A New York Times Notable Book

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic investigates the roles of race and sex in his own life and in literary history.

Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer's subjects: his mother, a self-described "Negress," who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's misogyny and racism; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other Black people or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men; and the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author's own social and intellectual formation.

Hilton Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. Written in 1996, long before the rise of the genre-defying memoir, The Women was a prescient work of criticism and self-investigation whose clear-eyed insight still feels fresh and urgent to this day. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that created a form all its own.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned how to survive, but forgot how to truly live. What if the version of you that helped you survive is now keeping you from being fully known and loved Sarah Jakes Roberts reveals how perfectionism, performance, and self-protection become armor and shows you how to lay it down, embrace who God created you to be, and experience genuine connection.

We became the dependable one. The achiever. The perfectionist. The people-pleaser. The strong one who never asks for help. We built lives that look orderly and pristine on the outside while quietly carrying the exhausting weight of proving ourselves, protecting ourselves, and performing for acceptance. But the armor that once helped us survive may now be keeping us from the very connection we long for.

In Get Over Yourself, New York Times bestselling author Sarah Jakes Roberts invites readers on a compassionate journey beneath the versions of themselves they've learned to become. Blending profound biblical insight, developmental research, and her own deeply personal story, including a life-altering accident that forced her to confront the identity she'd built around survival, Sarah reveals how God gently leads us beyond perfectionism, performance, and fear into lives marked by authenticity, freedom, and genuine connection.

Through vulnerable storytelling, practical wisdom, and fresh biblical perspective, readers will discover how to:

* Recognize the survival patterns shaping their relationships and identity.
* Release the pressure to constantly prove, protect, or perfect themselves.
* Heal from shame, fear, and the hidden lies that keep them emotionally guarded.
* Experience deeper intimacy with God, healthier relationships, and lasting inner freedom.
* Become the person love, not survival, requires.

Honest, hopeful, and transformative, Get Over Yourself is for anyone who's tired of carrying the weight of who they've had to become and ready to discover the freedom of becoming who God created them to be.

In a piercing blend of biography, criticism, and memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Salamishah Tillet explores Nina Simone’s life and the impact of her legacy.

In Nina Simone and the World She Made, Salamishah Tillet traces Nina Simone’s transformation from child prodigy to musical icon and fearless civil rights activist. When racism thwarted her dreams of becoming a classical pianist, Simone reinvented herself and created a sound wholly her own—one that would catapult her into stardom and the heart of the Black Power movement.

Decades later, Simone’s music inspired the hip-hop generation and Tillet’s own profound political awakening. From buying her first Nina Simone album to becoming a creative and activist, Tillet’s private encounters with Simone’s work grew into a broader exploration of her legacy. Exploring Simone’s unique impact on the American cultural landscape through the women who shaped her and those whom she shaped, Tillet reveals how art can be a powerful driver of social activism, and the struggles and sacrifices it involves.

With honest, lyrical prose, Tillet’s intimate portrait brings us close to Simone, while showing us how the singer’s voice captured the pain and promise of America and resonates in the fight for equality today. Nina Simone and the World She Made urges us to listen to Simone’s music—not just as a reflection of the past, but as a guide for the future.

An eloquent and original exploration of the Atlantic slave trade―now featuring the essay “Venus in Two Acts” and a new introduction by Dionne Brand.

A monumental work of first-person history, Lose Your Mother traces the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey Saidiya Hartman took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and the rippling effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African-American history.

The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger―torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to be uprooted from your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. There are no known survivors of Hartman’s lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping to find. Instead, she is a stranger in search of strangers, forging connections with others living in the wake of atrocity.

A rigorous and intimate reflection on the afterlife of slavery, Lose Your Mother is both a book of history and a book of grief. This 20th anniversary edition now includes Hartman’s landmark essay “Venus in Two Acts” and a new introduction by Dionne Brand―perfect for introducing new readers to Hartman’s lived-in way of contending with the past.

From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich, a novel about the collisions of youth—with want, with art, with rage—as experienced by a young Chippewa writer in politically fraught 1970s America.

