• Activists and agitators
• Art book lovers
• Students of Black history
• Teachers and parents looking for colorful ways to talk to young people about activism and resistance

Inspired by Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, these joyous portraits of Black men engaged in everyday life celebrate the deep roots and rich cultures of African American communities.

Have you ever wondered . . .
What do brothas do all day?
Brothas drive. Brothas dance. Brothas work. Brothas listen. And brothas love.

Scarry’s now-classic book, first published in 1968, is a richly illustrated guide to the places, jobs, and activities that defined the daily lives of grown-ups. Author-illustrator Ajuan Mance created What Do Brothas Do All Day?, like Scarry, in response to children’s innate curiosity about the activities and experiences of others, but also to meet the longing many kids have for characters and communities that look and feel like the people and places they know.

This joyous reflection of real Black men and boys engaged in everyday life is a gift for Black kids who rarely see themselves reflected in the pages of a book and an affirmation of their world and the people who populate it. From grocery shopping and waiting for a trim at the barbershop to singing, dancing, and laughing with friends, Mance captures the beauty in the ordinary, affirming the enduring strength of the Black community.

DIVERSE BOOKS FOR KIDS: This picture book features real Black men the author has observed in the world—everyday people, not models or stereotypes. One fan describes it as "just a rainbow of Black men, a beautiful rainbow of Black men."

LIBRARIAN LOVE: What Do Brothas Do All Day? began as an all-ages zine, but the author began to conceive of it as a children's book after being approached by two children's librarians.

INSPIRED BY A CLASSIC: As the author notes in the book, "I first encountered Richard Scarry’s work in the early 1970s when I was about six years old. The world of adults, with its grocery lists, PTA meetings, shopping trips, and dinner parties, seemed both tantalizingly exotic and impossibly complex. Today, those same descriptors can be applied to the ways that many people of all ages perceive Black men."

AN INVITATION: The book ends with an invitation, perhaps even a call to action: What will you do today?

Perfect for:

• Parents and grandparents seeking engaging read-aloud and read-along picture books
• Teachers and librarians looking for books featuring Black communities
• Gift for readers of Jacqueline Woodson, Kwame Alexander, Cedella Marley, and Derrick Barnes books
• Fans of Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Americanah gives us this powerful statement about feminism today—written as a letter to a friend.

A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a childhood friend, a new mother who wanted to know how to raise her baby girl to be a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie’s letter of response: fifteen invaluable suggestions—direct, wryly funny, and perceptive—for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. Filled with compassionate guidance and advice, it gets right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century, and starts a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.

A Skimm Reads Pick ● An NPR Best Book of the Year

*ships in 7 - 10 business days*

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age

Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical poetry.

Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own.

Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela's is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is "the black room of the world" that is Xuela's barrenness and motherlessness.

Kyrell Knight believes life is a game to be played and thoroughly enjoyed. He rarely takes anything seriously, lives in the moment, and indulges in as much pleasure with women as possible. But the sarcasm, money, and women are an attempt to erase the memories of his past as he tries to forget what he came from. It works until his past wants to be a part of his present.

Kyrell reconnects with Quinn Halifax at their mutual best friend's engagement party. They spark up a friendship that quickly turns to flames when it becomes a superficial, no strings attached relationship.

Kyrell is struggling with his past while Quinn is trying to secure her future. Neither is looking for more, but fate has other plans.
What happens when two people collide with fate?

Content Advisory: child abuse, death, mentions of suicide

From one of Brazil’s most acclaimed new literary stars, a twenty-first-century epic set in Rio’s largest favela.

Life on the morro, the hill, is good. Five young people―the brothers Washington and Wesley and their friends Douglas, Murilo, and Biel―live close to Rocinha’s main avenue, Via Ápia, just a quick bus ride from the beaches of Rio de Janeiro.

But the rhythms of their lives stutter and scratch when Brazil’s militarized police storm Rocinha as part of “pacification” efforts ahead of the upcoming World Cup and an influx of international tourists. Via Ápia charts the expectant anxiousness before the police’s invasion, the chaos born from their occupation of the hill, and the aftermath of their silent withdrawal from the favela after one year.

Told in heated bursts and marked by the charged chronology of the protagonists’ lives, Geovani Martins’s prodigious debut novel knits together the dramas and dreams of the favela during a peak of turbulent unrest. Like the boom boom kat of Brazilian funk, the unbridled ambitions and resolute friendships of these characters blare throughout Via Ápia, delivering a resonant counternarrative to the notion that violent interventions are the state’s only remedy to the afflictions of crime and poverty. The favela retorts: life, life is the answer.

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In this beautifully crafted, Rashomon-like novel, Maryse Conde has written a gripping story imbued with all the nuances and traditions of Caribbean culture. Francis Sancher--a handsome outsider, loved by some and reviled by others--is found dead, face down in the mud on a path outside Riviere au Sel, a small village in Guadeloupe.  None of the villagers are particularly surprised, since Sancher, a secretive and melancholy man, had often predicted an unnatural death for himself.  As the villagers come to pay their respects they each--either in a speech to the mourners, or in an internal monologue--reveal another piece of the mystery behind Sancher's life and death.  

Like pieces of an elaborate puzzle, their memories interlock to create a rich and intriguing portrait of a man and a community. In the lush and vivid prose for which she has become famous, Conde has constructed a Guadeloupean wake for Francis Sancher.  Retaining the full color and vibrance of Conde's homeland, Crossing the Mangrove pays homage to Guadeloupe in both subject and structure.