An insightful, witty novel set in early twentieth-century black Boston by the Harlem Renaissance's youngest member--reissued for a new generation of readers.
Fiction
- When It's Real
When It's Real
Nicole Jackson
Sold outBabi is holding her incarcerated man, Too Low, down. She loves him dearly, but is now questioning their future, as she realizes that he’s never going to change. Then just as she begins to reexamine her relationship, she ends up laying hands on an associate, damaging a certain somebody’s car in the process. Now, Face, the car owner, wants Babi to pay up, and we’re not talking monetarily.
What will Babi do when she faces temptation? Will she fold when a rich man wants her? Or will she remain loyal to her first and only love?
Exclusive content from The Borrowed Love crew is also at the end of this novel only in paperback. - Murder from A to Z (Mystery Bookshop)
Murder from A to Z (Mystery Bookshop)
V.M. Burns
$17.95When Michigan bookshop owner and mystery writer Samantha Washington and her sister, Jenna, agreed to host a class for seniors on estate planning, they didn’t plan on discovering shady doings at Shady Acres Retirement Village . . .
Nana Jo has volunteered her lawyer granddaughter, Jenna, to teach estate planning to retirees—with Sam providing her bookshop as the venue. But during the seminar, entitled Getting Your Ducks in Order, it quickly becomes clear someone’s up to Fowl Play. When elderly Alva Tarkington, accompanied by her niece, sits down for a consultation, Sam realizes the woman’s frequent blinking is actually Morse Code—S.O.S. The sisters get her alone, and Alva tells them she believes her life is in danger and must change her will . . .
Unfortunately, Alva is found dead the next day—seemingly from natural causes. But Nana Jo and the sisters suspect otherwise. In between penning her latest historical mystery, set in 1939 as England declares war on Germany and Lady Elizabeth Marsh pursues stolen paintings and a traitor, Sam teams up with the senior sleuths of Shady Acres to search for motives—beginning with Alva’s family. They soon learn not everyone is who they say they are, and someone is more than qualified to teach a class on cold-blooded murder . . .
- A Day with No Words
A Day with No Words
Tiffany Hammond
$18.99The #1 New York Times bestselling picture book by Tiffany Hammond, the creator of the popular Fidgets and Fries platform, invites readers into the life of an Autistic family who communicate without spoken language.
Aidan doesn't talk with words. He uses a tablet, tapping buttons with pictures to show what he means.
When Mama taps “Park . . . now?” Aidan quickly taps back “Yes.” And after Aidan twirls and twirls in the grass until he can no longer stand, he taps, “All done.”
Not everyone understands their family's unique way of communicating, though. Some think that because Aidan doesn't say words, he doesn't know words. But verbal speech isn't the only way we can connect with others. We can use tablets and letter boards, facial expressions, hand gestures, and written words.
With tenderness and heart, A Day with No Words illuminates the many unique ways people can understand each other, even if they don't speak.
- Link + Hud: Sharks & Minnows (Link & Hud, 2)
Link + Hud: Sharks & Minnows (Link & Hud, 2)
Jerome Pumphrey
$16.99Link and Hud are back with more mischief and mayhem in the series “full of Black boy joy, brother love, and silliness” (Book Riot).
Deep sea treasure hunting. Supersonic water walking. Swimming with sharks.
Lincoln and Hudson Dupré are brothers with active imaginations. When one of their imaginary adventures leads to the outdoor pool at the recreation center being closed, they’re faced with a choice: join the Sharks swim team or miss out on swimming altogether. But Coach Strickler is old-school and runs his team by the rules. Will the boys outwit their coach, make practice fun―and make the team?
Black-and-white illustrations throughout
- The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems
The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems
Patricia Smith
$30.00“Patricia Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last.” —Danez Smith, The Guardian
A collection of the finest new and selected poems from one of the most groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a “masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard” (Poetry Foundation).
The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s decorated career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows—and of Smith’s necessary voice.
Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder stunningly explores the fullness of living. The inimitable poetry of Patricia Smith radiates in The Intentions of Thunder—reaffirming Smith’s place as one of the indispensable poets of our time.
- Hide and Seeker
Hide and Seeker
Daka Hermon
Sold outOne of our most iconic childhood games receives a creepy twist as it becomes the gateway to a nightmare world.
Justin knows that something is wrong with his best friend. Zee went missing for a year. And when he came back, he was... different. Nobody knows what happened to him. At Zee's welcome-home party, Justin and the neighborhood crew play Hide and Seek. But it goes wrong. Very wrong.
