|
Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.
|
|
|
The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros
Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous–it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become.
|
|
|
Push
by Sapphire
A courageous and determined young teacher opens up a new world of hope and redemption for sixteen-year-old Precious Jones, an abused young African-American girl living in Harlem, who was raped and left pregnant by her father.
|
|
|
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
|
|
|
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
|
|
|
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
An African-American man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.
|
|
|
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao : Library Edition
by Junot Diaz
Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the fukú–the ancient curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love.
|
|
|
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son, in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.
|
|
|
Pedagogy of the oppressed
by Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire's methodology has helped to empower countless people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm.
|
|
|
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X with Alex Haley
Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America.
|
|
|
Loverboys
by Ana Castillo
A new collection of stories by the award-winning author of So Far from God explores the experience of love in all its diverse modes, from rapturous beginnings to bittersweet ends, in "La Miss Rose," "Vatolandia," and the title tale. Tour.
|
|
|
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic.
|
|
|
The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
The unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world's most gifted and imaginative storytellers. The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family.
|
|
|
Native Son
by Richard Wright
Native Son tells the story of a 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.
|
|
|
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
The unlikely alliance between Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway, and the aging Nakata, a man who has never recovered from a wartime affliction, brings dramatic changes to both characters as they embark on a surreal odyssey through a strange, sometimes violent, sometimes fantastical world.
|
|
|
Buck : a Memoir
by Molefi K. Asante
An account of the author's youth in Zimbabwe and in violent Philadelphia street gangs explores how his life was shaped by his father's absence, his brother's imprisonment, and his mother's and sister's struggles with mental illness.
|
|
|
Soul On Ice
by Eldridge Cleaver
The now-classic memoir that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the civil rights movement and the black experience.
|
|
|
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love—in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as "magical realism."
|
|
|
Always Running : La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.
by Luis J. Rodriguez
Always Running is the searing true story of one man’s life in a Chicano gang—and his heroic struggle to free himself from its grip. At times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-earned lesson for the next generation.
|
|
|
Manchild in the Promised Land
by Claude Brown
This 1965 classic traces the author's experiences as a first-generation African American raised in the Northern ghettos of Harlem in the mid-20th century, an upbringing marked by violence, drugs and devastating urban disadvantages.
|
|
|
Bless Me, Ultima
by Rudolfo A Anaya
Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will probe the family ties that bind and rend him, and he will discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past-a mythic legacy as palpable as the Catholicism of Latin America. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world...and will nurture the birth of his soul.
|
|
|
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
The lives of two sisters--Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a southern woman married to a man she hates--are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.
|
|
|
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
|
|
|
Black Boy : (American Hunger)
by Richard Wright
The author relates his life as an African American growing up in the South during the Jim Crow years.
|
|
|
Like Water for Chocolate
by Laura Esquivel
The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup.
|
|
|
Kaffir Boy : the true story of a Black youth's coming of age in Apartheid South Africa
by Mark Mathabane
When first published 20 years ago, Kaffir Boy changed the way the West understood South Africa. As powerful today as when it was first written, Mathabane's remarkable story of life under apartheid is told with brutal honesty and gives the reader a rare glimpse, behind the protests and boycotts, of the daily fear and hunger which was so devastating to the soul.
|
|
|
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez
Uprooted from their family home in the Dominican Republic, the four Garcia sisters - Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia - arrive in New York City in 1960 to find a life far different from the genteel existence of maids, manicures, and extended family they left behind. What they have lost - and what they find - is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories that make up this exquisite novel.
|
|
|