SALE

Enjoy 30% off on these select items using the code SALE. 

  • The Bookish Struggle Enamel Pin
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    "The Bookish Struggle" Enamel Pincelebrates the eternal battle between work and the irresistible allure of books! The very relatable caption, "How can I be expected to work when there are books to be read?" makes this magnet a must-have for every book lover. This pin adds a touch of literary rebellion to your everyday space. Embrace the bookish struggle with "The Bookish Struggle" enamel pin and turn your gear into a beacon for fellow bookworms. Because, really, who needs work when there are books waiting to be explored? Pin measures approx 1.3 inches.
  • "If It's Not Spicy I Don't Want It" Enamel Pin
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    "If It's Not Spicy I Don't Want It" Enamel Pin Enamel Pin Size: 1.75 Inches Dive into a world where whimsy meets wonder with Pinstory's exclusive collection of originally designed enamel pins. Drawing inspiration from the enchanting realms of fairycore, cottagecore, and the mystique of elven lore, each pin is a gateway to a story yet untold. Crafted for dreamers, book lovers, and seekers of the magical, our pins are more than mere adornments; they are symbols of the untamed imagination, of quiet moments in sun-dappled forests, and of tales whispered beneath the ancient boughs of mythical woods. Our Fairycore series captures the whimsical essence of fairy tales with designs that feature delicate wings, sparkling enchantments, and creatures that dance in the moonlight.
  • Aya & Pete Around The World Coloring Activity Book
    $12.00
    Inspire your child’s curiosity about the world with the Aya & Pete Around the World Coloring Activity Book! Designed for kids ages 4–8, this engaging travel-themed activity book combines creativity and learning through coloring pages, spot-the-difference games, mazes, crossword puzzles, and word searches. Featuring full-color artwork and fun facts from Aya and Pete’s adventures across North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia, children will enjoy exploring global landmarks, cultures, and geography while developing fine motor skills and problem-solving abilities. Perfect for family trips (perfect for quite amusement in restaurants and airplanes), classrooms, and family trips, this educational activity book sparks imagination and encourages screen-free playtime for little travelers everywhere. Perfect for travel, home learning, and screen-free playtime. Let your child explore the world one page at a time with Aya & Pete!
  • Beyond Midnight: An Ashe Cayne Novel, Book 5―A Gripping Chicago Mystery of Political Corruption, Deception, and Murder―Get Lost in the Pages of this Captivating Summer Read (An Ashe Cayne Mystery, 5)
    $21.99

    In the fifth installment of the Ashe Cayne series the smooth Chicago private eye stumbles into the city's internecine (and deadly) world of politics.

    The death of immigrant Juaquin Escobar has been ruled an accidental drowning in Lake Michigan. The only problem is he never drinks and never swims. When the CPD informs his nephew Ivan Ramirez and closes the case he refuses to believe it’s true.

    Convinced of foul play Ivan is referred to Ashe Cayne by his friend and socialite Penny Packer. After agreeing to take the case on pro bono he quickly discovers that things are not always what they seem. As Ashe investigates, he learns that Juaquin was last seen getting into a white van belonging to a heating and cooling company before he disappeared.

    Retracing Juaquin’s steps leads Ashe straight into a web of secrets and lies that anyone would do anything to escape—even murder.

  • REST Holiday Card  
    $6.00
    DETAILS: - Each card is originally drawn, designed and/or illustrated. - Card measures 4” x 6” on smooth matte white card stock. - Blank Inside
  • Merry Christmas Tree Card
    $6.00
    A2 4.25 X 5.5" Blank inside Includes envelope Printed on 100# cover smooth uncoated Printed in Chicago, IL Brighten someone's day with Bon Femmes' adorable greeting card, designed in the heart of Chicago. Measuring 4.25" x 5.5" and printed on smooth, uncoated 100# cover paper, this card is blank inside for your heartfelt message. Each card has a matching envelope, making it perfect for any occasion. Crafted with love and printed locally, it's a charming way to share your thoughts. Holiday/Christmas Card
  • Postcolonial Melancholia (The Wellek Library Lectures)
    $24.95

    In an effort to deny the ongoing effect of colonialism and imperialism on contemporary political life, the death knell for a multicultural society has been sounded from all sides. That's the provocative argument Paul Gilroy makes in this unorthodox defense of the multiculture. Gilroy's searing analyses of race, politics, and culture have always remained attentive to the material conditions of black people and the ways in which blacks have defaced the "clean edifice of white supremacy." In Postcolonial Melancholia, he continues the conversation he began in the landmark study of race and nation 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack' by once again departing from conventional wisdom to examine―and defend―multiculturalism within the context of the post-9/11 "politics of security."

