Fiction
- Mimi and the Cutie Catastrophe: A Graphix Chapters Book (Mimi #1)
Mimi and the Cutie Catastrophe: A Graphix Chapters Book (Mimi #1)
$7.99Rising star Shauna J. Grant makes her Graphix Chapters debut with this humorous and wholesome series.
Get drawn into reading with Graphix Chapters!
Graphix Chapters are ideal books for beginning and newly independent readers aged 6-8. With approachable page counts, easy-to-follow paneling, and artwork that supports text comprehension, these engaging stories with unforgettable characters help children become lifelong readers.
Meet Mimi. She's charming! She's cheerful! She's cute!
But that's not all! She's also a loyal friend and fun playmate, who has the best adventures with Penelope, her magical toy dog. But when Mimi notices people treating her like she's too cute, can she show them that she's much more than meets the eye? Or will she be stuck in this cute-astrophe?
- The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025
Nnedi Okorafor
$19.99A collection of the year’s best science fiction and fantasy short fiction selected by award-winning author of Death of the Author and the Binti Trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor, and series editor John Joseph Adams.
The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction, and it is the most respected—and most popular—of its kind.
Nnedi Okrafor selects twenty pieces that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year and explores the ever-expanding and changing world of science fiction and fantasy today.
- Death of the First Idea: Poems
Death of the First Idea: Poems
Rickey Laurentiis
$27.00From Whiting Award–winner Rickey Laurentiis, a mythic, lyric, decade-in-the-making new collection of masterful poems that probe the meanings of trans/formation and re-creation, a new classic about gender and love
When Rickey Laurentiis debuted in 2015 with Boy with Thorn, the poetry world heralded the arrival of an astonishing new lyric talent. “Call Rickey Laurentiis’ stylistic range virtuosity or call it correctly, necessity,” Terrance Hayes wrote. In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives. This staggering, irreverent, gentle, and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis’s poetics—from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the mid-century cinematic icon The Lady Chablis.
Then, brick by brick, she builds them anew and makes them her own. She maps a path onto the contradictions, precarity, and revelry of her hometown, “New Orleans / As that modern text, witnessed, and revised, by the light as radically / As by the water, which is history, which slip / Thru your hands. This city is a ghost for hire.” With this as her frame, Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace. “You see something in me,” she writes, “something grand, / Your very cowardice yearns for; you / Who would want to own it, wear it, be by it adorned, / It is so rare a thing, so fine as I am, and seemingly / Fragile, creole, and easily decadent: it is like a tree, then.”
In a world where what one is, and how one looks, or even just the idea of a person can get one killed, this is transformative work. This collection does not stump for its humanity, nor does it compromise its art in order to speak in its own voice. Sprung to its own sound, celebratory without apology, this is a book which reclaims the act of poetry itself, too, for the way it can reshape the writer, the mind, the body, the story we choose, and the images the world can imprint on us. (Can poetry do that?) Approaching from every angle and expanding in every direction as we read, Death of the First Idea probes every aspect of transformation. Celebratory, interrogatory, reclamatory, full of rage and range, these are poems for the storms of our time.
- Fever: A Novel
Fever: A Novel
Bernice L. McFadden
Sold outThe second of two steamy and entertaining romance novels, published under the beloved and distinguished author’s real name for the first time
Three years have passed since four friends—Geneva, Chevy, Crystal, and Noah—had a steamy summer of secrets and sleeping around. As another summer is fast approaching, they’ve sworn off any extracurricular activities, but as the temperature rises in the city, the friends find themselves in hot water again.
Geneva is busy taking care of her daughter and trying not to get too involved with her son’s young business manager. Chevy gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to assist a diva who might want more than what’s in the employment contract. Crystal has promised to save herself for Mr. Right (instead of jumping into bed with another Mr. Right Now), but her commitment is tested when an old acquaintance reenters her life. And while Noah is getting very cozy with his new neighbors in London, he’s still everyone’s favorite (and only) confidant who can’t stop himself from meddling in other people’s business.
