Here are examples of some of the books available in our collection. Please continue your search in the online catalog. To learn more about searching the catalog, watch this video.
Jump up and Say!: a collection of Black storytelling by
"Jump Up and Say! features more than seventy stories about the wide range of the Black experience, including traditional tales from Africa and the West Indies. Collected here are family stories and moral fables, ghost stories and tales rich in humor, as well as raps and rhymes, memoirs and songs, and stories and poems about freedom, protest, and change. In this collection, voices spanning centuries, continents, and cultures blend to celebrate the African-American storytelling tradition."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation by
Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation is a groundbreaking scholarly study of one of America_s most important and most controversial writers. Wheatley (1753-1784) was the first African American to publish a book on any subject in the new country, and America_s second woman to do so. There is probably no other American writer who has produced such critical controversy as Phillis Wheatley. In this new volume, John C. Shields-one of the foremost scholars of Wheatley- demonstrates that much of the negative response to her writings has been based on false assumptions and myths about her and her work. Much of this criticism began more than a century ago and has been passed on without dissent by generations of readers. Here, Shields sets a course for Wheatley scholars that will redefine the direction of future writing about her. Shields begins this volume with an incisive analysis of more than two hundred years of complicated and often misinformed scholarship and commentary about Wheatley. In following chapters, he explores Wheatley_s background and the cultural context in which she wrote. Shields provides new and subtle readings for a great many of her poems. He shows that Wheatley_s writing was deeply imbedded in several literary traditions, demonstrating that her work is the result of an African inheritance, a complex relationship with a Congregationalist religious heritage, and an intense involvement with classical literature. Read closely, Wheatley's works show she deserves credit for creating a liberationist aesthetic-the full implications of which are still to be worked out. This important new study is certain to become the standard in the field. Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation is essential for all students and scholars of American literature, African American literature, women_s literature, and multicultural literature. John C. Shields is the editor of The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley and the author of The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self, which won a Choice Outstanding Academic Book award and an honorable mention in the Harry Levin Prize competition, sponsored by the American Comparative Literature Association. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Center for Classicism in American Culture at Illinois State University.
The Scary Mason-Dixon Line by 
Short Fiction by Black Women, 1900-1920 by
The forty-six short stories collected in this volume were originally published in The Colored American Magazine or The Crisis between 1900 and 1920. The Introduction to the collection, written by Elizabeth Ammons, explores the role played by the major black magazines of that period and demonstrates how these two magazines provided the largest secular outlets for short fiction by black women at the turn of the century.
Ten Seconds by
The narrator, a Black oil refinery worker in Louisiana, looks back on his life and the people and events that have shaped it.
Three Classic African-American Novels by
William Wells Brown, Frances E.W. Harper, and Charles W. Chesnutt, three black writers who bore witness to the experience of their people under slavery, create a portrait of black life in the 19th century in these three novels.
Writing the Future of Black America: literature of the hip-hop generation by
This book presents an insightful exploration into the works of African American writers born in the 1960s and 1970s. ""Writing the Future of Black America"" explores the work of eight representative African American writers of the hip-hop generation to assess their common themes and offer insights into contemporary race relations in America as expressed and challenged in their works. In this groundbreaking study, Daniel Grassian takes as his subjects a group of impressive novelists, essayists, poets, and playwrights - Paul Beatty, Trey Ellis, Terrence Hayes, Allison Joseph, Jake Lamar, Suzan-Lori Parks, Danzy Senna, and Colson Whitehead - to chart the depths of their literary work against that of their predecessors in the civil rights generation and their predominantly white contemporaries of Generation X. Characterized by the pursuit of empowerment through hybridity, social criticism, and personal expression, hip-hop has become the music and culture of choice for a sizable portion of America, regardless of race or socioeconomic standing. Meanwhile the writers of this generation have received little serious critical attention, aside from singular book reviews and occasional essays. Grassian fills in a gap in the discourse with his thorough analysis of the works crafted by these distinguished hip-hop writers, and he makes a case for the validity and value of studying their sophisticated engagements with race in contemporary America. Selected because their work addresses a broad range of African American life, these writers fathom such topics as what it means to be African American or multiethnic in an increasingly global society, what role art and literature play in affecting their communities, and what positive and negative authority has been assigned to popular culture (and hip-hop culture specifically) in modern African American life.
