“A page turner and history lesson at once, Harlem Rhapsody reminds us that our stories are our generational wealth— this book and the real lives that inspired it.”—Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage (Oprah’s Book Club Pick)

She found the literary voices that would inspire the world…. The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian.
 
In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all.
 
W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Amidst rumors of their tumultuous affair, Jessie is determined to prove herself. She attacks the challenge of discovering young writers with fervor, finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends. Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives…every African American writer in the country wants their work published there.
 
When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts. She has shaped a generation of literary legends, but as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.

Women and weed--welcome to the revolution!

Good Weed Good Women is a bold collection of writing and photos celebrating the women who have taken the weed industry by storm, from cannabis entrepreneur and Buy Weed from Women founder Jasmine Mans. The book tells the full story of cannabis and how cannabis is being used both as a symbol and in its many physical forms by women in their journey towards greater mental, financial, sexual, spiritual, political, and societal freedom.

This book is a loud, feminist gathering of personal narratives, interviews, photos, illustrations, recipes, poetry, and more from many different intersections of the cannabis industry. Good Weed Good Women explores cannabis in relation to everything from spirituality and motherhood to money, race, and the law.

This beautifully packaged book features a vibrant mix of media, with author Jasmine Mans' voice threaded throughout to unify and cohere the collection. In addition to sharing the stories of other women through interviews and case studies, her personal essays and poetry appear in every chapter.

Langston Hughes's debut novel, a moving portrait of African American family life in 1930s Kansas, newly reissued for Union Square & Co.’s Herald Classics line.

Originally published in 1930, Not Without Laughter follows Sandy Rogers as a boy living in rural Kansas to his arrival in Chicago as a young man, set against a backdrop of poverty, racial segregation, and the onset of World War I. Orbiting Sandy are a host of vividly realized family members, including his mother Annjee, a housekeeper for a wealthy white family; his irresponsible father Jimboy, who plays guitar and is constantly in search of work; his aunts, blues-singing Aunt Harriet and social-climbing Aunt Tempy; and his pious, strong-willed grandmother Hager, who holds the generations together.

Partly inspired by Langston Hughes’s early life in the Midwest, Not Without Laughter is the debut novel of the literary giant, a sweeping and elegiac family drama that traces Black life in the early twentieth century, an important setting in the history of a racially divided America.

Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Fall 2024 Poetry Books

From Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, a stunning collection of early works—both polished poems andraw, unfinished, works-in-progress written from 1921-1927—curated by award winning poet and National Book Award finalist, Danez Smith.

Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was an eighteen-year-old on a train to Mexico City, seeking funds to pursue his passion. His early poems see Hughes finding his voice and experimenting with style and form. Beloved verses like “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” were written without formal training, often on the back of napkins and envelopes, and were inspired by the sights and sounds of Black working-class people he encountered in his early life. 

Blues in Stereo is a collection of select early works, all written before the age of twenty-five, in which we see Langston Hughes with fresh eyes. From the intimate pages of his handwritten journals, you will travel with Hughes outside of Harlem as he ventures to the American South and Mexico, sails through the Caribbean, and becomes the only Harlem renaissance poet to visit Africa. His poems and journal entries celebrate love as a tool of liberation. His songs showcase the musicality of verse poetry. And the collection even includes a play he cowrote with Duke Ellington with a full score that experiments with rhythm and structure.

Blues in Stereo portrays a young man coming of age in a changing world. Page by page, a young, fresh-faced Hughes contends with matters beyond his years with raw talent. And by keeping his original, handwritten notations found in archival material, we get to witness a genius’s earliest thought process in real time. National Book Award-nominated poet Danez Smith offers their insight and notes on themes, challenges, and obsessions that Hughes early work contains. Beautifully rendered and thoughtfully curated, Blues in Stereo foreshadows a master poet that will go on to define literature for centuries to come.

A collectible hardcover edition of our greatest African American poet's award-winning first novel, about a black boy's coming-of-age in a largely white Kansas town, featuring an introduction by National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy

A Penguin Vitae Edition

When first published in 1930, Not Without Laughter established Langston Hughes as not only a brilliant poet and leading light of the Harlem Renaissance but also a gifted novelist. In telling the story of Sandy Rogers, a young African American boy in small-town Kansas, and of his family--his mother, Annjee, a housekeeper for a wealthy white family; his irresponsible father, Jimboy, who plays the guitar and travels the country in search of employment; his strong-willed grandmother Hager, who clings to her faith; his Aunt Tempy, who marries a rich man; and his Aunt Harriet, who struggles to make it as a blues singer--Hughes gives the longings and lineaments of black life in the early twentieth century an important place in the history of racially divided America.

Penguin Vitae--loosely translated as “Penguin of one’s life”--is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

"This book is the chronicle of a bright and lively artistic ear that brought the African-American people full into the twentieth century. It is a wonderful book!” ―Amiri Baraka

In his incisive introduction to The Big Sea, an American classic, Arnold Rampersad writes: "This is American writing at its best--simpler than Hemingway; as simple and direct as that of another Missouri-born writer...Mark Twain."

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet--at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance."

The perfect introduction to one of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ‘30s, featuring a career-spanning collection of poems and three of his most powerful stories.

"Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature ... a powerful interpreter of the American experience." The Philadelphia Inquirer

Hughes's work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom.

Vintage Hughes includes the famed poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “I, Too,” “The Weary Blues,” “America,” “Let America Be America Again,” “Dream Variations,” “Young Sailor,” “Afro-American Fragment,” “Scottsboro,” “The Negro Mother,” “Good Morning Revolution,” “I Dream a World,” “The Heart of Harlem,” “Freedom Train,” “Song for Billie Holliday,” “Nightmare Boogie,” “Africa,” “Black Panther,” “Birmingham Sunday,” and “UnAmerican Investigators”; and three stories from the collection The Ways of White Folks: “Cora Unashamed,” “Home,” and “The Blues I’m Playing.”

Within the Circle is the first anthology to present the entire spectrum of twentieth-century African American literary and cultural criticism. It begins with the Harlem Renaissance, continues through civil rights, the Black Arts Movement, and on into contemporary debates of poststructuralist and black feminist theory. Drawing on a quote from Frederick Douglass for the title of this book, Angelyn Mitchell explains in her introduction the importance for those "within the circle" of African American literature to examine their own works and to engage this critical canon.
The essays in this collection—many of which are not widely available today—either initiated or gave critical definition to specific periods or movements of African American literature. They address issues such as integration, separatism, political action, black nationalism, Afrocentricity, black feminism, as well as the role of art, the artist, the critic, and the audience. With selections from Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and many others, this definitive collection provides a dynamic model of the cultural, ideological, historical, and aesthetic considerations in African American literature and literary criticism.
A major contribution to the study of African American literature, this volume will serve as a foundation for future work by students and scholars. Its importance will be recognized by all those interested in modern literary theory as well as general readers concerned with the African American experience.

Selections by (partial list): Houston A. Baker, Jr., James Baldwin, Sterling Brown, Barbara Christian, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, Sarah Webster Fabio, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. Lawrence Hogue, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Deborah E. McDowell, Toni Morrison, J. Saunders Redding, George Schuyler, Barbara Smith, Valerie Smith, Hortense J. Spillers, Robert B. Stepto, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Helen Washington, Richard Wright

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.