The electric story of two sisters and an unthinkable betrayal.

Mira Guhathakurta is a poetry editor at a distinguished literary magazine in New York, a dream job that has given her nearly everything she's always wanted. And then she reconnects with Jack from college--kind, funny, intelligent Jack--and suddenly Mira feels as if she might have found her soulmate. They've woven their lives together so thoroughly; all that remains is for Jack to meet her family: her beloved father and dear sister Joy. But when Joy commits an unthinkable act of betrayal, the sisters are impossibly fractured and their father's heart is broken. As the sisters navigate their tumultuous relationship and Mira starts over, it turns out that Joy isn't the only one who has been--or continues to be--dishonest.

In a propulsive story of love and passion and the ultimate pull of family, Sisters of a Halved Heart examines the lengths we will go to in order to make our own narratives of love work out, the lies we tell ourselves, and the ways in which the truth, often right in front of you, can be impossible to see.

In Through the Lens, Caridad Moro-Gronlier redefines ekphrasis for a visually saturated world, expanding her poetic gaze beyond the image to include the objects, spaces, texts, and moments that shape our cultural and personal landscapes. These poems do more than describe―they interrogate, interpret, and reflect, treating each subject as a living, dynamic presence. Moro-Gronlier invites the reader to slow down, look again, and reconsider how meaning is made. This genre-defying collection dismantles the frame and reframes the familiar, challenging not only what we perceive, but the very structures that teach us how―and what―it means to see.

MOJORHYTHM is book one of the the three book The Root and Sky Series of short stories.

“Sheree Renée Thomas gives us a whirlpool of poem and story, a 'wild and strangeful breed' of cosmology. . ."―Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio, Pulitzer Prize Winner.

The award-winning Sheree Renée Thomas, author of Nine Bar Blues, returns with a new collection steeped in Hoodoo, fantasy, magic myths, and lore.

Meet a spacefaring prophet of the future digging in the crates of earth's past. Step into a Memphis salon where coiled braids hold ancient power, and stylists conjure Rootwork against forces both seen and unseen. Witness a future where the state claims bodies, and women forge a rebellion of fire and spirit from the land's deep memory. Follow a stylish African dandy spy navigating a world woven with intrigue and hidden currents of power. and enter a legendary diner whose culinary wares change fates.

These tales resonate with the magic and mystery, the deep rhythms and blues of the soul's passage through life and beyond. Short stories that invite readers into realms where ancient traditions and futuristic visions collide in a vibrant chorus of magic, music, and adventure, where the raw pulse of the natural world intertwines with the hum of tomorrow's technology, revealing the boundless wonders of existence.

This is a multigenre brew, strange and wondrous, exploring the supernatural currents of music, history, and culture, Hoodoo as an ancient modern spiritual force and living folklore, the exquisite whimsy and profound horrors found in existence, and the boundless territories of the impossible.

Winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Cameron Awkward-Rich, Les Portes traces how harm against women and femmes takes root, recurs, and reshapes itself across generations. 

Unfolding in three movements—Le Début, Le Passé, and Le Présent—all of which rupture conventional domestic abuse narratives, and drawing heavily from zuihitsu, ekphrasis, erasure, and found forms to mirror the fractured experience of living through and after harm, these poems serve as radical meditations on the power to reflect as resistance. A queer woman caught in an abusive marriage begins to reimagine justice not as punishment but as something restorative, collective, and deeply non-carceral. 

In her debut book, Nnoka poses the question that propels the collection: “Where is the path forward / that ensures no recurrence?” Rather than gesture toward resolution, Les Portes dwells inside this question, and what emerges is not consolation but an immense reckoning.

Love and revolution in a crumbling world order.

Roma has a steady job, a mortgage, and a surrogate family in Queens. But as she moves through her daily routines, the powerful Empire that rules her world bares its teeth elsewhere—crushing freedom movements across the planet, including the Punjabi farmers’ uprising where her younger brother struggles on the frontlines.

Roma’s life is upended when her older brother entrusts her with a strange gift: an ordinary-looking plant that manifests a sophisticated bioengineered technology. The ‘cell’ opens a portal for an extraterrestrial spirit-body bearing news of a liberated future–and the potential to hack AI warfare—propelling Roma and her family into the core of a rising resistance.