Writing the Harlem Renaissance by
The contributors in this study examine the historical Harlem community during its renaissance period as well as its present-day community. A cursory investigation of the existent that focus on the Harlem community during its renaissance of the early twentieth century reveals that the compilations are primarily ones that present the subjects' life stories through the lens of praise songs. This book, however, presents the Harlem community through a lens that reveals more grounded and researched analyses that bring the influences and contributions of the Harlem Renaissance to a level of relevance in the twenty-first century from one or more critical vantage points. This study aims to move beyond the more obvious and foregrounded artistic contributions towards analyses of the Harlem Renaissance alongside analyses of a twenty-first century Harlem community and its present day contributions.
The Bluest Eye by
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME * From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner--a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace. In Morrison's acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove--an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. Here, Morrison's writing is "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry" (The New York Times).
Jazz by
From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author. "As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem's jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear." --Glamour In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This novel "transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious" (People). "The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to Black women." --The New York Times Book Review
Song of Solomon by
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.
Sula by
From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal--or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
What Moves at the Margin: selected nonfiction by
What Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrison's writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture. The first section of the book, ""Family and History,"" includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, ""Writers and Writing,"" offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, ""Politics and Society,"" includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture. Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers. Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University and is the author of Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and other novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.
The Color Purple by
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that tells the story of two sisters through their correspondence. With a new Preface by the author.
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: new poems by
"Though we have encountered our share of grief and troubles on this earth, we can still hold the line of beauty, form, and beat. No small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one." -- from the preface I was born to grow, alongside my garden of plants, poems like this one So writes Alice Walker in this new book of poems, poems composed over the course of one year in response to joy and sorrow both personal and global: the death of loved ones, war, the deliciousness of love, environmental devastation, the sorrow of rejection, greed, poverty, and the sweetness of home. The poems embrace our connections while celebrating the joy of individuality, the power we each share to express our truest, deepest selves. Beloved for her ability to speak her own truth in ways that speak for and about countless others, she demonstrates that we are stronger than our circumstances. As she confronts personal and collective challenges, her words dance, sing, and heal.
Meridian by
From Alice Walker, author of the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winner The Color Purple, comes Meridian, "a classic novel of both feminism and the Civil Rights movement" (Ms.). Meridian Hill is a young woman at an Atlanta college attempting to find her place in the 1960s revolution for racial and social equality. She discovers the limits beyond which she will not go for the cause, but despite her decision not to follow the path of some of her peers, she makes significant sacrifices in order to further her beliefs. Working in a campaign to register African American voters, Meridian cares broadly and deeply for the people she visits, and, while her coworkers quit and move to comfortable homes, she continues to work in the deep South despite a paralyzing illness. Meridian's nonviolent methods, though seemingly less radical than the methods of others, prove to be an effective means of furthering her beliefs. "A glowing affirmation of the possibility...of love and forgiveness--between men and women, black and white."--Baltimore Sun
Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart by
The Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar now gives us a beautiful new novel that is at once a deeply moving personal story and a powerful spiritual journey. In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Alice Walker has created a work that ranks among her ?nest achievements: the story of a woman's spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with love. Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love. Told with the accessible style and deep feeling that are its author's hallmarks, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is Alice Walker's most surprising achievement.
Once: poems by
This first volume of poetry established Walker as a poet of unusual sensitivity and power. All of the poems in this collection were written either in East Africa, where Walker spent the summer of 1965, or during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College. "Brief slashing poems-young and in the sun" (Muriel Rukeyser).
The Temple of My Familiar by
A combination of black history and contemporary social conditions is the mix in this novel for mature readers that contains scenes of sexual abuse.
The Third Life of Grange Copeland by
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Color Purple: a "moving, tender" novel of a Deep South tenant farmer's quest for a new life (Publishers Weekly). Grange Copeland, a deeply conflicted and struggling tenant farmer in the Deep South of the 1930s, leaves his family and everything he's ever known to find happiness and respect in the cold cities of the North. This misadventure, his "second life," proves a dismal failure that sends him back where he came from to confront his now grown-up son's disastrous relationships with his own family, including Grange's granddaughter, Ruth Copeland, a child that Grange grows to love. Love becomes the substance of his third and final life. He spends it in devotion to Ruth, teaching and protecting her--though the cost of doing so is almost more than he can bear. From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, this is an "honest sensitive tale . . . leavened by those moments of humor and warmth that have enabled men and women to endure so much tragedy" (Chicago Daily News).
