Search results: 314 results for “by Thomas C. Holt”
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314 results
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PRE-ORDER: Goliath: A Novel
PRE-ORDER: Goliath: A Novel
$29.00A young Black man feels called irresistably to farmland he's never seen, where a fateful feud simmers between a pastor and his protégé. A thunderous instant classic, this novel reimagines David and Goliath as the story of one unforgettable family, living in the era of the Great Migration and in the heart of the American South.
"PLEASE READ THIS MASTERPIECE." —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
In 1910, at the tender age of fourteen, David Jeremiah Lightfoot inherits his father’s farm in Mississippi: a barren, cursed plot of land once known as Goliath. David has never lived outside Chicago, but he is determined to claim and farm the land more effectively than his father ever could. Once there, David confronts both literal and figurative giants. And soon a high-stakes struggle with the burden of his ancestors’ legacy will intertwine his fate with that of his family, the land, and the surrounding community.
Narrating this saga is David’s youngest son, Little Bit, a uniquely sensitive storyteller with immense love for his parents, his grandfather Big Man, his uncle Jonathan, his cousin, and his brothers and sister. Little Bit charts the dramatic twists and turns of his father's rise to a precarious pinnacle of wealth and power, studded as it was with quiet moments of sweetness, joy, and transcendent beauty.
At once a profound, heartfelt story about one tight-knit family and an elegant, propulsive tragedy, Goliath weaves together themes of destiny and redemption. It is a revelatory meditation on the deep, troubled ties between Black Americans and the very ground on which past generations toiled and lived.
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The People Could Fly: The Picture Book
The People Could Fly: The Picture Book
Virginia Hamilton
from $14.99“THE PEOPLE COULD FLY,” the title story in Virginia Hamilton’s prize-winning American Black folktale collection, is a fantasy tale of the slaves who possessed the ancient magic words that enabled them to literally fly away to freedom. And it is a moving tale of those who did not have the opportunity to “fly” away, who remained slaves with only their imaginations to set them free as they told and retold this tale.
Leo and Diane Dillon have created powerful new illustrations in full color for every page of this picture book presentation of Virginia Hamilton’s most beloved tale. The author’s original historical note as well as her previously unpublished notes are included.
Awards for The People Could Fly collection:
A Coretta Scott King Award
A Booklist Children’s Editors’ Choice
A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year
A Horn Book Fanfare
An ALA Notable Book
An NCTE Teachers’ Choice
A New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book of the Century
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Tar Baby
Tar Baby
by Toni Morrison
$35.00The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones—of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people.
The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years—the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote wife—who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by sudden bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor among them—a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servant’s dazzling niece, but the protegée and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian’s expense and is home now for a respite from her Paris world of fashion, film and art.
Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. And, in a single moment, with Valerian’s perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a larger abdication. Margaret’s delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who at first is repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him—he calls himself Son; he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood; uneducated, violent, contemptuous of her privilege.
As Jadine and Son come together in the loving collision they have both welcomed and feared, the novel moves outward—to the Florida backwater town Son was raised in, fled from, yet cherishes; to her sleek New York; then back to the island people and their protective and entangling legends. As the lovers strive to hold and understand each other, as they experience the awful weight of the separate worlds that have formed them—she perceiving his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom, he perceiving her as the classic lure, the tar baby set out to entrap him—all the mysterious elements, all the highly charged threads of the story converge. Everything that is at risk is made clear: how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart.
Once again, Toni Morrison has given us a novel of daring, fascination, and power. -
PRE-ORDER: We Won't Be Here When It Ends
PRE-ORDER: We Won't Be Here When It Ends
$21.99From #1 New York Times bestselling author Mark Oshiro (The Sun and the Star) comes a deeply compelling and emotionally resonant new novel that puts a sinister spin on the idea that “the children are our future”.
There is little that frightens Arturo Ruiz anymore.
Life in the twenty-first century feels like one historic event after another. He and his friends have been through it all: pandemics. Floods and fires. Active shooters and drills at school. State-sanctioned violence. Still, the teens are expected to model resilience, to boldly march into the future and fulfill the promises of the generations before them.
Or so they had thought. Because tomorrow–the world is going to end.