As dreams and dialectics converge, Roma meditates on the role of faith—ruminating on mystic poetics and anticolonial legacies while yearning for a bewitching woman whose heart will only ever belong to the revolution.

Interweaving the sacred and the erotic, This Elegance engages with visual arts through the concept of sacra conversazione (“sacred conversation”), a style of Renaissance painting that imagines divine communion across time and space. Here, artists, thinkers, and pop icons commune in a similar sacred dialogue—Kathleen Collins, André Leon Talley, Richmond Barthé, Lyle Ashton Harris, Juan de Pareja, Janelle Monáe, Symone, and others appear as guiding spirits and creative kin.

For a Black, queer person so often dislocated from time and place, pleasure becomes an act of resistance—a grounding in the now. This Elegance is a love song—an offering to Black artistry, a tribute to visionary lives, and a testament to the power of beauty in even our most precarious moments.

By the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Author of On Earth As It Is Beneath

Edgar Wilson has a gruesome job, one he is entirely unsentimental about―he cleans up roadkill in rural Brazil. But one day vultures are circling in the woods, and he can’t not go see what they’re gathering for.What transpires is a quest―a miserable day-long journey―for a couple of poor working men who only want to acknowledge that everybody (and in this case, every literal body) has the right to be treated as more than just scrap or trash. Dead animals, defrocked priests, corpses abandoned in the woods, and a criminal outfit trafficking in body parts―Bury Your Dead is an exhortation, a road trip, a story of friendship, and a hymn to the small ways we can shape the world. Ana Paula Maia’s alchemy with the grimmest of ingredients makes this her more hopeful, generous novel yet.

A comic thriller where, too many craft beers and one crappy punch later, a dutiful trip back home to family spirals into a baffling whirlwind of murder, pills and fraud. 

After many peaceful years abroad, JP has returned home to Mexico to visit family and help care for his elderly mother. Instead, however, he finds himself at a bar, his fist inches from the face of Everardo, his sort-of childhood friend. He lands the blow and runs home. But when Everardo turns up dead the next morning, JP soon finds himself blamed for a murder that he (probably) didn't commit. What’s going on? Can Lagos really be more full of drugs, extortion, and fraud than when he left? Why is everyone offering him pills? How's he ever going to pay for his mother's medical treatment? It wasn't even that good a punch!

Weaving outright hilarity with wry tenderness, The Past Pursues Us is a fast-paced and funny whodunit that lovingly speaks to the stories we tell ourselves about home: about what changes, what doesn't, and what should.

‘I was riveted and charmed by this funny, humane and poignant novel. It’s written in a voice that is as ardent as it is sensitive, one marked by history and yet managing to remain beautifully unruly and independent.’ – Hisham Matar, author of My Friends and The Return 

 In an East London housing office, a frustrated local government employee spends his days trying to figure out what the latest policy announcement means for both himself and the migrants he works with every day. As a favour to a friend, he finds himself roped into organizing the funeral of Ghiyath, a young Syrian refugee. But it is not until his life collides with Ghiyath’s death that he realises just how much he has in common with those who’ve fallen through the cracks. Told with a wry cynicism and deadpan wit, On the Greenwich Line traces the absurdities of racism, austerity, and bureaucracy in contemporary England. This is a story about systemic failure and human courage, and about London and its many lost souls.

RING SHOUT SATURN  is book two of the the three book The Root and Sky Series of short stories.

Sheree Renée Thomas’s electrifying collection transports readers on a cosmic journey where ancient African Diasporic wisdom meets expansive Afrofuturist visions. From a prophet building a starship from salvaged dreams on a Martian farm to children breaking generational curses through powerful moonsongs, these tales explore themes of transformation, survival, and the enduring quest for liberation. Alien sisters navigate human complexities and river spirits offer profound wisdom, all set to an ancient beat that transcends time and space. Pulsing with Hoodoo, music, and myth, this collection resonates with the profound rhythms of existence, proving that true freedom knows no bounds—not even the cold void of space.