    This book adapts the concept of melancholia from its Freudian origins and applies it not to individual grief but to the social pathology of neoimperialist politics. The melancholic reactions that have obstructed the process of working through the legacy of colonialism are implicated not only in hostility and violence directed at blacks, immigrants, and aliens but in an inability to value the ordinary, unruly multiculture that has evolved organically and unnoticed in urban centers. Drawing on the seminal discussions of race begun by Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Orwell, Gilroy crafts a nuanced argument with far-reaching implications. Ultimately, Postcolonial Melancholia goes beyond the idea of mere tolerance to propose that it is possible to celebrate the multiculture and live with otherness without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent.

  • Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love
    $65.00

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    A richly illustrated account tracing the full arc of contemporary painter Suzanne Jackson’s life and multifaceted artistic vision

    First and foremost a painter, Suzanne Jackson has worked for six decades in a dizzying array of genres, including drawing, printmaking, poetry, dance, and theater design. Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love reveals Jackson’s achievements as a leading and influential artist who has been in dialogue with her contemporaries, from Betye Saar and Emory Douglas to Senga Nengudi and Mary Lovelace O’Neal.

    This wide-ranging book illuminates Jackson’s work and its connections to nature, environmentalism, performance, feminism, and Black and Native traditions. It explores the way her innovative hanging acrylic works break the canvas; the role of dance and set design in Jackson’s practice; and her trailblazing Los Angeles art space Gallery 32, which she ran from 1968 to 1970, and which became a focus for a circle of fellow emerging artists. The book also features artist dialogues between Jackson and Nengudi, Saar, Fred Eversley, and Richard Mayhew, as well as a conversation between Jackson and SFMOMA painting conservator Jennifer Hickey.

    Exhibition Schedule
    SFMOMA, San Francisco
    September 27, 2025–March 1, 2026

    Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
    May 14, 2026–August 23, 2026

    Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
    September 26, 2026–February 7, 2027

  • Law in Light: Priestesses, Priests, and the Revitalization of Akan Spirituality in the United States and Ghana
    $29.95

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    Law in Light is a groundbreaking book on the resurgence and transformation of Akan path spiritual communities in the United States and Ghana. Drawing on extensive collaborative ethnographic research, the book offers powerful portraits of priestesses, priests, and others on their spiritual journeys, in their ancestral reconnections, and in their everyday lives. The book spotlights a queen mother, shrine elders, priests, and priestesses of a prominent shrine house in Maryland, as well as leaders at a legendary Asuo Gyebi source shrine in Ghana. In exploring worlds of healing, empowerment, and justice, Lauren Coyle Rosen argues for the importance of two novel theoretical concepts, which she calls copresent jurisdictions and constellations of subjectivity. The book urges a broader retheorization of alternative spiritual orders within contemporary theopolitical, cosmopolitical, and postjuristocratic debates.

  • Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali
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    Part history, part legend, this is the story of Sundiata Keita: the heroic figure who founded the empire of Mali. A thirteenth-century oral epic, Sundiata sees the full-length tale captured in print for the first time.

    This is Sundiata, the epic tale of a man 'great among kings' who, through his legendary deeds and exploits, came to father an empire. For over 800 years, this story has been passed down to generations of listeners through spoken word.

    D.T. Niane's novelisation captures all the mystery and majesty of medieval African kingship. This ambitious story ranks alongside the Ancient Greek and Roman classics as one of the world's great adventure stories.

  • The South: A Novel
    $18.00

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    Long-listed for the Booker Prize

    A radiant, intimate novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer―about family, desire, and what we inherit.

