Together for the first time in this beautiful boxed set, the landmark Love Song to the Nation trilogy by the feminist icon bell hooks, includes the New York Times bestsellers All About Love, Communion, and Salvation.

All About Love: New Visions reveals how lovelessness results in a polarized society, and how we can do the work to heal these divisions. This book is a roadmap to understanding how we can build caring, compassionate, and loving spaces into our homes, schools, and workplaces.

Communion: The Female Search for Lovechallenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as a heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. It reveals how women of all ages can bring love into every aspect of their lives.

Salvation: Black People and Love Written from both historical and cultural perspectives, Salvation takes an incisive look at the transformative power of love in the lives of African Americans.

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.

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.

In this radiant and incisive debut novel in the tradition of works by ZZ Packer and Toni Cade Bambara, a Black woman fights to reclaim—and reinvent—her world after a little understood illness and a public health crisis threatens to upend everything she has.

Forty-seven-year-old Harmony Johnston is not suited for New York City life in 2019. From shampoos to synthetics to cell phones—the ubiquitous staples of modern daily life cause her physical pain, for reasons no one, including Harmony, understand. Doctors deny her illness is real, after seven years of enduring this private war, Harmony has her doubts too. Betrayed by her body and mind, as well as those closest to her—her obstinate physician sister, her sneaky best friend, and a spectral aunt who appears and disappears at whim—Harmony clings to the one doctor who offers hope.

In war, there are sacrifices: hair, boyfriend, sleep. Conditioned to place the comfort of others above her own needs, Harmony strives to be accommodating in an increasingly inhospitable world. But when the prestigious non-profit she works for relocates to an office with new wiring, painting, and carpeting (and the same old racial tensions) that exacerbate her pain, she quits her job and begins to set firm boundaries that upend her life, make her universe a little smaller, and magnify her loneliness.

As Harmony grows increasingly ill threatening her relationship with her one sympathetic doctor, she cuts herself off completely from the outside world and plunges into depression and literal darkness. When she eventually resurfaces, the world is irreversibly altered. With everyone now nearly as isolated as she is, Harmony resolves to re-connect with all she has lost. But can things ever really go back to normal?

At turns devastating, funny, and affirming, I Can Feel It All Over is an unforgettable debut novel about bodily autonomy, art, connection, and the pursuit of an authentic life amid the world's confines.

A hidden history of twentieth-century American modernity that re-examines a mere twelve-block area on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with Thelonious Monk as its guiding star. 

The Jungles reclaims the largely forgotten world of San Juan Hill, a predominantly Black neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side, was one of the most fertile centers of American cultural life in the twentieth century.

At once a biography, an urban history, and a cultural reckoning, Howard W. French’s The Jungles reveals how the neighborhood that would encompass Lincoln Center, previously known as the Jungles, fostered numerous pathbreaking Black artists, among them a young Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917–1982).

The story opens in Cuba in 1898, where we watch as Teddy Roosevelt’s forces triumph on San Juan Hill, with close to one-fifth of the overall invading force consisting of Black soldiers whose valor went largely unrecognized. After returning to the US, these veterans joined a broader wave of Black migrants moving northward, eventually settling in a Manhattan -neighborhood that would take the battle’s name. San Juan Hill became a lively, artistic Black community that preceded the Harlem Renaissance and inspired some of the highest twentieth- century creative triumphs―giving rise to the stride piano style and nurturing the genius of Monk, whose mold-breaking artistry struggled to gain traction in an industry then dominated by white producers.

As Robert Moses began tearing down the neighborhood under the guise of “urban renewal,” Monk became its most famous holdout, staying put in his cramped apartment in the Phipps Houses at 243 West 63rd Street, his upright piano protruding from his bedroom into the kitchen as he continued to make his iconic music.

By the late 1950s, Monk’s genius had finally been recognized, but the erasure already felt irreversible, extending even to the musical West Side Story, which reimagined the neighborhood’s streets as Latino gang territory, whitewashing the predominantly Black and Caribbean community that had actually lived there.

A compelling history from one of our finest American historians, The Jungles ultimately emerges as a new way of telling the history of music, of New York, and of America. The cradle of jazz was not only in New Orleans but also in San Juan Hill, and French’s magnificent recreation of that vanished world, and of the miraculous life of Thelonious Monk, restores to American cultural memory what erasure nearly stole for good.

12 illustrations

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About the Book

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.

From the Washington Post’s first race and ethnicity reporter, a poignant investigation into the aftermath of the Great Migration, the promise of a Second Great Migration, and what future Black communities could look like across America in this eye-opening and thoughtful study, a mix of The Warmth of Other Suns and How the Word Is Passed.

Since the 1990s, demographers have been documenting a new Great Migration: millions of Black Americans leaving Northern and Western cities for the South their parents and grandparents fled during Jim Crow. Huge numbers of Black people have been moving to Memphis, Houston, Charlotte, and other booming metropolises in the hopes of recreating the vibrant communities their grandparents once left. Have they found what they were looking for? Is it possible for Black Americans to have community, economic prosperity, and safety all in one place? And if so, where?

In the Search for Black Mecca, Emmanuel Felton examines how these questions are playing out in real lives today, going into the homes of Black Americans who are weighing what they want and where they hope to find it. He identifies three archetypes—“Those Who Stay,” “Those Who Leave,” and “Those Who Build Something New”—and reveals the costs and benefits of each decision, while seeking answers to deeper questions regarding communal responsibility, what’s needed to make Black neighborhoods thrive, and how to manage the fact that white people are often threatened by Black success. He also unravels his own family’s migration story through the lives of his two grandfathers—a prominent New Orleans dentist and a troubled musician who migrated to Oakland, California.

Through these stories, Felton crystalizes our understanding of what it means to find—or to create —our own meccas: radical spaces for Black joy, freedom, and imagination, even when the external world tries to take those places away.

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.

A new reissue of the acclaimed collection of essays blurring cultural criticism, memoir, even nonfiction itself, from the beloved Pulitzer Prize winner.

White Girls is about, among other things, Blackness, queerness, movies, Brooklyn, love (and the loss of love), AIDS, fashion, Basquiat, Capote, philosophy, porn, Eminem, Louise Brooks, and Michael Jackson. Freewheeling and dazzling, tender and true, it is an invaluable guide to the culture of our time, rendered in Hilton Als’s daring and provocative prose.

From NAACP Image Award–nominated author Elise Bryant comes a tender, funny novel following a type-A teen whose meticulously coordinated life unravels when she develops a chronic illness.
Jubilee Foster is busy. Between caring for her two younger siblings while her single dad is working, maintaining her perfect GPA, and volunteering at her beloved local community center, she doesn’t have time for trivial things like hobbies or sleep.
And that’s just the way Jubilee likes it. When her to-do list is endless and her color-coded planner is full, it’s easier to ignore the glaring fractures in her life—like her mom’s abandonment, or that her community center is on the brink of closing down for good. Or the reappearance of Neal, her childhood friend turned nemesis, and all of the annoying, distracting feelings he brings.
But then Jubilee starts breaking out in mysterious hives, and her ability to be a perfect student, daughter, sister, and friend begins to fray. As her life buckles under symptoms and side effects, Jubilee will have to tackle the most difficult task on her to-do list yet: accepting help.
Critically acclaimed author Elise Bryant returns with a love letter to eldest daughters, recovering people pleasers, and those managing chronic illnesses in desperate search for the care they deserve.

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.