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The definitive monograph on contemporary African American painter Kerry James Marshall, accompanying a major traveling retrospective. This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist’s career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.

Use discount code SALE for 30% off at checkout. 

Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the "middle passage," but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, Middle Passages offers a unique perspective on African Americans' ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.

Malcolm Gladwell returns with his most urgent book yet: a provocative investigation of America's epidemic of gun violence. 

The United States has far more homicides than any of its peers around the world. Why?

In this groundbreaking book, Malcolm Gladwell explores the American “peculiarity”―how the world’s wealthiest country came to suffer from a problem typically only seen in the world’s poorest countries.

Drawing on original interviews, archival and social science research, and his trademark insight, Gladwell approaches the American paradox through a series of stories. What can we learn from the miracle of a young gunshot victim in Washington, D.C.? How have the legal troubles of a seventeenth-century English knight influenced American attempts at gun control? Why would a European police chief be baffled by the graduation ceremony at any American police academy?

In a sweeping narrative, Gladwell travels from a shooting range in North Carolina, to the South Side of Chicago, to an old plantation house in Alabama, painting a picture of a country that does not understand its most pressing social problem, and as result, does not understand how to fix it.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times

From Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, a sermon in the public square on the issues that plague us most

Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in Congress and the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America, he exhorts us to reach for the highest and noblest aspects of our national character. Senator Warnock argues that we suffer not from a paucity of resources but from a poverty of moral imagination.

His sermon on the book of Isaiah draws from ideals resonant in his own faith and all the great faiths and other moral traditions, offering a bold vision of how to live and relate to one another in the land. A moral topography, he calls it, a geopolitics that centers love and justice, or as Dr. King would so often say, the beloved community. The Crooked Places Made Straight examines six crises at the center of American life: voting rights and voter suppression, gun violence, mass incarceration, the persistence of poverty, dark money in politics, and the climate emergency.

This is not a naive faith, either. As Senator Warnock writes: Isaiah is no stranger to frustration with institutional leadership. He knows well the perils of public corruption, sophisticated legalized bribery, and a political class more interested in preserving its own power than in serving the people. . . . He’s fed up with political leaders who are focused on their own gain at the expense of the people. “Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves,” he says.

For Senator Warnock, democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea. A vote is a kind of prayer. The Crooked Places Made Straight is his inspiring vision for a more just and equitable America where communities thrive with hope and possibility and every child has a chance.

It’s the early 1960s, and as the Civil Rights movement begins to reach segregated Tallahassee, the young, deeply principled Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to heart: he is “as good as anyone.”

He is about to enroll in the local black college, but for a black boy in the Jim Crow South, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear “out back.” Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr. King’s ringing assertion: “Throw us in jail and we will still love you.” His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive—that the world is crooked and the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. The tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.

Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys’ fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy.

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self-defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama, home as "an arsenal." Like King, many ostensibly "nonviolent" civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, Charles E. Cobb Jr. recovers this history, describing the vital role that armed self-defense has played in the survival and liberation of black communities.  Drawing on his experiences in the civil rights movement and giving voice to its participants, Cobb lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the long history and importance of African Americans taking up arms to defend themselves against white supremacist violence.   

About the Author:

Charles E. Cobb Jr. is a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and has taught at Brown University. An award-winning journalist, he is an inductee of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. Cobb lives in Jacksonville, Florida.  

The Conjuring of America tells the epic story of conjure women, who, through a mix of spiritual beliefs, herbal rituals, and therapeutic remedies gave rise to the rich tapestry of American culture we see today. Feminist philosopher, Lindsey Stewart, tells the stories of Negro Mammies of slavery; the Voodoo Queens and Blues Women of Reconstruction; and the Granny Midwives and textile weavers of the Jim Crow era. These women, in secrecy and subterfuge, courageously and devotedly continued their practices and worship for centuries and passed down their traditions. 
 
Emerging first in the American South during slavery, these women were thrust into the heart of national conflicts over generations of African American life. They combined ancestral magic and hyperlocal resources to respond to Black struggles in real time, forging a secret well of health and power hidden to their oppressors. As a result, conjure informs our lives in ways remarkable and ordinary—from traditional medicines that informed the creation of Vicks VapoRub and the rise of Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix, to the original magic of Disney’s The Little Mermaid (2023), and the true origins of the all-American classic blue jean.
 
