Search results: 43 results for “anan ameri”
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43 results
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Khaled and Jamila
Khaled and Jamila
Anan Ameri
$18.95Khaled and Jamila is a sweeping, multigenerational novel by Palestinian-American writer Anan Ameri that explores the enduring power of love and family across continents and cultures, asking what, in a divided world, truly lasts.
What in the world is beautiful forever? When disconnection rocks a family, the mistakes of one generation become the heartaches of the next …
1959, the West Bank, Palestine. Khaled’s bossy, hot-tempered father insists that his son go to college in the States so he can learn to help him run his business. Khaled, Arabic for forever, is reluctant to leave his secret, hometown crush. But he’s bullied into taking off for Ann Arbor. There he falls for a blue-collar American girl. One thing leads to another, including a daughter named Jamila, Arabic for beautiful. Family mayhem erupts on all sides.
Fast forward to 1984. Jamila has come of age growing up in Ann Arbor during the turbulent sixties and seventies. There she falls for her brother’s best friend, Ali, who she’s known for years. But even though he’s practically a member of the family, Ali is Black. Interracial marriages in the US are still few and far between. Mayhem breaks out again, tearing close ties apart.
And so, what might Sitti, the grandmother conciliator, have to say?
The names and heartaches of Khaled and Jamila ask, what in this mad world is beautiful forever? In Anan Ameri’s noisy, impatient, vibrant novel, enduring beauty is the kind of love that family can teach us. And it’s the larger, ever-expanding family of connections that love can show us when we learn to let it.
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Just Us: An American Conversation
Just Us: An American Conversation
by Claudia Rankine
$20.00*ships in 7 - 10 business days*
In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about Whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing Whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it look like if we step into it? “I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room,” she writes.
This brilliant assembly of essays, poems, documents, and images disrupts the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces―the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth―where neutrality and politeness deflect true engagement in our shared problems. Rankine makes unprecedented art out of the actual voices and rebuttals of others: White men responding to, and with, their White male privilege; a friend clarifying her unexpected behavior at a play; and women on the street expressing the political currency of dyeing their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complement Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Funny, vulnerable, and prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate and urgent book, a crucial call to challenge our vexed reality. -
Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
$20.00A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the visual, Rankine negotiates the enduring anxieties of medicated depression, race riots, divisive elections, terrorist attacks, and ongoing wars―doom scrolling through the daily news feeds that keep us glued to our screens and that have come to define our age.
First published in 2004, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a hauntingly prescient work, one that has secured a permanent place in American literature. This new edition is presented in full color with updated visuals and text, including a new preface by the author, and matches the composition of Rankine’s best-selling and award-winning Citizen and Just Us as the first book in her acclaimed American trilogy.
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a crucial guide to surviving a fractured and fracturing American consciousness―a book of rare and vital honesty, complexity, and presence.
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America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries
America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries
$31.00The New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again confronts America’s unfinished story in this blistering reassessment of race, freedom, and the myths that bind us.
Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country’s enduring refusal to face its true nature—especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth.
America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices—from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.—that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude’s is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present.
Centered around the major celebrations of America’s milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for the better angels of our future.
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Dear America: Notes Of An Undocumented Citizen
Dear America: Notes Of An Undocumented Citizen
$18.99Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “the most famous undocumented immigrant in America,” tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms.
“This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at its core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.
After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.”
―Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America
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Americanah: A Novel
Americanah: A Novel
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
$19.00The powerful new novel from the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun—a story of love and race centered around a young man and woman from Nigeria and the choices and challenges they face in the countries they come to call home.
As teenagers at a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under a military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu departs for America, where she suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, and is forced to confront something she never thought about back home: race. Obinze—the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor—had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America has closed its doors to him and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as the writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion—for their homeland and for each other—they face the toughest decisions of their lives. Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today’s hyper-globalized world. -
Citizen: An American Lyric
Citizen: An American Lyric
by Claudia Rankine
$20.00*ships in 7-10 business days*
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
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Amy Sherald: American Sublime
Amy Sherald: American Sublime
Sarah Roberts
$45.00Amy Sherald’s work, life, and significance for American art, as revealed in her powerful figurative paintings of Black subjects
Bringing together nearly all of her artwork to date, this lavishly illustrated volume situates the work of Amy Sherald (b. 1973) within the context of American realist and figurative painting. Encompassing the full arc of her career, from her poetic early works to the distinctive figure paintings and portraits that have become her hallmark, Amy Sherald: American Sublime unfolds her method of selecting individuals she meets on the street and using facial expression, body language, and clothing choices to create paintings that transcend portraiture and expand the canon of American art. Essays by curators Sarah Roberts and Rhea Combs; poet and writer Elizabeth Alexander; artist Dario Calmese; and renowned scholar Deborah Willis contextualize and illuminate Sherald’s creation of a new form of imaginative portraiture. Often depicting her subjects’ skin in gray monochrome, surrounded by few markers of place, time, or context beyond the clothes they wear, Sherald challenges the assumption that Black life is inextricably bound with struggle, creating images that engage in more expansive thinking about race and representation and the wide-open possibilities and complexities of every individual. Whether a passerby or the former first lady Michelle Obama, Sherald’s subjects are at ease with themselves, the world, and one another.
Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Exhibition Schedule:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
(November 16, 2024–March 9, 2025)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(April 9–August 3, 2025)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
(September 2025–January 2026) -
Backtalker: An American Memoir
Backtalker: An American Memoir
$30.00One of the most influential public intellectuals in the world and the architect of the two biggest ideas to reshape the American conversation about fairness offers the intimate story of how her life gave birth to these ideas.
It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day. In this case: race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory.
Backtalker is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw’s memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn’t as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. It happens when she is denied a role in the kindergarten school play. When she is escorted to the back door of a private club. When Anita Hill is exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas. When OJ Simpson goes on trial. When Obama launches My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only. When the movement against police violence overlooks Black women. Crenshaw is there for all of it.
In the vein of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, Crenshaw evokes each time and place like a gifted novelist with extreme honesty and specificity, making her book a series of awe-inspiring, deep revelations. As a result of her work, Crenshaw has become a force to be reckoned with across America—at schools, in the workplace, at dinner tables, and, of course, in our public square.
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LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority
LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority
$32.50“A perfect representation of Latino diversity” (The Washington Post), LatinoLand draws from hundreds of interviews and prodigious research to give us both a vibrant portrait and the little-known history of our largest and fastest-growing minority, in “a work of prophecy, sympathy, and courage” (Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author).
LatinoLand is an exceptional, all-encompassing overview of Hispanic America based on personal interviews, deep research, and Marie Arana’s life experience as a Latina. At present, Latinos comprise twenty percent of the US population, a number that is growing. By 2050, census reports project that one in every three Americans will claim Latino heritage.
But Latinos are not a monolith. They do not represent a single group. The largest groups are Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, and Cubans. Each has a different cultural and political background. Puerto Ricans, for example, are US citizens, whereas some Mexican Americans never immigrated because the US-Mexico border shifted after the US invasion of 1848, incorporating what is now the entire southwest of the United States. Cubans came in two great waves: those escaping communism in the early years of Castro, many of whom were professionals and wealthy, and those permitted to leave in the Mariel boat lift twenty years later, representing some of the poorest Cubans, including prisoners.
As LatinoLand shows, Latinos were some of the earliest immigrants to what is now the US—some of them arriving in the 1500s. They are racially diverse—a random infusion of white, Black, indigenous, and Asian. Once overwhelmingly Catholic, they are becoming increasingly Protestant and Evangelical. They range from domestic workers and day laborers to successful artists, corporate CEOs, and US senators. Formerly solidly Democratic, they now vote Republican in growing numbers. They are as culturally varied as any immigrants from Europe or Asia.
Marie Arana draws on her own experience as the daughter of an American mother and Peruvian father who came to the US at age nine, straddling two worlds, as many Latinos do. “Thorough, accessible, and necessary” (Ms. magazine), LatinoLand unabashedly celebrates Latino resilience and character and shows us why we must understand the fastest-growing minority in America.
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The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America
The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America
by Aaron Robertson
from $20.00A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia―and sought to transform their lives.
How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black?
These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit―the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members. Central to this endeavor was the Shrine’s chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism. The Shrine’s members opened bookstores and co-ops, created a self-defense force, and raised their children communally, eventually working to establish the country’s largest Black-owned farm, where attempts to create an earthly paradise for Black people continues today.
Alongside the Shrine’s story, Robertson reflects on a diverse array of Black utopian visions, from the Reconstruction era through the countercultural fervor of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present day. By doing so, Robertson showcases the enduring quest of collectives and individuals for a world beyond the constraints of systemic racism.
The Black Utopians offers a nuanced portrait of the struggle for spaces―both ideological and physical―where Black dignity, protection, and nourishment are paramount. This book is the story of a movement and of a world still in the making―one that points the way toward radical alternatives for the future.
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The Portable Anna Julia Cooper
The Portable Anna Julia Cooper
Shirley Moody-Turner
$20.00A collection of essential writings from the iconic foremother of Black women's intellectual history, feminism, and activism, who helped pave the way for modern social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name
Winner of the American Library Association Award for Best Historical Materials
A Penguin Classic
The Portable Anna Julia Cooper brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism and selected correspondences, including over thirty previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois. The Portable Anna Julia Cooper will introduce a new generation of readers to an educator, public intellectual, and community activist whose prescient insights and eloquent prose underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African American social and political activism.
Recognized as the iconic foremother of Black women's intellectual history and activism, Cooper (1858-1964) penned one of the most forceful and enduring statements of Black feminist thought to come of out of the nineteenth century. Attention to her work has grown exponentially over the years--her words have been memorialized in the US passport and, in 2009, she was commemorated with a US postal stamp. Cooper's writings on the centrality of Black girls and women to our larger national discourse has proved especially prescient in this moment of Black Lives Matter, Say Her Name, and the recent protests that have shaken the nation.
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