One by one, everyone who plays the game disappears, pulled into a world of nightmares come to life. Justin and his friends realize this horrible place is where Zee had been trapped. All they can do now is hide from the Seeker.
- The Living Is Easy
The Living Is Easy
Dorothy West
$19.95 - The Long Fall (Leonid McGill)
The Long Fall (Leonid McGill)
Walter Mosley
$22.00The widely praised New York Times bestseller, and Mosley's first new series since his acclaimed Easy Rawlins novels...
Leonid McGill is an ex-boxer and a hard drinker looking to clean up his act. He's an old-school P.I. working a New York City that's gotten a little too fancy all around him. But it's still full of dirty secrets, and as McGill unearths them, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be tested to the limit...
- A Mercy
A Mercy
Toni Morrison
$17.00NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In “one of Morrison’s most haunting works” (The New York Times),the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the story of a mother and a daughter—a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.
- Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black
Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black
Harriet E. Wilson
$16.95With a New Introduction and Notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Richard J. Ellis
A fascinating fusion of two literary models of the nineteenth century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, Our Nig, apart from its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in nineteenth-century Massachusetts.
This definitive edition of Our Nig includes a new Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Richard J. Ellis and a set of appendices: "Harriet Wilson's Career as a Spiritualist"; "Hattie E. Wilson in the Banner of Light and Spiritual Scientist" a collection of her extant contributions to these newspapers; "Documents from Harriet Wilson's Life in Boston," and a compilation of primary source material relating to Wilson's identity. There is also a new chronology of the life of Harriet Wilson by Richard J. Ellis, as well as an up-to-date Select Bibliography of current scholarship regarding Harriet Wilson. This edition gives the fullest account to date of the life of Harriet Wilson, filling out many critical points regarding her life after writing Our Nig, in particular when she became a "medium" who communicated with the dead and as an educator in the "Spiritualist" movement after the Civil War.
- Dork Diaries 1: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life (1)
Dork Diaries 1: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life (1)
Rachel Renée Russell
$14.99Nikki Maxwell is starting eighth grade at a new school—and her very first diary is packed with hilarious stories and art in this SUPER SQUEE updated edition of the first book in the #1 New York Times bestselling Dork Diaries series!
Nikki confesses all in her first diary ever: her epic battle with her mom for an iPhone, meeting her new soon-to-be BFFs Chloe and Zoey, falling for adorably sweet crush Brandon, dealing with her zany little sister Brianna’s antics—and the immediate clashes with mean girl MacKenzie, who becomes Nikki’s rival in a school-wide art competition.
Nearly 30 million books in print worldwide!
- The Known World: A Novel
The Known World: A Novel
Edward P. Jones
$17.99Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Award and recognized as the best book of fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times, Edward P. Jones's The Known World is a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power and continues to show its importance to the American literary canon.
Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love under the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave “speculators” sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.
An ambitious, courageous, luminously written masterwork, The Known World seamlessly weaves the lives of the freed and the enslaved—and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. The Known World not only marks the return of an extraordinarily gifted writer, it heralds the publication of a remarkable contribution to the canon of American classic literature.
- Lonely Crowds : A Novel
Lonely Crowds : A Novel
Stephanie Wambugu
from $18.99*Paperback Release Date - 7/7/26*
Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early '90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it.
Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world.
While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.
Ruth and Maria's decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead. - Sugar, Baby
Sugar, Baby
Celine Saintclares
Sold outFrom a dazzling new voice, a bold, intoxicating novel that shows "the grit alongside the glamor" (Vogue) of high-paid sex work in the age of the internet.
Sugar, Baby follows Agnes, a mixed-race 21-year-old whose life seems to be heading nowhere. Still living at home, she works as a cleaner and spends all her money in clubs on the weekends searching for distractions from her mundane life. That is until she meets Emily, daughter of one of her cleaning clients, who lives in London and works as a model . . . and a sugar baby, dating rich older men for money.
Emily's life is the escape Agnes has been longing for-extravagant tasting menus, champagne on tap, glamorous hotels with unlimited room service, designer gifts from dates who call her beautiful. But this new lifestyle is the last straw for her religious mother Constance.
Kicked out of her family home, Agnes moves in with Emily and the other sugar babies in their fancy London flat and is drawn deeper and deeper into their world. But these women come from money: they possess a safety net Agnes does not. And as she is thrown from one precarious relationship to the next-a married man who wants to show off the glamourous, exotic girl on his arm; a Russian billionaire's wife who makes Agnes central to a sex party in Miami-she finds herself searching for fulfillment just as desperately as she was before.