“Where do we find a definition? Where do we find what a poet is?”

Fargo, 1971. Erdrich’s narrator spends her days sneaking pocketsful of lasagna home from waitressing, missing the author friends who have floated out of town again, and wondering half-seriously if the poetry of local third graders is outdoing her own. In search of more life, more inspiration, and—always—enough food to get through the next day, she embarks on a series of jobs, affairs, and travels that illuminate the wild eccentricities of the American national character as much as they do the injustices—and resistances—boiling around her in North Dakota.

I’m Hungry explores shocking violence, unearthly beauty, and voracious appetites of all kinds, from sexual hunger to the need for a life transfigured by poetry. It answers the question of “what a poet is” with an indelible portrait of a young woman in a fractured community who finds her voice even as she encounters lovers, hustlers, and specters whose own hungers threaten to pull her under.

A bold, gorgeously textured, and unforgettable moral fable, this compelling novel will be revelatory to her legions of fans.

The Talented Mr. Ripley meets the Wu-Tang Clan: An American Saga in this dark psychological thriller.

Thomas “Maz” Kincaid lives a lavish life as a rising rap star: money, influence, and fame. But Maz’s success rests on a lie—his lyrics to his chart-topping album belong to someone else, his foster brother, Adonis.

Adonis, fresh out of prison is done watching his brother live off his talent and launches a calculated campaign of vengeance. But Maz won’t let all he’s worked for be taken away. He’s willing to lie, manipulate, and even kill to protect the fraudulent life he’s built.

As the rivalry escalates, the line between victim and villain blurs. With both men—damaged, cunning, and ruthless, locked in a psychological war where only one can survive the spotlight. Who will rule the stage, and who will end up in a grave?

Dark, complex, and suspenseful, All the Smoke is a cautionary tale, exploring identity, trauma, and the psychopathy behind stardom in the music industry.

From the award-winning novelist and poet Dionne Brand, a smart, sensual, and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course.

Theory begins as its narrator sets out, like many a graduate student, to write a wildly ambitious thesis on the past, present, and future of art, culture, race, gender, class, and politics―a revolutionary work that its author believes will synthesize and thereby transform the world.

While our narrator tries to complete this magnum opus, three lovers enter the story, one after the other, each transforming the endeavor: first there is beautiful and sensual Selah, who scoffs at the narrator’s constant tinkering with academic abstractions; then altruistic and passionate Yara, who rescues every lost soul who crosses her path; and finally spiritual occultist Odalys, who values magic and superstition over the heady intellectual and cultural circles the narrator aspires to inhabit. Each galvanizing love affair (representing, in turn, the heart, the head, and the spirit) upends and reorients the narrator’s life and, inevitably, requires an overhaul of the ever larger and more unwieldy dissertation, with results both humorous and poignant.

By effortlessly telling this short, intense tale in the voice of an unnamed, ungendered (and brilliantly unreliable) narrator, Dionne Brand makes a bold statement not only about love and personhood, but about race and gender―and what can and cannot be articulated in prose when the forces that inhabit the space between words are greater than words themselves.

Theory is a gorgeous, profoundly moving, word- and note-perfect novel of ideas that only a great artist at the height of her powers could write.

An inventive haunted house story with an uncanny twist, in which a woman mourning the recent death of her abusive mother takes a housekeeping job with increasingly strange and dangerous tasks, for fans of Carissa Orlando and Monika Kim.

Loretta is numb with grief. Reeling after the death of her abusive—although she would never use that word—mother and estranged from her younger sister, Loretta finds herself unemployed and alone.

Resolutely out of options, she hears of an unusual job opportunity. The owner of a huge home on the outskirts of town is looking for a live-in housekeeper—and offering thousands of dollars every week, in cash. There are only two simple rules: complete the daily chores left in the mailbox and no overnight guests. It seems like the perfect escape.