    When his grandfather dies, Jay travels south with his family to the property they’ve inherited, a once-flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.

    Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.

    Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members begin to confront their own secrets and regrets. Jack is a professor at a struggling local college whose failures might have begun when he married his student, Sui Ching. Sui Ching does her best to keep the family together, though she too wonders what her life could have been. And Fong, the manager, refuses to look at what is: at Chuan, at the land, at the global forces that threaten to render his whole life obsolete.

    At once sweeping and compressed, Tash Aw’s The South is a family novel of change and desire―a story of what happens when public and private lives collide, told with uncommon grace and beauty.

  • Bivouac
    $15.95

    The death of a Jamaican man’s father raises questions about the father’s political endeavors, and about the plight of 1980s Jamaica.

    “Few other novels encapsulate Jamaica’s political upheavals so well. Protagonist Ferron Morgan agonizes over his father’s death, maybe from a doctor’s mistake, maybe from a radical rival’s hands. Meanwhile, he’s running from everything, including his own emotions about his fiancée―with sad results. Bivouac is not an easy or light book, but the immediacy Dawes creates is worth it.” ―Literary Hub, included in 5 Books You May Have Missed in April

    “An examination of grief and politics in a deftly written novel set in 1980s Jamaica . . . Astonishing prose.” ―Kirkus Reviews

    When Ferron Morgan’s father dies in suspicious circumstances, his trauma is exacerbated by the conflict within his family and among his father’s friends over whether the death was the result of medical negligence or if it was a political assassination. Ferron grew up in awe of his father’s radical political endeavors, but in later years he watched as the resurgence of the political right in the Caribbean in the 1980s robbed the man of his faith.

    Ferron’s response to the death is further complicated by guilt, particularly over his failure to protect his fiancée from a brutal assault. He begins to investigate the direction of his life with great intensity, in particular his instinct to keep moving on and running from trouble.

    This is a sharply focused portrayal of Jamaica at a tipping point in its recent past, in which the private grief and trauma condenses a whole society’s scarcely understood sense of temporariness and dislocation.

  • The World of Queer Stories A 1000-piece Jjigsaw: Celebrating LGBTQ+ literary icons
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    1000-piece Jjigsaw

  • Camille's Lakou: A Novel (Global Black Writers in Translation)
    $22.95

    Camille has worked her way up from the Guadeluopean lakou where she was born and raised to the heights of Orlando, where she is a successful motivational speaker. Her assistant, Evelyn, is struggling as a single mother, especially since she has been keeping the existence of her son a secret from her family in Jamaica. As Camille relates the story of her life to Evelyn, she urges Evelyn to see her difficult life as one of great fortune—“My girl, a woman falls, but she never despairs”—and to fully share her joys and successes with her loved ones.

    Camille’s Lakou tells the story of Camille, a young Caribbean girl living with her single‑parent mother in a 1960s urbanized zone at the edge of Pointe‑à‑Pitre, Guadeloupe, following her through her adult life as a Caribbean migrant in Florida. Author Marie Léticée explores neocolonial culture clash and identity conflict themes that will be familiar to readers of the Francophone Caribbean coming‑of‑age novel and its revisions by women writers such as Capécia, Lacrosil, Manicom, Schwarz‑Bart, Condé, Pineau, and others. Léticée makes it her own by fleshing out a time and place not well‑represented in Guadeloupean literature. While previous bildungsromane from the writers mentioned here typically focus on rural peasant or urban bourgeois settings, Camille’s Lakou shifts location to an impoverished urban environment. “Lakou” is translated as “courtyard” or, more colloquially, “yard.” The author explores the culture and politics of lakou society while raising the issue of how this social dynamic is transformed through the impact of globalization and dispersal into a diasporic experience outside the island milieu of Camille’s childhood.

    In a collaborative translation effort between the author and Kevin Meehan, Camille’s Lakou will bring the realities and joys of Léticée’s Guadeloupe to an English audience for the first time.