From the moment enslaved Africans first arrived on these shores, conjure was heavily regulated and even outlawed. Now, Stewart uncovers new contours of American history, sourcing letters from the enslaved, dispatches from the lore of Oshun and other African mystics. The Conjuring of America is a love letter to the real magic Black women used, their magic Black women, their herbs, food, textiles, song, and dance, used to sow rebellion, freedom, and hope.

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Originally published in 1971, Gordon Parks’ Born Black was the first book to unite his writing and his photography. It was also the first to provide a focused survey of Parks’ documentation of a crucial time for the civil rights and Black Power movements. Today, more than 50 years later, this expanded edition of Born Black illuminates Parks’ vision for the book and offers deeper insight into the series within it. The original publication featured nine articles commissioned by Life magazine from 1963 to 1970―some never-before published―supplemented with later commentary by Parks and presented as his personal account of these important historical moments. Born Black includes the original text and images, as well as additional photographs from each series, spreads from the 1971 book, early correspondence, reproductions of related Life articles, and new scholarly essays. The nine series selected by Parks for Born Black―a rare glimpse inside San Quentin State Prison; extensive documentation of the Black Muslim movement and the Black Panthers; his commentaries on the deaths of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; intimate portrait studies of Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali and Eldridge Cleaver; and a narrative of the daily life of the impoverished Fontenelle family in Harlem―have come to define his legendary career as a photographer and activist. This reimagined, comprehensive edition of Born Black highlights the lasting legacy of these projects and their importance to our understanding of critical years in American history. Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation

The author and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Publishing Project gives voice to long silent African Americans from the past, allowing them to tell their own stories that shed new light on critical moments in the Black Freedom Struggle, challenging what we think we know about Black history.

History is at its best when new findings and perspectives challenge old ideas and notions about the past, and even overturn common wisdom.

What if a former enslaved man in Galveston, Texas, witnessed the first Juneteenth and told a completely different story from what most of us know about that day? Why were slave ships most prone to rebellion, including those carrying the most African women? How has Islam found its way into R&B, soul, jazz, and other American popular music? Who was Benjamin Banneker, really?

In A High Price for Freedom, historian Clyde W. Ford addresses these and other questions, amplifying little-known voices from the African American past. In this wide-ranging, impeccably researched book, Ford begins with the 1656 court case of a woman named Elizabeth Key, who won a verdict for her freedom against her would-be enslaver—a victory that would forever change the nature, brutality, and course of American slavery.

Ford examines a range of topics, from the role of women in fomenting slave revolts to an in-depth look at how Selma was not really about voting rights or even Martin Luther King, Jr, but about a twenty-six-year-old Black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson who was killed by an Alabama state trooper. As he laying dying in the only hospital that would treat Black people in February 1965, Jimmie Lee whispered to his nurse, a Catholic nun, “Sister, isn’t this a high price for freedom?”

Eye-opening, enlightening, and often counterintuitive, this fascinating history includes compelling, heartrending, and factual accounts about people and events in the African American past that teach us things we never learned and challenge the stories we thought we knew.

In 1953, Gordon Parks returned to Chicago on assignment for Life magazine to photograph the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church for a series on American religious life. After the success of his recent work for Life, Parks approached the Near West Side church with a decisive eye toward composing compelling images that conveyed simultaneously the universal humanity and local specificity of the religious community. This would be the first assignment for which he was both writer as well as photographer. His photographs and essay were never published by Life, yet as this book demonstrates, Parks’ visual and textual representation of Black religious life powerfully documents the dynamism of a community shaped by the Great Migration and Chicago’s industrial landscape. Parks embarked on a significant chapter of his aesthetic and conceptual development through his engagement with the pastor, the Reverend Ernest F. Ledbetter, Sr., and the members of his church. This publication features more than 65 previously unpublished photographs and contact sheets, complemented by Parks’ unseen manuscript and ephemeral material from the private collection of the Ledbetter family. A range of scholarly essays provides further insight and contextual analysis in art history, cultural geography, Black religious studies, and creative writing. Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation and Howard University, Washington DC