The Book of Rhythms by
Rhythm is something we share in common, you and I, with all the plants and animals and people in the world, and with the stars and moon and sun, and all the whole vast wonderful universe beyond this wonderful earth which is our home." In this beautifully designed book, Langston Hughes shares an appreciation of the rhythms of life--from visual patterns that catch the eye to rhythms in nature like the beating of a human heart, the pulse of the ocean, and the turning of the planets. With the keen eye of an artist and the perception of a poet, Hughes finds the seeds of rhythm in the slow flowing of the Mississippi River, the even slap-slap-slap of a jump rope, the swoop of a swing, and the steadiness of Grandma's rocking. He relishes the rhythms of nature in the opening of a many petaled rose or the intricacy of a snowflake. He calls up images and offers examples even the youngest reader will understand--clapping the rhythm of a favorite song, scrutinizing the lines and wrinkles of our hands, even examining the dining room chairs for "charming and graceful rhythms." Originally published in 1954, this new edition offers original illustrations, an introduction by musician Wynton Marsalis, and an afterword by Hughes scholar Robert G. O'Meally. Read it aloud to the youngest children as they become aware of the diversity of the world. Older children will delight in the varied and offbeat exercises and examples, and all ages will be touched by Hughes's zest for rhythm and for life itself.
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems by
"HOLD FAST TO DREAMS / For if dreams die / Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly." The Dream Keeper, the great African-American writer Langston Hughes's only collection of poems for children, includes some of his best loved works. It is being reissued in a handsome hardcover edition in celebration of its 75th anniversary. Filled with elegant scratchboard illustrations by Caldecott Honor winner Brian Pinkey, and featuring an introduction by noted children's poet Lee Bennett Hopkins, this gift edition is sure to be cherished by young readers and longtime poetry lovers alike.
Remember Me to Harlem: the letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964 by
These engaging and wonderfully alive letters paint an intimate portrait of two of the most important and influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Carl Van Vechten--older, established, and white--was at first a mentor to the younger, gifted, and black Langston Hughes. But the relationship quickly grew into a great friendship--and for nearly four decades the two men wrote to each other expressively and constantly. They discussed literature and publishing. They exchanged favorite blues lyrics ("So now I know what Bessie Smith really meant by 'Thirty days in jail / With ma back turned to de wall,'" Hughes wrote Van Vechten after a stay in a Cleveland jail on trumped-up charges). They traded stories about the hottest parties and the wildest speakeasies. They argued politics. They gossiped about the people they knew in common--James Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, H. L. Mencken. They wrote from near (of racism in Scottsboro) and far (of dancing in Cuba and trekking across the Soviet Union), and always with playfulness and mutual affection. Today Van Vechten is a controversial figure; some consider him exploitative, at best peripheral to the Harlem Renaissance--or, indeed, as the author of the novel Nigger Heaven, a blemish upon it, and upon Hughes by association. The letters tell a different, more subtle and complex story: Van Vechten did, in fact, help Hughes (and many other young black writers) to get published; Hughes in turn appreciated what Van Vechten was trying to do in Nigger Heaven and defended him, fiercely. For all their differences, Hughes and Van Vechten remained staunchly loyal to each other throughout their lives. A correspondence of great cultural significance, judiciously gathered together here for the first time and annotated by the insightful young scholar Emily Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem shows us an unlikely friendship, one that is essential to our understanding of literature and race relations in twentieth-century America.
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes by
With the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues. in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "brushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror...and the marrow of the bone of life." Book jacket.
Short Stories of Langston Hughes by
"Langston Hughes was a master of many literary forms - poetry, plays, essays, novels, and memoirs. But it is as a short-story writer that his talents combined in an especially vibrant way: his gift for humor and irony, his love of the vernacular, his brilliance in depicting character, and his profound perceptions about American life. This new collection of forty-seven stories written between 1919 and 1963 - the most comprehensive available - showcases Hughes's literary blossoming and the development of his personal and political concerns. Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and many have never before been collected. Included are Hughes's first stories, "Those Who Have No Turkey" and "Seventy-five Dollars," written for his high-school newspaper; his early work published in the groundbreaking African-American journals. The Crisis and The Messenger; and his later, masterful stories from Laughing to Keep from Crying, Something in Common, and The Ways of White Folks. These stories demonstrate Hughes's uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general. They are at once poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Vintage Hughes by
The perfect introduction to one of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s, featuring a career-spanning collection of poems and three of his most powerful stories. "Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature ... a powerful interpreter of the American experience." The Philadelphia Inquirer Hughes's work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom. Vintage Hughes includes the famed poems "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too," "The Weary Blues," "America," "Let America Be America Again," "Dream Variations," "Young Sailor," "Afro-American Fragment," "Scottsboro," "The Negro Mother," "Good Morning Revolution," "I Dream a World," "The Heart of Harlem," "Freedom Train," "Song for Billie Holliday," "Nightmare Boogie," "Africa," "Black Panther," "Birmingham Sunday," and "UnAmerican Investigators"; and three stories from the collection The Ways of White Folks: "Cora Unashamed," "Home," and "The Blues I'm Playing."
