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.

Being a doctor is Glover Israel’s passion. He tends to his patients like they are his children and takes pride in providing excellent care. He doesn’t have a good reputation among hospital staff, because he requires the same level of service from them toward his patients as well. Having to financially take care of his paraplegic father leaves little time for much of anything outside of work. The only things he can seem to find time for are carnal pleasures. He’s not looking for a relationship or anything close to love. So, he makes his rounds through potential candidates at will . . . until he literally bumps into Delaney Boutté.

Loving the wrong man can be hard to overcome emotionally. Delaney Boutté learns that lesson the hard way. When her relationship starts to fizzle and she finds out about her boyfriend’s philandering ways, she chooses to get even. Doctor Glover Israel seems to be the perfect candidate, since he has the reputation of being the womanizer of St. Ambrose Memorial Hospital. She knows he’s attracted to her, and physically, she’s attracted to him too, but she knows her heart isn’t ready for anything more than the carnal pleasures he’s known for indulging in.

Through their interactions at the hospital, the two quickly realize that there is more to their attraction than the physical aspect of it. Glover has nothing to lose by going for it, but Delaney feels her heart can’t withstand any more disappointment or heartbreak. Can the man that has avoided his feelings for so long convince the woman of his dreams that he’s ready for something real, or will she leave him to the proverbial streets from whence he came?

Essence bestselling author Kayla Perrin delivers a novel of suspense where a night of revenge turns deadly.

"I was thinking of some kind of initiation. Tailored just for her. The kind that will teach her a lesson not to mess with me."
--from We'll Never Tell

Shandra James is a man stealer. It's a sport to her, a game that she always wins. As a pledge of the exclusive Alpha Sigma Pi sorority, she should know her place, and know not to throw herself at a sister's boyfriend. But she's marked a new target: Henry Reid.

Henry's fiancée, Phoebe, and her sorority sisters, Miranda and Camille, decide to teach Shandra a lesson one night. A lesson that involves humiliation but nothing more. But unexpectedly the lesson turns deadly and the three women find themselves facing three new rules: Never mention what happened that night, protect each other, and tell no one. Yet when a murderer comes calling, they each discover that rules are meant to be broken.

We'll Never Tell is Kayla Perrin's most provocative, suspenseful novel yet.

A field-shaping account of how contemporary Black art revitalizes the Black radical tradition

In View of the Tradition argues that contemporary Black artists do not simply comment on politics. They help to generate it. Moving across sculpture, installation, photography, and film, Roderick A. Ferguson shows how Black art clarifies the stakes of capitalism, migration, war, settler colonialism, and ecological crisis while widening the tradition’s feminist, queer, and transnational horizons. The book asks what it means to relocate Black art in the annals of freedom rather than the balance sheets of the marketplace.

Reading work by John Akomfrah, Stephen Hayes, Hew Locke, Fabrice Monteiro, Wangechi Mutu, Noah Purifoy, Cauleen Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, Ferguson restores the social character of art: how artworks imagine community, connect histories, and model ways of making and remaking the world. Street-level practices associated with Purifoy reframe official narratives of disorder into studies of collective making and civic imagination. Weems’s Hampton Project situates Black and Native lives within intertwined histories of racial governance and settler pedagogy, building an aesthetics of reckoning that links emancipation to captivity.

Across the Atlantic world, artists turn to the sea as both history and prophecy. In the flotillas and filmic ecologies of Locke, Akomfrah, and Monteiro, water becomes a sensor of racial capitalism and refugee flight, and it calls Black radicalism to account for migration’s precarity and the force of deregulated markets. Mutu’s hybrid anatomies trace militarism’s afterlives, from colonial counterinsurgency to Cold War entanglements, where bodies and ecologies register violence yet assemble unexpected kinships. The book closes with art as praxis through Cauleen Smith’s Human 3.0 Reading List, a hand-drawn syllabus that doubles as an engine room of creation. Ferguson names a method that is accessible and rigorous: look closely, connect widely, and link visual literacy to insurgent study and to áshe, the capacity to make things happen. Written with clarity for general readers and with depth for scholars and classrooms, In View of the Tradition shows how Black art and radical thought come together to represent the world and to sketch other possible ones.

When two best friends' hobby of crashing weddings takes a deadly turn, they’re forced to embark on a road trip of survival in this addictive thriller.

How well do we really know our friends?

As the only Black women at an antebellum-themed wedding, Kayla and Zorie should’ve known this heist was doomed from the start. They should never have come, but when their financial situation became dire, they agreed to hit one last wedding.

Jaded and cynical Kayla has spent the last decade trying to fix her life since an angsty teen prank led to her arrest. Now, with her housekeeping job at a subpar hotel and her disappointing, Cinderella-esque relationship with her dad and obnoxious stepsister, she hates the life she’s built. Her only bright spots are her best friend, Zorie, and their favorite weekend pastime of crashing weddings to steal the money and pawn the gifts. But what started as a lark has evolved into a greedy obsession, making each wedding haul riskier than the last.

While trying to avoid the angry bride and groom, Kayla and Zorie's getaway takes a gruesome turn and suddenly the “Wedding Crasher Killers” are national news. The best friends are forced to hit the road to dodge the authorities, but their escape plan leaves behind a bloody trail of destruction from Georgia all the way to the bayou. As past grudges resurface, Kayla realizes that the best friend she thought she knew is more dangerous than she could ever have realized.