But secrets don’t stay secrets for long among these friends, and with sexual tensions high on both side of the pond, everyone is sure to catch the fever. . . .
- More Than A Crush
More Than A Crush
Nicole Jackson
Sold outLyric’s husband, Griff, has a wandering eye, and she knows it. He’s now taken things to a new height, as he suggests that he should be given a hall pass. The only problem is that Griff wants a pass to be with, Nay, his best friend’s, Shooter, girl. Needing a little incentive, Griff offers to swap out with Shooter, to get a mere taste of Nay. Unfortunately for Griff, what he believes will be one night of pleasure quickly transform into a life filled with pain.
This is the sexy, steamy, scandalous story of what happens when two friends swap out partners for the night. - Fat Ma: an erotic novel
Fat Ma: an erotic novel
Nicole Jackson
Sold outPiggy is in a bind, and Khyro has the cure for her problem. The only issue is that Khyro is married to Piggy’s cousin Tabitha. With her back against the wall, Piggy must use Fat Ma to get herself ahead. In this erotic tale, find out just how nasty and sticky the situation will become.
- The Weary Blues; Not Without Laughter; The Ways of White Folks (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
The Weary Blues; Not Without Laughter; The Ways of White Folks (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
Langston Hughes
Sold outA major hardcover compendium of poetry and fiction by the legendary Black American poet of the Harlem Renaissance
One of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes may be best known as a poet, but he was also a brilliant storyteller, blending elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom. Perhaps more than any other writer, Langston Hughes made the white America of the 1920s and 1930s aware of the Black culture thriving in its midst. Hughes's poetry and fiction works are messages from that America, sharply etched vignettes of its daily life, cruelly accurate portrayals of Black and white collisions.
This Everyman's Library compendium comprises Hughes's debut poetry collection, The Weary Blues, which catapulted him into literary stardom at just twenty-four years old; his award-winning debut novel, Not Without Laughter, published in 1930 to critical raves; and his 1933 collection of short stories The Ways of White Folks, currently only available in Vintage Classics trade paperback.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
- Humboldt Cut
Humboldt Cut
Allison Mick
$28.00Jordan Peele and Jeff Vandermeer meet The Overstory in comedy writer Allison Mick’s darkly humorous debut eco-horror novel, as a Black woman returns home to the redwood forests of northern California, only to unearth the monsters that lurk among the trees…
Jasmine Bay is a nurse for an Oakland mental health facility, battling her own demons, caught in a spiral of suicidal despair. Estranged from her brother James and his wife Tilly, who was once her best friend, Jas has chosen self-isolation to protect herself—even if it means denying herself a hopeful future with co-worker and potential love interest Henry Lewis.
When her godmother dies, Jas returns to Redceder for the funeral, a logging town where her grandfather William Whipple made a living deforesting the countryside, ripping and raping apart nature’s very foundations for corporate profits. As trees fell to axes and chainsaws, so did dozens of lumberjacks, falling prey to the dangers of their job—and to the ecoterrorism of Jas’s grandfather who was lynched for his crimes.
And buried in the haunted woods are even more dark secrets perpetrated by Jas’s family. Unnatural acts giving birth to entities made of human flesh and petrified bark, seeking to avenge the devastation that ravaged their land. It is an inheritance that threatens to consume the remnants of Jas’s family, and her very sanity. . .
Celebrated comedy writer Allison Mick’s Humboldt Cut exposes the traumatic costs of environmental destruction in an energetic, darkly humorous horror adventure that combines the botanical terrors of VanderMeer’s Annihilation and the psychological horror of The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones with a dash of Jordan Peele.
- Dork Diaries 3 1/2: How to Dork Your Diary
Dork Diaries 3 1/2: How to Dork Your Diary
Rachel Renée Russell
$14.99Create your own Dork Diary with this special, interactive addition to the #1 New York Times bestselling Dork Diaries series!
Nikki Maxwell can’t believe it when one morning she can’t find her diary! The hunt is on, and while she looks, Nikki can’t help putting together a list of important diary-keeping lessons to remember in case of missing diary emergencies like this one.
