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.

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.

A landmark study of twentieth-century Black picture magazines and their impact on Black American life

From the late 1930s through the early 1970s, national publications such as Our World, Sepia, Color, Elegant, Flash, Brown, and Ebony framed emerging definitions of success for Black middle-class audiences. These magazines featured dynamic photo essays, sometimes by photographers as renowned as Gordon Parks and Moneta Sleet Jr., that shaped perspectives on Black cultural life and influenced the way millions of Americans understood the world through photography.

This history of Black picture magazines and their contribution to American photography, journalism, and cultural production is the first to consider these publications through a visual and scholarly lens. It features more than 250 illustrations, essays by prominent curators and thinkers, and thematic contributions by celebrity experts, including

• Tina Beyoncé Knowles, businesswoman and House of Deréon fashion designer, on beauty culture
• Doug Glanville, sports journalist and former MLB player, on sports
• Carla J. Williams, photographer and 2025 Guggenheim fellow, on pulp pinups
• Jason Moran, jazz musician and MacArthur “genius” award-winner, on music
• TAYLOR ALXNDR, activist and performer, on drag and queer/trans representation

With a comprehensive list of Black picture magazines and the photographers whose work appeared in them, this volume will serve as both a foundational reference and a compelling visual history that reveals the profound role these publications played in defining and circulating images of Black life, achievement, and aspiration in the United States.

Published in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Exhibition Schedule:

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
(February 28 to May 31, 2027)

Portland Museum of Art, Maine
(October 8, 2027, to January 9, 2028)

New Orleans Museum of Art
(May 11 to August 6, 2028)

A globe-spanning jigsaw puzzle of a novel about what it is to be human during this nervous, catastrophic moment in time.

Dionne Brand’s brief, powerful small life has the dazzling, hypnotic rhythm of a series of waves, tossing together multiple narrators and stories in time and space. The novel works through affective momentum, through gathering velocity, through multiplying and quickening voices and stories. None of these vividly alive characters know one another, but all exist inside this nervous moment in time.

Throughout the novel, characters’ voices recur in random ways, each around their own “small life.” Each person is in the middle of an action or a demand or a situation or a misunderstanding, and each is attempting to find a life, to know a life, to navigate the precarity of life. These lives are unfolding anywhere in the world: leaving the outskirts of Cartagena, working the streets of Madrid, caught in a toxic flood, hanging on to the edge of a boat in the Mediterranean, cleaning a stall in a North American airport, setting off to work on an oil platform, refusing eviction from an apartment. Their stories build and braid through inference, familiarity, and emotion―shock, realization, small joy―offering glimpses of the innermost workings of human beings in our contemporary, catastrophic zeitgeist.

CORETTA SCOTT KING HONOR ARTIST, SEAN QUALLS

From Coretta Scott King Honor artist and illustrator of Questlove's The Idea in You, Sean Qualls comes a captivating introduction on how Black people have influenced music throughout history and what music means to Black culture.

The people sing; the people dance. The people have the music, and the music is the people.

Music has been embedded into the fabric of Black life since the first notes rang out and found their way into the souls of the first African inhabitants. From the melancholic blues to the funkifyingly upbeat disco, from earth-shattering rock ’n’ roll to groundbreaking jazz and hip-hop, music has been the bedrock of Black hope and culture. From its earliest arrival in the Americas, Black music has shaped American music and the world has never been the same because of it.

Coretta Scott King Honor illustrator Sean Qualls brings us the electrifying history of Black music and moves from one ground-breaking era to another, giving his own vibrant and hip spin on the rhythm and blues that will always have the power to comfort, guide, inspire, and remind us all.

