From the PEN-nominated author of The Blueprint comes a moving novel about two women connected by music, memory—and murder.

Texas, 1983. Lola Jones is in prison for the death of her mother’s former lover, a man whose presence tangled itself through both their lives. After years of silence, Lola writes a letter to the dead man’s daughter—the “secret sister” from the better part of town in whose shadow Lola has lived most of her life.

As Lola reaches across time and memory, her story unfolds in two mirrored movements: the first, a chronicle of her mother, Camille, a blues singer shaped by love, ambition, and loss; the second, a recounting of Lola’s own coming of age in the echo of Camille’s legacy.

Braided with music, memory, and the weight of being misunderstood, Sweet Water explores inheritance, identity, and the ways women learn to survive what they cannot control. It is a story about Black women connected and separated by their experiences with each other, and with the men in their lives. Written as a letter, structured like a blues song—call and response, verse and refrain—the novel asks what it means to reclaim your voice when someone else’s pain has defined your existence.

The iconic NAACP magazine’s most dynamic and daring African American voices gathered together for the first time in a groundbreaking literary collection, from founding editor W. E. B. DuBois and Jessie Fauset to today's modern day cultural critics, including June Shagaloff and Michael A. Lawrence.

The Crisis magazine is the official publication of NAACP. It was created in 1910 by renowned historian, civil rights activist, and NAACP co-founder W. E. B. DuBois. The magazine appeared three years before Conde Nast launched an American version of Vanity Fair and fifteen years before Harold W. Ross introduced The New Yorker to readers.

Du Bois started The Crisis in one room of the New York Evening Post building in New York City and edited the publication until 1934. A group of NAACP leaders adapted the name from James Russell Lowell's poem The Present Crisis, written at the height of the Civil War.

In the premier issue Du Bois made clear of the publication’s goals: "The Crisis will record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of inter-racial relations, and especially those which affect the Negro-American. Secondly, it will be a review of opinion and literature, recording briefly books, articles, and important expressions of opinion in the white and colored press on the race problem. Thirdly, it will publish a few short articles. Finally, its editorial page will stand for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American democracy."

At the time, Du Bois noted, "it was the rule of most white papers never to publish a picture of a colored person except as a criminal and the colored papers published mostly pictures of celebrities who sometimes paid for the honor. In general, the Negro race was just a little afraid to see itself in plain ink." Everything changed with the advent of The Crisis.

Now, for the first time ever The Best of the Crisis will bring together the magazine’s previously published most dynamic and daring voices and stories from its founding until today in one extraordinary collection, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Bayard Rustin, Francis Grimke, J.A. Rogers, Stetson Kennedy, E. Franklin Frazier, Oswald Garrison Villard, Jessie Fauset and Arna Bontemps.

This edition will spotlight the first section devoted to Negro children, the first presentation of Negro artwork, the first feature stories about successful Negroes, the first full-fledged drive for Pan-Africanism, the first special numbers devoted to Negro educational advancement, the first articles on consumers cooperation all tied together with contemporary voices on where we stand on these issues today.

Ten years after her E! reality TV show Rob & Chyna aired, the entrepreneur and actress formerly known as Blac Chyna is subverting expectations and sharing where her faith walk leads her.

For years, Angela White’s public persona and private life was that of the Kardashian-adjacent Blac Chyna, former stripper and reality television star. Born Angela Renée White on May 11, 1988, in Washington, DC, she first burst onto the scene in 2010 as Nicki Minaj’s stunt double in Kanye West’s Monster video. That same year, Drake’s shout-out in Miss Me put her name in the game, sparking buzz that landed her in national magazines. Her exotic look and hustle at Miami’s King of Diamonds strip club turned heads, but it was her high-profile relationships with rapper Tyga (father of her son, King Cairo) and Rob Kardashian (father of her daughter, Dream) that cemented her fame, along wih her unapologetic persona.

What many didn’t realize was that privately her notoriety was additionally complicated by an alcohol addiction that drew her away from the person she’d been raised to be. But four years ago, Angela made the decision to reclaim herself, which meant stepping out of the toxic limelight, removing a number of physical enhancements, and sobering up. Both for herself and for her children.