A brilliant new collection by the great Caribbean writers and scholar: “an engaging, deep-hearted, strong-spirited, and richly musical poet” (The Multicultural Review)

Equinox is an unforgettable and never-before-published masterwork completed by Kamau Brathwaite before his death in 2020. Written in his unique Sycorax typeface and replete with compelling images and photographs, Equinox contains poems written in Brathwaite’s singular Barbadian vernacular and visionary style―poems about the Middle Passage, the natural world, Billie Holiday, Whitney Houston, the Kumina dance in Jamaica, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, and Breughel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” among many tidalectic topics. The lyrical poems in Equinox weave together history and culture with the imagery of Brathwaite’s native Barbados, weaving a lush tapestry of injustice, redemption, and hope.

A major landmark of 20th-century Caribbean poetry. “Those who lament that the Age of Giants is over have evidently never read Kamau Brathwaite” (Eliot Weinberger)

Here, in a single volume, is Kamau Brathwaite’s early groundbreaking trilogy The Arrivants―containing Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969)―a brilliant and visionary exploration of the predicament of the poet living in the New World. Through the tension of regional dialect, musical rhythms, historical flashbacks, and excursions to Europe, New York, and Africa, Brathwaite interweaves the past and present of his Caribbean homeland―its natural beauty, its violent history, and the values that sustain its people―into a vigorous and unforgettable poetic work.

Douglass’s letters from the 1880s reveal both his unrelenting efforts to protect African American rights and little-known details about his personal life
 
The fourth volume of the Correspondence Series presents Frederick Douglass as a still-influential public figure but also as a man aware that the gains African Americans made during the Civil War and Reconstruction were not as well secured as he had hoped.
 
For this volume, the editors selected 247 of the 914 known letters sent to or from Douglass between 1881 and 1888. An active partisan, Douglass corresponded regularly with Republican party leaders from the local to national level about campaign tactics and strategies. Douglass also often received letters from African Americans who detailed the deteriorating state of race relations across the South in the 1880s. Douglass used his correspondence to advance the political stature of Republicans he regarded as most sympathetic to protecting African American rights.
 
Douglass wrote about his taste in reading; his fondness for carriage riding; his feuds with family members and neighbors; his first wife, Anna Murray; and his remarriage, to Helen Pitts, and the controversy that the interracial marriage generated. Douglass’s correspondence details the seven-month honeymoon the couple took in Europe and Egypt, the reunion with old abolitionist friends in Great Britain, and candid appraisals of places he visited and people he met overseas.

From the award-winning author of Fiebre Tropical, an electric, highly anticipated novel set in Colombia’s underground queer scene.

Isolated in a dreary Bogotá apartment, Ignacio’s light has dimmed, leaving his teenage daughter Valentina to raise herself in the wake of her mother’s death. Valentina longs to discover the details of her mother’s drowning and for Ignacio to snap out of his depression―his listless afternoons spent smoking cigarettes in long blonde wigs, telenovelas humming in the background, haunted by memories of the young man he loved and betrayed.

From Ignacio’s dark past emerges the luminous Mamadora Eléctrica, the wise travesti who introduced Ignacio to the city’s queer scene years prior. Stepping into a maternal role for Valentina, Mamadora fears the worst: that Ignacio’s self-loathing may have unleashed a curse on them all. A profound and irreverent story about coming undone, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You affirms Julián Delgado Lopera as a brilliant and singular voice―“a writer who is grinding their own colors” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times).

A selection of the exquisite, passionate verse of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, superbly translated into English

Finalist for the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation • Finalist for the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry • Winner of the 2024 Big Other Readers’ Choice Award • Shortlisted for the 2025 PEN Heaney Prize • Longlisted for the 2025 National Translation Award for Poetry, sponsored by American Literary Translators Association

“An unvarnished view of war and its repercussions: fear, dread, devastation, and exile.”―Elisabeth Egan, New York Times Book Review
 
Born in Jerusalem in 1978, Najwan Darwish is one of the most important poets of the Arabic-speaking world. This definitive collection, which draws from five volumes published in Arabic as well as new unpublished work, brings to English-language readers a sweeping trove of Darwish’s most powerful and urgent poetry of the last decade.
 