The Music, The People will make for the most fun Black music history guide as it’s:

* A Picture Book That Makes History Fun: The fun, funky, and lively voice present in The Music, The People is unlike any other and delivers the history of music genres created, influenced, and loved by Black individuals in a way that is sure to readily engage and enlighten readers as they move through music history.
* Filled with Important Messages About Music: The Music, The People infuses its pages with important messages regarding music’s ability to uplift, transcend, break barriers, and lead revolutions. Music feeds the soul, and Qualls gratifyingly depicts that.
* Features Art Like No Other: Each page of The Music, The People features Qualls’ signature breathtaking art as he moves through each musical era, making for a reading experience that’s as gratifying as it is captivating.

Weaving back and forth between China in the 1990s and America in 2010s, three people’s lives are changed by a murder one of them may have committed in this magnificent novel from Yiyun Li, newly reissued.

When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious incident in which a friend of theirs was poisoned. Grown up, the three friends are separated by distance and personal estrangement. Moran and Ruyu live in the United States, Boyang in China; all of them are haunted by what happened in their youth and by doubt about themselves.

In Wisconsin, Moran visits her ex-husband, whose kindness once overcame her flight into solitude. In California, Ruyu helps a local woman care for her family and home, avoiding entanglements, as she has done all her life. In Beijing, Boyang struggles to deal with an inability to love―and with the outcome of what happened among the friends twenty years before.

Brilliantly written and a breathtaking page-turner, Kinder Than Solitude resonates with provocative observations about human nature and life. In mesmerizing prose, and with profound insight, Yiyun Li weaves a remarkable story that explores the impact of personality and the past on the shape of a person’s present and future.

A woman reexamines her past and reveals long-held secrets by annotating a former lover’s diary in this extraordinary novel by Yiyun Li, newly reissued.

Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.

Increasingly obsessed with Roland’s intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. She returns inexorably to the memory of her daughter Lucy. Must I Go is a novel about life in all its messy glory, and of a life lived absolutely on its own terms. With her characteristic candor and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that act as compass to our human hearts.

An eloquent and original exploration of the Atlantic slave trade―now featuring the essay “Venus in Two Acts” and a new introduction by Dionne Brand.

A monumental work of first-person history, Lose Your Mother traces the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey Saidiya Hartman took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and the rippling effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African-American history.

The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger―torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to be uprooted from your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. There are no known survivors of Hartman’s lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping to find. Instead, she is a stranger in search of strangers, forging connections with others living in the wake of atrocity.

A rigorous and intimate reflection on the afterlife of slavery, Lose Your Mother is both a book of history and a book of grief. This 20th anniversary edition now includes Hartman’s landmark essay “Venus in Two Acts” and a new introduction by Dionne Brand―perfect for introducing new readers to Hartman’s lived-in way of contending with the past.

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.

Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.

This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.

From Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony winner Viola Davis and New York Times-bestselling publisher, editor, and author Lavaille Lavette comes an action-packed series filled with humor, heart, and undercover hijinks!

Discovering your grandma is a spy is easy. The hard part is proving it…and staying alive in the process.

When Jazzlyn discovers that her estranged grandmother is moving in, she's beyond frustrated. Being 13-years old is hard enough with an annoying brother and an overbearing mother ― and now she must deal with a grandma who is taking over her bedroom?!

Jazz has better things to do like hanging out with her best friend, getting stellar grades, and of course, finding the perfect dress – and the perfect date – for the Sadie Hawkins dance. She has big goals and doesn’t need grandma cramping her style.

Before long, Jazz starts to notice peculiar things Grandma does like sneaking out at night and popping up as a substitute phys ed teacher at school. Her instincts tell her that Grandma Mae is up to something, and she decides to prove it. One night, Jazz follows her grandmother into the city and the adventure begins. Caught up in a world of high speed car chases, a ninja fight in an alley, a kidnapping at the school dance, and mysterious money transfers, can Jazz prove her grandma is a spy?

As for Mae, laying low isn’t exactly her strong suit, and, she discovers, neither is playing a grandma. Keeping her nosy granddaughter in the dark is child’s play. But an old nemesis has returned and is on the hunt for Mae’s whereabouts. Can she keep her family safe and separate from her secret life… before it’s too late?

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

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.