The new novel from acclaimed, three-time instant #1 New York Times–bestselling author Tomi Adeyemi blends shocking contemporary storytelling with a sinister dark academic flair to create a blockbuster about rage, longing, and a woman’s darkness that will leave readers breathless.

When Emery steps foot onto Dartmouth’s campus, she knows what she has to do: keep her scholarship, take her meds, and pray no one ever finds out about the past she left behind.

But that all changes when Emery meets an intoxicating girl named Roux, her disarming stepbrother named Eli, and the mystical band of girls Roux calls “The Sirens.” Each Siren is as beautiful as the last, and their lives on campus are shrouded in extravagance and secret parties. Before the girls became Sirens, they were outcasts, yet under Roux, their wildest dreams come true. When Roux offers Emery the chance to join them, Emery will do whatever it takes to make it in.

Even if it costs Emery her life.

From the author of the multi-award-winning, National Book Award–longlisted, “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive” (George Saunders) story collection Heads of the Colored People, comes a sly, spry, literary debut novel about the murder of an infamous moonshiner and the cacophony of true stories a small town can tell about itself.

Rich Milford is dead. At last.

We find ourselves in 1920’s Oklahoma, just far enough out of Tulsa, just long enough after the Race Massacre of 1921. For as long as anyone can remember, the Milfords have led plentiful lives on the backs of the townspeople of Newville. Now, on the ominous brink of the Great Depression and at the height of Prohibition, Richard Milford was an infamous moonshiner and womanizer who, it seems, finally crossed the wrong person at the wrong time. He’s dead and buried with only his women to mourn him, but a question remains: Who killed him, and why?

Top suspects are his four “wives,” Lally, Sophronia, Georgette, and Vivianne. But as their stories burst to light, the very idea of a true story comes apart before our eyes.

In an electric follow-up to her acclaimed debut collection, Nafissa Thompson-Spires once again serves up a brilliant distillation of front-of-mind happenings—think, cults of personality, capitalism run amok in politics, and rampant societal distrust—structured like a stupefying line dance. In her uniquely powerful, humorous manner, Thompson-Spires takes on the interdependent clash of the traditional and the newfangled in this gobsmackingly excellent novel.

"Makes a valuable contribution to the ever-widening field of Morrison studies by exploring the intricacies of Morrison's African references, giving critics the ability to make more informed readings of the novels."--Canadian Review of American Studies

"A study of African cosmology and epistemology in Morrison’s writings that draws on the academic author's experience in the Kongo and Yoruba traditions."--Chronicle Review

"Addresses a real need: a scholarly and ritually informed reading of spirituality in the work of a major African American author. No other work catalogues so thoroughly the grounding of Morrison’s work in African cosmogonies. Zauditu-Selassie's many readings of Ba Kongo and Yoruba spiritual presence in Morrison's work are incomparably detailed and generally convincing."--Keith Cartwright, University of North Florida

While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison is the most comprehensive. In this volume, K. Zauditu-Selassie explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. She delves deeply into African spiritual traditions, clearly explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison’s novels.

Zauditu-Selassie is uniquely positioned to write this book, as she is not only a literary critic but also a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. The result is a comprehensive, tour-de-force critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz.

Never-before-seen unpublished works by award-winning American literary icon Ntozake Shange, featuring essays, plays, and poems from the archives of the seminal Black feminist writer who stands alongside giants like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, curated by National Book Award winner Imani Perry with a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Tarana Burke.
 
            In the late ’60s, Ntozake Shange was a student at Barnard College discovering her budding talent as a writer, publishing in her school’s literary journal, and finding her unique voice. By the time she left us in 2018,  Shange had scorched blazing trails across countless pages and stages, redefining genre and form as we know them, each verse, dance, and song a love letter to Black women and girls, and the community at large.
            Sing a Black Girl’s Song is a new posthumous collection of Shange’s unpublished poems, essays, and plays from throughout the life of the seminal Black feminist writer. In these pages we meet young Shange, learn the moments that inspired for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf…, travel with an eclectic family of musicians, sit on “The Couch” opposite Shange’s therapist, and discover plays written after for colored girls’ international success. Sing a Black Girl’s Song houses, in their original form, the literary rebel’s politically charged verses from the Black Arts Movement era alongside her signature tender rhythm and cadence  that capture the minutia and nuance of Black life. Sing a Black Girl’s Song is the continuation of a literary tradition that has bolstered generations of writers and a long-lasting gift from one of the fiercest and most highly celebrated artists of our time.  

