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.

From the final decades of US slavery to the present, a powerful and illuminating history of a profound inequity: the special burden of infant care and loss experienced by Black women.

In the United States, Black infants are far less likely than white infants to survive their first year of life. Underlying this predicament is a history of profound loss and persistent striving, which has durably shaped Black life in America. Following generations of mothers, caregivers, laborers, and activists from the final decades of slavery to the present, Perilous Passages chronicles the intimate practices and collective strategies Black communities created and relied upon to sustain early life threatened by disease, inadequate medical care, and racialized harm.

Perilous Passages examines nineteenth-century domestic care practices that carried families through the violence of slavery and war, and traces Black eugenic ideas, the efforts of various grassroots movements, and myths and realities surrounding the 1980s panic over “crack babies.” Health professionals, legal officials, and scientific experts exerted pressure, sometimes directly―as in antimidwifery campaigns―and sometimes more subtly, through life insurance practices that devalued Black life. Wangui Muigai shows that at every turn, authorities recast infant deaths as the fault of Black women, with ongoing impact on birthing experiences and outcomes. Still, Black women and their communities have always done more than bear loss. They have produced vital knowledge about its causes, trained in specialized care, developed networks of cradle-to-grave support, and organized to reform society in ways that safeguard children.

Centering Black women’s experiences, Perilous Passages insists on visceral confrontation with the deadliness of American racism while also offering a powerful account of what makes life possible.

An ambitious teen enrolls at an elite science institute in Morbid Curiosities, a young adult thriller from author S. Hati.

When the Institute’s invitation arrived at my doorstep, it felt like it had been inked in my blood, sweat, and tears.

Aarya’s life plan has been set for as long as she can remember: finish high school with a bang, attend the best college she can get into, then land a prestigious biology research job. Her ticket to this dream is a one-year program at the Elizabethan Institute, the preeminent organization for life sciences in the United States, currently on the cusp of revealing a major project that could transform the worlds of biology and medicine.

But as Aarya tries to settle in to a school with sky-high academic expectations and research cloaked in mystery, it becomes clear that someone doesn’t want her there. As the scholarship student surrounded by rich, cutthroat peers who seem all too willing to torment her, she never expected to make friends, but the notes warning her to run rattle her to her core. She finds an ally in Sofia, a mysterious girl who claims to be the subject of closed-door Institute experiments and begs for Aarya’s help in discovering the Institute's true goal.

As rumors of mutated flora and fauna in the nearby city circulate and a murder investigation rocks the Institute, Aarya must navigate Sofia’s growing paranoia and her own increasingly unreliable memory to determine which classmates she can trust―and which would rather see her dead.

"A sharply intelligent, darkly fascinating academic thriller about unraveling the hard truths of who you are and who you want to be - and the final twist made me gasp out loud." ―Andrew Joseph White, New York Times-bestselling and award-winning author of Compound Fracture

An essential history of modern Black cinema, as led by avant-garde filmmaker, director, novelist, composer, and playwright Melvin Van Peebles.

Beg Borrow Steal, a title inspired by Black artists’ make-a-way-out-of-no-way ethos, is a stirring and remarkable deep dive into Black independent film and culture, as modeled by raconteur and iconoclast Melvin Van Peebles. Award-winning writer Santi Elijah Holley enriches the extraordinary history with interviews from today’s most innovative Black independent filmmakers and actors, such as Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, and Samuel L. Jackson, as well as Van Peebles’s published and unpublished manuscripts, critical reviews, analyses, and reflections.

Independent Black artists across all disciplines—from music and theater to literature and poetry—continue to push boundaries, challenge stereotypes, and pursue their own vision, away from traditional gatekeepers. The success of artists like Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, Jordan Peele, and Ryan Coogler can be traced directly to the pioneering work of Van Peebles, whose ambitious and innovative multidisciplinary artistry never yielded to anybody else’s vision but his own.

As a Black American who’d overcome poverty, discrimination, and other obstacles, Van Peebles refused to let White America take advantage of him and his talent. It’s made him a beacon for every Black auteur and independent filmmaker of the past 50 years. Sinners, Black Panther, Sorry to Bother You, Get Out, She's Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, Boyz n the Hood, Shaft, Superfly, Daughters of the Dust, Selma, the list goes on. It is impossible to imagine any of these culturally defining films existing, if not for the groundwork laid by Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. It is canon in Black film.

Beg Borrow Steal is the story of the legendary man who provided the blueprint for independent Black cinema, and a tribute to the power of radical Black creativity in American art and culture.