The idyllic solitude quickly sours into a waking nightmare. The daily chores escalate from simple cleaning to grotesque demands for Loretta’s flesh and blood. Any resistance is met with painful and increasingly life-threatening punishments. Loretta is familiar with this situation—well trained by her mother and miserable childhood— and isolates herself inside the carnivorous mansion. As her sense of reality warps and she falls deeper into the house’s clutches, her friends and sister try to intervene before it’s too late. But to survive, Loretta must decide whether to accept the comfort of familiar cycles or find out how hard she’s willing to fight for herself.

Both a terrifying thriller and an emotional portrait of resilience in the face of abuse, This House Is Not a Home is an ambitious debut from an exciting new voice in adult horror.

From MacArthur Genius, award-winning expert on justice transformation, James Bell, Sorrow’s Kitchen presents a groundbreaking and unapologetically hopeful vision of what is possible if we center our communities and justice systems around care and wellbeing rather than punishment and control.

Weaving together powerful stories and solutions from his frontline work with justice practitioners, law enforcement officers, and community members throughout the states and around the globe, James Bell has written a book with a simple and powerful idea at its core: A justice system based on punishment makes all of us less safe. But we each have the power to reimagine and recreate justice in our communities in such a way that all of us are seen and cared for. And justice transformation begins with youth justice.

Sorrow’s Kitchen: The End of Punishment and the Beginning of True Safety delves into the deeply entrenched racial inequities within America’s justice system, tracing their roots to slavery, segregation, and systemic oppression. Through personal anecdotes, historical analysis, and a critique of current practices, James Bell exposes how structural racism has shaped the administration of justice, perpetuating cycles of harm and inequality. The metaphor of "Sorrow’s Kitchen," borrowed from Zora Neale Hurston, serves as a poignant symbol of the collective suffering endured by Black communities, while highlighting their resilience and determination to rise above systemic injustices.

A central focus of Sorrow’s Kitchen is the failure of punitive justice systems to ensure public safety or address the root causes of harm. Bell’s critiques of mass incarceration, racialized social control, and the over-policing of marginalized communities, make the argument that these approaches exacerbate inequality rather than resolve it. He advocates for a transformative vision of justice rooted in care, equity, and community-centered solutions. By centering the voices and expertise of those most impacted by systemic injustice, Sorrow’s Kitchen calls for dismantling harmful structures and replacing them with restorative practices that prioritize wellbeing and healing.

Ultimately, Sorrow’s Kitchen is a call to action, urging readers to reckon with America’s history of racial violence and to imagine a more equitable future. It emphasizes the importance of collective action, power-sharing, and authentic inclusion in reimagining justice systems that serve all people with dignity and humanity. Infused with hope and determination, Sorrow’s Kitchen challenges the status quo and inspires a vision of a society where care replaces control, and justice is truly transformative.

COMPANION TO NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER, BLACK GOLD
In this companion picture book to Black Gold, the NAACP Image Award winner, Laura Obuobi and Society of Illustrators’ honoree London Ladd team up to tell a story that celebrates Black life, brims with black joy, and instills an important message about Black resilience.
Black is precious.
Black is holy.
Black is powerful.
Black is many things, and its magnificence can be found all throughout the world. It’s in obsidian, in the rolling fields of calla lilies, and the birth of the universe. Most importantly, Black is a people whose strength, grace, and resilience would foster change, creativity, and a culture from which would emerge a world that would never be the same and a community whose genius continues to inspire all. Despite everything that Black people have endured, they are still present—living and thriving.
Powerhouse duo Laura Obuobi and London Ladd return with another poignant, lyrical text that celebrates all that being Black is, positively reinforcing the magnitude of possibilities that being Black can—and will—be. With its important themes, Black Is will enchant young readers with events and achievements by people in Black history and the Black diaspora, like uprisings, innovations in culture, entertainment, literature, including civil rights work by West Africans, Caribbeans, and Black Americans.

