WINNER OF THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

“An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration.” —Isabel Wilkerson

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. South to America is an essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America

We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.

This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.

Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line.

In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. 

Heavy is a “gorgeous, gutting…generous” (The New York Times) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

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At the March On Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was 57 years old, well beyond her most prolific days. But in her speech at the march, she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,” she told the crowd. From those few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines—whether it’s the 27 seconds in “Gimme Shelter” where Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,” a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in black and white culture, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance.

John Murillo’s second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation. A sparrow trapped in a car window evokes a mother battered by a father’s fists; a workout at an iron gym recalls a long-ago mentor who pushed the speaker “to become something unbreakable.” The presence of these and poetic forbears—Gil Scott-Heron, Yusef Komunyakaa—provide a context for strength in the face of danger and anger. At the heart of the book is a sonnet crown triggered by the shooting deaths of three Brooklyn men that becomes an extended meditation on the history of racial injustice and the notion of payback as a form of justice.

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We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates’s iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including “Fear of a Black President,” “The Case for Reparations,” and “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates’s own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels

One of The Center for Fiction's 200 Books That Shaped 200 Years of Literature

"Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose.”―Tayari Jones, New York Times Book Review

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 Street, originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, is the first novel by a Black woman to sell more than a million copies, and is a haunting story that still resonates today.

The Street tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young Black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s.

Lutie is confronted by racism, sexism, and classism on a daily basis in her pursuit of the American dream for herself and her son, Bub. Lutie fully subscribes to the belief that if she follows the adages of Benjamin Franklin by working hard and saving wisely, she will be able to achieve the dream of being financially independent.

With an Introduction from New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones.

* A BEAUTIFUL PACKAGE WITH FLAPS: Featuring French flaps and a unique vivid cover design, each book in the collection is published as a deluxe trade paperback that is a part of a stunning series look.
* HARPER COLLINS AMERICAN CLASSICS: This series includes timeless novels, poetry, children’s books, and groundbreaking nonfiction that has shaped American thought, literature, and identity across generations.
* AMERICA’S PUBLISHER: Since its founding in 1817, no American publisher has been so entwined in the history of American letters. Our books enrich, challenge, and defined the American spirit.
* AMERICA 250: The HarperCollins American Classics arrive in time for America’s 250th anniversary celebrations.

If the question is America-and by extension, who is and what does it mean to be American? -AFRICANAMERICAN'T offers no answers. The CAN'T in the title suggests impossibility and that is precisely what the book is interested in. Even in the so-called land of opportunity, some things remain impossible for its speaker(s). In a way, AFRICANAMERICAN'T is a document of attempted refusals: assimilation, forgetting, and allegiance to any one country. However valid despair might be as a response to the continued failings of his two countries, Ayokunle Falomo traverses the distance between betrayal and love in an attempt to find poetry-and perhaps, something like hope-in all the places it can't be found.

"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."

In this haunting historical novel, a light-skinned Black man goes undercover to investigate lynchings in the Jim Crow South, only to be confronted by the very evil that has pursued him since childhood.

Clark Wendell White first encountered the Nightmare as a child during the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, when he and his father stood guard over their family home. In the eyes of the mob surging through his neighborhood, Clark sensed this malevolent presence. It was then that the Nightmare took shape, burrowing deep into his mind and feeding on his fear.

Years later, the same evil presence drives Clark to the NAACP's headquarters in New York City, where he answers an ad seeking light-skinned Black men for dangerous undercover work. As a spy for the NAACP, Clark investigates lynchings, impersonating the very Nightmare that once tormented him.

As Clark descends deeper into this double life, another force rises: a new chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, finding a foothold in the storied streets of New York City. Among its eager recruits is Sam Cahill—the one man who can see past his disguise. Now Clark must outwit both the living and the dead, as he confronts a past that refuses to stay buried and a future where the act of passing exacts a soul-deep price.

Inspired by the life of civil rights activist Walter White, who passed as a white man to expose the brutality of lynchings from the South to the Midwest, American Nightmare is a gripping historical thriller that reveals the most terrifying monsters aren't those that go bump in the night but those that walk among us.

