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  • One Blood: A Novel

    by Denene Millner

    $29.99

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    Join New York Times bestselling author Denene Millner as she unravels three generations of women tied together by blood, love, and family secrets in this searing novel.

    “In delicious, decadent prose, Denene Millner does what few authors can–compose a sprawling multigenerational tale that is necessary American reading. One Blood sings the song of the South in a voice that is heartbreaking, hopeful, and resilient. A masterpiece.”

    –Tara M. Stringfellow, National Bestselling author of Memphis

    Join New York Times bestselling author Denene Millner as she explores the lives of three generations of women tied together by love, hope, dreams, ambition...and family secrets in this epic novel.

    Meet Grace: raised by her beloved grandmother in tension-filled, post-segregation Virginia, Grace is barely a teenager when she loses her grandmother. Shellshocked, she is shipped up North to live with her formidably ambitious Aunt Hattie?a woman who firmly left behind her Southern roots in pursuit of upward mobility. Feeling like a fish out of water in the high society world filled with fancy teas and coveted debutante balls, Grace’s only place of comfort is with the smart, handsome son of one of the society’s grand dames.

    Meet Delores: beautiful, intelligent and fierce, Delores a.k.a. Lolo has never had it easy. Once she makes it north, she puts aside her dream of being a model to do what she has to do to survive as a woman with little money and no mooring: get married and have a family of her own. When secrets start to spill out and she and her family slowly begin to unravel, Lolo is willing to do whatever it takes to keep her dream intact and those she loves together.

    Meet Rae: when Lolo’s headstrong daughter, Rae discovers that she is adopted, it’s just one secret among others that her family is keeping. When Rae finds out that she’s about to become a mother herself, she knows that there is an important reckoning that must be faced about herself and her two mothers.

    Potent, poetic, powerful, told with deep love, and spanning from the Great Migration to the civil unrest of the 1960s to the quest for women’s equality in early 2000s, Denene Millner’s beautifully wrought novel explores three women’s intimate, and often complicated, struggle with what it truly means to be to be family.

  • Butterfly

    by Ashley Antoinette

    $16.99

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    "Run away from the boy that gives you butterflies, he's going to break your heart." Morgan Atkins has been faithfully living by that creed ever since her heart was broken by her first love. She's terrified of feeling that rush and those butterflies again. She's settled down with a respectable man, and lives comfortably and in luxury. She has everything and wants for nothing...but her life is missing that spark.

    When someone from her past erupts into her perfect life, Morgan starts to feel that rush again. Those butterflies. And while her mind tells her she shouldn't be going down this road, her heart tells her something else. The more involved she becomes in the illicit affair that follows, the more she can't tell the difference between right and wrong. Someone will end up hurt. Someone may end up dead. Will Morgan survive this storm? Or will she be ruined again by the ultimate heartbreak?

  • Vampires of El Norte

    by Isabel Cañas

    $28.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days* 

     

    Vampires and vaqueros face off on the Texas-Mexico border in this supernatural western from the author of The Hacienda.


    As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters—her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead.

    Something that once attacked Nena nine years ago.

    Believing Nena dead, Néstor has been on the run from his grief ever since, moving from ranch to ranch working as a vaquero. But no amount of drink can dispel the night terrors of sharp teeth; no woman can erase his childhood sweetheart from his mind.

    When the United States invades Mexico in 1846, the two are brought abruptly together on the road to war: Nena as a curandera, a healer striving to prove her worth to her father so that he does not marry her off to a stranger, and Néstor as a member of the auxiliary cavalry of ranchers and vaqueros. But the shock of their reunion—and Nena’s rage at Néstor for seemingly abandoning her long ago—is quickly overshadowed by the appearance of a nightmare made flesh.

    And unless Nena and Néstor work through their past and face the future together, neither will survive to see the dawn.

     

  • Disappearing Acts

    by Terry McMillan

    $17.00

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    From #1 New York Times bestselling author Terry McMillan comes an honest look at a modern romance, from love at first sight to painful reality to working toward a happy ending....