In spare lyric verse, Darwish testifies to the brutal and intimate traumas of war, the anguished fatigue of waking up each morning in an occupied land, and the immeasurable toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While anchored in the geography of Palestine, his poetry also explores the rich artistic inheritance of the Arabic-speaking world, moving between regions, landscapes, and eras, from the glories of medieval Granada to the rippling shores of contemporary Haifa. In dialogue with poets, philosophers, and seekers from many different traditions, Darwish’s verse pulses with spiritual longing and a sense of battered, disoriented wonder―a witness to both the atrocities we visit upon one another and the miracle that we are here at all.
 
No One Will Know You Tomorrow is a tribute to the indomitability of the human spirit: its sensitive attunement to beauty and its endurance in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

Longlisted for the 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize
One of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Historical Fiction Books of the Year
A Library Journal Best Book of the Year
A BookBrowse Best Book of the Year

“Searing.… [G]ripping.… Impressive[ly] guides us through her characters’ emotional depths.” ―Alida Becker, New York Times Book Review

Three people―two enslaved, one indentured―living beside each other, struggling against their circumstances, trying to bend destiny.

As the seventeenth century burns to a close in Tidewater, Virginia, America’s character is wrought in the fires of wealth, race, and freedom.

Young Bless, the only child left to her enslaved mother, stubbornly crafts the terms of her vital existence. She stands as the lone bulwark between her mother and irreparable despair, her mother’s only possibility of hope, as Bless reshapes the boundaries of love.

David is a helping child and a solace to his parents, and he gave a purpose to their trials. His survival hinges on his mother’s shrewd intellect and ferocious fight, but his sustenance is his freed Black father’s dream of emancipation for the entire family.

Jack Dane, a Scots-Irish boy, sails to Britain’s colonies when his father sells him into indentured servitude as an escape from poverty. There Jack learns from the rich the value of each person’s life.

A breathtaking, haunting, and epic saga, This Here Is Love intimately intertwines us with these beautifully drawn, unforgettable American characters. Bless, taken to serve the slaveowner’s daughter, must decide where she belongs: with the enslaved or above them. David, sold away from his people, retreats into himself even as he yearns to unite with others. Jack, acting impetuously, changes his fortune, but will doing so sacrifice his humanity?

All three come together on Jack’s land. As they face and challenge each other, they will relinquish and remake beliefs about family and freedom, even as they confront the limits of love.

Returning to print after nearly 50 years, Survivor completes Octavia E. Butler’s thrilling Patternist series, including a short story from the Patternist saga and new historical essays from a major Butler scholar.

This deluxe edition includes: 
* An incredible new cover and package
* Premium French flaps and newly designed, full color interior covers
*  High-quality paper with elegant deckled-edges  

The Patternist books (Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster) comprise Butler's longest, most complex series, stretching from late 17th century Africa to outer space in the far future, as rival factions of humanity develop incredible powers—only to use them to subjugate others. For nearly half a century, the fourth volume, Survivor, has been out of print at Octavia E. Butler's request.

It tells the story of Alanna, a colonist fleeing a plague-scarred Earth. But the planet she lands on is inhabited by the alien Kohn, whose battling tribes soon trap Alanna in their war. She must make alliances—while plotting betrayals. She must protect her heart—while putting it at risk. And she must decide if the best way to retain her humanity . . . is to leave it behind.

Now returning to print, Survivor is put into its proper historical context thanks to contributions from scholar and Octavia E. Butler Fellow Alyssa Collins.
This long-awaited volume also contains "A Necessary Being," the only short fiction set in the Patternist universe, to finally, fully bring together and complete the Patternist series for readers everywhere.

A young woman’s life spirals out of her control after her childhood best friend publishes a memoir that discusses the tragic events of their childhood, in this beautiful, powerful novel from the internationally bestselling author of Others Were Emeralds.

Mei’s life isn’t what she thought it would be. She's still entangled in a love triangle with Jacques and Kath that began when they were teens; her parents are drowning in debt; and she’s stuck pulling off identity fraud jobs for her cruel auntie and her auntie’s nauseating son, who won’t leave Mei alone.