A compelling journey of self-discovery that offers sharp commentary on race, beauty, and class, Sugar, Baby is an electric, original, spellbinding novel that will keep readers turning the pages until the very end.
- Mending Bodies
Mending Bodies
Lai Chu Hon
$18.00In a failing city, a government program incentivizes couples to “conjoin”—surgically attach themselves to one another—promising a flourishing economy, ecological revitalization, and personal fulfillment. A student writing her dissertation on the program’s history begins to suffer from insomnia. As her world unravels and under the weight of expectations by both society and her close friends, she worries that maybe they are all right when they tell her it would be better—for the good of another person and for the good of the country—to sacrifice everything that she is and get conjoined. Mending Bodies blends body horror and political allegory to explore a world where even the motives of those you love most are shaped by larger forces.
- A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke (Las Leonas, 3)
A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke (Las Leonas, 3)
Adriana Herrera
$18.99He's not like other dukes…
Paris, 1889
Physician Aurora Montalban Wright takes risks in her career, but never with her heart. Running an underground women’s clinic exposes her to certain dangers, but help arrives in the unexpected form of the infuriating Duke of Annan. Begrudgingly, Aurora accepts his protection, then promptly finds herself in his bed.
New to his role as a duke, Apollo César Sinclair Robles struggles to embrace his position. With half of society waiting for him to misstep and the other half looking to discredit him, Apollo never imagined that his enthralling bedmate would become his most trusted adviser. Soon, he realizes the rebellious doctor could be the perfect duchess for him. But Aurora won’t give up her independence, and her secrets make her unsuitable for the aristocracy.
When dangerous figures from their pasts return to threaten them, Apollo whisks Aurora away to the French Riviera. Far from the reproachful eye of Parisian society, can Apollo convince Aurora that their bond is stronger than the forces keeping them apart?
Can't get enough of the Las Leonas?
* Book 1: A Caribbean Heiress in Paris
* Book 2: An Island Princess Starts a Scandal
* Book 3: A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke - The Eyes Are the Best Part
The Eyes Are the Best Part
Monika Kim
$19.95PRE-ORDER. ON SALE DATE: March 31, 2026
“Violent, smart, gruesome and wildly original, this novel pulls readers into a horrific world of murder and cannibalism while also critiquing misogyny, exploring Asian fetishization and stereotypes, sharing what it’s like to navigate two cultures and telling a touching story of a family in turmoil.” —New York Times Book Review
TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Crying in H-Mart meets My Sister, the Serial Killer in this brilliantly subversive, feminist psychological horror novel about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective.
Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her Appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying . . . yet enticing.
In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Mouthwatering blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescendingly toward Ji-won and her sister, as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. But George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that.
No matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.
"I was enticed from the first line and entertained throughout. The Eyes Are the Best Part is a quirky, engaging read."—Oyinkan Brainthwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer
- The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
by Dinaw Mengestu
$18.00Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C., his only companions two fellow African immigrants who share his bitter nostalgia and longing for his home continent. Years ago and worlds away Sepha could never have imagined a life of such isolation. As his environment begins to change, hope comes in the form of a friendship with new neighbors Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter. But when a series of racial incidents disturbs the community, Sepha may lose everything all over again.
Watch a QuickTime interview with Dinaw Mengestu about this book.
- The Rich People Have Gone Away: A Novel
The Rich People Have Gone Away: A Novel
by Regina Porter
$18.00A diverse group of New Yorkers are brought together by the search for a missing woman—in this electric novel of secrets, connection, and community.
Brooklyn, 2020. Theo Harper and his pregnant wife, Darla, head upstate to their summer cottage to wait out the lockdown. Not everyone in their upscale Park Slope building has this privilege: not Xavier, the teenager in the Cardi B T-shirt, nor Darla’s best friend, Ruby, and her partner, Katsumi, who stay behind to save their Michelin-starred restaurant.
During an upstate hike on the aptly named Devil’s Path, Theo divulges a long-held secret—and when Darla disappears after the ensuing argument, he finds himself the prime suspect. As Darla’s and Theo’s families and friends come together to search for her, with Ruby and Katsumi stepping in to broker peace, past and present collide with startling consequences.
Set against the pulse of an ever-changing city, The Rich People Have Gone Away connects the lives of ordinary New Yorkers to tell a powerful story of hope, love, and inequity in our times—while reminding us that no one leaves the past behind completely.
