Search results: 35 results for “C. J. Farley”
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35 results
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PRE-ORDER: Who Knows You by Heart: A Novel
PRE-ORDER: Who Knows You by Heart: A Novel
$18.99"Electrifying and smart, Who Knows You By Heart is part thriller, part prophecy, part gift and all the way live."--Junot Diaz
“Scintillates with light and warmth…And it’s hilariously funny. The view of Big Tech through Olivia the coder’s eyes is delicious. I absolutely loved this book.” —Alison Bechdel
Part social thriller, part modern love story, Who Knows You by Heart is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what’s real in an age of artificial intelligence.
Octavia Crenshaw, a Jamaican-American coder living in Manhattan, is broke, burned out, and haunted by her parents’ deaths. Desperate to pay off some debts, she ditches her nonprofit job for a high-paying gig at Eustachian Inc., a Big Tech company that specializes in audio entertainment. Language, communication, human connection—these are the markets Eustachian wants to revolutionize...and dominate.
Octavia finds herself swept up in the world of the Tech Titans, with its lure of instant riches and its seemingly limitless future. But as one of Eustachian’s very few Black employees, Octavia is uncomfortably aware of things that seem to escape her coworkers: unexplained tech glitches, cryptic remarks, a mysterious secret floor in the corporation’s gleaming headquarters.
But she sets her suspicions aside when she’s recruited by another Black coder—the infuriating but attractive Walcott—to collaborate on a secret project code-named Zion. Zion is a new kind of AI-powered storytelling, one that’s programmed to be free from the racist and sexist biases that plague other AI products. Zion could launch Eustachian into a bold new future and make its developers super rich while righting all kinds of injustices. Octavia and Walcott’s excitement over their creation sets off romantic sparks between the two of them, until they discover a toxic secret about their employer—something that they can’t unlearn, or overlook, but must overcome.
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PRE-ORDER: Frankie's Summer
PRE-ORDER: Frankie's Summer
$15.99Determined to make friends at her new school, a girl dons a hot dog mascot costume to earn enough money to throw the perfect party in this hilarious and achingly true-to-life middle grade graphic novel from the beloved and award-winning creators of Duel.
Popular Frankie’s middle school life turns upside down when her family’s hot dog restaurant goes up in literal flames and they move to a new neighborhood with a different school. Suddenly she’s the new kid trying to figure out who her friends are when the classmates she likes most are decidedly uncool and the popular kids are kind of mean.
Frankie’s determined to win everyone over with an extravagant, super fun birthday blowout. But to earn the money for her party, she’ll have to spend her summer dressed as a giant hot dog mascot for her quirky family’s new food truck. Will Frankie’s brat summer doom her to be a loser or will she discover that wieners never quit?
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PRE-ORDER: A Different Girl: A Memoir
PRE-ORDER: A Different Girl: A Memoir
$30.00By the actress, singer, dancer, director, and author, an honest and impassioned memoir that spans from her childhood in Atlanta to her years with Alvin Ailey, to Broadway and her time as a star in ’90s Black Hollywood.
Best known for her iconic role as Whitley in the '90s hit sitcom A Different World, Jasmine Guy grew up mixed in Atlanta, near Morehouse and Spelman, where her father taught philosophy. When she first encountered Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, her life was given a sense of purpose. At seventeen, she moved to New York, fulfilling her childhood dream of dancing with the company.
Dance would give way to acting, first on the Broadway stage, then on screen with Spike Lee's School Daze. When she accepted a part on A Different World, she had no way of knowing the impact it would have on its era, or that it would cement her status as one of the greatest stars of Black Hollywood of the '80s and '90s.
In A Different Girl, Guy, with the help of her daughter and confidante Imani Guy Duckette, offers an unflinching and heartfelt account of her rise to stardom. She reveals her battles with depression, her wavering self-image, her brushes with racism in Hollywood, and her lifelong yearning to create beautiful work. Along the way, she crosses paths with some of her generation’s greatest talents, including Whitney Houston, Debbie Allen, and Tupac Shakur.