But Mei’s world begins to truly unravel when she hears her childhood best friend Soey’s voice for the first time in years, being interviewed on the radio about her new memoir, chronicling the childhood attack that left Soey with brain damage and killed her younger sister. When Mei reconnects with Soey, the leader of their childhood friend group known as the Daisy Chain, their encounter kicks off a series of events that culminate in another shocking death, putting Mei squarely in the public eye. As past and present collide, Mei starts spiraling after Soey implores her to find out who killed Daiyu—a search that leads Mei to uncover what happened that dark day in the woods behind their school, all those years ago.

Revered for her lyrical imagery, emotional acumen, and thoughtful voice, Lang Leav uses her gifts to brilliant effect, exploring unsolved mysteries, cycles of trauma and abuse, and the answers to a timeless question: how do you honor someone's memory without losing sight of yourself?

“Now offered in translation for the first time, this collection featuring women navigating societal expectations (and their small rebellions) is a classic.” — Boston Globe

A spiky, edgy collection of five sly yet sensitive stories spotlighting clear-eyed and “difficult” women who are navigating their identities as workers and women in contemporary Japan—a feminist, anti-capitalist modern classic published outside Asia and in English for the first time.

The Dilemmas of Working Women is Fumio Yamamoto’s darkly witty look at modern Japanese women who are ambivalent about their lives and jobs. In “Naked,” a woman who’s simultaneously lost her business and her husband finds that it is surprisingly comfortable to stay at home sewing stuffed animals, even if it makes her a “loser” in the eyes of society. In “Planarian,” a young woman recovering from breast cancer tells her friends and boyfriend that she would prefer to be the titular worm to organically regenerate her body. Each of these spiky women—as well as the three other protagonists in this groundbreaking work—chafes against social expectations that equate work with worth and demand women squeeze into the confining and sometimes dehumanizing role of employee in a world built by and for men.

First published in Japan in 2000, The Dilemmas of Working Women struck a nerve with Japanese readers and became a bestselling literary sensation, selling nearly half a million copies and winning the prestigious Naoki Prize in Literature. A quarter of a century later, this brilliant modern classic—available for the first time outside Asia and in English—remains deliciously funny and astonishingly relevant.

Translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom

Raven Leilani’s Luster meets Halle Butler’s The New Me, SOFT SPOTS is a darkly funny and off-kilter coming-of-age novel following recent college graduate Robin Clarke after she runs away from her family, only to be forced to confront whether she should reconcile with her father when his health takes a sudden turn for the worst.

After miraculously securing a teaching job at a dysfunctional high school, loner Robin moves to South Bend, Indiana, where she’s paired with an eerily perfect roommate: Naomi. Freshly estranged from her abusive parents, Robin obsesses over two absurd goals: to be the best teacher at the school, despite never having taught, and to become best friends with Naomi, who could not be more her opposite. Meanwhile back home, Robin’s brother must decide between being loyal to his sister or their parents.

Just as Robin grows closer to her students and Naomi, she receives earth-shattering news from her brother. Desperate to cope, Robin redoubles her efforts to befriend Naomi, spiraling even deeper into obsession and self-sabotage. Everything comes to a head when one of Robin’s many bad choices come back to bite her, and she must confront the limits of forgiveness, the weight of memory, and the true cost of estrangement.

A chilling Lovecraftian horror story from the author of Midnight Rooms, in which a recently freed slave from America making a new life for herself in 1700 Venice finds the mysterious plague that killed her former master may have followed her to Italy . . . and now stalks the canals.

Venice, Italy, 1700. The only survivor on a ship, Mercy disembarks in Italy, carrying two precious possessions: the first-ever camera that makes daguerreotype plates and a letter regarding an appointment meant for the dead slave holder.

The letter takes her to Umberto, an Anatomist. In his basement workspace, she learns he hired the man who formally owned her to capture images of dissected corpses. But that man is dead. With no other recourse for her or Umberto, Mercy assumes the position. In return for the sample plate she took, Umberto takes her to the home of the Contessa, a British woman who married into her title. Charmed by Marcy, she invites the young woman to stay for the season to take pictures.