How to Dork Your Diary is chock-full of tips from Nikki on fun things to write about in your diary, with lots of space for readers to write and draw their own entries.
- Afrofuturism Short Stories (Gothic Fantasy)
Afrofuturism Short Stories (Gothic Fantasy)
Isis Asare
$30.00Exploring new black literature, following the success of Black Sci-Fi and First Peoples Shared Stories.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture characterises Afrofuturism (as distinct from Africanfuturism) as expressing "notions of Black identity, agency and freedom through art, creative works and activism that envision liberated futures for Black life." This new book offers new stories from open submissions and by invitation, as well as classic stories, and a new introduction, all exploring the many angles of this theme. It follows the success of Black Sci-Fi (2021) of which Scientific American said "contains a thrilling group of memorable, moving tales that often examine the intersections of race, gender, grief, tech and the fantastical." and Publishers Weekly, in a Starred Review "With topics ranging from slavery to space travel, the impressive breadth of this anthology makes for a well-rounded survey. Readers, writers, and scholars alike will find great value here."
The Flame Tree Gothic Fantasy, Classic Stories and Epic Tales collections bring together the entire range of myth, folklore and modern short fiction. Highlighting the roots of suspense, supernatural, science fiction and mystery stories the books in Flame Tree Collections series are beautifully presented, perfect as a gift and offer a lifetime of reading pleasure.
- I Remember Death By Its Proximity
I Remember Death By Its Proximity
by Mahogany L Browne
$16.00The long form poem is tethered in folklore and personal narrative, detailing the impact of the destructive mass incarceration system.
Mahogany L. Browne’s evocative book-length poem explores the impacts of the prison system on both the incarcerated and the loved ones left behind.
I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love is an expansive poetic meditation on who we think is bound by incarceration. The answer: all of us. Weaving personal narrative, case studies, and inventive form, Browne invokes the grief, pain, and resilience in the violent wake of the prison system. This poem is dirge work but allows us to revel in the intricacies of our human condition. Written by a beloved and prolific writer, organizer, and educator, this work serves as a practice of self-reflection and accountability. Browne steps into the lineage of Sonia Sanchez’s Does Your House Have Lions? with the precision of a master wordsmith and the empathy of an attentive storyteller. - Life’s Little Lessons: Bye-Bye Diaper
Life’s Little Lessons: Bye-Bye Diaper
Bernette Ford
$8.99Bye-bye diapers! That’s what toddlers will proudly proclaim after they hear this appealing tale of a lovable duck who takes the big step. When Piggy can’t come out to play because he’s busy sitting on the potty, Ducky realizes it’s time to grow up, too. A sweet and subtle story, with two huggable animals that children will embrace.
- Tumbling: A Novel
Tumbling: A Novel
Diane McKinney-Whetstone
$18.99“Warm and intimate. . . . An accomplished novel, with sharply drawn characters, exuberant prose, plenty of period detail and a wise, forgiving outlook on family life.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review
Tumbling is the beloved bestselling debut novel that launched the luminous career of Diane McKinney Whetstone, critically acclaimed author of Tempest Rising, Blues Dancing, Leaving Cecil Street, and Trading Dreams at Midnight. Writing in a style as accessible as Terry McMillan, yet with the literary touches of Toni Morrison, McKinney Whetstone’s Tumbling is a poignant, exquisitely rendered story of the ties that bind us and the secrets that keep us apart.
Noon and Herbie are deeply in love and living in a tightly knit African American neighborhood in South Philadelphia during the 1940s. But their marriage remains unconsummated because of a horrible incident in Noon's past, so each seeks comfort elsewhere: Noon in the warm acceptance of the neighborhood church; Herbie in the arms of Ethel, a jazz singer. Then one day an infant girl is left on their doorstep, and later Ethel blesses them with her five-year-old niece. Suddenly and unexpectedly a family, Herbie, Noon, and their two girls draw closer—until an outside threat reawakens a fire in Noon, causing her to rise up and fight to hold her family and her community together.
- Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
James Baldwin
$19.00A major work of American literature from a major American writer that powerfully portrays the anguish of being Black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war.