And the nightmares Arturo had been having―the ones with the buzzing, eerie entities asking terrible questions about survival? Those were meant to be a warning.
Unfortunately for Arturo, his sister, and his two best friends, their parents are no help–abandoning them suddenly and leaving behind only the cryptic message:
We won’t be here when it ends.
This is the story of how to survive the end of the world--or die trying.
WE WON’T BE HERE WHEN IT ENDS is an unflinchingly honest look at the darkest possible timeline, infused with a shocking supernatural twist. Equal parts humanity and horror―this book is perfect for fans of Andrew Joseph White, Carnaby Kim, and Parasyte.
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The Sacred Place: A Novel
The Sacred Place: A Novel
$22.00Inspired by the murder of Emmett Till, this novel offers a powerful and profound exploration of black pain, suffering, and strength in the segregated South.
In the summer of 1955, fourteen-year-old Clement enters a general store in Money, Mississippi to purchase a soda. Unaware of the consequences of flouting the rules governing black-white relations in the South, this Chicago native defies tradition, by laying a dime on the counter and turns to depart. Miss Cuthbert, the store attendant, demands that he place the money in her hand, but he refuses, declaring, "I ain't no slave!" and exits with a sense of entitlement unknown to black people at the time. His behavior results in his brutal murder. This event sparks a war in Money, forcing the black community to galvanize its strength in pursuit of equality.
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The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures
The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures
$20.00An extraordinary new work, epic in scale and lyrical in flight, by the award-winning author of Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor.
“How big is a home?”
“What is space without reaching?”
“You ever think about being remembered?”
Posing questions that belie their simplicity, Sean Hill’s new collection is rooted in our shared history, lived experience, and a speculative future. It considers how we fashion identities through formative relationships with history and community, with our ancestors, our children, and ourselves. These connections underscore our ties to nature and emphasize humanity’s seemingly inevitable turn to violence. For instance, a meditation on the white-headed woodpecker connects to knowledge of Black miners in nineteenth century Roslyn, Washington, and sparks an understanding of white-headed woodpeckers as “arboreal miners” with “a patch of red feathers / on the back of their crowns” that the speaker observes and “can’t help but see blood.”
This collection ranges in setting from antebellum Georgia to twenty-first century Alaska, from the Wild West to the Asteroid Belt in the twenty-fifth century. The exploration of people in relation to place excavates the complexity of heritage and privilege, fatherhood amid environmental collapse, and the inherited memories, abilities, hardships, and love that link Black people living centuries apart.
Taken together, these poems, queries, and possibilities paint a sensibility that strives to integrate itself into the known world, and through that world into an imagined future. In searching for answers that almost arrive, The Negroes Send Their Love reveals a heart as big as the home it seeks.
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Dawn
Dawn
by Octavia E. Butler
$18.99In the future, nuclear war has destroyed nearly all humankind. An alien race intervenes, saving the small group of survivors from certain death. But their salvation comes at a cost.
The Oankali are able to read and mutate genetic code, and they use these skills for their own survival, interbreeding with new species to constantly adapt and evolve. They value the intelligence they see in humankind but also know that the species -- rigidly bound to destructive social hierarchies -- is destined for failure. They are determined that the only way forward is for the two races to produce a new hybrid species -- and they will not tolerate rebellion.
Akin looks like an ordinary human child. But as the first true human-alien hybrid, he is born understanding language, then starts to form sentences at two months old. He can see at a molecular level and kill with a touch. More powerful than any human or Oankali, he will be the architect of both races' future. But before he can carry this new species into the stars, Akin must reconcile with his own heritage in a world already torn in two.
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Native Son
Native Son
by Richard Wright
$18.00“Native Son declares Richard Wright’s importance, not merely as the best Negro writer, but as an American author as distinctive as any of those writing today.”—New York Times This edition of Native Son reprints the original edition in which Wright omitted several passages which book club editors feared would prove offensive to readers in 1940 and which were restored to the book in later editions.
Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright’s powerful novel is just as meaningful today as when it was written, both in its unsparing reflection of the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and in what it means to be black in America. An undisputed classic since it was first published, Native Son has sold close to three million copies.
This abridged edition—the original 1940 text—includes an afterword by John Reilly and contains an introduction, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” by Richard Wright.