An extraordinary new work, epic in scale and lyrical in flight, by the award-winning author of Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. 

“How big is a home?” 

“What is space without reaching?” 

“You ever think about being remembered?”

Posing questions that belie their simplicity, Sean Hill’s new collection is rooted in our shared history, lived experience, and a speculative future. It considers how we fashion identities through formative relationships with history and community, with our ancestors, our children, and ourselves. These connections underscore our ties to nature and emphasize humanity’s seemingly inevitable turn to violence. For instance, a meditation on the white-headed woodpecker connects to knowledge of Black miners in nineteenth century Roslyn, Washington, and sparks an understanding of white-headed woodpeckers as “arboreal miners” with “a patch of red feathers / on the back of their crowns” that the speaker observes and “can’t help but see blood.” 

This collection ranges in setting from antebellum Georgia to twenty-first century Alaska, from the Wild West to the Asteroid Belt in the twenty-fifth century. The exploration of people in relation to place excavates the complexity of heritage and privilege, fatherhood amid environmental collapse, and the inherited memories, abilities, hardships, and love that link Black people living centuries apart. 

Taken together, these poems, queries, and possibilities paint a sensibility that strives to integrate itself into the known world, and through that world into an imagined future. In searching for answers that almost arrive, The Negroes Send Their Love reveals a heart as big as the home it seeks.

"In a world eager to promote the newest wunderkind, grandmother theology carries us two or more generations back: to the kitchens, hair salons, gardens, and church basements of older Black women who are often invisible in theological discourse but without whom the American Christian church would cease to exist."

The church mothers who raised Yolanda Pierce, dean of Howard University School of Divinity, were busily focused on her survival. In a world hostile to Black women's bodies and spirits, they had to be. Born on a former cotton plantation and having fled the terrors of the South, Pierce's grandmother raised her in the faith inherited from those who were enslaved. Now in paperback, In My Grandmother's House follows Pierce as she reckons with that tradition, building an everyday womanist theology rooted in liberating scriptures, experiences in the Black church, and truths from Black women's lives. Pierce tells stories that center the experiences of those living on the underside of history, teasing out the tensions of race, spirituality, trauma, freedom, resistance, and memory. The paperback features a new readers' guide, written by the author, that is useful for individual reflection and group discussion.

A grandmother's theology carries wisdom strong enough for future generations. The Divine has been showing up at the kitchen tables of Black women for a long time. It's time to get to know that God.

From the charismatic author of Cooking for the Culture, a collection of heritage recipes inspired by the oldest-known published cookbook written by a Black woman.

Cooking from Scratch is chef and storyteller Toya Boudy’s most personal―and most irresistible―cookbook yet. Written during a transformative chapter in her life, it’s infused with the warmth, humor, and grit that have made her a morning-show favorite. Drawing inspiration from Malinda Russell’s groundbreaking 1866 cookbook, A Domestic Cook Book, Boudy reimagines simple, soul-satisfying dishes designed to bring people together. In the wake of divorce and deep self-reflection, she has returned to the kitchen―the place that saved her nearly 30 years ago as a teenage single mom. Cooking from Scratch includes 70 family-loved recipes shaped by the cultures that define her: Mini Crawfish Pies, Jamaican Curry, African Spinach Stew, homey Salisbury Steak, and more. Beyond the table, she shares 20 natural remedies―from herbal cough syrup to “Detox” Lentil Soup―that nourish body and spirit alike.

With every page, Boudy shows how healing, joy, and resilience can begin with something beautifully simple: cooking from scratch.

75 photographs

This heart-pounding Southern gothic horror debut from Beatrice Winifred Iker, takes readers to Bricksbury University, the oldest and most storied HBCU in the nation. But as one student is about to find out, a long history comes with a legacy of secrets.
 
Zora Robinson is an ambitious grad student in her dream program, Appalachian Studies, at Bricksbury University. When her thesis advisor hands her a strange diary and suggests she research the local folklore about a beast roaming the woods surrounding campus, Zora finds a community uneager to talk to an outsider.
 
As she delves into the history of the beast, she uncovers a rumored secret society called the Keepers that has tenuous ties to the beast…and Bricksbury itself. Zora soon finds herself plagued by visions of the past, and her grip on reality starts to slip as she struggles to uncover what is real and what is folklore. But when a student goes missing, Zora starts to wonder if the Keepers ever really disbanded.
 