"Baldwin is one of the few genuinely indispensable American writers." —Saturday Review
At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable.
For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty.
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is overpowering in its vitality and extravagant in the intensity of its feeling.
- Sula (Contemporánea)
Sula (Contemporánea)
Toni Morrison
$14.95Una obra maestra de la ganadora del Premio Nobel de Literatura 1993.
Esta es la historia de Sula y Nel, dos niñas que crecen juntas en un barrio de negros, compartiendo sus sueños e ilusiones. Ambas son precoces y curiosas, hijas de familias pobres. Pero el tiempo pasa y, cuando Nel se casa, Sula se marcha del suburbio para ir a la universidad y viajar por el país. Diez años después, Sula regresa e involuntariamente destruye la familia y la felicidad de Nel. A partir de entonces, los pintorescos habitantes del suburbio la consideran una bruja malvada...
Ambientada en los EE.UU. en el período de entreguerras, Sula es un portentoso retrato del poder de lo femenino en una comunidad pobre y rural de negros, donde las mujeres reinan como madres, hechiceras y depositarias de la tradición oral.
Reseña:
«Un aullido de amor y rabia, travieso y divertido, duro y amargo.»
The New York Times - James Baldwin : Collected Essays : Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays (Library of America)
James Baldwin : Collected Essays : Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays (Library of America)
James Baldwin
Sold outToni Morrison's definitive edition of James Baldwin's incomparable nonfiction.
Contains all the major essays collections in their entirety, plus 36 uncollected essays.
James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck's documentary "I Am Not Your Negro." Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America's Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin's nonfiction ever published.
With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic wit, Baldwin fearlessly articulated issues of race and democracy and American identity in such famous essays as "The Harlem Ghetto," "Everybody's Protest Novel," "Many Thousands Gone," and "Stranger in the Village." Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, fusing in unique fashion the personal, the literary, and the political.
The classic The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps the most influential of his writings, is his most penetrating analysis of America's racial divide and an impassioned call to "end the racial nightmare...and change the history of the world." The later volumes No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era and include his remarkable works of film criticism. A further 36 essays—nine of them previously uncollected—include some of Baldwin's earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
- Invisible Life: A Novel (Invisible Life Trilogy)
Invisible Life: A Novel (Invisible Life Trilogy)
E. Lynn Harris
Sold outThe re-issue of a remarkable first novel by a young, gay, black author who fashioned a deeply moving and compelling coming of age story out of the highly controversial issues of bisexuality and AIDS.
Law school, girlfriends, and career choices were all part of Raymond Tyler's life, but there were other, more terrifying issues for him to confront. Being black was tough enough, but Raymond was becoming more and more conscious of sexual feelings that he knew weren't "right." He was completely committed to Sela, his longtime girlfriend, but his attraction to Kelvin, whom he had met during his last year in law school, had become more than just a friendship.
Fleeing to New York to escape both Sela and Kelvin, Raymond finds himself more confused than ever before. New relationships--both male and female--give him enormous pleasure but keep him from finding the inner peace and lasting love he so desperately desires. The horrible illness and death of a friend eventually force Raymond, at last, to face the truth.
- Cane River
Cane River
Lalita Tademy
$25.99A New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick-the unique and deeply moving saga of four generations of African-American women whose journey from slavery to freedom begins on a Creole plantation in Louisiana.
Beginning with her great-great-great-great grandmother, a slave owned by a Creole family, Lalita Tademy chronicles four generations of strong, determined black women as they battle injustice to unite their family and forge success on their own terms. They are women whose lives begin in slavery, who weather the Civil War, and who grapple with contradictions of emancipation, Jim Crow, and the pre-Civil Rights South. As she peels back layers of racial and cultural attitudes, Tademy paints a remarkable picture of rural Louisiana and the resilient spirit of one unforgettable family.
