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African Americans in Literature
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Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Separated by respective ambitions after falling in love in occupied Nigeria, beautiful Ifemelu experiences triumph and defeat in America while exploring new concepts of race, while Obinze endures an undocumented status in London until the pair is reunited in their homeland 15 years later, where they face the toughest decisions of their lives. By the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun.
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The Light of the World: A Memoir
by Elizabeth Alexander
A Pulitzer Prize-finalist poet reflects with gratitude on her life after the sudden death of her husband. Elizabeth Alexander finds herself at an existential crossroads after the sudden death of her husband. Channeling her poetic sensibilities, Alexander tells a love story that is, itself, a story of loss. As she reflects on the beauty of her married life, the trauma resulting from her husband's death, and the solace found in caring for her two teenage sons, Alexander universalizes a very personal quest for meaning and acceptance in the wake of loss.
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The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou
by Maya Angelou
Presents a definitive collection of poetry from Angelou's previous anthologies--Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water, Oh Pray my Wings Gonna Fit Me Well, And Still I Rise, I Shall Not Be Moved, On the Pulse of Morning, and Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?
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Collected Essays
by James Baldwin
A comprehensive compilation of Baldwin's previously published, nonfiction writings encompasses essays on America's racial divide, the social and political turbulence of his time, and his insights into the poetry of Langston Hughes and the music of Earl Hines.
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
First published in 1953, this is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. 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 storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
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The Sellout: A Novel
by Paul Beatty
Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens, smack in the middle of downtown L.A., the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in psychological studies, classic experiments revised to include a racially-charged twist. He also grew up believing this pioneering work might result in a memoir that would solve their financial woes. But when his psychologist father is killed in a shoot out with the police, all that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral and some maudlin what-ifs. Fueled by this injustice, he sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident--the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins, our narrator initiates a course of action--one that includes reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school--destined to bring national attention. The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game.
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The Mothers: A Novel
by Brit Bennett
In a contemporary black community, 17-year-old Nadia Turner mourns the suicide of her mother, leading her to take up with the local's pastor's son; but when she gets pregnant, the pregnancy and the subsequent cover-up will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. A first novel.
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Ruby: A Novel
by Cynthia Bond
Loving the beautiful but damaged Ruby all of his life, Ephraim is torn between his dutiful sister and a chance for a life with Ruby when the latter returns to their small East Texas home and confronts the dark forces that traumatized her early years. A first novel.
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The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks
by Gwendolyn Brooks
A selection of the influential African-American poet's works reflects her modernist style and includes numerous definitive World War II poems as well as pieces about the social and political upheavals of the 1960s.
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Clotel: Or, the President’s Daughter
by William Wells Brown
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter is an 1853 novel by United States author and playwright William Wells Brown about Clotel and her sister, fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson.
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William Wells Brown: An African American Life
by Ezra Greenspan
Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone’s, “rented” out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as “Sandy” reinvented himself as “William Wells” Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits and went on to write the earliest African American works in many genres: travelogue, novel (the now canonized Clotel), printed play, and history. He also practiced medicine, ran for office, and campaigned for black uplift, temperance, and civil rights. Ezra Greenspan sets Brown’s life in the richly rendered context of his times, creating a fascinating portrait of an inventive writer who dared to challenge the racial orthodoxies and explore the racial complexities of nineteenth-century America.
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Solemn
by Kalisha Buckhanon
Suspecting that a new baby in her trailer-park community may be a half-sibling related to her father's philandering, Solemn is shattered by the baby's murder and finds refuge in a fantasy life and new friendships before her father's activities land her in a group home for troubled girls.
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Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler
Dana, a black woman, finds herself repeatedly transported to the antebellum South, where she must make sure that Rufus, the plantation owner's son, survives to father Dana's ancestor.
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The Emperor of Ocean Park
by Stephen L. Carter
A novel set in two privileged worlds: the upper crust African American society of the Eastern seaboard—families who summer at Martha’s Vineyard—and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school. Talcott Garland is a successful law professor, devoted father, and husband of a beautiful and ambitious woman, whose future desires may threaten the family he holds so dear. When Talcott’s father, Judge Oliver Garland, a disgraced former Supreme Court nominee, is found dead under suspicious circumstances, Talcott wonders if he may have been murdered. Guided by the elements of a mysterious puzzle that his father left, Talcott must risk his marriage, his career and even his life in his quest for justice.
