94 results for “by Charles M. Blow”

Not finding what you're looking for? Check out our shop on bookshop.org to order and still support us ♥

Availability

Price

$
–
$

More filters

  • The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

    by Charles M. Blow

    from $17.99

    *Ships in 7-10 business days*

    Acclaimed columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a “race book.” But as violence against Black people—both physical and psychological—seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests of the summer of 2020, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans. He envisioned a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America. Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, Charles set out to offer a call to action by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms.

    So what will it take to make lasting change when small steps have so frequently failed? It’s going to take an unprecedented shift in power. The Devil You Know is a groundbreaking manifesto, proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country. This book is a grand exhortation to generations of a people, offering a road map to true and lasting freedom.

  • Mayhem and the Mortal cover image

    Shanora Williams

    $32.99

    Don't miss out on the stunning DELUXE LIMITED EDITION while supplies last. This breathtaking collectible is only available on a limited first print run in the U.S. and Canada, a must-have for any book lover.

    Dungeons & Dragons meets The Wizard of Oz in this darkly hilarious romantasy adventure in which a young woman who will do anything to rescue her sister from an evil sorcerer's curse hires a ruthless assassin. They embark on a quest with a band of misfits, one of whom harbors a devastating secret that could ruin her fairy-tale ending.

  • Book cover image

    by Cebo Campbell

    from $18.00

    In a world without white people, what does it mean to be Black?

    One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.

    Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly “post-racial” America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

    Heading south toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell’s astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.

  • All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson

    by Charles Johnson

    $34.95

    *ships/available for pickup in 7-10 business days

    Years before he wrote his National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage, Charles Johnson created these sidesplitting and subversive gag comics about Black life in America, now collected for the first time in nearly half a century.

    Before Charles Johnson found fame as a novelist and won the National Book Award for Middle Passage in 1991, he was a cartoonist, and a very good one.

    Taught via mail correspondence course by the comics editor Lawrence Lariar, mentored by the New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti, and inspired by the call of poet Amiri Baraka to celebrate and depict Black life in America, Johnson crafted some of the fiercest and funniest cartoons of the twentieth century. 

    Reimagining the gag comic as a powerful and incendiary tool, Johnson tackled America’s mid-century afflictions—segregation, inner-city poverty, police brutality, and white supremacy—by craftily subverting stale gag tropes. He populated them with bullet-dodging Black Panthers, doubt-filled Klansmen, militant babies, self-serving politicians, and complacent suburban liberals.

    This collection, Johnson’s first in nearly fifty years, brings together work from across his career: college newspaper gags, selections from his books Black Humor and Half-Past Nation Time, his unpublished manuscript Lumps in the Melting Pot, and uncollected pieces. Taken together, this volume reveals Johnson as long overdue for appreciation as a cartoonist of the first order. 

  • Middle Passage cover image

    Charles Johnson

    $18.00

    A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Charles Johnson’s National Book Award-winning masterpiece—"a novel in the tradition of Billy Budd and Moby-Dick…heroic in proportion…fiction that hooks the mind" (The New York Times Book Review)—now with a new introduction from Stanley Crouch.

    Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave and irrepressible rogue, is lost in the underworld of 1830s New Orleans. Desperate to escape the city’s unscrupulous bill collectors and the pawing hands of a schoolteacher hellbent on marrying him, he jumps aboard the Republic, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri. Thus begins a voyage of metaphysical horror and human atrocity, a journey which challenges our notions of freedom, fate and how we live together. Peopled with vivid and unforgettable characters, nimble in its interplay of comedy and serious ideas, this dazzling modern classic is a perfect blend of the picaresque tale, historical romance, sea yarn, slave narrative and philosophical allegory.

    Now with a new introduction from renowned writer and critic Stanley Crouch, this twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Middle Passage celebrates a cornerstone of the American canon and the masterwork of one of its most important writers. "Long after we’d stopped believe in the great American novel, along comes a spellbinding adventure story that may be just that" (Chicago Tribune).

  • This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

    by Charles E. Cobb Jr

    $25.95

    Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self-defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama, home as "an arsenal." Like King, many ostensibly "nonviolent" civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, Charles E. Cobb Jr. recovers this history, describing the vital role that armed self-defense has played in the survival and liberation of black communities.  Drawing on his experiences in the civil rights movement and giving voice to its participants, Cobb lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the long history and importance of African Americans taking up arms to defend themselves against white supremacist violence.   

    About the Author:

    Charles E. Cobb Jr. is a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and has taught at Brown University. An award-winning journalist, he is an inductee of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. Cobb lives in Jacksonville, Florida.  

  • Why Bushwick Bill Matters
    $18.95

    *ship in 7-10 business days

    In 1989 the Geto Boys released a blistering track, “Size Ain’t Shit,” that paid tribute to the group’s member Bushwick Bill. Born with dwarfism, Bill was one of the few visibly disabled musicians to achieve widespread fame and one of the even fewer to address disability in a direct, sustained manner. Initially hired as a dancer, Bill became central to the Geto Boys as the Houston crew became one of hip-hop’s most important groups.

    Why Bushwick Bill Matters chronicles this crucial artist and explores what he reveals about the relationships among race, sex, and disability in pop music. Charles L. Hughes examines Bill's recordings and videos (both with the Geto Boys and solo), from the horror-comic persona of “Chuckie” to vulnerable verses in songs such as “Mind Playing Tricks On Me,” to discuss his portrayals of dwarfism, addiction, and mental illness. Hughes also explores Bill’s importance to his era and to the longer history of disability in music. A complex figure, Bill exposed the truths of a racist and ableist society even as his violent and provocative lyrics put him in the middle of debates over censorship and misogyny. Confrontational and controversial, Bushwick Bill left a massive legacy as he rhymed and swaggered through an often-inaccessible world.