    Franklin Swift was a sometimes-employed construction worker and a not-quite-divorced dad of two. Zora Banks was a teacher, singer, and songwriter. They met in a Brooklyn brownstone, and there could be no walking away....

    In this funny, gritty love story, Franklin and Zora join the ranks of fiction’s most compelling couples as they move from Scrabble to sex, from layoffs to the limits of faith and trust. Disappearing Acts is about the mystery of desire and the burdens of the past. It’s about respect—what it can and can’t survive. And it’s about the safe and secret places that only love can find.

  • Romance in Marseille

    by Claude McKay

    $16.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days*

    The pioneering novel of physical disability, transatlantic travel, and black international politics. A vital document of black modernism and one of the earliest overtly queer fictions in the African American tradition. Published for the first time.

    A Penguin Classic

    Buried in the archive for almost ninety years, Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille traces the adventures of a rowdy troupe of dockworkers, prostitutes, and political organizers--collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor. While stowing away on a transatlantic freighter, Lafala is discovered and locked in a frigid closet. Badly frostbitten by the time the boat docks, the once-nimble dancer loses both of his lower legs, emerging from life-saving surgery as what he terms "an amputated man." Thanks to an improbably successful lawsuit against the shipping line, however, Lafala scores big in the litigious United States. Feeling flush after his legal payout, Lafala doubles back to Marseille and resumes his trans-African affair with Aslima, a Moroccan courtesan. With its scenes of black bodies fighting for pleasure and liberty even when stolen, shipped, and sold for parts, McKay's novel explores the heritage of slavery amid an unforgiving modern economy. This first-ever edition of Romance in Marseille includes an introduction by McKay scholars Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell that places the novel within both the "stowaway era" of black cultural politics and McKay's challenging career as a star and skeptic of the Harlem Renaissance.

  • The Survivalists: A Novel by Kashana Cauley
    $27.00


    A single Black lawyer puts her career and personal moral code at risk when she moves in with her coffee entrepreneur boyfriend and his doomsday-prepping roommates in a novel that's packed with tension, curiosity, humor, and wit from a writer with serious comedy credentials

    In the wake of her parents’ death, Aretha, a habitually single Black lawyer, has had only one obsession in life—success—until she falls for Aaron, a coffee entrepreneur. Moving into his Brooklyn brownstone to live along with his Hurricane Sandy-traumatized, illegal-gun-stockpiling, optimized-soy-protein-eating, bunker-building roommates, Aretha finds that her dreams of making partner are slipping away, replaced by an underground world, one of selling guns and training for a doomsday that’s maybe just around the corner. 

    For readers of Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, and Zakiya Harris’s The Other Black GirlThe Survivalists is a darkly humorous novel from a smart and relevant new literary voice that's packed with tension, curiosity and wit, and unafraid to ask the questions most relevant to a new generation of Americans: Does it make sense to climb the corporate ladder? What exactly are the politics of gun ownership? And in a world where it’s nearly impossible for young people to earn enough money to afford stable housing, what does it take in order to survive?

     

  • Addicted: A Novel

    by Zane

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    *ships in 7 - 10 business days*

    Before there was E.L. James’s 50 Shades of Grey, there was Zane’s Addicted. Once described as “the hottest paperback in the country” by the New York Times and now a major motion picture distributed by Lionsgate, this wildly popular novel by the Queen of Erotica follows one woman’s life as it spirals out of control when her three extramarital affairs lead her down a dark and twisted path.

    For successful African-American businesswoman Zoe Reynard, finding the pleasure she wants, the way she wants it, is not worth the risk of losing everything she has: marriage to the man she has loved since childhood, a thriving company, and three wonderful children. But Zoe feels helpless in the grip of an overpowering addiction…to sex.

    Finding a compassionate woman therapist to help her, Zoe finally summons the courage to tell her torrid story, a tale of guilt and desire as shocking as it is compelling. From the sensitive artist with whom she spends stolen hours on rumpled sheets to the rough and violent man who draws her toward destruction, Zoe is a woman desperately searching for fulfillment—and something darker, deeper, and perhaps deadly. As her life spins out of control and her sexual escapades carry her toward a dangerous choice, Zoe is racing against time to uncover the source of her “fatal attraction”—as chilling secrets tumble forth from the recesses of a woman's mind, and perilous temptations lead toward a climax that can threaten her sanity, her marriage…and her life.