  • Insurgent Visions: Feminism, Justice, Solidarity (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
    $28.95

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    In a current era marked by carceral logics, authoritarianism, and white supremacy, there has never been a greater need for the tools and inspiration that radical feminism provides. In Insurgent Visions, Chandra Talpade Mohanty explores methods of anticapitalist resistance to radically transform everyday life. She presents insurgent feminism—a theory and praxis with which to contest and replace the practices of violence grounded in racialized gender relations. Insurgent feminism unsettles existing power structures in order to enact new relationships and forge new subjectivities, epistemologies, and communities. Drawing on organizing efforts in the US-Mexico borderlands, Palestine/Israel, and Kashmir, as well as on abolitionist and Dalit feminisms, Mohanty contends that the knowledge that emerges from the experiences of marginalized groups who are struggling for economic, racial, and social justice is key for imagining feminist futures. She also turns to the neoliberal landscape of higher education in the United States and the difficulties of instituting transformative antiracist and anti-imperialist feminist knowledge building. Mapping new challenges for radical praxis, Mohanty reconfigures feminist studies while offering a model for decolonial cross-border organizing and solidarity.

  • The Dating Prohibition: A Novel

    Taj McCoy

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    In this spicy new rom-com, an ambitious entrepreneur working to get her speakeasy supper club off the ground is pushed off balance when her childhood crush turns up, hotter than ever––then tells her she's off-limits.

    Now that Kendra’s returned home, she can’t help feeling like a kid again—back in her big brother’s shadow, trying to get her restaurant off the ground while his new venture is flying high right out the gate. It doesn’t help that everyone refuses to stop calling her Keke, the childhood nickname she loathes.

    The only bright spot is her longtime crush BJ. He’s been her big brother’s best friend for most of her life, and he’s always been that cool, chill guy who was easy to talk to and made her laugh. Now he’s looking at her like she’s all grown up, and there’s nothing childish about the chemistry brewing between them. Even better, he takes her dreams seriously, and he’s ready to help her make her supper club a reality.

    But then BJ extinguishes the sparks flying between them, insisting nothing romantic can ever happen because she’s “off limits.” As her investors fall through and her best chance at fulfilling her professional dreams points toward leaving home again for a fresh start, will BJ be ready for love before Kendra moves on? Or will he sweep her off her feet when she least expects it?

  • The Devil Is a Southpaw: A Novel

    Brandon Hobson

    $29.00

    A haunting, unforgettable novel of obsession, pride, and forgiveness, exploring the friendship and rivalry between two gifted boys in harrowing circumstances, from the acclaimed writer of The Removed

    Milton Muleborn has envied Matthew Echota, a talented Cherokee artist, ever since they were locked up together in a dangerous juvenile detention center in the late 1980s. Until Matthew escaped, that is.

    A novel within a novel, we read here Milton’s dark, sometimes comic, and possibly unreliable account of the story of their childhood even as, years later, he remains jealous of Matthew’s extraordinary abilities and unlikely success. Milton reveals secrets about their friendship, their families, and their nightmarish, surreal, experience of imprisonment. In revisiting the past, he explores the echoing traumas of incarceration and pride.

    Filled with Brandon Hobson’s swirling yet visceral writing, and punctuated with original artwork, The Devil Is a Southpaw is an ambitious, elegant, and propulsive novel in the spirit of Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel García Márquez.

  • Kerry James Marshall: Rythm Mastr. This Is How It Begins

    Kerry James Marshall

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    The iconic comic created by contemporary African American artist Kerry James Marshall.

    Marshall, widely considered one of America’s greatest living painters and inspired chronicler of the African American experience, has sought to diversify the art historical canon. In the late 1990s, he began working on a series of comics in response to the absence of authentic black characters and authors in the mainstream.

    Marshall’s comic offers an alternative reality focused on the main character, Rythm Mastr, and his young protégé, Farell, superheroes whose powers derive from the seven gods of the Yoruba pantheon. Marshall’s characters debate history, philosophy, and politics in vernacular black English using the graphic novel medium to create an empowering, utopian blend of science fiction and Afrofuturism.

    Initially serialized in a daily newspaper and presented as a Carnegie International installation, it has appeared in various incarnations over the past two decades, including light boxes, paintings, graphic prints, and drawings. This volume is the most comprehensive look at the character, its genesis, and its evolution.