Sharp, unpredictable, and madcap from start to finish, Love You to Death is the most fun—and deadly—road trip you’ll ever take.

This richly illustrated and vastly inclusive collection uplifts the works of authors who are often underrepresented in the literary world. Using their keen knowledge and deep love for all things literary, coauthors Jamise Harper (founder of the Diverse Spines book community) and Jane Mount (author of Bibliophile) collaborated to create an essential volume filled with treasures for every reader:

• Dozens of themed illustrated book stacks—like Classics, Contemporary Fiction, Mysteries, Cookbooks, and more—all with an emphasis on authors of color and authors from diverse cultural backgrounds
• A look inside beloved bookstores owned by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color
• Reading recommendations from leading BIPOC literary influencers

Diversify your reading list to expand your world and shift your perspective. Kickstart your next literary adventure now!

*ships/ready for pick-up in 7-10 business days*

In the stunning first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. 

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.

Literature has the power to help build a shelter in language for a way of being that holds integrity and love as its root. In the tradition of Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and many other Black writers and theorists, poet and professor Khadijah Queen observes questions of life and literature, human feeling and behavior, and explores language-based solutions to common cultural conflicts that are often rooted in harmful assumptions.

Instead of operating from a base of unquestioned thought and systemic tradition, Radical Poetics presents more inclusive and accurate ways of contemplating literary work. Building on ideas and theoretical practices from Édouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Saidiya Hartman, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, Queen reads for where love is present as well as for where it is absent—tracing systems of thought and aesthetic choices to track how characters are portrayed in terms of race, gender, class, and disability. She analyzes short stories, novels, nonfiction narratives, poetry, and a play from authors such as Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, Dionne Brand, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Natasha Trethewey, and Muriel Rukeyser. Queen’s essays offer shifts in thinking about language—beyond calling out the ways language punishes vulnerability, entrenches harm, and suppresses true intercultural communication. Her intuitive approach aims to correct inaccuracies that have served as a foundation for the discriminatory thinking that undergirds American institutions and culture, particularly the continued glorification of violence. Radical Poetics makes a case for the imperative and practical value of understanding poetics beyond artistic and academic spaces and into everyday life.

A profound exploration of the art and magic of writing by New York Times bestselling author Isabel Allende.

In this deeply personal and insightful book, Isabel Allende delves into her creative process, reflecting on nearly half a century of writing that has captivated millions of readers worldwide.

For Isabel, writing is more than a craft. It is an addiction, a means of preserving memory, and a way to make sense of life. She offers readers an intimate glimpse into her creative world, where stories take shape through intuition, discipline, and a deep connection to the human experience. It is also a glimpse into the life of a writer who views literature as a portal to understanding the chaos of life.

Story Telling is not a prescriptive guide to writing. Rather, it is a conversation. In it, Isabel shares her triumphs, mistakes, and lessons learned from the challenges and joys of writing. She intertwines her own stories with invaluable wisdom for anyone pursuing the craft, making this book equally a memoir, a masterclass in the alchemy of storytelling, and a celebration of the enduring power of stories.

Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin's reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin's own experience, of a preacher's son coming of age in 1930's Harlem. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as "an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us." Giovanni's Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America's racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin's most ambitious novel. Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin's short fiction, including the masterful "Sonny's Blues," the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer: "For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

A founding document of African American Studies, reissued for today’s students and scholars
 
In a landmark 1968 conference at Yale University, students, faculty, and community activists helped establish “Afro‑American Studies” as a major, and then a thriving department, at Yale. In these conference proceedings, participants argue for the necessity of Black Studies as a field, start to delineate its central debates, discuss its relationship to the broader community, and plot a course of study. Bristling with implied action and the power of an idea whose time has come, this classic reissue will serve as a resource for new generations of scholars and activists.
  
Contributors to the proceedings include McGeorge Bundy, Lawrence W. Chisolm, Harold Cruse, David Brion Davis, Nathan Hare, Maulana Ron Karenga, Martin Kilson, Jr., Gerald A. McWorter, Sidney W. Mintz, Boniface Obichere, Alvin Poussaint, Edwin S. Redkey, Charles H. Taylor, Jr., and Robert Farris Thompson.
 
In a new introduction, Farah Jasmine Griffin reflects on the legacy of this book and the trajectory of the field over the decades; forewords by Ralph C. Dawson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recall the pioneering moment at Yale and all that it made possible.

Paperback

The unforgettable, inspiring story of a teenage girl growing up in a rural Nigerian village who longs to get an education so that she can find her “louding voice” and speak up for herself, The Girl with the Louding Voice is a simultaneously heartbreaking and triumphant tale about the power of fighting for your dreams. Despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles in her path, Adunni never loses sight of her goal of escaping the life of poverty she was born into so that she can build the future she chooses for herself - and help other girls like her do the same. Her spirited determination to find joy and hope in even the most difficult circumstances imaginable will “break your heart and then put it back together again” (Jenna Bush Hager on The Today Show) even as Adunni shows us how one courageous young girl can inspire us all to reach for our dreams…and maybe even change the world.