Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole Dennis- Benn pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas. At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is ruthlessly determined to shield Thandi from the same fate. When plans for a new hotel threaten their village, Margot sees not only an opportunity for her own financial independence but also perhaps a chance to admit a shocking secret: her forbidden love for another woman. As they face the impending destruction of their community, each woman—fighting to balance the burdens she shoulders with the freedom she craves—must confront long-hidden scars. From a much-heralded new writer, Here Comes the Sun offers a dramatic glimpse into a vibrant, passionate world most outsiders see simply as paradise.

A beautifully layered portrait of motherhood, immigration, and the sacrifices we make in the name of love from award-winning novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn.

Heralded for writing “deeply memorable . . . women” (Jennifer Senior, New York Times), Nicole Dennis-Benn introduces readers to an unforgettable heroine for our times: the eponymous Patsy, who leaves her young daughter behind in Jamaica to follow Cicely, her oldest friend, to New York. Beating with the pulse of a long-withheld confession and peppered with lilting patois, Patsy gives voice to a woman who looks to America for the opportunity to love whomever she chooses, bravely putting herself first. But to survive as an undocumented immigrant, Patsy is forced to work as a nanny, while back in Jamaica her daughter, Tru, ironically struggles to understand why she was left behind. Greeted with international critical acclaim from readers who, at last, saw themselves represented in Patsy, this astonishing novel “fills a literary void with compassion, complexity and tenderness” (Joshunda Sanders, Time), offering up a vital portrait of the chasms between selfhood and motherhood, the American dream and reality.

A young model is catapulted from her life in Jamaica to the international world of high fashion in this tender, powerful novel about the distance one woman must travel to find out what it means to be truly free—by the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of Patsy and Here Comes the Sun.

Nestled within Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, Cherry Village has belonged for generations to the Maroons—freed slaves descended from Faye’s ancestor, the legendary Grandy Henrietta. But Faye’s restless nature and independence have always marked her as different, and she dreams of a life beyond the rural coffee-farming community that follows the old ways. When Faye’s mother is forced to sell their ancestral land after falling ill, Faye worries she will be trapped forever.

A chance meeting with a modeling scout offers Faye the opportunity to save her family and pursue the freedom she craves. Her career will take her on a whirlwind journey of luxury and excess, love and adventure, as well as greed and deception. But her success will challenge everything she thought she knew about herself, forcing her to confront a legacy of pain, resilience, and survival that began generations before.

A story of land and river, myth and history, unbreakable hope and generational resilience, interwoven with Jamaican folklore and featuring an unforgettable heroine, Black Gold further establishes Nicole Dennis-Benn as one of the most dynamic voices in contemporary fiction.

A collectible hardcover edition of the beloved novel about a New York City girlhood that heralded a renaissance in Black women’s literature, with a new foreword by Nicole Dennis-Benn, the bestselling author of Patsy and Here Comes the Sun

One of The New York Times Magazine’s 25 Most Significant New York City Novels from the Last 100 Years

A Penguin Vitae Edition

Selina Boyce comes of age in 1940s New York as the daughter of two immigrants from Barbados: a free-spirited father she adores and who dreams of returning to his Caribbean island home, and a disciplined, hardworking mother she admires and who is determined to purchase their Brooklyn brownstone. When her father comes into an unexpected inheritance, Selina is torn between his nostalgia for the past and her mother’s ambition for the future, all while negotiating racism, sexuality, Depression-era poverty, and the competing values of African Americans and her West Indian immigrant community.

First published in 1959, Brown Girl, Brownstones opened a window into the rich inner life of Black women and today ranks with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as one of the great New York City novels. With her autobiographical debut, Paule Marshall paved the way for Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Maya Angelou—and took her place in the American literary canon.

Penguin Vitae—loosely translated as "Penguin of one's life"—is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

The beloved novel about a New York City girlhood that heralded a renaissance in Black women’s literature, with a new foreword by Nicole Dennis-Benn, the bestselling author of Patsy and Here Comes the Sun

One of The New York Times Magazine’s 25 Most Significant New York City Novels from the Last 100 Years

A Penguin Classic

Selina Boyce comes of age in 1940s New York as the daughter of two immigrants from Barbados: a free-spirited father she adores and who dreams of returning to his Caribbean island home, and a disciplined, hardworking mother she admires and who is determined to purchase their Brooklyn brownstone. When her father comes into an unexpected inheritance, Selina is torn between his nostalgia for the past and her mother’s ambition for the future, all while negotiating racism, sexuality, Depression-era poverty, and the competing values of African Americans and her West Indian immigrant community.

First published in 1959, Brown Girl, Brownstones opened a window into the rich inner life of Black women and today ranks with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as one of the great New York City novels. With her autobiographical debut, Paule Marshall paved the way for Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Maya Angelou—and took her place in the American literary canon.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The National Book Award-winning historian of Stamped from the Beginning charts how “great replacement theory” has moved from the margins to become the most dominant political theory of our time—and what we can do to safeguard democracy from this insidious threat.

Recall the words chanted in Charlottesville, Virginia, but heard around the world: “You will not replace us!” Recall the string of mass shooters around the world—in Oslo and Christchurch, Buffalo, El Paso, and Pittsburgh—who claimed their crimes were a defense against “White genocide.” Recall business and media figures cultivating anxiety and furor over demographic change. These incidents only scratch the surface of this ascendant idea: Popular and ruling politicians in every region of the world have been expressing some version of great replacement theory, eroding democratic norms in the name of preventing demographic change and restoring national greatness.