Formally enslaved, Marcy finds this new life of freedom heady, as she takes on the mantle of a photographer and guest in a decadent house of pleasure under the hospitality of an aristocrat. Under the Contessa’s roof, she meets a diverse cast of friendly and strange individuals with whom she forms new bonds and friendships.

But all is not well in her new life. Something dark and hungry stalks the canals that snake through the city, biting at her heels. The same death that rode the waves with her now surrounds her in this strange place. What is this malevolence that haunts her? As she tries to understand this macabre force, she must grapple with a greater fear: that the horror that endangers her friends is herself.

The Sunken, The Adored is dark, eerie, and wholly original—at once unsettling and irresistibly addictive.

From one of America's most cherished and celebrated poets, a landmark collection of Nikki Giovanni's early work from the transformational years of 1968-1998!

“Nikki Giovanni is one of our national treasures.”—Gloria Naylor

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, HarperCollins is proud to present this library of American classics drawn from our storied catalog. This timeless classic brings readers Nikki Giovanni's poems from her books Black Feeling Black Talk; Black Judgement; Re: Creation; My House; The Women and the Men; Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day; and Those Who Ride the Night Winds.

When Nikki Giovanni’s poems first emerged during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, she immediately took a place among the most celebrated and controversial artists of our time. More than 50 years later, Giovanni still stands as one of the most commanding, luminous voices to grace America’s political and poetic landscape.

Stirring, provocative, and resonant, these poems heralded the arrival of an indelible literary voice that resounds to this day.

Winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award.

“A story that will slam the power of poetry and love back into your heart.” —Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Speak and Chains

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, HarperCollins is proud to present this library of American classics drawn from our storied catalog. The Poet X is the astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth.

Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking.

But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.

With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems.

Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.

“When Miss Brooks. . . writes out of her heart, out of her rich and living background, out of her very real talent, then she induces almost unbearable excitement.” — New York Times

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, HarperCollins is proud to present this library of American classics drawn from our storied catalog. Selected Poems is the classic volume by the distinguished and celebrated poet Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This compelling collection showcases Brooks's technical mastery, her warm humanity, and her compassionate and illuminating response to a complex world.

By 1963 the civil rights movement was in full swing across the United States, and more and more African American writers were increasingly outspoken in attacking American racism and insisting on full political, economic, and social equality for all. In that memorable year of the March on Washington, Harper & Row released Brooks’s Selected Poems, which incorporated poems from her first three collections, as well as a selection of new poems.

This edition of Selected Poems includes A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks's first published volume of poetry for which she became nationally known and which led to successive Guggenheim fellowships; Annie Allen, published one year before she became the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize in any category; and The Bean Eaters, her fifth publication which expanded her focus from studies of the lives of mainly poor urban black Americans to the heroism of early civil rights workers and events of particular outrage—including the 1955 Emmett Till lynching and the 1957 school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Winner 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.

Oh say, can’t you see,

by the dawn’s early light,

what strange fruit and fear

this land has sown?

In this psychologically haunting YA fiction anthology, ten talented writers explore the terror and anxiety that bleed into the Black psyche in America.

From black market medical experiments to shapeshifting monsters, to doomsday cults and body snatchers each story casts an unnerving and thought-provoking light on the real-world horrors of our society that can disrupt a life—or end it.

Ranging from speculative to contemporary, this collection of terror and resistance asks if we can finally see the thing that goes bump in the night, and how it walks freely in the light of day, too.

Coming soon! The Marriage Rebound by Meka James will be available Aug 25, 2026.

Ishmael Reed has created a sharp, wildly funny slave’s-eye view of the Civil War.

Three slaves infected with Dysaethesia Aethipica (a term coined in the nineteenth century for the disease that makes Negroes run away) escape from Virginia. Not satisfied with leaving slavery halfway, one of the trio has vowed to go the whole distance to Canada; his master, Arthur Swille, determined to recover his property, pursues, hot on Raven Quickskill’s trail.