There is Elisabeth, who bears both a proud legacy and the yoke of bondage... her youngest daughter, Suzette, who is the first to discover the promise-and heartbreak-of freedom... Suzette's strong-willed daughter Philomene, who uses a determination born of tragedy to reunite her family and gain unheard-of economic independence... and Emily, Philomene's spirited daughter, who fights to secure her children's just due and preserve their dignity and future.
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Cane River presents a slice of American history never before seen in such piercing and personal detail.
- The Rules of Fortune: A Novel
The Rules of Fortune: A Novel
Danielle Prescod
$16.99A daughter’s investigation into her family history threatens to destroy their legacy in a gripping novel about power, money, and secrets by the author of Token Black Girl.
On their Martha’s Vineyard estate, the Carter family prepares to celebrate. But when the billionaire patriarch dies right before his seventieth birthday, the media is quick to question the future of the multi-industry conglomerate that makes the Carters living legends. Amid the succession crisis, his daughter, Kennedy, is questioning her father’s past.
Kennedy is an aspiring filmmaker, and the documentary she’d planned to present at her father’s party begins an inquest into the life of a man she never really knew. A thoughtful outlier in an elite and fiercely guarded dynasty, she’s not interested in keeping up the appearances that define her impeccably poised mother or in the capitalist games her ruthless brother plays. Kennedy wants only to understand the origins of their empire, and the lethally ambitious man behind it. That understanding comes at a cost.
As a twisted history emerges, the fault lines in the family grow. Torn between morality and the promise of maintaining wealth, Kennedy must decide what’s most important―the Carter legacy or exposing the shocking truth of how it was built.
- The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel
The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel
Jamaica Kincaid
Sold outFrom the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age
Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman’s inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical prose.
This novel tells the deeply charged story of a woman’s life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own.
Kincaid takes us from Xuela’s childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela’s is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness, and her deep sympathy for those who share her history. But underlying all is “the black room of the world” that is Xuela’s motherlessness and barrenness.
- Born in a House of Glass
Born in a House of Glass
by Chinenye Emezie
$19.99As Udonwa grows, her hidden family history changes her forever.
Let me tell you a story. It’s about a war. This war is not the type fought with guns and machetes. It is a family type. A silent war. The type fought in the heart. It began long before I was formed.
Udonwa’s family is at war ― a war of relationships, played out under the tyranny of a monster dad. Age twelve, Udonwa has a peculiar love for her father, Reverend Leonard Ilechukwu, who favours her but beats his wife and his other children. She sees his good side: after all, he pays the school fees, and tells her that she, named “the peaceful child,” is the one most likely to become a doctor.
When her newly married eldest sister suddenly takes her from their family compound in Iruama, Nigeria, to live with her in Awka, Udonwa experiences violence first-hand. Later, pieces of a sinister picture emerge that shake her life to the core.
No longer the person she thought she was, Udonwa launches into a period of extreme change, and parts of her life spiral into chaos as she finds herself torn between her love for her father and an underlying need to free herself. This vivid family saga is engrossing, deeply unsettling, and finally uplifting.
- Stuck in the Country with You
Stuck in the Country with You
by Zuri Day
$12.99Good fences make good neighbors—except when a scorching shared past makes things complicated—in this delightful city-meets-country romance from Zuri Day.
She’s packing her bags—and her baggage.
Ten years ago, Genesis Washington made a very poor decision. At the time, it seemed great. Fantastic. Explosive. But the truth is, your one-night rebound should never be your younger brother’s rival. And he definitely shouldn’t be someone who allegedly only slept with you to gain the upper hand—even if the sex was amazing.
Now Genesis is blindsided when the farm she’s inherited just happens to be right next door to Jaxson King, the regrettable one-night stand she’s still painfully attracted to. This man has aged like the finest of wines, and what’s worse, he’s now a thoughtful and responsible father. Good thing Genesis has a (*cough* long-distance *cough*) boyfriend. Well, sort of. It’s complicated.
Jaxson and his hotness should be easy enough to ignore. But when city-girl Genesis discovers there’s a serious learning curve to her humble new home, it’s Jaxson who’s there to lend a very skilled helping hand. With every problem that arises, Jaxson is seemingly making all the right moves—both on the farm and when things heat up behind closed doors. But, surely, that doesn’t mean he’s right for Genesis, does it?
