more than slavery and ghetto lit.
Explore a powerful collection of books beyond slavery and ghetto lit, uncovering untold stories, resilience, and diverse narratives in African American literature.
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ID: 0312288980
(Type: books)
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White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The blockbuster debut novel from "a preternaturally gifted" writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Time—set against London's racial and cultural tapestry, reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. “[White Teeth] is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones, and textures…with a raucous energy and confidence.” —The New York Times Book Review
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The Colossus of New York
by Colson Whitehead
In a dazzlingly original work of nonfiction, the two time Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys recreates the exuberance, the chaos, the promise, and the heartbreak of New York. Here is a literary love song that will entrance anyone who has lived in—or spent time—in the greatest of American cities. A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city’s inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories. Colson Whitehead conveys with almost uncanny immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of newcomers who dream of making it their home; of those who have conquered its challenges; and of those who struggle against its cruelties. Whitehead’s style is as multilayered and multifarious as New York itself: Switching from third person, to first person, to second person, he weaves individual voices into a jazzy musical composition that perfectly reflects the way we experience the city. There is a funny, knowing riff on what it feels like to arrive in New York for the first time; a lyrical meditation on how the city is transformed by an unexpected rain shower; and a wry look at the ferocious battle that is commuting. The plaintive notes of the lonely and dispossessed resound in one passage, while another captures those magical moments when the city seems to be talking directly to you, inviting you to become one with its rhythms. The Colossus of New York is a remarkable portrait of life in the big city. Ambitious in scope, gemlike in its details, it is at once an unparalleled tribute to New York and the ideal introduction to one of the most exciting writers working today. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!
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ID: 0940242753
(Type: books)
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The Color of Water
by James McBride
'James McBride evokes his childhood trek across the great racial divide with the kind of power and grace that touches and uplifts all our hearts.' - Bebe Moore Campbell 'A triumph...The two stories, son's and mother's, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note at a time of racial polarization.' - The New York Times Book Review
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ID: 1400076218
(Type: books)
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ID: 0385471440
(Type: books)
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No Disrespect
by Sister Souljah
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author, rapper, and activist—Sister Souljah uses her passionate voice to deliver what is at once a fiercely candid autobiography and a survival manual for any Black woman determined to keep her heart open and her integrity intact in modern America. Each chapter of No Disrespect is devoted to someone who made a difference in Sister Souljah’s life—from the mother who raised her to the men who educated (and mis-educated) her about love—and each bares a controversial truth about the Black condition in America: the disintegration of families; the unremitting combat between the sexes; and the thousand and one ways in which racism continues to circumscribe how Black people see themselves and treat one another. The result is an outspoken and often courageous rejoinder to the pieties of race, class, and gender by a writer who is at once wise, bawdy, brutally funny, and as sensitive a lightning rod in a thunderstorm.
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Dhalgren
by Samuel R. Delany
In one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel "to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s" (Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of Fortress of Solitude). Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there.... The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young man—poet, lover, and adventurer—known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.
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ID: 1565841069
(Type: books)
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Gigantic
by Marc Nesbitt
An extraordinary collection of dynamic stories by an exciting new voice in American fiction, Gigantic features ten powerful stories of emotional stagnation and personal transformation, passion and violence, race and community, that are viscerally immediate in their impact and otherworldly in their scope. In "What Good Is You Anyway?" a struggling mattress salesman witnesses a horrific car accident at his bus stop and embarks on a wild journey that will lead him to put his life in order, beginning with his troubled relationship with his disabled alcoholic father. In "Quality Fuel for Electric Living," a sanitation worker, recovering from a romantic breakup and a painful hangover, suddenly faces a life-threatening situation while collecting an unusual deer carcass. In "Thursday the Sixteenth," a club manager dating the ex-girlfriend of a reggae singer unwittingly becomes entangled in a chain of events that ends in a violent confrontation. At turns comic and heartbreaking, and at all times rich with language and meanings that operate simultaneously on a variety of levels, the stories of Gigantic mark the arrival of an exciting voice in American fiction. "Impressive ... Ten lean and energetic stories ... Grimly funny, bleakly fatalistic, and emotionally true all at once." -- Chris Lehman, The Washington Post "Beautiful ... Nesbitt is smart, dark, and funny, like a young Elmore Leonard with a drinking problem." -- Sam Sifton, The New York Times Book Review "Nesbitt takes risks. ... with imagery, details of his characters' dead-end lives and even with structure.... Wonderful ... A talent to watch." -- David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle "Nesbitt sets out to blow his readers away with his debut collection.... He succeeds.... Funny, tense and horrifying." -- Carole Goldberg, The Hartford Courant
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ID: 1573223786
(Type: books)
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Tumbling
by Diane Mckinney-whetstone
A beautiful and uplifting debut from one of the,most exciting voices in new black fiction.,.
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Devil in a Blue Dress
by Walter Mosley
Devil in a Blue Dress, a defining novel in Walter Mosley’s bestselling Easy Rawlins mystery series, was adapted into a TriStar Pictures film starring Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins and Don Cheadle as Mouse. Set in the late 1940s, in the African-American community of Watts, Los Angeles, Devil in a Blue Dress follows Easy Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Monet, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.
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ID: 0684843269
(Type: books)
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ID: 0345407954
(Type: books)
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A Lesson Before Dying
by Ernest J. Gaines
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a Black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. "An instant classic." —Chicago Tribune A “majestic, moving novel...an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives" (Chicago Tribune), from the critically acclaimed author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. "A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer." —Boston Globe "Enormously moving.... Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes." —Los Angeles Times “A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living.” —San Francisco Chronicle
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A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
"Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of Black people's lives been seen on the stage," observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959. This edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry's landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff. Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of Black America—and changed American theater forever. The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," which warns that a dream deferred might "dry up/like a raisin in the sun." "The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun," said The New York Times. "It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic."
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Native Son
by Richard Wright
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
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ID: 0130846961
(Type: books)
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ID: 0394423232
(Type: books)
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Fledgling
by Octavia E. Butler
A young girl suffering from amnesia wakes up to find that she's actually a middle-aged vampire.
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ID: B000C4T07I
(Type: books)
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ID: 0071418628
(Type: books)