- A Shimmer of Red
A Shimmer of Red
by Valerie Wilson Wesley
$16.95*ships in 7-10 business days
With pandemic-fearing city dwellers fleeing to the New Jersey suburbs, Risko Realty—and Odessa Jones—are having their best year ever. Finally on solid financial footing, Odessa is debt-free and looking forward to the future. But she doesn’t need second sight to sense her new young co-worker, Anna Lee, is on edge--and straight-up terrified--in spite of her hot sales record and sunny, outgoing attitude. And when Anna is killed in a hit-and-run, Odessa sees immediately that it was no accident . . .
It's soon clear that Anna was being stalked. But even with the help of family, friends—and Odessa’s feisty cat, Juniper—Odessa is coming up with more questions than clues. Why was Anna avoiding influential real-estate mogul Emily Delbarton? Why is Delbarton’s decidedly creepy brother so fixated on Anna? Did Anna make enemies through her previous job at the town’s exclusive gentlemen’s club? And can Odessa rule out her own ex-fiancé—who’s back in her life with an astounding connection to Anna—and wanting a second chance? Finding the answers will come at an increasingly deadly cost—one Odessa’s talents must somehow trap a killer to repay . . . - The Nigerwife
The Nigerwife
by Vanessa Walters
Sold out*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*
In this twisty and electrifying debut novel, a young woman goes missing in Lagos, Nigeria, and her estranged auntie will stop at nothing to find the truth behind her disappearance. Perfect for fans of My Sister, the Serial Killer and The Last Thing He Told Me.
Nicole Oruwari has the perfect life: a handsome husband; a palatial house in the heart of glittering Lagos, Nigeria; and a glamorous group of friends. She left gloomy London and a troubled family past behind for sunny, moneyed Lagos, becoming part of the Nigerwives—a community of foreign women married to Nigerian men.
But when Nicole disappears without a trace after a boat trip, the cracks in her so-called perfect life start to show. As the investigation turns up nothing but dead ends, her auntie Claudine decides to take matters into her own hands. Armed with only a cell phone and a plane ticket to Nigeria, she digs into her niece’s life and uncovers a hidden side filled with dark secrets, isolation, and even violence. But the more she discovers about Nicole, the more Claudine’s own buried history threatens to come to light.
An inventively told and keenly observant thriller where nothing is as it seems, The Nigerwife offers a razor-sharp look at the bonds of family, the echoing consequences of secrets, and whether we can ever truly outrun our past. - Notes on Her Color: A Novel
Notes on Her Color: A Novel
by Jennifer Neal
$27.00*ships in 7-10 business days*
Florida kitsch swirls together with magical realism in this glittering debut novel about a young Black and Indigenous woman who learns to change the color of her skin
Gabrielle has always had a complicated relationship with her mother Tallulah, one marked by intimacy and resilience in the face of a volatile patriarch. Everything in their home has been bleached a cold white—from the cupboards filled with sheets and crockery to the food and spices Tallulah cooks with. Even Gabrielle, who inherited the ability to change the color of her skin from her mother, is told to pass into white if she doesn’t want to upset her father.
But this vital mother-daughter bond implodes when Tallulah is hospitalized for a mental health crisis. Separated from her mother for the first time in her life, Gabrielle must learn to control the temperamental shifts in her color on her own.
Meanwhile, Gabrielle is spending a year after high school focusing on her piano lessons, an extracurricular her father is sure will make her a more appealing candidate for pre med programs. Her instructor, a queer, dark-skinned woman named Dominique, seems to encapsulate everything Gabrielle is missing in her life—creativity, confidence, and perhaps most importantly, a nurturing sense of love.
Following a young woman looking for a world beyond her family’s carefully -coded existence, Notes on Her Color is a lushly written and haunting tale that shows how love, in its best sense, can be a liberating force from destructive origins. - In West Mills
In West Mills
by De'Shawn Charles Winslow
$16.00*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*
For readers of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie and The Turner House, an intimately told story about a woman living by her own rules and the rural community that struggles to understand her.
Azalea “Knot” Centre is determined to live life as she pleases. Let the people of West Mills say what they will; the neighbors’ gossip won’t keep Knot from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature, and the company of men. And yet, Knot is starting to learn that her freedom comes at a high price. Alone in her one-room shack, ostracized from her relatives and cut off from her hometown, Knot turns to her neighbor, Otis Lee Loving, in search of some semblance of family and home.