From showing up to glowing up, the characters in Afterglow Books are on the path to leading their best lives and finding sizzling romance along the way. Don’t miss any of these other fun titles…
Frenemy Fix-Up by Yahrah St. John
The Devil in Blue Jeans by Stacey Kennedy
Out of Office by A.H. Cunningham
Church Girl by Naima Simone
- Evil Eye: A Novel
Evil Eye: A Novel
by Etaf Rum
Sold outThe acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of A Woman Is No Man returns with a striking exploration of the expectations of Palestinian-American women, the meaning of a fulfilling life, and the ways our unresolved pasts affect our presents.
“After Yara is placed on probation at work for fighting with a racist coworker, her Palestinian mother claims the provocation and all that’s come after were the result of a family curse. While Yara doesn’t believe in old superstitions, she finds herself unpacking her strict, often volatile childhood growing up in Brooklyn, looking for clues as to why she feels so unfulfilled in a life her mother could only dream of. Etaf Rum’s follow-up to her debut, A Woman Is No Man, is a complicated mother-daughter drama that looks at the lasting effects of intergenerational trauma and what it takes to break the cycle of abuse” (Time magazine).
- Such a Fun Age
Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid
$17.00*ships in 7-10 business days
A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.
But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.
With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times. - The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart: Stories
The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart: Stories
by Alice Walker
$17.00*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*
"These are the stories that came to me to be told after the close of a magical marriage to an extraordinary man that ended in a less-than-magical divorce. I found myself unmoored, unmated, ungrounded in a way that challenged everything I'd ever thought about human relationships. Situated squarely in that terrifying paradise called freedom, precipitously out on so many emotional limbs, it was as if I had been born; and in fact I was being reborn as the woman I was to become."
So says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker about her beautiful new book, in which "one of the best American writers today" (The Washington Post) gives us superb stories based on rich truths from her own experience. Imbued with Walker's wise philosophy and understanding of people, the spirit, sex and love, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart begins with a lyrical, autobiographical story of a marriage set in the violent and volatile Deep South during the early years of the civil rights movement. Walker goes on to imagine stories that grew out of the life following that marriage—a life, she writes, that was "marked by deep sea-changes and transitions." These provocative stories showcase Walker's hard-won knowledge of love of many kinds and of the relationships that shape our lives, as well as her infectious sense of humor and joy. Filled with wonder at the power of the life force and of the capacity of human beings to move through love and loss and healing to love again, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart is an enriching, passionate book by "a lavishly gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review). - My Government Means to Kill Me: A Novel
My Government Means to Kill Me: A Novel
by Rasheed Newson
Sold outBorn into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, Earl “Trey” Singleton III leaves his overbearing parents and their expectations behind by running away to New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. In the city, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Along the way Trey attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships—all while seeking the meaning of life amid so much death.
Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning. - Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm: A Novel
Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm: A Novel
by Laura Warrell
from $17.00*ships in 7-10 business days*
“A modern masterpiece.” —Jason Reynolds, best-selling author of Look Both Ways
It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer, a forty-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man, lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. Before a gig in Miami, he learns that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him. Instead of facing the necessary conversation, Circus flees, setting off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life. Most notable among them is his teenage daughter, Koko, who idolizes him and is awakening to her own sexuality even as her mentally fragile mother struggles to overcome her long-failed marriage and rejection by Circus.
Delivering a lush orchestration of diverse female voices, Warrell spins a provocative, soulful, and gripping story of passion and risk, fathers and daughters, wives and single women, and, finally, hope and reconciliation, in answer to the age-old question: how do we find belonging when love is unrequited? - We Lie Here: A Thriller by Rachel Howzell Hall
We Lie Here: A Thriller by Rachel Howzell Hall
$15.95A woman’s trip home reveals frightening truths in a twisty novel of murder and family secrets by the New York Times bestselling author of And Now She’s Gone and These Toxic Things.