  • We Lie Here: A Thriller by Rachel Howzell Hall
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    A 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.

  • Afterlives: A Novel

    by Abdulrazak Gurnah

    $28.00

    *ships/available for pickup in 7-10 business days

    When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza too, is back from the war. He was not stolen but sold into service, where he became the protégé of an officer whose special interest has left him literally scarred for life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks only steady work and safety – until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, ready to snatch them up and once again carry them away.
    Spanning from the end of the nineteenth century, when the Europeans carved up Africa, on through the tumultuous decades of revolt and suppression that followed, AFTERLIVES is an astonishingly moving portrait of survivors refusing to sacrifice their humanity to the violent forces that assail them.

  • Peaces: A Novel

    by Helen Oyeyemi

    $17.00

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

     

    The prize-winning, bestselling author of Gingerbread; Boy, Snow, Bird; and What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours returns with a vivid and inventive new novel about a couple forever changed by an unusual train voyage.


    When Otto and Xavier Shin declare their love, an aunt gifts them a trip on a sleeper train to mark their new commitment - and to get them out of her house. Setting off with their pet mongoose, Otto and Xavier arrive at their sleepy local train station, but quickly deduce that The Lucky Day is no ordinary locomotive. Their trip on this former tea-smuggling train has been curated beyond their wildest imaginations, complete with mysterious and welcoming touches, like ingredients for their favorite breakfast. They seem to be the only people onboard, until Otto discovers a secretive woman who issues a surprising message. As further clues and questions pile up, and the trip upends everything they thought they knew, Otto and Xavier begin to see connections to their own pasts, connections that now bind them together.

    A spellbinding tale from a star author, Peaces is about what it means to be seen by another person--whether it's your lover or a stranger on a train--and what happens when things you thought were firmly in the past turn out to be right beside you.

  • Lakewood: A Novel

    by Megan Giddings

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    A startling debut about class and race, Lakewood evokes a terrifying world of medical experimentation—part The Handmaid’s Tale, part The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

    When Lena Johnson’s beloved grandmother dies, and the full extent of the family debt is revealed, the black millennial drops out of college to support her family and takes a job in the mysterious and remote town of Lakewood, Michigan.

    On paper, her new job is too good to be true. High paying. No out of pocket medical expenses. A free place to live. All Lena has to do is participate in a secret program—and lie to her friends and family about the research being done in Lakewood. An eye drop that makes brown eyes blue, a medication that could be a cure for dementia, golden pills promised to make all bad thoughts go away.

    The discoveries made in Lakewood, Lena is told, will change the world—but the consequences for the subjects involved could be devastating. As the truths of the program reveal themselves, Lena learns how much she’s willing to sacrifice for the sake of her family.

    Provocative and thrilling, Lakewood is a breathtaking novel that takes an unflinching look at the moral dilemmas many working-class families face, and the horror that has been forced on black bodies in the name of science.

  • God Help the Child

    by Toni Morrison

    $14.95

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A New York Times Notable Book • This fiery and provocative novel from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.

    At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride’s mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that “what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”

  • The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull
    $16.99

    Ships in 7-10 business days.

    Now Available In Paperback

    *Winner of the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards for Speculative Fiction (Debut Category)*

    Included in Oprah Magazine's "16 Books to Read to Celebrate Caribbean-American Heritage Month

    Named a Best Book of 2019 by Polygon, Barnes and Noble, Publishers WeeeklyKirkus, Library Journal, and Fountain Bookstore!

    Shortlisted for the 2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

    Longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Awards.

    Included in Locus' 2019 Recommended Reading List for First Novel.

    AAMBC Literary Award Nominee for Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy Author of the Year.