  • Jerrell Gibbs: No Solace in the Shade

    Angela N. Carroll

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    The first major publication on Baltimore-based painter Jerrell Gibbs, whose contemplative portraits of Black sitters thrum with a vivid sense of place and reflect the complexity and emotional depth of everyday Black life.

    This book captures a prolific period of self-examination and observation for contemporary artist Jerrell Gibbs (b. 1988). Known for his luminously rendered, expressionistic oil paintings, Gibbs uses the figure as a dynamic and recurring motif to explore themes of Black masculinity, fatherhood, legacy, and remembrance.

    Drawing from archival family photographs, Gibbs emphasizes placement, size, and proportion, blending intimate mark-making with bold painterly gestures. By complicating and subverting visual stereotypes, Gibbs engages deeply with the materiality of painting, offering tender, emotionally evocative portrayals of Black men as husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. These allegorical and autobiographical works underscore quiet moments of joy, sorrow, and beauty as vital components of Black life. Additionally, commissioned portraits of such figures as Elijah Cummings and August Wilson are juxtaposed with allegorical figures from Gibbs’s dreams, reflecting his growth as an artist and individual. Gibbs’s work offers a fresh approach to painting the human form, following in the footsteps of other Black figurative painters Kerry James Marshall, Henry Taylor, and Amy Sherald.

  • Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets (Calico Series, 12)

    Sarah Coolidge

    $17.00

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    Five female Afghan poets wield language to combat the loneliness, absurdity, and claustrophobia of life in a war-torn country and its diaspora. There are “hypnotic, long beards” tangled with mass extinctions; hateful men burning grapevines; black blindfolds; jinn in chadors; and condoms advertised every eight minutes on TV. Interspersing these are tender moments: one poet describes brushing her daughter’s hair, while another imagines a tree growing at the center of a room, undisturbed by the bombs outside. In the wake of the Taliban’s escalating war on Afghan women’s rights, Hair on Fire is a blazing tribute to a group of exceptional poetesses and a reminder of what we lose when voices are silenced.

  • Brown Girl in the Snow

    Yolanda T. Marshall

    $19.95

    Perfect for kids aged 4-8 comes a stunning picture book about persistence, being creative in the garden, and adapting to a new place.

    When Amina moves from the Caribbean to a new snowy home, she misses growing her favorite foods. There are no coconut trees to climb, no gardens full of sweet potatoes and callaloo—only ice and snow. As Amina looks out her frosted window, she sings a traditional children’s song from back home, adding her own twist: “There’s a brown girl in the snow, tra la la la la, where none of her plants will grow.”

    Determined to find a way to make her favorite plants grow in a new climate, she comes across a possible solution after discovering a library book about gardening and greenhouses. Perhaps there is a way to grow sweet potatoes, after all!

    This stunning picture book written by a Guyanese-born author features:

    * An introduction to gardening and greenhouses
    * A note from the author about the inspiration behind the story

    With gorgeous images by Marianne Ferrer, and moving text by Yolanda T. Marshall, Brown Girl in the Snow is inspired by a traditional Caribbean children’s song and captures a child’s unwavering persistence and passion, as she grows into her new home.

  • Prospect Park: Photographs of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025

    Jamel Shabazz, Laylah Amatullah Barray, Richard E. Green

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    Spanning 45 years of Jamel Shabazz’s photography in Prospect Park, this gorgeous and meditative volume captures the heart and soul of Brooklyn through one of its most cherished spaces.

    Known for his iconic NYC street photography documenting the city’s African American community, Jamel Shabazz first gained widespread acclaim with his books Back in the Days and A Time Before Crack, renowned for their vivid portrayal of 1980s style and culture.

    However, long before his fame as a photographer, Shabazz served in the military and as a corrections officer for twenty years. After long days at work, he often sought refuge in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, describing it as a place to find inner peace—and, since 1980, he has continued capturing its vibrant spirit.

    This collection features his signature portraits of locals, from Afro-Caribbean percussionists at Drummer’s Grove to multicultural families enjoying moments of quiet reflection. Complementing these human-centered images are lesser-seen landscapes revealing the serene beauty of the park.

