Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Award and recognized as the best book of fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times, Edward P. Jones's The Known World is a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power and continues to show its importance to the American literary canon.

Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love under the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave “speculators” sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

An ambitious, courageous, luminously written masterwork, The Known World seamlessly weaves the lives of the freed and the enslaved—and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. The Known World not only marks the return of an extraordinarily gifted writer, it heralds the publication of a remarkable contribution to the canon of American classic literature.

Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Award and recognized as the best book of fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times, Edward P. Jones's The Known World is a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power and continues to show its importance to the American literary canon.

Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation―as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love under the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave “speculators” sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

An ambitious, courageous, luminously written masterwork, The Known World seamlessly weaves the lives of the freed and the enslaved―and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. The Known World not only marks the return of an extraordinarily gifted writer, it heralds the publication of a remarkable contribution to the canon of American classic literature.

Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Award and recognized as the best book of fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times, Edward P. Jones's The Known World is a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power and continues to show its importance to the American literary canon.

Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love under the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave “speculators” sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

An ambitious, courageous, luminously written masterwork, The Known World seamlessly weaves the lives of the freed and the enslaved—and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. The Known World not only marks the return of an extraordinarily gifted writer, it heralds the publication of a remarkable contribution to the canon of American classic literature.

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"The Best American Novelist Whose Name You May Not Know"—Calvin Baker, The Atlantic

"A literary giant, and one of my absolute favourite writers" -TAYARI JONES, author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE

"An American writer with a powerful sense of vital inheritance, of history in
the blood." -John Updike, The New Yorker

Eva's Man is a gripping psychological portrait of a woman unable to love for fear of pain. Imprisoned for the bizarre murder of her lover, Eva Median Canada weaves together memory and fantasy to reveal a life tormented by the brutality of sexual abuse and emotional silence. Brilliantly experimenting with language, Jones infuses her graphic and powerful narrative of the triple yoke of race, class, and gender with a rich musical and oral idiom.

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).

Claudia Jones stood at many crossroads. Her world was one of heated battles for Black liberation, of anti-fascism in the build-up to World War II, of national liberation struggles across the Global South, of the US government persecuting her and her comrades for their activism and membership in the Communist Party. And as a Black woman, she was also determined to bring to light how race and gender are embedded in and essential to the struggles of the working class.

At a time when the hegemony of imperialism and capitalism remain strong while new contradictions and signs of struggle arise, Jones' political writings are a lesson in identifying the most urgent tasks for moving socialism, the political project of the working class, forward. From her poetry, to newspaper articles, to pamphlets, to speeches, A Fighting Dream: The Political Writings of Claudia Jones brings her to us as she was: unrelenting, fearless, and a Communist.

Claudia Jones challenges us all to stand with our principles, to build organization, and to clearly see how understanding the intersectional aspects of our struggle is crucial for the liberation of humanity and the planet.

From Ibi Zoboi, bestselling, award-winning author of American Street and co-author of Punching the Air, comes a bold new YA coming-of-age story, which explores race, feminism, and complicated family dynamics. The ideal next read for fans of Roxane Gay, Jacqueline Woodson, and Elizabeth Acevedo.

Warrior Princess. That’s what Nigeria Jones’s father calls her. He has raised her as part of the Movement, a Black separatist group based in Philadelphia. Nigeria is homeschooled and vegan and participates in traditional rituals to connect her and other kids from the group to their ancestors. But when her mother—the perfect matriarch of their Movement—disappears, Nigeria’s world is upended. She finds herself taking care of her baby brother and stepping into a role she doesn’t want.

Nigeria’s mother had secrets. She wished for a different life for her children, which includes sending her daughter to a private Quaker school outside of their strict group. Despite her father’s disapproval, Nigeria attends the school with her cousin, Kamau, and Sage, who used to be a friend. ­There, she begins to flourish and expand her universe.

As Nigeria searches for her mother, she starts to uncover a shocking truth. One that will lead her to question everything she thought she knew about her life and her family.

From award-winning author Ibi Zoboi comes a powerful story about discovering who you are in the world—and fighting for that person—by having the courage to be your own revolution.

With previous work hailed by the New York Times as “unflinching” and “piercing”, Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving is her most personal collection to date.

In her fourth poetry collection, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness have to be suppressed to make way for "progress"?

Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father’s garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama’s first Black and youngest Poet Laureate, Lullaby for the Grieving finds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing.

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“People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’”

Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves.

A prize-winning sociologist’s radical vision of the social power of erotic life. 

“Fearless, candid, and bold, Sex in Public is necessary reading for anyone interested in imagining a different kind of world, one that approaches eroticism and freedom as fundamentally linked.” —Jennifer C. Nash, author of Black Feminism Reimagined

Whether we are contending with shame, healing from trauma, or experimenting in the bedroom, there is a common tendency to cast anything sexual as a problem best solved in private. Fears of judgment fuel an air of oppression around something that should be liberating. According to feminist sociologist Angela Jones, we must reject this solitary vision of desire to claim the pleasure fundamental to our freedom.

Sex in Public offers a revolutionary new paradigm for understanding sexuality. Sex is never strictly personal, but relentlessly social, shaped by power relations, and possessing outsized power of its own. To make this case, Jones charts the inner and interrelated workings of our desires, behaviors, identities, relationships, and communities. 

Guiding readers through field-leading sociology, sexual science, and the voices of sexual rule-breakers worldwide, Jones pinpoints the repressive forces that distort eroticism’s power, but also reveals our means of breaking free. Championing a rebellious spirit that uplifts bodily autonomy, justice, and care, Sex in Public makes a tantalizing promise: better sex lives and empowerment await, if only we dare to know our sexualities fully, reimagining society as we do.

In this powerful debut reminiscent of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, two men in Atlanta reconcile their human dignity against the price of their professional ambitions working for a real estate development company displacing Black residents in preparation for the 1996 Olympics.

Daily interactions between Jacob and Daniel are a powder keg of sexual tension and uncertainty. A recent Morehouse graduate and Brooklyn transplant, Jacob fears that accepting the truth of his sexuality will disappoint the hopes his parents have for him to lead a respectable life. Grieving the death of his mother while searching for answers about a father he has never known, Daniel, an Atlanta native, has resigned himself to the reality that men who love men don’t have happy endings.

When Jacob meets Sherman, a social worker fighting for one of the families being displaced by the project, he must decide if rejecting security is worth the risk of embracing the unknown. In the midst of navigating his grief, and volatile relationship with Jacob, Daniel learns of his father’s identity. Though meeting his father could provide Daniel with the closure he has always sought, the distance between what Daniel wants and what he’s willing to do for it remains a question only he can answer.