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Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations to Toni Morrison’s revolutionary humanism to D’Angelo’s simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthy’s bracing essays investigate with virtuosic intensity the art, music, literature, and political stances that have defined the twenty-first century. Even as our world has suffered through successive upheavals, McCarthy contends, “something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of black art making.” Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis.

They may be the author of the #1 most banned book in America, but George M. Johnson isn't finished telling their story yet. Written with unflinching emotion and unapologetic boldness, And If I Die Before I Wake is nothing short of a testimony -- one the world desperately needs to hear.

George M. Johnson is no stranger to death. In this debut adult memoir, readers are invited to witness as they navigate an HIV diagnosis, alcoholism, tremendous loss, and nationwide book bans over the span of 15 years. Through the highs and lows of life in the spotlight, they have clung to family and community like never before -- finding their most authentic self along the way.

Drawing inspiration from Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, And If I Die Before I Wake explores grief, trauma, sexuality, and the Black family through the lens of transformation, healing, and hope. Poetic, grounded, and bursting with signature humor, this is New York Times-bestselling author George M. Johnson more bold, more brave, and more daring than ever.

The Romare Bearden Reader brings together a collection of new essays and canonical writings by novelists, poets, historians, critics, and playwrights. The contributors, who include Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Kobena Mercer, contextualize Bearden's life and career within the history of modern art, examine the influence of jazz and literature on his work, trace his impact on twentieth-century African American culture, and outline his art's political dimensions. Others focus on specific pieces, such as A Black Odyssey, or the ways in which Bearden used collage to understand African American identity. The Reader also includes Bearden's most important writings, which grant readers insight into his aesthetic values and practices and share his desire to tell what it means to be black in America. Put simply, The Romare Bearden Reader is an indispensable volume on one of the giants of twentieth-century American art.

Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Romare Bearden, Mary Lee Corlett, Rachel DeLue, David C. Driskell, Brent Hayes Edwards, Ralph Ellison, Henri Ghent, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harry Henderson, Kobena Mercer, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Robert G. O’Meally, Richard Powell, Richard Price, Sally Price, Myron Schwartzman, Robert Burns Stepto, Calvin Tomkins, John Edgar Wideman, August Wilson

Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison, investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation’s collective unconscious

In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America’s most famous works and authors, drawing a direct line from the Black bodies that built the nation to the Black characters that many of the country’s canonical white writers imagined in their work. Morrison sees these fictions as a form of creation and projection, arguing that they helped manufacture American racial identity – these “Africanist” presences are “the shadow that makes light possible,” as Morrison writes, and the reflections of the authors’ own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings.

With profound erudition and wit, Morrison breaks wide open the American conception of race with energetic, enlivening readings of the nation’s canon, revealing that our liberation from these diminishing notions comes through language. “How,” Morrison wonders, “could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, or progress, of suffragism, or Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands … of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with – without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants?”

To read these lectures, collected here for the first time, is to encounter Morrison, not just the writer but also the teacher, in the most profound and subversive way yet. With a foreword from her son, Ford Morrison, and an introduction from her Princeton comparative literature colleague, Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory collection that promises to redefine the American canon.

The 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.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A New York Times Notable Book • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: an emotional powerhouse of a novel about a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America mined with lethal pitfalls for an unwary Black man

When Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war, he journeys to his native Georgia with a renewed sense of purpose in search of his sister, but it becomes clear that their troubles began well before their wartime separation. Together, they return to their rural hometown of Lotus, where buried secrets are unearthed and where Frank learns at last what it means to be a man, what it takes to heal, and—above all—what it means to come home.

La obra maestra de la premio Nobel de Literatura Toni Morrison, «la mejor novela norteamericana de los últimos cincuenta años» según The New York Times, ganadora del Premio Pulitzer y del American Book Award

«No puedo imaginar la literatura norteamericana sin esta novela.»
John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

Para escribir esta magnífica historia, merecedora del Premio Pulitzer, Toni Morrison se inspiró en la vida real de una esclava afroamericana, Margaret Garner, que en 1856 escapó de una plantación en Kentucky y consiguió llegar al estado libre de Ohio. A punto de ser recapturada, Margaret tomó la trágica decisión de sacrificar a su hija para salvarla de una vida en cautiverio.