What is great replacement theory? Variations on the theory have existed for centuries, but it was given this name by a French novelist in 2011 who believed Black and Brown immigrants were “invading” Europe, brought by shadowy elites to “replace” Europe’s White population. From there, politicians and theorists—whether in the United States or the United Kingdom, Germany or Chile, Hungary or Australia—repackaged the conspiracy as a story of “globalists” welcoming “migrant criminals” and diversity initiatives to take away the jobs, cultures, electoral power, and the very lives of White people. Over time, great replacement theory has expanded the threat to include citizens, men, Jews, Christians, heterosexuals, and ethnic majorities in countries as distinct as Russia, El Salvador, Brazil, Italy, and India. All are targeted with the message that they are under an existential attack that only a strongman can prevent.

In our fast-shifting political landscape, most people are unfamiliar with this theory’s origins and its spread, which isn’t a coincidence. In Chain of Ideas, international bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi uses exacting and clear prose to uncover the roots of great replacement theory and its various mutations around the world. It is an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age—and how we can free ourselves from it.

From Whiting Award–winner Rickey Laurentiis, a mythic, lyric, decade-in-the-making new collection of masterful poems that probe the meanings of trans/formation and re-creation, a new classic about gender and love

When Rickey Laurentiis debuted in 2015 with Boy with Thorn, the poetry world heralded the arrival of an astonishing new lyric talent. “Call Rickey Laurentiis’ stylistic range virtuosity or call it correctly, necessity,” Terrance Hayes wrote. In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives. This staggering, irreverent, gentle, and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis’s poetics—from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the mid-century cinematic icon The Lady Chablis.

Then, brick by brick, she builds them anew and makes them her own. She maps a path onto the contradictions, precarity, and revelry of her hometown, “New Orleans / As that modern text, witnessed, and revised, by the light as radically / As by the water, which is history, which slip / Thru your hands. This city is a ghost for hire.” With this as her frame, Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace. “You see something in me,” she writes, “something grand, / Your very cowardice yearns for; you / Who would want to own it, wear it, be by it adorned, / It is so rare a thing, so fine as I am, and seemingly / Fragile, creole, and easily decadent: it is like a tree, then.”

In a world where what one is, and how one looks, or even just the idea of a person can get one killed, this is transformative work. This collection does not stump for its humanity, nor does it compromise its art in order to speak in its own voice. Sprung to its own sound, celebratory without apology, this is a book which reclaims the act of poetry itself, too, for the way it can reshape the writer, the mind, the body, the story we choose, and the images the world can imprint on us. (Can poetry do that?) Approaching from every angle and expanding in every direction as we read, Death of the First Idea probes every aspect of transformation. Celebratory, interrogatory, reclamatory, full of rage and range, these are poems for the storms of our time.

A joyous exploration of imagination and finding inspiration, The Idea in You is the debut picture book from Questlove—New York Times bestselling author, six-time GRAMMY Award–winning drummer, producer, and Academy Award–winning filmmaker—and Coretta Scott King Honor Award–winning illustrator Sean Qualls

An idea can come from anywhere.
Start here: reach up into the sky
And unhook a star.

Questlove’s debut picture book, an uplifting story about passion, creativity, and joy—exuberantly illustrated by award-winning artist Sean Qualls—will inspire kids to find their own creative pursuits.

The pocket MBA for entrepreneurial moms and women of color who want to build a business from scratch, overcome financial obstacles, and shift the trajectory of their life, from a globally recognized entrepreneur, business coach, and digital educator.

While starting a new business is hard for everyone—half close their doors within the first five years—it’s even harder for female entrepreneurs. Ellie Diop, founder and CEO of Ellievated Academy, Fully Funded Co., and Mommy to Millionaire, intimately knows the barriers that historically have kept women from economic freedom. She also knows how to overcome them.

From starting her business with a single $1,200 stimulus check in 2020, to becoming a self-made millionaire in her very first year, Ellie has mastered the art of life changing entrepreneurial success—and now, with Girl, Start that Business!, she’s ready to share those secrets.

The strategies within these pages are battle tested: Ellie has turned thousands of her clients into profitable business owners. And she’s done so by meeting them where they are. Ellie knows many women are starting from zero—no money, no business plan, no customers. What they do have is a great idea, hustle, heart, and street savvy. This non-judgmental, sassy, and whip-smart pocket MBA is what female entrepreneurs need to turn their dreams into life-changing reality.

Let’s go, girl, start that business today!

EVENT DEETS: 

When: December 5 at 630 PM

Where: Kindred Stories (2304 Stuart Street, HTX 77004)

How: RSVP for your time with Glory. Please purchase On Girlhood if you have not to support our programming. 

About The Book

Proudly introducing the Well-Read Black Girl Library Series, On Girlhood is a lovingly curated anthology celebrating short fiction from such luminaries as Rita Dove, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and more.

Featuring stories by: Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Dorothy West, Rita Dove, Camille Acker, Toni Cade Bambara, Amina Gautier, Alexia Arthurs, Dana Johnson, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edwidge Danticat, Shay Youngblood, Paule Marshall, and Zora Neale Hurston.

“When you look over your own library, who do you see?” asks Well-Read Black Girl founder Glory Edim in this lovingly curated anthology. Bringing together an array of “unforgettable, and resonant coming-of-age stories” (Nicole Dennis-Benn), Edim continues her life’s work to brighten and enrich American reading lives through the work of both canonical and contemporary Black authors—from Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison to Dana Johnson and Alexia Arthurs. Divided into four themes—Innocence, Belonging, Love, and Self-Discovery—On Girlhood features fierce young protagonists who contend with trials that shape who they are and what they will become. At times heartbreaking and hilarious, the stories within push past flat stereotypes and powerfully convey the beauty of Black girlhood, resulting in an indispensable compendium for every home library.

About The Author