But Sober Mine is about more than fighting addiction. It’s about redemption, finding balance, and rebuilding one’s self from the inside out. Angela returned to her faith, was baptized in 2022, and she’s been sober for nearly four years and counting. She’s also pursuing a degree in divinity training and education.

In Sober Mine, Angela pulls back the curtain and shares the personal journey that led her to the world stage, giving insight into what you thought you thought you knew about her from those reality television days, and she does it all in her signature voice, direct with a side order of humor.

This book is about grabbing onto faith, discovering one’s strength, and learning you don’t have be perfect to live the life you deserve—you just gotta keep it real.

A gripping historical novel about two mothers, still reeling from the loss of a beloved soldier, whose opposing views on an impending Gold Star pilgrimage ignite personal journeys of their own.

Bound by grief, two women must choose how much they will sacrifice for one last goodbye.

It's 1933, and thousands of American mothers have already crossed the ocean to France to visit the graves of their sons lost during the Great War. Yet for Black Gold Star Mothers and Widows, this government-sponsored pilgrimage is an insult. As the final group of mourners prepare to sail cross the Atlantic—with white women aboard luxury liners and Black women relegated to cargo ships—many must decide if the long, segregated journey is worth the unfair treatment.

One widow wants to remember...

Thelma Hayes just wants to see her husband again—or at the very least, his final resting place. Widowed only a year after marrying the love of her life, she longs to give her fourteen-year-old son something he’s never had: a connection to the father he never knew. When an unexpected opportunity places France within reach, Thelma is willing to sacrifice almost anything to make the journey.

One mother refuses to forget...

Charlotte Hayes has already lost too much. After surviving the murder of her husband, the destruction of her home, and the death of her only son, she refuses to surrender one more piece of herself. Standing firm against the segregated pilgrimage to France, Charlotte vows not to accept anything less than equal acknowledgment of her son’s sacrifice.

Bound together by the man they both lost—and divided by how to best honor his memory—these two grieving women must decide what matters more: demanding dignity—or getting to say goodbye one last time.

Inspired by the true story of the segregated Gold Star Mothers Pilgrimage, THE COLOR OF SACRIFICE is a gripping historical novel about love, loss, reconciliation, and the painful cost of war.

From the landmark writer and activist of the Harlem Renaissance, Alice Dunbar Nelson, A Carnival Jangle is a powerful and unflinching collection of stories inspired by her early life in New Orleans.

These are stories of love, betrayal and fortitude, peopled by an array of vivid characters whose dramas bring alive Creole life in the late nineteenth century.

Women must walk a tightrope between respectability and desire in stories such as 'A Carnival Jangle'. Poverty is tackled head-on in the moving stories 'M'sieu Fortier’s Violin' and 'Little Miss Sophie', whilst Catholic faith mixed with Creole spirituality looms large in 'The Goodness of St. Rocque and Odalie'.

This series of pocket-sized paperbacks celebrates the art of the short story and marks Macmillan Collector's Library's 10th anniversary. Each contains a curated selection of short stories from a literary giant: Katherine Mansfield, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, James, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Alice Dunbar Nelson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rabindranath Tagore.

A new book of poems from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips.

Is this who I must be,
or maybe just
what I am?

“Sir” is an honorific, a title that indicates the superiority of its recipient, the subordination of its speaker. Carl Phillips’s SIR examines power and submission, abandon and restraint, whether in our personal, intimate relationships with others and ourselves, or in our relationships with such abstract masters as grief, memory, desire, regret, and the traumas of history. These are all things we’re told to try to overcome, to gain mastery of. Do we have a choice, though? And if so, how to choose ‘correctly,’ in a time when appearance and reality are constantly in flux, when hierarchy is revealed to be a matter of perspective, when even language itself is suspect, with its ability both to structure emotion and to estrange us from it?

In poems filled with tenderness, moral inquiry, and self-reckoning, stretched across natural landscapes both familiar and uncertain, SIR confirms–once again–that Carl Phillips is one of our finest and most enduring poets writing today.

An eloquent, prize-winning historian chronicles the rise of Black enterprise in America.