Frank, unfiltered, and often laugh-out-loud funny, Guy shares her vulnerabilities and gifts in the hope that readers see themselves in her words. A Different Girl is a book for dancers, mixed kids, dreamers, and anyone who needs to hear her hopeful message.
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PRE-ORDER: Your Pain Is My Joy
PRE-ORDER: Your Pain Is My Joy
$30.00Suge Knight was handed nothing in life. Anything he ever had, he fought for, knowing that he had to take what he deserved. Now in this unflinching memoir from behind bars, Suge takes readers on a thrilling ride through the Golden Age of Rap and the streets of Compton.
Back when the streets and the music business mixed freely, Suge Knight brought rap icons such as Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur to global superstardom with the creation of his label Death Row Records. Living by the rules of the streets, where might makes right and only the strong survive, Suge made his artists household names the same way he fought his way out of Compton, Los Angeles: By overpowering anyone who got in his way.
Everyone in the rap game has a story about Suge Knight. Now, for the first time, Suge is telling his side. From his legendary encounter with Vanilla Ice to blow-out brawls with P. Diddy and the night when he and Tupac got shot in Vegas, Suge doesn’t shy away from the controversy that has followed him his entire life. He pulls no punches, asks for no forgiveness, and explains exactly how he battled his way to the top.
YOUR PAIN IS MY JOY is more than a music memoir: it’s a candid and unapologetic look inside the mind of the original rap kingpin. Electrifying, raw, and often hilarious, Suge gives readers a shotgun seat tour through the wild, wild west of gangsta rap.
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PRE-ORDER: Highblood: A Novel
PRE-ORDER: Highblood: A Novel
$27.00“They say that as a young pup she liked to bite. She ripped chunks of flesh from three servants and nearly bled one of them to death.”
In Barranquilla, Carnival belongs to the living, the dead, and the women who feed on both.
Julieta Vanterroso was born with fangs, a beautiful little monster in a family that knew exactly what to do with monsters. Her grandmother, Julia Vanterroso, has built an empire out of blood: the Sanguina factory, the Highblood Club, the old Carnival families, the politicians, the servants, the bodies that can be drained and paid and forgotten. In Barranquilla, the Vanterrosos do not hide what they are. They dress it in lace, teach it to dance, put it on a float, and call it tradition.
Now Julieta is meant to become Queen of Carnival. She must smile, dance, read the Bando, marry the man chosen for her, and step into the future her grandmother has prepared since the day she was born. But as Carnival approaches and the Vanterroso family begins to turn on itself, bodies appear where they shouldn’t, old rituals start to fail, and the women around Julieta grow hungry in ways even blood cannot satisfy.
By the time Carnival crowns its queen, Julieta will have to decide how much of herself she is willing to lose to become what her family has been waiting for.
Drawing from Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, Highblood transforms Barranquilla Carnival into a landscape of blood, spectacle, and ritual, where women inherit hunger like a family heirloom and survival depends on who is willing to devour whom first.
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PRE-ORDER: Color Me a World
PRE-ORDER: Color Me a World
$19.99A mother and son with synesthesia—the ability to experience one sense through another—share their unique perspective in this tender and charming picture book.
Have you ever tasted a triangle or felt the color purple? What if sound was something you could see? A mother and son, both synesthetes, embark on a whimsical, sensory journey that celebrates the varied ways they see, smell, hear, and feel the world around them.
As they watch Nana’s laughter bloom into a garden and feel colors on their cheeks, they shine a light on the beauty of neurodivergence, helping readers discover the deliciousness in our differences and the pure joy of painting the world with the beauty of our very own colors.
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PRE-ORDER: Sailing Home on an Elephant
PRE-ORDER: Sailing Home on an Elephant
$19.99When a little girl loses her grandmother, her world is drained of all its color and whimsy, until a magical dream carries her back toward the light in this tender and imaginative picture book about grief.