The Ways of White Folks by
Perhaps more than any other writer, Langston Hughes made the white America of the 1920s and '30s aware of the black culture thriving in its midst. Like his most famous poems, Hughes's stories are messages from that other America, sharply etched vignettes of its daily life, cruelly accurate portrayals of black people colliding -- sometimes humorously, more often tragically -- with whites. Here is the ailing black musician who comes home from Europe to die in his small town -- only to die more quickly and brutally than he had imagined. Here are the wealthy bohemians who collect Negroes like so many objets d'art ... the moonlighting student who becomes the reluctant confidante of a boozy white Don Juan ... the elegant charlatan who peddles "real, primitive jazz out of Africa" as a nostrum to the spiritually starved elite. Filled with mordant wit and human detail, The Ways of White Folks is unmistakably the work of a great poet who was also a shrewd and compelling storyteller. Book jacket.
Giovanni's Room by
Set in the contemporary Paris of American expatraites, liasons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. James Baldwin's brilliant narrative delves into the mystery of loving with a sharp, probing imagination, and he creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the heart.
Go Tell It on the Mountain by
Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression.
If Beale Street Could Talk by
Like the blues -- sweet, sad and full of truth -- this masterly work of fiction rocks us with powerful emotions. In it are anger and pain, but above all, love -- affirmative love of a woman for her man, the sustaining love of a black family. Fonny, a talented young artist, finds himself unjustly arrested and locked in New York's infamous tombs. But his girlfriend, Tish, is determined to free him, and to have his baby, in this starkly realisitic tale... a powerful endictment of American concepts of justice and punishment in our time.
Jimmy's Blues: selected poems by
This is the first collection of poetry by the black writer known chiefly for his novels.
Just above My Head by
The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to a church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It On The Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land. "A work of passion... Glimpses of family life in Harlem, rapturous music-making in the churches, movements of uneasiness in even the most casual meetings between whites and blacks--scenes that Baldwin seems preternaturally gifted in understanding."--The New York Times Book Review.
Mules and Men by
Zora Neale Hurston brings us Black America's folklore as only she can, putting the oral history on the written page with grace and understanding. This new edition of Mules and Men features a new cover and a P.S. section which includes insights, interviews, and more. For the student of cultural history, Mules and Men is a treasury of Black America's folklore as collected by Zora Neale Hurston, the storyteller and anthropologist who grew up hearing the songs and sermons, sayings and tall tales that have formed and oral history of the South since the time of slavery. Set intimately within the social context of Black life, the stories, "big old lies," songs, voodoo customs, and superstitions recorded in these pages capture the imagination and bring back to life the humor and wisdom that is the unique heritage of Black Americans.
