The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series.

“Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again

“Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review

From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box,and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America.

For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues.

In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion.

But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.

The first-ever Black history to center queer voices, this landmark study traces the lives of LGBTQ+ Black Americans from slavery to present day

Gender and sexual expression have always been part of the Black freedom struggle

In this latest book in Beacon’s award-winning ReVisioning History series, Professors C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost unearth the often overlooked history of the Black queer community in the United States.

Arguing that both gender and sexual expression have been an intimate and intricate part of Black freedom struggle, Snorton and Bost present historical contributions of Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming Americans from slavery to the present day to highlight how the fight against racial injustice has always been linked to that of sexual and gender justice.

Interweaving stories of queer and trans figures such as:

* Private William Cathay/Cathay Williams, born female but enlisted in the Army as a man in the mid-1860s
* Josephine Baker, internationally known dancer and entertainer of the early 20th century who was also openly bisexual
* Bayard Rustin, prominent Civil Rights activist whose well known homosexuality was viewed as a potential threat to the movement
* Amanda Milan, a black trans woman whose murder in 2000 unified the trans people of color community,

this book includes a deep dive into the marginalization, unjust criminalization, and government legislation of Black queer and trans existence. It also shows how Black Americans have played an integral role in the modern LGBTQ rights movement, countering narratives that have predominantly focused on white Americans.

Through storytelling and other narratives, Snorton and Bost show how the Black queer community has always existed, regardless of the attempts to stamp it out, and how those in it continue to fight for their rightful place in the world.

“[A] delicious literary Gothic debut.” –THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, EDITORS' CHOICE

“Moody and evocative as a fever dream, Catherine House is the sort of book that wraps itself around your brain, drawing you closer with each hypnotic step.” – THE WASHINGTON POST

A Most Anticipated Novel by Entertainment Weekly • New York magazine • Cosmopolitan • The Atlantic • Forbes • Good Housekeeping • Parade • Better Homes and Gardens • HuffPost • Buzzfeed • Newsweek • Harper’s Bazaar • Ms. Magazine • Woman's Day • PopSugar • and more!

A gothic-infused debut of literary suspense, set within a secluded, elite university and following a dangerously curious, rebellious undergraduate who uncovers a shocking secret about an exclusive circle of students . . . and the dark truth beneath her school’s promise of prestige.

Trust us, you belong here.

Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study with its experimental curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment, has produced some of the world’s best minds: prize-winning authors, artists, inventors, Supreme Court justices, presidents. For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years—summers included—completely removed from the outside world. Family, friends, television, music, even their clothing must be left behind. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige, and that its graduates can become anything or anyone they desire.

Among this year’s incoming class is Ines Murillo, who expects to trade blurry nights of parties, cruel friends, and dangerous men for rigorous intellectual discipline—only to discover an environment of sanctioned revelry. Even the school’s enigmatic director, Viktória, encourages the students to explore, to expand their minds, to find themselves within the formidable iron gates of Catherine. For Ines, it is the closest thing to a home she’s ever had. But the House’s strange protocols soon make this refuge, with its worn velvet and weathered leather, feel increasingly like a gilded prison. And when tragedy strikes, Ines begins to suspect that the school—in all its shabby splendor, hallowed history, advanced theories, and controlled decadence—might be hiding a dangerous agenda within the secretive, tightly knit group of students selected to study its most promising and mysterious curriculum.

Combining the haunting sophistication and dusky, atmospheric style of Sarah Waters with the unsettling isolation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Catherine House is a devious, deliciously steamy, and suspenseful page-turner with shocking twists and sharp edges that is sure to leave readers breathless.

A photographic look at Brooklyn's iconic Empire Roller Disco by photographer Patrick D. Pagnano.