· Brimming with Black Joy: This book is magical, heartwarming, and a bright reminder that diverse stories are hopeful too. Laura has created a world where all facets of Black life, especially joy, are brought to light.
· Champion for Self-Love: This uplifting, impactful, and lyrical book will empower Black children and will inspire them to love themselves exactly as they are. This book delivers the important message that Black is beautiful and powerful.
· Bedtime Story with Lyrical, Poignant Text: Laura spins a story with language that is so rich, it is as though she has captured a dream on the page. Readers will be enthralled by this sweeping, meditative tale.
· Timely and Timeless Picture Book: This is a book that will always resonate with readers as they move on through every stage of their lives, uplifting and empowering, and is the perfect baby shower gift and graduation gift.

A transformative, practical guide to true wellness and a life of abundance and balance, from the renowned astrophysicist, TED Fellow, and working mother.

What would your life look like if you allowed yourself to rest?

Dr. Aomawa Shields is a lifelong overachiever. While working harder than everyone else led to career success and public accolades—from completing her six-year PhD program in five to presenting a celebrated TED Talk that has received 1.8 million views—when she became a mom, a crisis of mental and physical health forced her to question the cost of pushing herself to the brink—and look for a better way.

As an astronomer searching for life on other planets, Dr. Shields has long learned from the cosmos, and in these pages she shares her hard-won wisdom, structured over the course of a year of practice. With her expert guidance and the same rest tools she teaches her students, you can learn to:

* choose self-compassion over self-hatred and -critique
* pause and settle using techniques from yoga nidra, mindfulness, and journaling
* take action from a place of rest, which is far more productive than action born from chronic exhaustion, anxiety, and stress
* set boundaries with yourself and others
* unravel expectations around being a "good mother, "good daughter," "good friend," and "good worker"
* live seasonally and in relationship with nature

Dr. Shields' tools allow the body and mind to rest so overachievers can hear wisdom from within, often for the first time, about the unique fears that keep them striving for perfection, and the authentic pursuit of joy that can replace those fears. With mindful practices, prompts, and takeaways, Dr. Shields shows us how being realistic about our commitments can be a triumph, not a failure; why a 30 minute mini-vacation needs to be in your schedule; and what to say to ourselves when we feel that itch to do “one more thing” on our phone—even when we know it's a losing battle.

While Dr. Shields used to identify more with the heat and intensity of O-type stars, she now values the slow burn of M-type stars. It is time to release your old thinking and its path to burnout and instead embrace a way forward that nourishes your peace, wholeness, and connection to self and the universe.

Celebrate Brenda Jackson's 150th book, Spilling the Tea! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Tuesday, May 15 @ 7PM

Where: Kindred Stories Reading Garden (2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004)

How: RSVP WITH BOOK

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ninety-something Mama Laverne is determined to find all of her great-grandchildren their perfect match before going home to glory. So far, her success rate is 100 percent—and she intends to keep it that way.

Ninety-something-year-old Felicia Laverne Madaris, known in the family as Mama Laverne, is determined to find all of her great-grandchildren the perfect match before she goes home to glory. So far, her success rate is 100 percent, and she intends to keep it that way.

After sustaining injuries in Iraq, US Army Ranger Chancellor (Chance) Madaris was told he’d never walk again. Chance credits his great-grandmother, Mama Laverne, with giving him the will and fortitude to heal and prove the doctors wrong. He has a healthy respect for her meddling ways and knows he’ll eventually end up next on her matchmaker’s list.

When Zoey Pritchard was eight, she survived a car accident that left both her parents dead. She was sent to live with her great-aunt who refused to speak about her parents. Zoey has no memory from before the crash, but she’s been having the same dream over and over…

Guided by nothing but a hunch and images from her dream, Zoey travels to Houston. Searching for answers, Zoey uncovers a scandal involving her parents and the wealthy and powerful Madaris family. Her trail leads her straight to Chance’s door. The dislike and intense attraction are instant and simultaneous. Was it chance or Mama Laverne’s plan to throw this pair together?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BRENDA JACKSON is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than one hundred contemporary multicultural romance novels, including the Madaris Family series, the Westmorelands series, and The Playas series. She was the first African-American author to have a book published under the Harlequin/Silhouette Desire line and the first African-American romance author to hit both the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists in the series romance genre. Many of her books have been adapted into movies. Brenda lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and divides her time between family, writing and traveling. brendajackson.net.