There’s something in the woods and it has its eyes on Zora.

The next book in the New Haven series, interconnected standalones featuring second chances, fiery passion, and Black heroines who get their happily ever afters. This is part one of a trilogy.

Mallory

The first time I kissed Christopher Johnson, I knew he would be my biggest mistake. It didn't stop me from wanting him though, and when the ghosts from my past came barging into the present, it didn't stop me from agreeing to let him help.

It was supposed to be a simple business arrangement, a few months of playing a role that came far too easily to the both of us, but it wasn't long before it became more.

Love. Devotion. Heartbreak in its truest form.

Some people say life is for the living, but I say life is for the prepared. For the planners who know that controlling every piece on the board is the only way to get the result you want.

To avoid unfortunate complications like having your heart broken by a man past experiences taught you, you never should have trusted in the first place.

Christopher

There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do for Mallory Kent.

I think I knew it the first time I laid eyes on her, and it's remained one of my unspoken truths for the two years that I've known her. But I never thought I'd get the opportunity to do anything about it because Mallory is one of those people who doesn't need anyone.

She's strong, serious, and always in control of every situation around her, which is why the second I see her looking panicked and uncertain in the arms of a figure from her past, I don't think. I just act.

I had no idea that one small decision would lead to this. A fake relationship―designed to solve her problems and mine―turned real. An earth shattering love torn apart by the very forces that led to its conception. Forces that turned me into the source of our destruction.

There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do for Mallory Kent, including break her heart to save her soul.

Lennox ‘Oz’ Anderson met what would become his obsession the night Shandea ‘Dea’ Saunders sat down to play a game of poker. Now that he had his obsession in his possession, he had to ensure that he could keep her. Oz never expected his own flesh and blood to betray him. And he definitely wasn’t going to let his twin go as far as kidnapping Dea for his own twisted pleasure, a right that was only Oz’s, without having to pay for it... with his life. Dea belonged to him and him alone. Family or not, Lennox planned to ensure that everyone, including Shandea, understood that he would do anything to protect what was his.
Will Oz find Dea in time, or will he be too late to stop his brother?
Shandea ‘Dea’ Saunders had always known how crazy Lennox was, but she never thought the craziness in his life would get so close to her. Dea didn’t know if she could look into Lennox’s face without seeing his twin... if she even made it out alive.
How will Dea ever be able to face the love of her life when he has the face of her kidnapper?

Hendrix ‘Henny’ Pharma knew things would have to change once he had another taste of his addiction. Henny refused to make the same mistake twice, but life always interfered with his desires. This time, Hendrix planned to have it all with Tali by his side and avenge the death of his brother.
Can Hendrix manage to keep his addiction and both his legal and illegal empires? Or will the ghosts of his past take it all?
Tali Saunders had one goal: to leave Union City and never look back. She successfully stuck to that commitment until her mother fell ill, and she had to return home. She never imagined her last night in Union City would be one she would never forget. Six years later, Henny was still on her mind. Tali never expected to run into the very man she’d compared every encounter she’d had to that one night with him. Now Tali had entered into a deal with the very man she couldn’t keep off her mind. Tali believed she could walk away from Henny when it was all said and done. But Henny has other ideas, like keeping Tali exactly where she belonged…in his bed.
Will Tali walk away again? Or will she stay?

Soul ties were created in one night, bonding two couples in ways they’d never planned or imagined. Now that betrayal, jealousy, and death have appeared, will it make them second guess their connections being destiny, or will it rip them apart?

***This book contains explicit language, graphic violence, and strong sexual content. It is intended for adults.***

In The Elsewhere Is Black, Marisa Solomon examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism. Tracing the flow of trash and waste across Black spaces, from Brooklyn’s historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant to the post-plantation towns of Virginia’s Tidewater, Solomon contends that waste infrastructures concentrate environmental risk in an elsewhere that is routinely Black. Solomon emphasizes that ecological violence is a form of racialized heteropatriarchal environmental control that upholds whiteness as a propertied way of life and criminalizes Black survival. As she points to acute sites of toxicity, Solomon theorizes the relationship between the devaluation of land and Black and more-than-human life to reveal how the risks of poisoning, police violence, dispossession, and poverty hold Black life captive. Locating Black survival as a site from which alternative eco-political imaginations spring, she foregrounds how people live and dream amidst waste’s daily accumulation. Solomon opens new ecological horizons to ask: What forms of environmentalism emerge when Black un/freedom has never been distant from waste?