TV writer Yara Gibson’s hometown of Palmdale, California, isn’t her first choice for a vacation. But she’s back to host her parents’ twentieth-anniversary party and find the perfect family mementos for the celebration. Everything is going to plan until Yara receives a disturbing text: I have information that will change your life.
The message is from Felicia Campbell, who claims to be a childhood friend of Yara’s mother. But they’ve been estranged for years—drama best ignored and forgotten. But Yara can’t forget Felicia, who keeps texting, insisting that Yara talk to her “before it’s too late.”
But the next day is already too late for Felicia, whose body is found floating in Lake Palmdale. Before she died, Felicia left Yara a key to a remote lakeside cabin. In the basement are files related to a mysterious tragedy, unsolved since 1998. What secrets was Felicia hiding? How much of what Yara knows about her family has been true?
The deeper Yara digs for answers, the more she fears that Felicia was right. Uncovering the truth about what happened at the cabin all those years ago will change Yara’s life—or end it.
- Anywhere You Run: A Novel
Anywhere You Run: A Novel
by Wanda M. Morris
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From the acclaimed author of All Her Little Secrets comes yet another gripping, suspenseful novel where, after the murder of a white man in Jim Crow Mississippi, two Black sisters run away to different parts of the country . . . but can they escape the secrets they left behind?
It’s the summer of 1964 and three innocent men are brutally murdered for trying to help Black Mississippians secure the right to vote. Against this backdrop, twenty-two-year-old Violet Richards finds herself in more trouble than she’s ever been in her life. Suffering a brutal attack of her own, she kills the man responsible. But with the color of Violet’s skin, there is no way she can escape Jim Crow justice in Jackson, Mississippi. Before anyone can find the body or finger her as the killer, she decides to run. With the help of her white beau, Violet escapes. But desperation and fear leads her to hide out in the small rural town of Chillicothe, Georgia, unaware that danger may be closer than she thinks.
Back in Jackson, Marigold, Violet’s older sister, has dreams of attending law school. Working for the Mississippi Summer Project, she has been trying to use her smarts to further the cause of the Black vote. But Marigold is in a different kind of trouble: she’s pregnant and unmarried. After news of Huxley’s murder brings the police to her door, Marigold sees no choice but to flee Jackson too. She heads North seeking the promise of a better life and no more segregation. But has she made a terrible choice that threatens her life and that of her unborn child?
Two sisters on the run—one from the law, the other from social shame. What they don’t realize is that there’s a man hot on their trail. This man has his own brand of dark secrets and a disturbing motive for finding the sisters that is unknown to everyone but him . . .
- Witchful Thinking by Celestine Martin
Witchful Thinking by Celestine Martin
$15.99Love 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. - The Dating Playbook by Farrah Rochon
The Dating Playbook by Farrah Rochon
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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? - Shallow Waters: A Novel by Anita Kopacz
Shallow Waters: A Novel by Anita Kopacz
$17.99In this “captivating” (Harper’s Bazaar) and lyrical debut novel—perfect for fans of The Water Dancer and the Legacy of Orïsha series—the Yoruba deity of the sea, Yemaya, is brought to vivid life as she discovers the power of Black resilience, love, and feminine strength in antebellum America.
Shallow Waters imagines Yemaya, an Orïsha—a deity in the religion of Africa’s Yoruba people—cast into mid-1800s America. We meet Yemaya as a young woman, still in the care of her mother and not yet fully aware of the spectacular power she possesses to protect herself and those she holds dear.
The journey laid out in Shallow Waters sees Yemaya confront the greatest evils of this era; transcend time and place in search of Obatala, a man who sacrifices his own freedom for the chance at hers; and grow into the powerful woman she was destined to become. We travel alongside Yemaya from her native Africa and on to the “New World,” with vivid pictures of life for those left on the outskirts of power in the nascent Americas.
Yemaya realizes the fighter within, travels the Underground Railroad in search of the mysterious stranger Obatala, and crosses paths with icons of our history on the road to freedom. Shallow Waters is a “riveting and heartbreaking” (Publishers Weekly) work of ritual storytelling from promising debut author Anita Kopacz.
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