Otis Lee is eager to help. A lifelong fixer, Otis Lee is determined to steer his friends and family away from decisions that will cause them heartache and ridicule. After his failed attempt as a teenager to help his older sister, Otis Lee discovers a possible path to redemption in the chaos Knot brings to his doorstep. But while he’s busy trying to fix Knot’s life, Otis Lee finds himself powerless to repair the many troubles within his own family, as the long-buried secrets of his troubled past begin to come to light.
Set in an African American community in rural North Carolina from 1941 to 1987, In West Mills is a magnificent, big-hearted small-town story about family, friendship, storytelling, and the redemptive power of love. - Reggie and Delilah's Year of Falling
Reggie and Delilah's Year of Falling
by Elise Bryant
Sold outFrom the NAACP Image Award–nominated author of Happily Ever Afters comes a dual POV rom-com about Reggie and Delilah, who fall in love through missed connections and chance meetings on holidays over the course of a year.
Delilah always keeps her messy, gooey insides hidden behind a wall of shrugs and yeah, whatevers. She goes with the flow—which is how she ends up singing in her friends’ punk band as a favor, even though she’d prefer to hide at the merch table.
Reggie is a D&D Dungeon Master and self-declared Blerd. He spends his free time leading quests and writing essays critiquing the game under a pseudonym, keeping it all under wraps from his disapproving family.
These two, who have practically nothing in common, meet for the first time on New Year’s Eve. And then again on Valentine’s Day. And then again on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s almost like the universe is pushing them together for a reason.
Delilah wishes she were more like Reggie—open about what she likes and who she is, even if it’s not cool. Except . . . it’s all a front. Reggie is just role-playing someone confident. The kind of guy who could be with a girl like Delilah.
As their holiday meetings continue, the two begin to fall for each other. But what happens once they realize they’ve each fallen for a version of the other that doesn’t really exist?
- River Sing Me Home
River Sing Me Home
by Eleanor Shearer
$27.00Ships in 7-10 business days.
Rare. Moving. Powerful. This beautiful, page-turning and redemptive story of a mother’s gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children in the aftermath of slavery marks the arrival of a remarkable new talent.
Her search begins with an ending.…
The master of the Providence plantation in Barbados gathers his slaves and announces the king has decreed an end to slavery. As of the following day, the Emancipation Act of 1834 will come into effect. The cries of joy fall silent when he announces that they are no longer his slaves; they are now his apprentices. No one can leave. They must work for him for another six years. Freedom is just another name for the life they have always lived. So Rachel runs.
Away from Providence, she begins a desperate search to find her children—the five who survived birth and were sold. Are any of them still alive? Rachel has to know. The grueling, dangerous journey takes her from Barbados then, by river, deep into the forest of British Guiana and finally across the sea to Trinidad. She is driven on by the certainty that a mother cannot be truly free without knowing what has become of her children, even if the answer is more than she can bear. These are the stories of Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy. But above all this is the story of Rachel and the extraordinary lengths to which a mother will go to find her children...and her freedom. - The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
by James Weldon Johnson
Sold outA Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of the groundbreaking classic novel of the Black experience in America that is still remarkably relevant more than a century later.
First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards—and double consciousness—experienced by Black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man became a pioneering document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.
Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to "pass" for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century—from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of ragtime. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but color.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored 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. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times. - Some of Them Will Carry Me by Giada Scodellaro
Some of Them Will Carry Me by Giada Scodellaro
$16.96A fiercely original debut collection centers Black women in moments of imminent change.
Giada Scodellaro’s stories range in length, style, and tone—a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, and art.
What brings them together is a focus on experiences of Black women in moments of dislocation, and a cinematic prose style saturated with detail: a child’s legs bent upon the small bosom of their mother, three-piece suits floating in a river, a man holding a rotting banana during sex, wet cardboard, a woman walking naked through a traffic tunnel.
In language that is lyrical, minimal, and often absurd, the diverse stories in Some of Them Will Carry Me deconstruct contemporary life while building a surprising new reality of language, intimacy, and loss. - Meridian
Meridian
by Alice Walker
$16.99*ships in 7-10 business days
From Alice Walker, author of the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winner The Color Purple, comes Meridian, "a classic novel of both feminism and the Civil Rights movement" (Ms.).
Meridian Hill is a young woman at an Atlanta college attempting to find her place in the 1960s revolution for racial and social equality. She discovers the limits beyond which she will not go for the cause, but despite her decision not to follow the path of some of her peers, she makes significant sacrifices in order to further her beliefs.