Entrepreneurs like Booker T. Washington and Madam C.J. Walker are familiar figures in the history of Black business. But from the hopeful dawn of emancipation to the crucible of Jim Crow, from rural Mound Bayou, Mississippi, to the bustling blocks of Harlem, many others built extraordinary businesses in pursuit of prosperity and freedom. Nevertheless, their efforts to pursue the American Dream were steadily undermined by people intent on profiting on their innovations and reining in their opportunities. Award-winning historian Shennette Garrett-Scott reveals the everyday genius of the people who refused to accept exclusion as identity: former slaves turned cotton mill owners, washerwomen turned financiers, and self-taught visionaries who built banks, real estate empires, and grocery store chains. Their successes were real, but ventures that promised economic independence often provoked backlash as white elites, politicians, and vigilantes tried to contain Black success. Even the boldest dreams often buckled under the combined weight of limited resources and state obstruction.

A daring tale, lyrically told, The Business of Freedom reveals the history, strengths, and weaknesses of Black capitalism as a strategy for both individual and collective empowerment and shows why free enterprise alone could never deliver the freedom its champions promised.

26 illustrations

Award-winning author Kai Ashante Wilson returns with a bold new vision of fantasy. The Fall of Elvenesse transforms the genre of Tolkien in the image of N. K. Jemisin, Marlon James, and Simon Jimenez.

Elves have ruined the world.

From their high mountain, the cruel knights of Elvenesse range out to conquer. They pillage, they enslave, they wreak genocide. Always the Elves have taken, never considered when the bill for their crimes will come due.

That time has come. The fury of the world has awoken. The victims will have their vengeance.

A divine scourge of fire sweeps across the land toward Elvenesse, and the last free people of the Nations flee before it. As the mountains char, rivers boil, and savannas burn, the Free Nations rely on the muscle and magic of their strong and runt freaks. But as their one remaining Saint assumes his power, he receives a prophecy: the Nations' only path to survival runs through Elvenesse. Only by navigating the Elven labyrinth can he win his people's lives.

An award-winning young scholar explores how Black women have remade―and continue to remake―our understanding of the past.

Across centuries, Black women have invented means to preserve what official history could not: friendship albums, kitchen-table philosophy, blogs, playlists, oral histories, and archives held in the mind. In The Light Keepers, Jessica Marie Johnson traces this radical tradition through the centuries-long prism of American empire, from the holds of slave ships to contemporary digital worlds, showing that there is nothing finished or settled about how Black women understand time, trauma, and survival.

Blending personal narrative, archival fragments, and ancestral wisdom, Johnson reframes Black women not as subjects of history but as archivists and historians. Against erasure, against shame, against death itself, Black women have transformed the bitterest waters of history into tools for living, loving, and imagining freedom. The Light Keepers offers readers a daring new way to think about the past―and a powerful lesson in how knowledge is made when survival demands it.

88 illustrations

There are so many things we once believed were true, good, and beautiful that we now no longer believe. Ideas we once defended with confidence now seem naive, misguided, or even harmful.

Every generation looks back at what their parents believed and rolls their eyes. Every generation thinks they stand on the right side of history, but history has a way of humbling our confidence. That only means future generations will look back and judge us to be wrong, false, and bad.

One day, we also will be on the wrong side of history. It's okay to be wrong about things that don't matter, like cultural trends, personal tastes, and leisure activities. But what if we're wrong about things that really matter, like faith, God, and eternal consequences? What if we've been believing all the wrong things? In How to Be on the Right Side of History, Sam Chan reveals how--when it comes to things of ultimate truth, goodness, beauty, and God--we can have confidence that our beliefs aren't just fads but are grounded in eternal reality.

In this meticulously researched and vividly written account, a prominent historian reclaims a forgotten incident of racial violence in the Jim Crow South.

The Rifle and the Plough reconstructs a little-known episode from the summer of 1910, when the Black farming settlement of Sandy Beulah in East-Central Texas came under attack. White mobs waged war on prosperous Black landowners; rumors became weapons; celebration became provocation. Historian Steven A. Reich shows how the massacre unfolded and why it happened: the growing accumulation of land by Black residents, heightened racial tensions following boxer Jack Johnson’s heavyweight title victory, and white resistance to Black autonomy and public festivity, including Juneteenth. The Rifle and the Plough recovers the rise and destruction of a thriving Black community and asks why this history still matters. By linking racial violence to struggles over historical memory, land theft, and accountability, Reich speaks directly to contemporary debates about how the nation confronts its past, what justice demands of the present, and what reparative futures might yet be imagined.

59 illustrations

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.