With myth-bending ingenuity, Reed merges history, fantasy, political reality, and high comedy as he parodies the fugitive slave narrative: the slave-poet Quickskill flees to Canada on a nonstop jumbo jet; Abe Lincoln waltzes through slave quarters to the tune of “Hello Dolly”; the plantation mistress lies in bed watching the Beecher Hour on TV. Flight to Canada’s preposterous episodes leap out from the pages of history to reveal a keen sense of America past and present.

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, TIME, and LITERARY HUB

Beloved author and winner of The Story Prize, Paul Yoon, is back with the unforgettable story of a working dog, Etna, who, after a devastating war, embarks on an odyssey in the hopes of returning home.

Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home—to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.

Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?

This is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up, and ultimately a novel about finding hope in the most dire of times.

For the first printing only! This hardcover features sprayed stenciled edges while the special edition supply lasts.

Legendborn meets The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina in this captivating contemporary fantasy debut about a teen whose newly awakened magical abilities send her searching for answers at an elite boarding school that has a mysterious connection to her family's history.

Harper grew up loving her grandma Gigi's stories about pretty brown girls with magic from the stars, but they were just that--stories...until Gigi's sudden death awakens a dangerous power building beneath Harper's skin. Desperate for answers, Harper finds herself drawn to an elite boarding school in the Appalachian Mountains.

A school that Gigi herself attended, and one rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of witches past.

Harper arrives at Black Mountain Academy determined to learn about her burgeoning power, even if that means dealing with Kai, her grumpy ex-best friend now hellbent on getting her to leave campus, and his cousin, Lucas, who won't let her forget the almost-kiss from last summer. But Black Mountain Academy was built on secrets, and the deeper Harper digs, the more sinister rot she finds lurking beneath.

When Harper unearths a chilling local legend about the gruesome deaths of twelve witches on campus, she feels an uncanny connection to the women. But someone doesn't want her exposing the school's dark past, and when it becomes clear they'll kill to stop her, Harper has to decide whether to leave her history behind or risk everything for the truth of her own identity.

Three girls with entangled pasts compete for glory in their elite all-girls private school’s annual tournament, putting their survival skills and their relationships to the test, in this young adult thriller that’s “Shakespearean…stunning…dark academia at its finest” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Gardner isn’t like other boarding schools. They take in those who’ve been rejected everywhere else, they offer a survival skills class that has students killing and gutting animals, and then there’s the Tournament.

A competition available only to seven elite seniors, the Tournament is revered by the entire student body. They’d do almost anything—including completing a series of grueling physical challenges—to win the champion’s cup.

And this year, three seniors make the Tournament more cutthroat than ever.

Max, the ruthless scholarship student who can’t afford any distractions, not even her ex best friend Nora’s stupid confession of love at the end of last year that ruined everything between them.

Nora, who always put herself on the sidelines so Max could have everything she wanted, but might just be ready for center stage now that Max has brutally excised herself from Nora’s life.

And Teddy, the transfer who’s on her last chance and will chase any high that can pull her back from the gaping, dark void inside herself that’s always threatening to pull her in.

If one of them wants to win, then they can’t let anything—or anybody—get in their way.

When Jada Williams is relentlessly pursued by the Debt Police, she is left with no choice but to take down her student loan company with the help of two mall coworkers—from the author of the “lethally witty” (The New York Times Book Review) The Survivalists.

Jada Williams is good at judging people by their looks. From across the mall, she can tell not only someone’s inseam and pants size, but exactly what style they need to transform their life. Too bad she’s no longer using this superpower as a wardrobe designer to Hollywood stars, but for minimum wage plus commission at the Glendale mall.

When Jada is fired yet again, she is forced to outrun the newly instated Debt Police, who are out for blood. But Jada, like any great antihero, is not going to wait for the cops to come kick her around. With the help of two other debt-burdened mall coworkers, she hatches a plan for revenge. Together, the three women plan a heist to erase their student loans forever and get back at the system that promised them everything and then tried to take it back.

“A novel of great fun and unforgettable fury” (Megha Majumdar, bestselling author of A Burning), The Payback is a razor-sharp and hilarious dissection of race, power, and the daily grind, from one of the most original and exciting writers at work today.