Philippines’ late dictator. It is a world in which American pop culture and local Filipino tradition mix flamboyantly, and gossip, storytelling, and extravagant behavior thrive.

A wildly disparate group of characters—including movie stars and waiters, a young junkie and the richest man in the Philippines—becomes ensnared in a spiral of events culminating in a beauty pageant, a film festival, and an assassination. At the center of this maelstrom is Rio, a feisty schoolgirl who will grow up to live in America and look back with longing on the land of her youth.

Born in 1933, the oldest of twelve children in a family of sharecroppers in Oscar, Louisiana, Ernest J. Gaines wrote novels and stories, set on and around the former slave plantation he called home, that are modern classics—nuanced, compassionate portraits of women and men, both Black and white, caught in the vortex of race in America. He joins the Library of America with this volume gathering his four greatest novels.

* The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), the story of an elderly woman born into slavery who witnesses Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. A living testament to the history, hopes, courage, and survival of her people, Miss Jane is one of the most indelible and unforgettable characters in American fiction.
* In My Father’s House(1978) finds an activist minister organizing a civil rights protest in his town when his estranged son suddenly appears on the scene, threatening to expose his family's secret past.
* A Gathering of Old Men (1983) sees a group of elderly Black men with nothing left to lose decide to make a last stand against the racism that has defined and delimited their lives.
* A Lesson Before Dying(1993, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and an Oprah Book Club selection), in which a local schoolteacher attempts to help a young man falsely convicted of the murder of a white man face execution with dignity.

A fitting tribute to a still underappreciated American genius, this volume also includes a chronology of Gaines’s life and career written by his authorized biographer, John Wharton Lowe, and helpful notes.

Issa Rae’s Insecure with a magical realist spin: River Mumma is an exhilarating contemporary fantasy novel about a young Black woman who navigates her quarter-life-crisis while embarking on a mythical quest through the streets of Toronto.

Alicia has been out of grad school for months. She has no career prospects and lives with her mom, who won’t stop texting her macabre news stories and reminders to pick up items from the grocery store.

Then, one evening, the Jamaican water deity, River Mumma, appears to Alicia, telling her that she has twenty-four hours to scour the city for her missing comb.

Alicia doesn’t understand why River Mumma would choose her. She can’t remember all the legends her relatives told her, unlike her retail co-worker Heaven, who can reel off Jamaican folklore by heart. She doesn’t know if her childhood visions have returned, or why she feels a strange connection to her other co-worker Mars. But when the trio are chased down by malevolent spirits called duppies, they realize their tenuous bonds to each other may be their only lifelines. With the clock ticking, Alicia’s quest through the city broadens into a journey through time—to find herself and what the river carries.

Energetic and invigorating, River Mumma is a vibrant exploration of diasporic community and ancestral ties, and a homage to Jamaican storytelling by one of the most invigorating voices in today’s literature.

“This quirky, fizzy, charming debut surprises and amuses. Reid-Benta writes beautifully, drawing on Caribbean mythologies to create a fast paced and entertaining tale. It's rare to find a novel written with such humour and heart.” —T. L. Huchu, USA Today Bestselling author of The Library of the Dead

Old secrets are brought to light when a family matriarch returns to Brazil after years away in this “original and highly immersive” (Good Morning America) debut that explores the heartbreak and hope of what it means to be from two homes, two peoples, and two worlds.

Daniel Cunha has a lot on his mind.

He got dumped by his pregnant girlfriend, his grandfather just dropped dead, and on the anniversary of the raid that doomed his drug-dealing aunt and uncle, his mother makes her unwanted return, years after she fled to marry another American fool like his father.

Misfortune, however, is a Cunha family affair, and no generation is spared. Not Daniel’s grandfather João—poor João—born to a prostitute and forced to raise his siblings while still a child himself. Not João’s wife, Marta, branded as a bruxa, reviled by her mother, and dragged from her Ilha paradise by her scheming daughter, Maria. And certainly not Maria, so envious of her younger sister’s beauty and benevolence that she took her vicious revenge and fled to the States, abandoning her children: Daniel and Lucia, both tainted now by their half-Americanness and their mother’s greedy absence.

There’s poison in the Cunha blood. They are a family cursed, condemned to the pain of deprivation, betrayal, violence, and, worst of all, love. But now Maria has returned to grieve her father and finally make peace with Daniel and Lucia, or so she says. As New Year’s Eve nears, the Cunha family hurtles toward an irrevocable breaking point: a fire, a knife, and a death on the sands of Copacabana Beach.

Amid the cacophony of Rio’s tumult—rampant poverty, political unrest, the ever-present threat of violence—a fierce chorus of voices rises above the din to ask whether we can ever truly repair the damage we do to those we love in this “fiery debut novel” (The Washington Post).