The Complete Stories by
This collection of Zora Neale Hurston's complete stories provides a window into the evolution of one of the most important African American writers. This edition has been repackaged as a modern classic with a new cover and a P.S. section which includes insights, interviews, and more. This landmark gathering of Zora Neale Hurston's short fiction--most of which appeared only in literary magazines during her lifetime and some of which has never before been published--reveals the evolution of one of the most important African-American writers. Spanning her career from 1921 to 1955, these stories attest to Hurston's tremendous range and establish themes that recur in her longer fiction. The stories in this collection map, in rich language and imagery, Hurston's development and concerns as a writer and provide an invaluable reflection of the mind and imagination of the author of the acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Zora Neale Hurston: a life in letters by
A landmark collection of more than five hundred letters written by a woman at the heart of the Harlem Renaissanc--an author who remains one of the most intriguing people in American cultural history. Alice Walker’s 1975Ms.magazine article "Looking for Zora" reintroduced Zora Neale Hurston to the American literary landscape, and ushered in a virtual renaissance for a writer who was a bestselling author at her peak in the 1930s, but died penniless and in obscurity some three decades later. Since that rediscovery of novelist, anthropologist, playwright, folklorist, essayist, and poet Zora Neale Hurston, her books--from the classic love storyTheir Eyes Were Watching Godto her controversial autobiography,Dust Tracks on the Road--have sold millions of copies. Hurston is now taught in American, African American, and women's studies courses in high schools and universities from coast to coast. Now, inZora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, the fascinating life of one of the most enigmatic literary figures of the twentieth century comes alive. Through letters to Harlem Renaissance friends Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Dorothy West, and Carl Van Vechten, and to bestselling author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Fannie Hurst, among others, readers experience the exuberance and trials of Hurston’s life. Her letters to her patron, Mrs. Charlotte "Godmother" Osgood Mason, are laced with equal amounts of cynicism and reverence, and offer a fascinating glimpse of the perilously thin line Hurston tread to maintain vital monetary support as she pursued her art and avant-garde lifestyle (which included crossing the country collecting folklore, and a job as story editor at Paramount Pictures in the 1940s). Meticulously edited and annotated, this landmark collection of letters will provide her fans, as well as those discovering Hurston for the first time, with a penetrating and profound portrait into the life, writings (four novels, a play, an autobiography, and countless essays), and impressive imagination of one of the most amazing characters to grace American letters.
Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro folk-tales from the Gulf states by
A recently discovered collection of folktales celebrating African American oral tradition, community, and faith..."splendidly vivid and true."--New York Times Every Tongue Got to Confess is an extensive volume of African American folklore that Zora Neale Hurston collected on her travels through the Gulf States in the late 1920s. The bittersweet and often hilarious taleswhich range from longer narratives about God, the Devil, White Folk, and Mistaken Identity to witty one-linersreveal attitudes about faith, love, family, slavery, race, and community. Together, this collection of nearly 500 folktales weaves a vibrant tapestry that celebrates the African American life in the rural South and represent a major part of Zora Neale Hurstons literary legacy.
Sweat by
Now frequently anthologized, Zora Neale Hurston's short story "Sweat" was first published in Firell, a legendary literary magazine of the Harlem Renaissance, whose sole issue appeared in November 1926. Among contributions by Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, "Sweat" stood out both for its artistic accomplishment and its exploration of rural Southern black life. In "Sweat" Hurston claimed the voice that animates her mature fiction, notably the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; the themes of marital conflict and the development of spiritual consciousness were introduced as well. "Sweat" exemplifies Hurston's lifelong concern with women's relation to language and the literary possibilities of black vernacular. This casebook for the story includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of the author's life, the authoritative text of "Sweat," and a second story, "The Gilded Six-Bits." Published in 1932, this second story was written after Hurston had spent years conducting fieldwork in the Southern United States. The volume also includes Hurston's groundbreaking 1934 essay, "Characteristics of Negro Expression," and excerpts from her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. An article by folklorist Roger Abrahams provides additional cultural contexts for the story, as do selected blues and spirituals. Critical commentary comes from Alice Walker, who led the recovery of Hurston's work in the 1970s, Robert Hemenway, Henry Louis Gates, Gayl Jones, John Lowe, Kathryn Seidel, and Mary Helen Washington.
Kindred by
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur "Genius" Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. "I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm." Dana's torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner's plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction's oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. "Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise" (New York Times). "Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it's absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream." --N. K. Jemisin Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin.
Parable of the Sower by
Forced to flee an America where anarchy and violence have completely taken over, empath Lauren Olamina--who can feel the pain of others and is crippled by it--becomes a prophet carrying the hope of a new world and a new faith christened "Earthseed". A stirring portrait of 21st-century America by the author of "Wild Seed". Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Parable of the Talents by
Lauren Olamina's daughter, Larkin, describes the broken and alienated world of 2032, as war racks the North American continent and an ultra-conservative religious crusader becomes president.
Xenogenesis by
Doro is an entity who changes bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex--or design. He fears no one--until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu has also died many times. She can absorb bullets and make medicine with a kiss, give birth to tribes, nurture and heal, and savage anyone who threatens those she loves. She fears no one--until she meets Doro. From African jungles to the colonies of America, Doro and Anyanwu weave together a pattern of destiny that not even immortals can imagine.Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