    An alien ship rests over Water Island. For five years the people of the US Virgin Islands have lived with the Ynaa, a race of superadvanced aliens on a research mission they will not fully disclose. They are benevolent in many ways but meet any act of aggression with disproportional wrath. This has led to a strained relationship between the Ynaa and the local Virgin Islanders and a peace that cannot last.

    A year after the death of a young boy at the hands of an Ynaa, three families find themselves at the center of the inevitable conflict, witnesses and victims to events that will touch everyone and teach a terrible lesson.

  • Filthy Animals

    by Brandon Taylor

    from $16.00

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    In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.

    One of the breakout literary stars of 2020, Brandon Taylor has been hailed by Roxane Gay as “a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways.” With Filthy Animals he renews and expands on the promise made in Real Life, training his precise and unsentimental gaze on the tensions among friends and family, lovers and others. Psychologically taut and quietly devastating, Filthy Animals is a tender portrait of the fierce longing for intimacy, the lingering presence of pain, and the desire for love in a world that seems, more often than not, to withhold it.

  • Harlem Sunset

    by Nekesa Afia

    $16.00

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    A riveting Harlem Renaissance Mystery featuring Louise Lloyd, a young Black woman working in a hot new speakeasy when she gets caught up in a murder that hits too close to home...

    Harlem, 1927. Twenty-seven-year-old Louise Lloyd has found the perfect job! She is the new manager of the Dove, a club owned by her close friend Rafael Moreno. There Louise meets Nora Davies, one of the girls she was kidnapped with a decade ago. The two women—along with Rafael and his sister, Louise’s girlfriend, Rosa Maria—spend the night at the Dove, drinking and talking. The next morning, Rosa Maria wakes up covered in blood, with no memory of the previous night. Nora is lying dead in the middle of the dance floor. 
     
    Louise knows Rosa Maria couldn’t have killed Nora, but the police have a hard time believing that no one can remember anything at all about what happened. When Louise and Rosa Maria return to their apartment after being questioned by the police, they find the word GUILTY written across the living room wall in paint that looks a lot like blood. Someone has gone to great lengths to frame and terrify Rosa Maria, and Louise will stop at nothing to clear the woman she loves.  

  • Business Not As Usual

    by Sharon C. Cooper

    $16.00

    *ships/available for pickup in 7-10 business days

    A woman learns the hard way about mixing business with pleasure in this hilarious new romantic comedy by USA Today bestselling author Sharon C. Cooper.

    I am beautiful. I am confident. I am lovable. I am a lottery winner.

    This is the mantra that will get Dreamy Daniels through each day until she makes it big. So what if she lives in a seedy part of Los Angeles in a house that’s one earthquake away from crumbling, or works an unfulfilling secretarial job while struggling to finish her bachelor’s degree? All Dreamy needs to do is win the lottery, which she’s been entering in as a weekly tradition with her grandfather. When she catches the attention of her boss’s potential investor, Dreamy has to remind herself to focus on her career goals so she can be her own boss. Who cares if he has the social grace of the Duke of Sussex and the suaveness of Idris Elba? No distractions allowed.

    Growing up with a father who is an A-list actor and a socialite mother, venture capitalist Karter Redford lives in the world of the rich and famous. Instead of attending movie premieres, however, he prefers spending his time helping the less fortunate, backing start-up companies and investing in cutting-edge ideas. Karter is used to his life revolving around work, but when he decides he wants someone to share it with, he falls for someone his mother would never approve of: hilarious, quirky Dreamy, who has goals of her own…but also isn’t a wealthy, upper-crust socialite. Though it’s clear they’re from different worlds, their relationship might just be his greatest investment yet.

  • Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

    by Ntozake Shange

    $19.99

    Ntozake Shange's beloved Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is the story of three sisters and their mother from Charleston, South Carolina.