“American Spy updates the espionage thriller with blazing originality.”—Entertainment Weekly
“There has never been anything like it.”—Marlon James, GQ
“So much fun . . . Like the best of John le Carré, it’s extremely tough to put down.”—NPR

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • Entertainment Weekly • Esquire • BuzzFeed • Vulture • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping • The New York Public Library

What if your sense of duty required you to betray the man you love? 

It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a young black woman working in an old boys’ club. Her career has stalled out, she’s overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she’s given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes. Yes, even though she secretly admires the work Sankara is doing for his country. Yes, even though she is still grieving the mysterious death of her sister, whose example led Marie to this career path in the first place. Yes, even though a furious part of her suspects she’s being offered the job because of her appearance and not her talent.

In the year that follows, Marie will observe Sankara, seduce him, and ultimately have a hand in the coup that will bring him down. But doing so will change everything she believes about what it means to be a spy, a lover, a sister, and a good American.

Inspired by true events—Thomas Sankara is known as “Africa’s Che Guevara”—American Spy knits together a gripping spy thriller, a heartbreaking family drama, and a passionate romance. This is a face of the Cold War you’ve never seen before, and it introduces a powerful new literary voice.

NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

“Spy fiction plus allegory, and a splash of pan-Africanism. What could go wrong? As it happens, very little. Clever, bracing, darkly funny, and really, really good.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Inspired by real events, this espionage thriller ticks all the right boxes, delivering a sexually charged interrogation of both politics and race.”—Esquire

“Echoing the stoic cynicism of Hurston and Ellison, and the verve of Conan Doyle, American Spy lays our complicities—political, racial, and sexual—bare. Packed with unforgettable characters, it’s a stunning book, timely as it is timeless.”—Paul Beatty, Man Booker Prizewinning author of The Sellout

"[A]ccessible and intellectually rich…Essential reading to understand the economic state of the nation." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

The celebrated legal scholar and author of The Color of Money reveals how neoliberals rigged American law, creating widespread distrust, inequality, and injustice.

With the nation lurching from one crisis to the next, many Americans believe that something fundamental has gone wrong. Why aren’t college graduates able to achieve financial security? Why is government completely inept in the face of natural disasters? And why do pundits tell us that the economy is strong even though the majority of Americans can barely make ends meet? In The Quiet Coup, Mehrsa Baradaran, one of our leading public intellectuals, argues that the system is in fact rigged toward the powerful, though it wasn’t the work of evil puppet masters behind the curtain. Rather, the rigging was carried out by hundreds of (mostly) law-abiding lawyers, judges, regulators, policy makers, and lobbyists. Adherents of a market-centered doctrine called neoliberalism, these individuals, over the course of decades, worked to transform the nation―and succeeded.

They did so by changing the law in unseen ways. Tracing this largely unknown history from the late 1960s to the present, Baradaran demonstrates that far from yielding fewer laws and regulations, neoliberalism has in fact always meant more―and more complex―laws. Those laws have uniformly benefited the wealthy. From the work of a young Alan Greenspan in creating "Black Capitalism," to Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s efforts to unshackle big money donors, to the establishment of the "Law and Economics" approach to legal interpretation―in which judges render opinions based on the principles of right-wing economics―Baradaran narrates the key moments in the slow-moving coup that was, and is, neoliberalism. Shifting our focus away from presidents and national policy, she tells the story of how this nation’s laws came to favor the few against the many, threatening the integrity of the market and the state.

Some have claimed that the neoliberal era is behind us. Baradaran shows that such thinking is misguided. Neoliberalism is a failed economic idea―it doesn’t, in fact, create more wealth or more freedom. But it has been successful nevertheless, by seizing the courts and enabling our age of crypto fraud, financial instability, and accelerating inequality. An original account of the forces that have brought us to this dangerous moment in American history, The Quiet Coup reshapes our understanding of the recent past and lights a path toward a better future.

"A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music." — Langston Hughes

"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music—through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."

So says Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America—not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.