Brooklyn’s Empire Rollerdrome opened its doors in 1941 and soon became the borough’s premier destination for recreational and competitive roller skating. But it wasn’t until the late 1970s that the celebrated rink reached iconic status by replacing its organist with a live DJ, installing a state of the art sound and light system, and renaming itself after the nationwide dance craze it had helped to originate: the Empire Roller Disco was born. In 1980, the acclaimed street photographer Patrick D. Pagnano went on assignment to document the Empire and its legendary cast of partygoers. The resulting photographs, gathered in Empire Roller Disco for the first time, capture the vibrant spirits, extraordinary styles, and sheer joys of Brooklyn roller disco at its dizzying peak.

A sweeping story about four women whose lives are shaped by love, longing, and pain. Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in the US who is unlucky in love and coping with the pandemic on her own. Zikora, is a successful lawyer living in Washington DC who finds herself, unexpectedly, a heartbroken single mother. Omelogor is a scholar researching pornography for a Master's thesis in Women's Studies. And Nafissatou, Chiamaka's housekeeper, is trying to reclaim her dignity after a terrible sexual assault. In Dream Count, we come to know these interesting, challenging, and complicated women as they navigate their rich and complex lives. Long revered as a writer who understands how we talk about race and identity, Adichie uses these themes to explore a group of disparate and fascinating women and their worlds, turning a sharp eye on contemporary society. A major literary event, Dream Count is a thrilling, sizzling new work that confirms Adichie's status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.

Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?

In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.

Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history.

While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day.

“Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY

Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award

Teens compete to become gods in this high-octane YA fantasy for fans of Lightlark and Lore.

Fawn Gallo is a con artist. In a world where the gods and their offspring hold all the power, she’s a mere mortal making her way by scamming the wealthy. Ever since the God of Shadow placed a curse on her family, she’s known she’s destined for a scrappy life and an early death.

Mackie Prince should have the privileges of being a demigod. But her father, the God of Merriment, doesn’t acknowledge her, leaving Mackie and her mother to live in poverty.

When the God of Merriment himself announces an Ascension Trial—a once-a-century competition for demigods to win godhood—Fawn and Mackie each see a chance to steal divinity for themselves.

Locked in Merriment Manor with six other hopefuls, Fawn and Mackie are shocked to find each other. Ever since a devastating betrayal shattered their childhood friendship, they’ve been sworn enemies. But as the trial proceeds, and the tasks turn dangerous, Mackie and Fawn realize they may have to push their yearslong rivalry aside and rely on each other. . . or risk certain death.

A beautifully written and often speculative story collection infused with Caribbean and African myths and cultures, exploring love, betrayal, motherhood, death, and home.

GROUNDED IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND INFUSED WITH TRADITIONS of Africa and the Caribbean, A Good Haunting: Stories spins myth, magic, and realism into heartrending tales of characters seeking love and connection. Death is the primary antagonist in each of these stories, sometimes appearing as death of self, other times as death of a loved one, and often as both.

In the title story, “A Good Haunting,” a widower in the midst of an unorthodox death ritual uses humor to deal with grief and guilt while coming to terms with unsavory details about his spouse’s sudden death. In “The Way of the Volt,” an eighteenth-century African queen is made immortal, sold into slavery, and left to face a series of impossible choices that force her to struggle with what it means to be human. In “The Sunset Toll,” members of the last community on earth disappear one by one until there are just three people left, trying to maintain hope even as they question the forces that keep them trapped on earth.

The characters wrestle with foes, agonize at crossroads, and face painful truths, all while grappling with grief, love, betrayal, motherhood, and ideas of home. Some triumph, some do not―but they all emerge irrevocably changed by their experiences.

Longtime NBC News reporter Char Adams writes a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements told through the lens of Black-owned bookstores, which have been centers for organizing from abolition to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.

In Black-Owned, Char Adams celebrates the living history of Black bookstores. Packed with stories of activism, espionage, violence, community, and perseverance, Black-Owned starts with the first Black-owned bookstore, which an abolitionist opened in New York in 1834, and after the bookshop’s violent demise, Black book-lovers carried on its cause. In the twentieth century, civil rights and Black Power activists started a Black bookstore boom nationwide. Malcolm X gave speeches in front of the National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem—a place dubbed “Speakers’ Corner”—and later, Black bookstores became targets of FBI agents, police, and racist vigilantes. Still, stores continued to fuel Black political movements.