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PRE-ORDER: Lonesome Holler: A Novel
PRE-ORDER: Lonesome Holler: A Novel
$28.99From the author of the acclaimed novel, House of Cotton, comes an electric, haunting new Southern noir following the residents of Better Tomorrow Trailer Park in the aftermath of a gruesome murder.
Summer ’97. Deadly sins. Misguided obsessions.
When Better Tomorrow Trailer Park’s owner, Joe Candle, is found nailed to a cross in the center of the lot, the police have one question for the park’s eccentric residents: Who killed Candle?
No one is safe from suspicion. Not the pretty, calf-eyed cashier with a shadowed past, or the barber and his strange, altered demeanor, or the young son of a cop who harbors a volcanic temper.
As the investigation begins and satanic panic grips this small town in the heart of Appalachia, the low-grade paranoia spreads beyond the borders of the park. With the arrival of a lone, mysterious detective, a darker plot is soon unearthed. The questions that arise threaten the very existence of Better Tomorrow, and the community is tested to its breaking point.
Thundering towards the dreaded summer solstice, Lonesome Holler is a beautifully written exploration of loneliness, a blue-tuned elegy for community, and a comedic, devastating ode to the South.
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Duels (The French List)
Duels (The French List)
Néhémy Dahomey
$25.00PRE-ORDER:ON SALE DATE: Oct 6, 2025
A gripping tale of education, violence, and hope, in which one man's dream for a better future collides with a community on the edge of transformation.
Set in 1842, this novel foregrounds a Haiti that is grappling with the weight of an onerous debt imposed by France, forcing its citizens to pay reparations to French colonists in exchange for diplomatic recognition of the first Black republic of the Americas. In the town of Boën, a prosperous notary, Ludovic Possible, decides to take a bold step to secure the future of his community. He opens a schoolhouse where local children can learn both artisanal skills and the essential ability to read and write. For Ludovic, education represents the best chance for the people of Boën to rise above their hardships and build a prosperous future—especially for Aïda, a quiet and enigmatic girl whose mother’s marvelous stories captivate him.
The tranquility of Boën is soon shattered, however, by a series of duels that pit families, neighbors, and even animals against each other. As tensions rise, Ludovic’s vision for a better future is threatened by the escalating violence. In Duels, Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey introduces readers to a rich and unforgettable cast of characters—Aïda, Ludovic, Balthazar Possible, Pépé the Tempest, and many others—who find themselves at the crossroads of a nation on the brink of transformative change.
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We Were Not Kings: A Novel
We Were Not Kings: A Novel
Robert de la Chevotière
$16.99From island life in the Caribbean to a new beginning in France, a young man comes of age in a sweeping and lyrical novel about family, loss, secrets, and finding freedom from the past.
Eighteen-year-old Salomon Destin graduates high school and anxiously trades life on Guadeloupe in the Caribbean for France to continue his studies.
Strasbourg is his new home. He’s carving out a promising new path for himself. And most of all, he’s left behind the disorder of so much family drama, including that of a dissolute father, a mother who turns a blind eye to the chaos, his troubled and aimless brother Junior, and Salomon’s inherited obligations as peacekeeper. Although one year away, in love for the first time, and an ocean safely separating his old life and new, Salomon is pulled back to the island by the news of a tragedy. As unexpectedly comforting as Guadeloupe is―the food, music, ocean, and sun stirring up beautiful island memories―the traumas of the past remain.
Years later, while facing the echoes of family demons in his own marriage and confronting the stunning secrets and revelations to come, Salomon, and everyone he loves, must find the strength to move forward once and for all. But will freedom come with a price?
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Happy Land
Happy Land
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
$19.00A woman learns the astonishing truth of her family’s ties to a vanished American Kingdom in this riveting new novel from the New York Times bestselling, NAACP Image Award-winning author of Take My Hand.
Nikki Berry hasn’t seen her grandmother in years, due to a mysterious estrangement inherited from her mother. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, she’s determined to learn the truth while she still can.
But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen.
It sounds like the makings of a fairy tale—royalty among a community of freed people. But the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she discovers in the woods, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family’s secrets are wrapped up in these hills. Because this land is their legacy, and it will be up to her to protect it before it, like so much else, is stolen away.
Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multi-generational novel about the stories that shape us and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.
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