Mama Belle tells her granddaughter that color made the world happy, and Ladymay knows this is true. Their life together is full of wonder, and May dresses in the prettiest rainbow-colored outfits and chases morning sunrises and beautiful butterflies. Then Mama Belle goes away and May learns she won’t be coming back. May gets sent to live with strangers who already have a house full of children. All the color fades from her world.
Then an old cassette tape brings back Mama Belle’s voice, and that night, an elephant comes to May in a dream. It takes her across Virginia and through the ocean, to the land of the ancestors Mama Belle told her about. Can this elephant help May remember the beauty of her grandmother’s lessons and return color to her world?
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PRE-ORDER: The Misfit Witches of Marigold Island
PRE-ORDER: The Misfit Witches of Marigold Island
$18.95Warm and witchy, The Misfit Witches of Marigold Island is a cozy fantasy and slow-burn sapphic romance for fans of The Spellshop and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches.
A spell gone wrong leaves a witch powerless—but opens the door to a new kind of magic.
Paloma has spent a decade as a witch's apprentice, dedicating herself completely to the craft of spell casting. But even with her whole future planned, all it takes is one sneeze to send a spell awry, extinguishing her magic completely. Paloma's distraught: Without her powers, can she even call herself a witch?
At the gentle urging of her mentor, Paloma returns home to verdant, magical Marigold Island. There, she launches By the Broom, a successful courier service, and finds community in a house of other Queer misfit witches and their familiars—including a straw hat–wearing raccoon named Nori. Still, the ache of losing her powers—and her sense of self—lingers. Even a flirtation with Liss, the charming café owner whose chocolate chip cookies are literally enchanted to feel like a hug, can't quiet her grief. As she zooms around making deliveries, she can't ignore the blight creeping across the island—or the feeling that Marigold's magic is fading too.
Paloma's used to solving problems on her own. Can she learn to accept her limitations and trust her new housemates to help her save the island they all love before it's lost to them forever?
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PRE-ORDER: The Northbound Train: A Story of the Great Migration (A Picture Book)
PRE-ORDER: The Northbound Train: A Story of the Great Migration (A Picture Book)
$19.99A unique perspective on the Great Migration, when more than six million Black American families left the South to escape Jim Crow laws and racial violence
Clickety-clack! Don’t look back!
Jane and her parents sit in the segregated train car, traveling from Birmingham, Alabama, to Chicago, Illinois, where her father has found a new job. At the start of the journey, they are forced to sit at the back while white passengers ride at the front.
But when the train crosses the Mason-Dixon line, the conductor announces that passengers may change seats―and for the first time, Jane sees Black and white families sitting side by side.
Based on the author’s family history, The Northbound Train offers a powerful child’s-eye view of the Great Migration and captures what it means to leave home behind in search of something better. Includes recommendations for additional reading and an author’s note about this pivotal moment in American history.
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PRE-ORDER: Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist
PRE-ORDER: Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist
$30.00Timnit Gebru, one of the fiercest voices in the world speaking truth to power, chronicles her journey as a refugee and Black woman in STEM—delivering an inspiring vision for better, human-centered, equitable technology.
Timnit Gebru has been present at nearly every inflection point in tech’s recent history. She was an engineer at Apple on the cusp of the iPhone’s first release, a PhD student at Stanford’s computer vision lab as her advisor worked on the enormous datasets so crucial to AI’s development, and the most senior Black woman on the Ethical AI team at Google as DeepMind and Open AI took over the field of artificial intelligence—where she was forced out for having raised the alarm about bias in large language models, causing global shockwaves in the tech industry.
Starting with her childhood during which she was forced to flee the 1998 Ethiopian-Eritrean war, through the fraught process of achieving refugee status, Gebru shows how her early love of science and math was inextricably intertwined with her belief that these were reliably objective safe spaces. Over time, through high school in Greater Boston, college at Stanford, and jobs at Apple, Microsoft, and Google, she came to realize that perhaps some of the biases and injustices she witnessed in her life outside of academics were true about technology, too.