En estas páginas, Sethe es la esclava prófuga que vendió su cuerpo para grabar el nombre de su hija muerta en la lápida: diez minutos por «Beloved», veinte por «Querida Beloved». Muchos años después, Sethe vive en Ohio con Denver, su hija adolescente, y Paul D., un viejo amigo que también fue esclavo. Todos intentan prosperar y olvidar el pasado, hasta que un día aparece una joven que dice llamarse Beloved. Tiene la edad que tendría su hija si viviese y sabe ciertas cosas que sugieren que podría serlo.

Beloved se convirtió de inmediato en un clásico cuando se publicó en 1987. El crítico John Leonard escribió en Los Angeles Times: «No concibo la literatura norteamericana sin esta novela». Casi dos décadas después, The New York Times la eligió como la mejor novela norteamericana de los últimos cincuenta años.

Reseñas:
«Uno de los libros por lo que vale la pena volver a la biblioteca (aunque sea virtual). Obra esencial de la Premio Nobel de Literatura.»
Begoña Alonso, Elle

«Imbricando un realismo desabrido con una poderosa imaginación fantástica, [...] Beloved se convirtió de inmediato en un clásico».
Zenda

«Toni Morrison fue un gigante de su época y de la nuestra. Todo el mundo debería

leer Beloved.»
Margaret Atwood, The New York Times

«Beloved es la gran novela norteamericana no escrita del siglo XIX, trata de cosas sobre las que jamás se escribió y que laten sin embargo en el fondo de novelas sí escritas, por Melville, por Poe.»
A. S. Byatt

«Una maravillosa artesana a la que la gente tiende a pasar por alto. Es tan genial e innovadora como Faulkner, García Márquez y Woolf.»
The New York Times

«La mejor obra de Toni Morrison. [...] Muestra su prodigioso talento.»
Chicago Sun-Times

«Si hay una novela con la que empezar a leer a Toni Morrison, es Beloved. [...] Morrison es un tesoro norteamericano.»
Biblioteca Pública de Nueva York

«He terminado una segunda vuelta de Beloved, la misteriosa y tan fascinante novela de Toni Morrison, donde el mundo de los esclavos negros se vuelve un asunto íntimo y a la vez mágico. [...] Y las protagonistas son las mujeres, que todo lo desafían, y son ellas mismas la libertad.»
Sergio Ramírez, Babelia

«Su obra es un bello y significativo desafío a nuestras conciencias y nuestra imaginación moral.»
Barack Obama

«Beloved te hace sentir que todo lo que has escrito es aburrido y sin vida. El nivel de destreza, la perfección y la belleza de las oraciones, el alcance de la imaginación, el orden del lenguaje en torno al dolor indescriptible. Es buenísimo. Además, es nuestra historia de terror más estadounidense. [...] Sé que Morrison no escribía para mí, pero moldeó mi escritura y le estoy eternamente agradecida.»
Carmen María Machado

Paradise opens with one of Morrison’s most raw and Faulknerian scenes: early one morning in 1976, nine men from the town of Ruby, Oklahoma—population 360, all black—unleash an assault upon a convent seventeen miles away. The misfortunes suffered in Ruby, the men believe, come from the convent women, who are rumored to engage in witchcraft and abortion. From this fateful moment of collision, Morrison takes us back to the town’s origins in 1890, when it was founded by former slaves. She then guides us through Ruby’s tumultuous journey through the twentieth century, as generations are born and lost, as racial turmoil shakes the nation. As time wears on, the residents of Ruby become ever more convinced that they must isolate themselves in order to preserve their freedom and dignity. Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise is a deeply resonant allegory, one of Morrison’s most ambitious works.