    Together, these photographs underscore its dual role as a bustling cultural hub and a tranquil refuge. Perfect for anyone who cherishes Brooklyn’s cultural history, this volume reveals a new and deeply personal side of Shabazz's work, offering a compelling portrait of community, resilience, and connection within an urban sanctuary.

  • Ravishing

    Surya, Eshani

    $28.00

    A brilliant and compelling debut, Ravishing shines a light on the dark enticements of the beauty industry and how it capitalizes on our desire to be someone we are not

    A provocative, darkly surreal novel of two Indian American siblings caught in the clutches of a beauty tech company, Ravishing is a searing portrait of the beauty industry’s dangerous ability to change people’s relationship to their bodies and the cult-like grip it has on youth.

    For teenage Kashmira, it’s painful to look in the mirror; she has her father’s face, and every feature is a reminder of his abandonment. When a friend introduces her to Evolvoir, a beauty product that changes users’ features, Kashmira is quickly hooked on how it allows her to erase the triggers of her grief. Meanwhile, at Evolvoir’s corporate offices, Kashmira’s estranged brother Nikhil first sees the product as an opportunity to make a difference and a name for himself, but is quickly mired in corporate complicity as reports surface of the product causing severe pain and persistent symptoms in some users. As chaos ensues, Kashmira is hospitalized and must negotiate the constraints of her new reality, while Nikhil uncovers a vicious truth that will force him to decide where his loyalties lie.

    Perfect for readers of Gold Diggers and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, Ravishing is a visceral, yet immensely tender, coming-of-age story of two Indian American siblings caught in the clutches of a predatory beauty tech company, providing an illuminating portrait of the complexities of growing up brown, chronic illness, and our relationship to ourselves.

  • Third Girl From The Left

    Martha Southgate

    $17.95

    At the center of this dazzling novel is Angela, a twenty-year-old beauty who leaves the stifling conformity of Oklahoma to search for fame during the rise of blaxploitation cinema in Los Angeles. But for her mother, Mildred, a strait-laced survivor of the 1921 Tulsa race riots, Angela's acting career is unforgivable, and the distance between them grows into a silence that lasts for years. It is only when Angela's daughter, Tamara, a filmmaker, sets out to close the rift between them that the women are forced to confront all that has been left unspoken in their lives.

    Bold and beautifully written, Third Girl from the Left deftly explores the bonds of family and the inextricable pull of the movies.

  • A Revolutionary for Our Time: The Walter Rodney Story

    Leo Zeilig

    $22.95

    Walter Rodney was a scholar, working class militant, and revolutionary from Guyana. Strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, he remains central to radical Pan-Africanist thought for large numbers of activists’ today. Rodney lived through the failed –though immensely hopeful -socialist experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, in Tanzania and elsewhere.

    The book critically considers Rodney's contribution to Marxist theory and history, his relationship to dependency theory and the contemporary significance of his work in the context of movements and politics today. The first full-length study of Rodney’s life, this book is an essential introduction to Rodney's work.

  • Lauren Halsey: emajendat

    Lauren Halsey

    $60.00

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    Inspired by the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood that the artist and her family have lived in for generations, Halsey’s expansive practice teems with the signs and symbols that populate that urban landscape and celebrates the community’s vitality and a creative form of resistance to advancing gentrification and the threat of erasure.

    The artist’s important work centers the on Black community, both aesthetically and materially. Halsey gathers icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience from local vernacular sources recontextualizing and reinterpreting them for her utopic fantasies of the city. Both celebrating Black cultural expressions and archiving them, her work—which includes wall works, massive multiroom installations, and immersive outdoor environments—is a potent reminder of the importance of community and home.

    Beyond the signs and symbols of contemporary South Central, Halsey employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as a means to reclaim lost legacies, drawing inspiration from Afrofuturism—a transcultural movement blending science fiction with aspects of Black art and culture—and the utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio.

  • Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005

    James T. Campbell

    $30.00

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    Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

    Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the "middle passage," but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, Middle Passages offers a unique perspective on African Americans' ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.