Working in a campaign to register African American voters, Meridian cares broadly and deeply for the people she visits, and, while her coworkers quit and move to comfortable homes, she continues to work in the deep South despite a paralyzing illness. Meridian's nonviolent methods, though seemingly less radical than the methods of others, prove to be an effective means of furthering her beliefs.
"A glowing affirmation of the possibility...of love and forgiveness??—??between men and women, black and white."??—??Baltimore Sun - Blue in Green
Blue in Green
by Wesley Brown
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The latest work from the veteran novelist called “one hell of a writer” by James Baldwin and “wonderfully wry” by Donald Barthelme: a timely meditation on the psychological impact of police brutality, through the lens of a day in the life of Miles Davis
Written by playwright and novelist Wesley Brown, Blue in Green narrates one evening in August 1959, when, mere weeks after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of the New York City Police Department outside of the Birdland jazz club. In the aftermath, we enter the strained relationship between Davis and his wife, Frances Taylor, whom he has recently cajoled into ending her run as a performer on Broadway and retiring from modern dance and ballet altogether. Frances, who is increasingly subject to Davis’ temper—fueled by both his professional envy and substance abuse—reckons with her upbringing in Christian Science and, through a fateful meeting with Lena Horne, the conflicting demands of motherhood and artistic vocation. Meanwhile, blowing off steam from his beating, Miles speeds across Manhattan in his sports car. Racing alongside him are recollections of a stony, young John Coltrane, a combative Charlie Parker and the stilted world of the Black middle class he’s left behind.
- The Moment We Met: A Novel by Camille Baker
The Moment We Met: A Novel by Camille Baker
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A meddling app says she’s about to meet her match, but which of the four possibilities is the one—and more importantly, is she ready for love? Find out in this novel about family, soul mates, and chasing dreams by the author of Have We Met?
Tiwanda Harris’s thirtieth birthday is a turning point. Gifted her late mother’s journal, Tiwanda is finally getting a glimpse of who her mother was as an adult. Shortly after, the budding entrepreneur receives a grant to jump-start a delicious business opportunity—and her sweet dreams don’t end there. Tiwanda’s been sent a dating app called Met that promises four matches, and among them, her soul mate. All Tiwanda has to do is tap “Yes”…
Though she’s doubtful about fitting romance into her life, the choices are hers. As the matches begin to surface, Tiwanda is surprised to find that maybe there is some future potential there after all. But which one could lead to real love? Only time will tell. That is, if she can find the time.
With her focus split between launching her career, helping heal old family rifts, maintaining friendships while building new ones, and also trying to open her heart to romantic love, chasing so many dreams is leaving Tiwanda breathless. But who knows? With destiny on her side, maybe there’s a chance all those dreams could come true.
- None But the Righteous: A Novel
None But the Righteous: A Novel
by Chantal James
$16.95Lyrical, riveting, and haunting from its opening lines, None But the Righteous is an extraordinary debut that signals the arrival of an unforgettable new voice in contemporary fiction
In seventeenth-century Peru, St. Martin de Porres was torn from his body after death. His bones were pillaged as relics, and his spirit was said to inhabit those bones. Four centuries later, amid the havoc of Hurricane Katrina, nineteen-year-old Ham escapes New Orleans with his only valued possession: a pendant handed down from his foster mother, Miss Pearl. There’s something about the pendant that has always gripped him, and the curiosity of it has grown into a kind of comfort.
When Ham finally embarks on a fraught journey back home, he seeks the answer to a question he cannot face: Is Miss Pearl still alive? Ham travels from Atlanta to rural Alabama, and from one young woman to another, as he evades the devastation that awaits him in New Orleans. Catching sight of a freedom he’s never known, he must reclaim his body and mind from the spirit who watches over him, guides him, and seizes possession of him. - Another Brooklyn
Another Brooklyn
by Jacqueline Woodson
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National Book Award Finalist
New York Times BestsellerFor August, running into a long-ago friend sets in motion resonant memories and transports her to a time and a place she thought she had mislaid: 1970s Brooklyn, where friendship was everything.
August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi shared confidences as they ambled their neighborhood streets, a place where the girls believed that they were amazingly beautiful, brilliantly talented, with a future that belonged to them.
But beneath the hopeful promise there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where mothers disappeared, where fathers found religion, and where madness was a mere sunset away.
Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative period when a child meets adulthood—when precious innocence meets the all-too-real perils of growing up. In prose exquisite and lyrical, sensuous and tender, Woodson breathes life into memories, portraying an indelible friendship that united young lives.
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