    Ntozake Shange's beloved Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is the story of three sisters and their mother from Charleston, South Carolina. Sassafrass, the oldest, is a poet and a weaver like her mother before her. Having gone north to college, she is now living with other artists in Los Angeles and trying to weave a life out of her work, her man, her memories and dreams. Cypress, the dancer, leaves home to find new ways of moving in the world. Indigo, the youngest, is still a child of Charleston--"too much of the south in her"--who lives in poetry and has the supreme gift of seeing the obvious magic of the world. Shange's rich and wondrous story of womanhood, art, and passionately-lived lives is written "with such exquisite care and beauty that anybody can relate to her message" (The New York Times).

     

  • Juneteenth: A Novel

    Ralph Ellison

    $25.00

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    “Tell me what happened while there’s still time,” demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerant Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. Bliss’s history encompasses the joys of young southern boyhood, bucolic days as a filmmaker, lovemaking in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: How did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals?

    With new material by John F. Callahan, who first compiled Juneteenth out of thousands of manuscript pages in 1999, and an updated introduction by National Book Award-winning author Charles R. Johnson, this brilliantly crafted, moving, and wise novel is the work of an American master.

  • For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

    by Ntozake Shange

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    From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange's words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century.

    First published in 1975 when it was praised by The New Yorker for "encompassing...every feeling and experience a woman has ever had," for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

  • I'll Make A Spectacle of You
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    This heart-pounding Southern gothic horror debut from Beatrice Winifred Iker, takes readers to Bricksbury University, the oldest and most storied HBCU in the nation. But as one student is about to find out, a long history comes with a legacy of secrets.
     
    Zora Robinson is an ambitious grad student in her dream program, Appalachian Studies, at Bricksbury University. When her thesis advisor hands her a strange diary and suggests she research the local folklore about a beast roaming the woods surrounding campus, Zora finds a community uneager to talk to an outsider.
     
    As she delves into the history of the beast, she uncovers a rumored secret society called the Keepers that has tenuous ties to the beast…and Bricksbury itself. Zora soon finds herself plagued by visions of the past, and her grip on reality starts to slip as she struggles to uncover what is real and what is folklore. But when a student goes missing, Zora starts to wonder if the Keepers ever really disbanded.
     
    There’s something in the woods and it has its eyes on Zora.

  • A Love Tap
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    Bernardo Wade’s A Love Tap—introduced by award-winning poet and essayist Ross Gay—reckons with complexities of racial identity, masculinity, recovery, and spirituality, revealing the narrative and psychic evolution of a poet who has found himself in the language.

    Wade’s evocative debut swaggers through time, through family, through love, through the perseverance of growing up in the deep South as a Black son with a white mom. Illustrating the strangeness and cacophony of his native New Orleans, he divines sweet relief in small mercies—a rosary strung with Mardi Gras beads, a Sunday football game, Nigel Hall covering Frankie Beverly in Lafayette Square, bare feet in a stream, a mother kneading dough. In intimate, nuanced portraits of loved ones, in requiems and broken sestinas, he pushes past his trauma, troubling the years he spent in addiction or resenting his father.

    As he maps out the parts he played in his life’s most formative moments, he can’t help but “retune the heart / strings of hard men,” teaching us how to become more human, often in the face of inhumanity. Here, he manages to land, not a crushing blow, but a love tap—the softest way to knuckle another’s cheek.

  • Coach (5) (Track)
    $17.99

    In this companion to Jason Reynolds’s award-winning and New York Times bestselling Track series, meet Coach as a boy striving to come into his own as a track star while facing upheaval at home.

    Before Coach was the man who gave caring yet firm-handed guidance to Ghost, Lu, Patina, and Sunny on the Defenders track team, he was little Otie Brody, who was obsessed with Mr. 9.99 (a.k.a. Carl Lewis) and Marty McFly from Back to the Future. Like Mr. 9.99—and his own dad—Otie is a sprinter. Sprint free or die is practically his motto.

    Then his dad, who is always away on business trips, comes home with a pair of Jordans. JORDANS. Fine as fine can be. Otie puts them on and feels like he can leap to the moon…maybe even leap like Mr. 9.99 when he won the Olympic gold medal in the long jump. But one morning he wakes up to find his brand-new secret weapon kicks are missing—right off his feet! And Otie just might have a fuzzy memory of his dad easing them off as Otie was sleeping, but that can’t be right, can it?