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.

Sometimes, the perfect match isn't the one you planned for. Fans of The Boyfriend Project by Farrah Rochon and One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London will love Weight for Me.

Julissa Sanders has it all--a thriving PR agency, a superstar NFL quarterback fiancé, and a picture-perfect life. But when a careless comment about her weight gain goes viral, Julissa's world crumbles. Determined to regain control, she hits the gym, only to find an unexpected ally in her fiancé's best friend, Malachi.

As Julissa navigates the pressures of planning a high-profile wedding and managing her image, she finds herself drawn to the man who's supposed to be just her trainer. With her carefully crafted life unraveling, Julissa must choose between the love she thought she wanted and the love that could change everything.

For readers of Nightcrawling, My Absolute Darling, and My Dark Vanessa, this captivating debut centers on nineteen-year-old Keke as she sets out on a desperate quest for freedom and a stable life for herself and her young daughter.

Keke is a young mother living in the basement of a house in Newark, New Jersey under the watchful eye of a man called Daddy. For five years, she has been told that she’ll be able to move upstairs once she and the other “girls” being trafficked hit the magic number. When that happens, she will no longer have to work the motels along the interstate. Her daughter, Angel, will be able to go to school, and Keke will live with Daddy in a real home, like a real family.

But then Keke gets picked up by vice cops and diverted to a women’s shelter, upending the delicate balance of her life. Hope for a new beginning starts shining through the cracks―but she doesn’t trust the system to save her. Unwilling to surrender Angel to foster care, Keke needs to figure out how to get both herself and her daughter to freedom.

Sakinah Hofler’s debut is a taut, incendiary testament to a mother’s love, and an uncompromising evocation of how desperation can drive you through to the light.

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.

A bold and singularly funny novel about a young Ethiopian American woman whose twenty-first-century life collides spectacularly with Ethiopian legends that she knows can’t possibly be real, and yet...

“Remember when we were children The storyteller would shout, Teret teret, meaning a tale, a tale, and we would yell back Yelam beret! We didn’t know this meant a cow’s house, just that it rhymed. And then the story would begin.”

Belaynesh Tessema, an Ethiopian American journalist working at the independent travel magazine aptly named Trivial Pursuits, isn’t exactly pleased when her overbearing boss insists she travel to Washington, DC, to cover a story about a newly incorporated, all-Ethiopian town. When she starts packing to leave, things start to get…strange. First, there are the huge lapses in Belaynesh’s memory and sense of place and time. Perhaps more alarming, she realizes that every morning when she wakes up, she begins the same day again: September 10, 2007, which also happens to be the last day of the Ethiopian calendar year. Or, more to the point, the day before the world is set to end.

Enter Teret, a talking parrot who reveals an ambitious plan to un-stick time, sending him and Belaynesh deep into the world of Ethiopian mythology. At its center is the star of the apocryphal Book of Enoch, the mysterious Henok, who’s none too happy at the many ways Belaynesh’s arrival on this strange, surreal scene has disrupted the book he’s dedicated his life to composing. As Belaynesh and Teret dodge contemporary reinventions of the book’s grandest flourishes, from fallen angels to time traveling giants, and even Henok himself, Belaynesh learns that sometimes moving forward requires looking back.

Irreverently funny and wildly inventive, Teret Teret is modern magical realism at its best. It blends some of Ethiopia’s oldest stories with a heroine for our current moment, for a mold-breaking, epic tale about identity, love, and writing new stories when the old ones don’t serve us anymore.

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.

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.

Written by an engineer who has worked for the FBI and the White House, this STEMinist picture book biography tells the story of Bessie Blount, a groundbreaking Black inventor.

What do you do when people tell you no? This is a true story of what happens when you tell yourself yes!

When a teacher said she couldn’t write with her left hand, Bessie taught herself to be right-handed. At a time when many people were unfairly denied more education, Bessie studied hard and became a nurse and physical therapist. And when her patients—injured World War II soldiers—couldn’t feed themselves, Bessie invented a device to assist them. Bessie‘s determination allowed her to help others in so many ways.

From celebrated STEMinist (STEM-feminist) Afua Bruce and award-winning artist Laura Freeman comes the inspiring true story of the extraordinary Bessie Blount.

* A trailblazing inventor who overcame oppression to succeed
* Informational back matter, including a timeline, author’s note, and guide to inventing
* Inspiring true story for fans of Maya’s Song, Ketanji, and Because Claudette