  • Book cover image

    by Danez Smith

    $18.00

    Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

    Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America's acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem―part map, part annotation, part visual argument―offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

    Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love―those given and made―are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

  • Blues for Mister Charlie: A Play cover image

    James Baldwin

    $16.00

    An award-winning play from one of America’s most brilliant writers about a murder in a small Southern town, loosely based on the 1955 killing of Emmett Till. • "A play with fires of fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes, a roar of protest in its throat." —The New York Times

    James Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated—and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion. 

    In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence, James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race.

    For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a "boy" like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast.

  • The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie cover image
    $32.00

    A fresh, charming, socially conscious tour of the mysteries of space-time, from the award-winning author of The Disordered Cosmos

    In her highly acclaimed debut, distinguished cosmologist and particle physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shared with her audience an abiding sense of wonder at the cosmos, while imagining a world without the entrenched injustice that plagues her field. Now, in The Edge of Space-Time, she embraces that cosmic wonder, taking readers on a mind-altering journey to the boundaries of the universe, inviting us to spend time at the edge of what we know about space-time and about ourselves.

    Guided by her conviction that for humanity to go forward we must know our cosmic past, Prescod-Weinstein renders accessible some of the most abstract concepts of theoretical physics and draws on poetry and popular culture—from Queen Latifah to Lewis Carroll to Big K.R.I.T. to Sun Ra and Star Trek— to tell fascinating stories about the fundamental quantum nature of space-time and everything inside of it. Here we meet the quantum cat that is both dead and alive, learn the difference between dark matter and dark energy, explore the inner workings of black holes, investigate the possibility of a unified theory of quantum gravity, and map out the meeting place of the unimaginably vast with the confoundingly small, following our guide out to the far reaches of the particle horizon and down to the tiniest (and queerest) neutrino. Prescod-Weinstein shows us how spending time with the cosmos is a vital human activity that enriches all our lives. Along the way, she calls on us to resist colonial approaches to space exploration and instead imagine a better path forward in our pursuit of humanity’s undeniable connection with the stars.

    Through Prescod-Weinstein’s clear-eyed and unique perspective, and informed by her deep knowledge of post-colonial history and Black feminist thought, The Edge of Space-Time argues that physics is an essential way for everyone to look at the universe and presents a compelling case that “the edge” is a powerful vantage point from which to see the big picture.

  • The Myth of Bouncing Back: Ditching the Lies of Resilience and Learning How to Rise for Real cover image
    $18.99

    A Roadmap for Coming Back Stronger After Life's Hardest Falls
    · How to lament, learn to stand again, and ultimately rebuild a beautiful life
    · Helps you understand how you grow and change as a result of life's challenges and disappointments
    · A hopeful, encouraging, and energizing book for the hurting

    There's no such thing as bouncing back. Whether that sentence made you frown in disagreement or sigh with relief that someone finally gets it, this book is for you. There's a lot of talk about resilience these days, but true resilience isn't just maintaining a positive attitude in the face of obstacles or returning to where you were before some difficulty or trauma occurred. It's a lifelong practice of falling, learning, and rising again with each new challenge. It's about becoming who you're meant to be.

    With deeply personal stories and biblical reflections, Charaia Rush guides you through a process of building resilience through the cycles of failure, faith, and transformation. She shows you how to
    · face your fears
    · own your story--yes, even the hard parts
    · release relationships, roles, or mindsets that no longer serve you
    · reclaim your intrinsic worth apart from achievements or approval
    · redefine success
    · trust the process
    · hold on to hope even when the future feels uncertain
    · and more

    Firmly grounded in God's promises, this practical and hopeful book offers a road map for rising again after life's hardest falls--while finding purpose in the process.

  • Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore cover image

    Char Adams

    $32.00

    Longtime NBC News reporter Char Adams writes a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements told through the lens of Black-owned bookstores, which have been centers for organizing from abolition to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.

    In Black-Owned, Char Adams celebrates the living history of Black bookstores. Packed with stories of activism, espionage, violence, community, and perseverance, Black-Owned starts with the first Black-owned bookstore, which an abolitionist opened in New York in 1834, and after the bookshop’s violent demise, Black book-lovers carried on its cause. In the twentieth century, civil rights and Black Power activists started a Black bookstore boom nationwide. Malcolm X gave speeches in front of the National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem—a place dubbed “Speakers’ Corner”—and later, Black bookstores became targets of FBI agents, police, and racist vigilantes. Still, stores continued to fuel Black political movements.

    Amid these struggles, bookshops were also places of celebration: Eartha Kitt and Langston Hughes held autograph parties at their local Black-owned bookstores. Maya Angelou became the face of National Black Bookstore Week. And today a new generation of Black activists is joining the radical bookstore tradition, with rapper Noname opening her Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles and several stores making national headlines when they were overwhelmed with demand in the Black Lives Matter era. As Adams makes clear, in an time of increasing repression, Black bookstores are needed now more than ever.

    Full of vibrant characters and written with cinematic flair, Black-Owned is an enlightening story of community, resistance, and joy.

Stay Informed. We're building a community committed to celebrating Black authors + artisans. Subscribe to keep up with all things Kindred Stories.