    Unless all the reasons for his dad’s “gone’s” are very different from what he’s been told… Because now, not only are the Jordans missing, but so is his father.

  • Blackass: A Novel
    $16.00

    Furo Wariboko, a young Nigerian, awakes the morning before a job interview to find that he's been transformed into a white man. In this condition he plunges into the bustle of Lagos to make his fortune. With his red hair, green eyes, and pale skin, it seems he's been completely changed. Well, almost. There is the matter of his family, his accent, his name. Oh, and his black ass. Furo must quickly learn to navigate a world made unfamiliar and deal with those who would use him for their own purposes. Taken in by a young woman called Syreeta and pursued by a writer named Igoni, Furo lands his first-ever job, adopts a new name, and soon finds himself evolving in unanticipated ways.

    A. Igoni Barrett's Blackass is a fierce comic satire that touches on everything from race to social media while at the same time questioning the values society places on us simply by virtue of the way we look. As he did in Love Is Power, or Something Like That, Barrett brilliantly depicts life in contemporary Nigeria and details the double-dealing and code-switching that are implicit in everyday business. But it's Furo's search for an identity--one deeper than skin--that leads to the final unraveling of his own carefully constructed story.

  • Black American Short Stories (American Century Series)
    $22.00

    The success of John Henrik Clarke's American Negro Short Stories, first published in 1966, affirmed the vitality and importance of black fiction. Now this expanded edition of that best-selling book, with a new title, offers the reader thirty-one stories included in the original―from Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar in the late nineteenth century to the rich and productive work of the Harlem Renaissance: writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright; the World War II accomplishments of Chester Himes, Frank Yerby, and many others; and the later fiction of James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka). Seven additional contributions round out a century of great stories with the work of Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Eugenia Collier, Jennifer Jordan, James Allan McPherson, Rosemarie Robotham, and Alice Walker. Dr. Clarke has included a new introduction to this 1993 edition, and a short biography of each contributor.

  • Kookie Dough (Jacobs Brothers)
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    The rules were simple.

    This week only.
    No emotions.
    No attachments.
    No expectations.
    Just sex.
    Nothing more.
    Nothing less.
    Never again.
    And no one could find out.

    Those were the rules that Kayadah Kookman and Jonel Jacobs decided on when a vacation fling was put on the table.

    A fling neither one of them saw coming.

    But a wild night left them both throwing caution to the wind and bending the rules.

    Find out which ones were broken.

    _____

    This is second book in the Jacobs Brothers series. Each book will feature a different brother. The first book, Finding Kristmas - featuring X + Deuce - does not need to be read beforehand.

  • There Are Rivers in the Sky: A Novel
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    From the Booker Prize finalist, author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two great rivers, all connected by a single drop of water. • "Make place for Elif Shafak on your bookshelf [and] in your heart. You won't regret it."—Arundhati Roy, winner of the Booker Prize

    In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.

    In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.

    In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.

    In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.

    A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, which remanifests across the centuries. A source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

  • The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025

    Nnedi Okorafor

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    A 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.

  • Fortress of Ambrose (House of Marionne)

    J. Elle

    $20.99

    Seductive magic. Deadly betrayal.

    Don’t miss the explosive finale of the dark, romantic fantasy of the New York Times-bestselling House of Marionne series, which #1 bestselling author Alex Aster praises as "a sweeping fantasy brimming with magic, secrets, and romance."

    The stunning first printing of Fortress of Ambrose will feature a gorgeous designed case and exclusive metallic endpapers!

    With the future of the Order clouded in uncertainty, and the evil within its ranks coming to the surface, Quell Marionne has nowhere left to turn.

    Everyone Quell cares about is gone and she still can’t escape the powerful legacy that wants to destroy her. But when she uncovers an earth-shattering revelation, she must choose: be the hero the magic world needs or save Jordan.

    Meanwhile, a darkness festers inside Dragunheart Jordan Wexton. His path to survival means becoming the monster he was bred to hate, if he can overcome the power rotting within himself.