Over the course of her life, Gebru has seen up close how the destructive ideologies and outsized egos of the tech world have come to wreak havoc on our environment, our economies, and the lives of billions of people. She has also come to understand how we could have made a different choice every step of the way, and how we still can.
Part memoir and part manifesto, Deep Unlearning is as much about ideology as it is about technology—and about how to privilege justice in both.
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PRE-ORDER: Another View: The Vibrant World of Contemporary Black Artists
PRE-ORDER: Another View: The Vibrant World of Contemporary Black Artists
$59.95An intimate look into the studios of twenty prominent Black artists working today, enlivening their art practice and creative lives through stunning photographs and exclusive interviews
‘Both a vital record of the present and a powerful testament to the legacies still being created.’ – Angela Bassett, actress, director, and producer
Another View: The Vibrant World of Contemporary Black Artists is a groundbreaking, intimate exploration of the studios, living spaces, and creative processes of twenty of today’s most notable Black artists. The book includes 150 never-before-published photographs taken by acclaimed artist Awol Erizku, presenting the ultimate behind-the-scenes tour of striking studios across the United States, works in progress by some of the world’s most creative people, and the objects and settings that inspire them. Exclusive profiles inspired by interviews with celebrated curator Isolde Brielmaier offer compelling personal advice and unique insights into the art world, giving readers an inside look at the role of art in society, perspectives on legacy, and what it means to be a Black artist today. An illuminating introduction by lauded scholar and critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores the historical precedents and critical context that led to the exciting current moment of Black contemporary art in America.
Showcasing work across media – including painting, sculpture, textile, collage, photography, and more – the featured artists have won prestigious awards such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, MacArthur Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts grant, and are in the collections of leading institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Guggenheim. These artists represent a pivotal moment in American art history, where Black artists are gaining unprecedented institutional recognition and also fundamentally changing conversations about identity, history, and representation in contemporary art. This book captures a crucial juncture – not only showcasing the ways these artists think about their work, but also highlighting important, personal conversations about how their influence will shape the next generation of artists and the broader cultural landscape for decades to come.
Featured artists: Nina Chanel Abney; Derrick Adams; Sanford Biggers; Jordan Casteel; Nick Cave; Renee Cox; Leonardo Drew; Theaster Gates; Rashid Johnson; Titus Kaphar; Glenn Ligon; Kerry James Marshall; Xaviera Simmons; Lorna Simpson; Shinique Smith; Hank Willis Thomas; Mickalene Thomas; Nari Ward; Carrie Mae Weems; and Fred Wilson.
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PRE-ORDER: Invisible Senators: The Hidden Legacy of America's First Black Senators and the Birth of Multiracial Democracy
PRE-ORDER: Invisible Senators: The Hidden Legacy of America's First Black Senators and the Birth of Multiracial Democracy
$29.00From the author of the acclaimed Invisible Generals comes the unsung history of the first Black US senators—two men who overcame fierce resistance to help America forge a multiracial democracy.
In 1870—a mere five years after the Civil War ended—Hiram Revels became the first Black US senator sworn into office. Abolitionist Wendell Phillips proclaimed him “the Fifteenth Amendment in flesh and blood.” During his tenure, Revels would fight for civil rights, public education, and birthright citizenship. Blanche K. Bruce followed in Revels’s footsteps, introducing pivotal legislation to secure back pay for Black veterans and promoting infrastructure projects to help reunite the North and South. Bruce would go on to become the register of the treasury, the first Black American to have his signature appear on US currency.
Revels and Bruce faced fierce opposition from within both major political parties, and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws further eroded Blacks’ momentum. When Bruce’s term ended, there wouldn’t be another Black US senator for eighty-six years. A systematic campaign of diminishment reduced the accomplishments of Revels, Bruce, and their Reconstruction-era peers to the point of obscurity.
Invisible Senators is a surprising, clear-eyed, and inspiring tribute that restores Revels and Bruce to their rightful place in US history. Their powerful story compels us to reflect on the progress they made and to recognize the ongoing struggles for justice in America—moving us to continue building the inclusive democracy that they began.
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