  • Steamy on Set

    D S Walls

    $15.99

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    After a devastating breakup leaves her questioning everything, Farrah Darby trades her flailing life in San Francisco for a fresh start in Hollywood as a movie set stylist. Her fashion expertise should be her ticket to success, but there's one problem: Director Errol Davis seems determined to make her life hell. Every costume choice becomes a battle, every interaction a test of wills.

    Farrah gives as good as she gets - if Davis wants war, she'll show him exactly what she's made of. But between their heated arguments, she can't help noticing other things too: his intense focus when he's directing, the rare smile that transforms his face, and yes, that irritatingly perfect ass. When a crisis on set forces them to work closely together, Farrah glimpses a different man beneath the harsh exterior - one who might be worth the risk of letting her guards down again.

    Now she's facing a dilemma bigger than any wardrobe decision: trust her head, which warns her to keep her distance, or her heart, which whispers that their rivalry might be disguising something much more intriguing.

  • Forever for the Culture: Notes from the New Black Digital Arts Renaissance

    Steven Underwood

    $29.95

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    THE CURATORS OF CULTURE: Celebrate Black digital art in this essay collection revealing how Black artists have shaped everything from TikTok dances to viral memes

    Steven Underwood digs into the current Black digital arts movement that has shaped popular culture for the last decade. He connects this current space to historical influences, speaking to a “legacy of audacity and daring that presented us with the opportunity to redirect the conversations on Blackness back on its center. Back to Black people.” Written as a collection of thought-provoking essays pulling in social commentary, interviews, popular culture, and deep research, Underwood taps into a topic that is incredibly relevant but often unknown.

    The nature of the internet is so ephemeral that sometimes we forget when we do something worth celebrating. For Black people particularly, that’s unforgiveable. Digital Black art has become increasingly more outspoken, introspective, and genre-defining. But it’s also vulnerable. Original phrases, tweets, dances, songs, and other content are often taken from a Black artist and attributed to a white influencer. And Black creators are paid less for their work, though their engagement is often higher than that of their white peers. There is also the added risk of backlash and hate that comes with publicly existing online. As an award-winning writer with a popular online presence, Underwood is no stranger to the experiences of Black digital artists. Using his own personal stories, he highlights the beauty, vulnerability, and innovation of the Black digital arts movement.

    Shining a light on the curators of our culture, Forever for the Culture narratively follows the construction of a new Black art movement and how creators have defined a community when that community does not have a physical space.

  • How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder: A Novel

    Nina McConigley

    $26.00

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    A bold, inventive, and fiercely original debut novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece’s private confession to the reader—she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British.

    Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die.

    According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life. At its heart, the tale she weaves is:
    a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
    b) a moving story of sisterhood
    c) a playful ode to the 80s
    d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
    e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language,
    trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence

    Or maybe it’s really:

    f) all of the above.

  • The Birds of Opulence (Kentucky Voices)

    Crystal Wilkinson

    $19.95

    Use discount code SALE at checkout for 30% off. 

    From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street comes an astonishing new novel. A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness.

    The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves and must fight to survive.

    Crystal Wilkinson offers up Opulence and its people in lush, poetic detail. It is a world of magic, conjuring, signs, and spells, but also of harsh realities that only love―and love that's handed down―can conquer. At once tragic and hopeful, this captivating novel is a story about another time, rendered for our own.

  • Sungi Mlengeya

    Tandazani Dhlakama

    $35.00

    Use discount code SALE for 30% off at checkout

    Whether infused by movement or stillness, Mlengeya's black-and-white portrait paintings radiate both power and peace

    Born in 1991 in Dar es Salaam, Sungi Mlengeya captures the essence of Black womanhood in her haunting monochromatic acrylic portraits. The meticulously painted figures are set against a minimalist white background, creating a striking contrast that emphasizes skin texture and form. Her portraits, whether infused by movement or stillness, radiate both power and peace, offering the viewer intimate moments of strength and serenity. In this first monograph dedicated to Mlengeya, the curator Tandazani Dhlakama brilliantly analyzes how African, Black and feminist conditions are intertwined in her work, and the intimate conversation between Sungi and her model, Jemima Michael, takes us behind the scenes of a work in the making.

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