    In a world where the line between proper and forbidden magic blurs, Quell and Jordan, along with two unlikely allies – bitter assassin Yagrin Wexton and magicless Heir Nore Ambrose, must navigate a treachero's path where freedom hangs by a thread. Can love tip the scales toward freedom? Or will rivalries and deadly betrayals shatter their hearts and destroy the world they once knew?

  • Little Movements: A Novel

    Lauren Morrow

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    A sparkling debut novel about a woman who must figure out whether being creatively fulfilled is compatible with being happily married, and what it means to be a Black artist in one of the whitest parts of America.

    Thirty-something Layla Smart was raised by her mother to dream medium. But all Layla’s ever wanted was a career in dance, which requires dreaming big. So when she receives an offer to be the choreographer-in-residence at Briar House in rural Vermont, she temporarily leaves behind Brooklyn, her job, her friends, and her husband to pursue it.

    Layla has nine months to navigate a complex institution and teach a career-defining dance to a group of Black dancers in a very small, very white town. She has help from a handsome composer, a neurotic costume designer, a witty communications director, and the austere program director who can only compare Layla to Black choreographers. It's an enormous feat, and that’s before Layla’s marriage buckles under the strain of distance, before Briar House’s problematic past comes to light, and before Layla finds out she's pregnant.

    Little Movements is a poignant and insightful story that explores issues of race, class, art, and ambition. It is a novel about self-discovery, the pressures placed on certain bodies, and never giving up on your dream.

  • The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze

    Derrick Barnes

    $17.99

    "Derrick Barnes takes all forms of storytelling available to him­—allegory, folktales, and classics—to weave a novel that is empowered, empowering, and incredibly human. You won't be the same after reading it."
    —Erin Entrada Kelly, two-time winner of the Newbery Medal

    National Book Award finalist and Newbery Honoree Derrick Barnes tackles timely issues of race and prejudice in this powerful, nuanced novel about an accomplished Black boy who strives to be seen as human.

    In the small town of Great Mountain, Mississippi, all eyes are on Henson Blayze, a thirteen-year-old football phenom whose talents seem almost superhuman. The predominately white townsfolk have been waiting for Henson to play high-school ball, and now they’re overjoyed to finally possess an elite Black athlete of their own.

    Until a horrifying incident forces Henson to speak out about injustice.
    Until he says that he might not play football anymore.
    Until he quickly learns he isn’t as loved by the people as he thought.

    In that moment, Henson’s town is divided into two chaotic sides when all he wants is justice. Even his best friends and his father can’t see eye to eye. When he is told to play ball again or else, Henson must decide whether he was born to entertain people who may not even see him as human, or if he’s destined for a different kind of greatness.

    Written for children ages 10 and up, Derrick Barnes’s groundbreaking novel masterfully combines a modern-day allegory with classic-style tall tales to weave a compelling story of America’s obsession with relegating Black people to labor or entertainment. Spanning the 1800s to today, this exceptional story shows how much has changed over centuries. . . and, at the same time, how little.

  • What Makes YOU Happy?

    Nedra Glover Tawwab

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    By the influential relationship therapist and bestselling author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, this story will help young kids learn to express their own needs rather than people-pleasing.

    Avery loves to make people happy—so much so that she often ignores her own wants and needs. If a friend's favorite color is yellow, she always gives that friend the yellow marker. If someone wants PB&J for lunch, she gives up her own sandwich.

    Now, her birthday is coming up and she's having trouble deciding what to do for her party. She knows her friends would love going to an amusement park, so maybe she should ignore the fact that the rides make her feel sick. Her brother loves superheroes, so she's considering having a superhero party. Luckily, her friends help her realize it's OK to do what makes you happy—especially on your own special day. Her birthday party is her best one yet!

  • The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: A Novel

    Kiran Desai

    $32.00

    A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss

    “A novel so wonderful, when I got to the last page, I turned to the first and began again.”—Sandra Cisneros
    "A grand and stirring love story, written in exquisite prose . . . [a] sheer delight!"—Namwali Serpell

    When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.

    Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

    The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

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