A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

From the author of the Oprah's Book Club Selection An American Marriage, here is a beautifully evocative novel that proves why Tayari Jones is "one of the most important voices of her generation" (Essence).

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A poignant and powerful story of the American South in the 1960s and of one woman who risks her life for the people she loves from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, now available in a new edition featuring an introduction by Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage.

“A classic novel of both feminism and the Civil Rights movement.”—Ms. Magazine

Meridian Hill, a dedicated and courageous young activist in the 1960s, works to create peace and understanding through her civil rights work, touching the lives of all those she meets even when her health begins to deteriorate. With the old rules of Southern society collapsing around her, her coworkers quitting and moving to comfortable homes and lives, and others turning to more violent means of achieving change, Meridian fights a lonely battle to reaffirm her own humanity—and that of all her people.

A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with an introduction by Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), an excerpt from the never before seen follow-up, and discussion guide.
 
Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve and sends them to earn their keep for the household, whether in domestic service, in the fields, or at “the farmhouse” on the edge of town, where Rozelle beds local men for money.
 
But Tangy Mae has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby white high school. She has a chance to change her life, but can she break from Rozelle’s grasp without ruinous—even fatal—consequences?

“A page turner and history lesson at once, Harlem Rhapsody reminds us that our stories are our generational wealth— this book and the real lives that inspired it.”—Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage (Oprah’s Book Club Pick)

She found the literary voices that would inspire the world…. The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian.
 
In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all.
 
W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Amidst rumors of their tumultuous affair, Jessie is determined to prove herself. She attacks the challenge of discovering young writers with fervor, finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends. Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives…every African American writer in the country wants their work published there.
 
When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts. She has shaped a generation of literary legends, but as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.

He’s a newly single father with a demanding job as a firefighter.
She’s a newly unemployed daycare worker in need of new job.
Tripp believes it’s fate when his station house is called to a fire at the daycare Brylee works at. It becomes harder to manage being a full time father to a newborn and the hours his job demands so when he sees an opportunity to hire Brylee as an inhouse nanny he doesn’t hesitate.
The situation with his daughter’s mom is sticky, he’s trying to fight his feelings for Brylee, but Tripp learns it’s hard to ignore someone who checks all his boxes so perfectly.

The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones—of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people.

The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years—the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote wife—who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by sudden bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor among them—a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servant’s dazzling niece, but the protegée and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian’s expense and is home now for a respite from her Paris world of fashion, film and art.

Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. And, in a single moment, with Valerian’s perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a larger abdication. Margaret’s delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who at first is repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him—he calls himself Son; he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood; uneducated, violent, contemptuous of her privilege.

As Jadine and Son come together in the loving collision they have both welcomed and feared, the novel moves outward—to the Florida backwater town Son was raised in, fled from, yet cherishes; to her sleek New York; then back to the island people and their protective and entangling legends. As the lovers strive to hold and understand each other, as they experience the awful weight of the separate worlds that have formed them—she perceiving his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom, he perceiving her as the classic lure, the tar baby set out to entrap him—all the mysterious elements, all the highly charged threads of the story converge. Everything that is at risk is made clear: how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart.

Once again, Toni Morrison has given us a novel of daring, fascination, and power.

Foreword by Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

Edited with an introduction by Genevieve West, professor and chair of the English, Speech, and Foreign Languages department at Texas Woman’s University

A collection of remarkable stories of the Harlem Renaissance from “one of the greatest writers of our time” (Toni Morrison) Zora Neale Hurston.

In May 1925, Zora Neale Hurston—then a fledgling writer—was living in New York, “desperately striving for a toe-hold on the world.” For the next decade, she wrote short works that captured the zeitgeist of African American life and transformed her into one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nearly a century later, this singular talent is recognized as one of the most influential and revered American artists of the modern period.

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is an outstanding collection of stories that flash with Hurston’s biting, satiric humor, as they share revelations about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism, that proudly reflect African American folk culture. Brought together for the first time, they include eight of Hurston’s “lost” Harlem gems, which were found in dusty periodicals and archives. All are timeless classics that enrich our understanding and appreciation of this exceptional writer’s voice and her contributions to America’s literary traditions.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • FINALIST FOR THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE, HURSTON/WRIGHT LEGACY AWARD, AND PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: Washington Post, Boston Globe, and NPR

“Magical and dangerous. I could not put it down.”—Tayari Jones, bestselling author of Kin

From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger, a “smart, searing” (Washington Post) novel following a strong-willed Haitian American woman who must survive a brutal kidnapping—now featuring a new foreword by the author

Published to terrific acclaim and a national bestseller, An Untamed State heralded Roxane Gay as a prodigious, arresting talent and one of the preeminent writers working today. 

By all appearances, Mireille Duval Jameson is living the perfect life: she’s the daughter of one of Haiti’s richest sons and has an adoring husband and a precocious infant son. The fairytale ends when Mireille is kidnapped in broad daylight by a gang of heavily armed men in front of her father’s Port-au-Prince estate. Held for ransom, Mireille must endure the torments of a man who calls himself the Commander and who resents everything she represents. 

A powerful, unflinching story of wealth in the face of crushing poverty and the lawless anger that corrupt governments produce, Roxane Gay’s brilliant debut is the tale of one strong-willed woman, and redemption found in the most unexpected of places.

FROM THE WINNER OF THE NIGERIA PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

It is Baby’s birthday again, but Grace has not seen her first born in twenty-six years. Now a wife, mother to twin daughters and the owner of a successful medical clinic, Grace has carefully constructed a new life. Now, the secret she’s kept for decades is about to resurface—and it could destroy everything.

Grace was only fifteen when she got pregnant and, under pressure from her parents, gave Baby away. Unable to forgive their decision, she cut them off completely. When Grace’s estranged mother walks back into her life unannounced, the fragile existence she spent years building begins to unravel. And with it, the wall Grace has built against a question she must never ask: the question of what truly happened to Baby.

A tightly wound story of family, bitter secrets, and sweeter forgiving, Grace is a novel for all mothers and daughters, a must-read for fans of Bernardine Evaristo and Tayari P. Jones.