Amid these struggles, bookshops were also places of celebration: Eartha Kitt and Langston Hughes held autograph parties at their local Black-owned bookstores. Maya Angelou became the face of National Black Bookstore Week. And today a new generation of Black activists is joining the radical bookstore tradition, with rapper Noname opening her Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles and several stores making national headlines when they were overwhelmed with demand in the Black Lives Matter era. As Adams makes clear, in an time of increasing repression, Black bookstores are needed now more than ever.

Full of vibrant characters and written with cinematic flair, Black-Owned is an enlightening story of community, resistance, and joy.

The story of a runaway mother’s ten days of freedom—and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment—from Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes.

April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her lips: dead inside. That is, until one day, as she finds herself spiraling toward the volcanic rage she calls the white hot, a voice inside her tells her to just . . . walk away. She wanders to a bus station and asks for a ticket to the furthest destination; she tells the clerk to make it one-way. That ticket takes her from her Philly home to the threshold of a wilderness and the beginning of a nameless quest—an accidental journey that shakes her awake, almost kills her, and brings her to the brink of an impossible choice.

The White Hot takes the form of a letter from mother to daughter about a moment of abandonment that would stretch from ten days to ten years—an explanation, but not an apology. Hudes narrates April’s story—spiritual and sexy, fierce and funny—with delicate lyricismand tough love. Just as April finds in her painful and absurd sojourn the key to freeing herself and her family from a cage of generational trauma, so Hudes turns April’s stumbling pursuit of herself into an unforgettable short epic of self-discovery.

Meet the kids in Mrs. Z's wacky and wonderful third grade class! Fia Hosein loves life in Peppermint Falls, but when she notices her Trinidadian accent beginning to fade, she hits a few bumps in the road while regaining her voice. 

When Fia Hosein and her family moved from Trinidad & Tobago to Peppermint Falls, she was excited for everything new that awaited them, like snow days! But one cold winter day, Fia's voice starts to sound different and Ma and Grampy tell her it sounds like she has “snow in her throat.” Oh no! Did Fia catch a cold?

Now, Mrs. Z has assigned Fia a verbal presentation to perform in front of the whole class. How is Fia supposed to speak in front of her classmates when her voice feels all wrong? With the support of her parents, friends, and teachers, Fia must find a new sound that rings true to who she is!

Both sweetly poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, with black-and-white illustrations by Pura Belpré Honor artist Kat Fajardo, Fia's story invites readers into Mrs. Z’s class where friendship and fun rule the school, from New York Times bestselling author Tracey Baptiste.

Perfect for!
★ My Weirdtastic School fans
★ Reluctant readers
★ Classroom read-alouds
★ Andrew Clements fans
★ Young musicians
★ Anyone who’s had a big move!

Read them all! The Kids in Mrs. Z’s Class have plenty of stories to share!
Emma McKenna, Full Out (#1)
Rohan Murthy Has a Plan (#2)
Poppy Song Bakes a Way (#3)
The Legend of Memo Castillo (#4) 
Wyatt Hill Brings a Lizard to School (#5) 
Ayana Ndoum Takes the Stage (#6) 
Olive Little Gets Crafty (#7)
Synclaire Fields Knows the Score (#8)
Theo Chang is Not a Cat (#9)—available for preorder now!
Thunder Nelson Does the Impossumble (#10)—available for preorder now!
Sebastian Metzger Solves a Sticky Situation (#11)—available for preorder now!
Fia Hosein Finds Her Beat (#12)—available for preorder now!

The Kids in Mrs. Z’s Class is an innovative series where every book is written by a different all-star author and features a different kid in the same third-grade class. They can be read in any order!