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Angels Make Their Hope Here: A Novel
by Breena Clarke
After arriving in Russell's Knob, New Jersey, via the Underground Railroad, Dossie Bird experiences and enjoys a new life with the Smoot family in a racially diverse town in this new novel from the author of Cross My Heart.
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What We Lose: A Novel
by Zinzi Clemmons
Raised in Pennsylvania, Zinzi Clemmons's heroine Thandi views the world of her mother's childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor - someone, or something, to love. In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi's life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood.
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Bud, Not Buddy
by Christopher Paul Curtis
Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father--the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.
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Autobiographies
by Frederick Douglass
Biography, DOUGLASS. The great American reformer of the nineteenth century recounts his life from a slave to a leader in the movements for emancipation and black labor.
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Collected Poems: 1974–2004
by Rita Dove
An unabridged collection of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and U.S. poet laureate's work includes 30 years of her prose and verse, covering seven books, including poems that touch upon adolescence, love stories, war, industrialization and civil rights.
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The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois
This 1903 classic is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literary history. It helped to create the intellectual argument for the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. Du Bois drew from his own experiences to develop this groundbreaking work on being African-American in American society. Souls justified the pursuit of higher education for Negroes and thus contributed to the rise of the black middle class. By describing a global color-line, Du Bois anticipated pan-Africanism and colonial revolutions in the Third World.
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Writings
by W. E. B. Du Bois
Historian, sociologist, novelist, editor, and political activist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was the most gifted and influential black intellectual of his time. Here are his essential writings, spanning a long, restless life dedicated to the struggle for racial justice. "The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade" recounts how Americans tolerated the traffic in human beings until taught by bloody civil war the consequences of moral cowardice; the essays in "The Souls of Black Folk" celebrate the strength and pride of black America, pay tribute to black music and religion, assess the career of Booker T. Washington, remember the death of an infant son; the autobiography "Dusk of Dawn" moves from a Massachusetts boyhood to the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. and emerging Pan-African consciousness. Essays and speeches from 1890 to 1958--angry and satiric, proud and mournful--show Du Bois at his freshest and most trenchant.
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W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963
by David L. Lewis
Biography, DU BOIS. The second volume of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography begins with the end of World War I and chronicles the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance, the little-known political agenda behind it, Du Bois's battle for equality and justice for African Americans, and his self-exile in Ghana.
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The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
by Heidi W. Durrow
After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white. A first novel.
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Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
A milestone in American literature, this book has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
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Juneteenth
by Ralph Ellison
In Washington D.C., in the 1950s, Senator Sunraider is mortally wounded by an assassin's bullet. From his deathbed, he calls out for Hickman, an old black minister. As the two men relive their memories of a shared history, they gradually reveal the secrets of their past.
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Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man
by Vincent Carretta
In this widely acclaimed biography, historian Vincent Carretta gives us the authoritative portrait of Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–1797), the former slave whose 1789 autobiography quickly became a popular polemic against the slave trade and a literary classic. Equiano was the English-speaking world's most renowned person of African descent in the 1700s and is considered the founding father of both the African and the African American literary traditions.
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The Jewels of Aptor
by Samuel R. Delany
The Priestess of Argo leads a poet, a three-legged thief, and a giant in an attempt to rescue her daughter and a group of magical jewels from barbaric island of Aptor.
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The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
by Ernest J. Gaines
Fiction, GAINES. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane’s eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.
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A Lesson Before Dying
by Ernest J. Gaines
Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man who returns to his hometown to teach, forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, when he is asked to impart his learning and pride to the condemned man.
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The Annotated African American Folktales
by Henry Louis Gates
A treasury of dozens of African-American folktales discusses their role in a broader sophisticated, complex and heterogeneous cultural heritage, sharing illuminating annotations and illustrations complementing such classics as the Brer Rabbit stories, the African trickster Anansi and out-of-print tales from the late 19th century's Southern Workman.
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Difficult Women
by Roxane Gay
A collection of stories by the award-winning author of Bad Feminist explores the hardscrabble lives, passionate loves and quirky human connections experienced by diverse protagonists, including a woman who pretends she does not know that her husband and his identical twin switch places with her.
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The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, 1968-1998: 1968-1998
by Nikki Giovanni
Representing three decades of work, an omnibus of poetry by the author of the award-winning Blues and Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea features pieces written between 1968 and 1998 and includes the contents of five previously published volumes.
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The Wide Circumference of Love: A Novel
by Marita Golden
A respected family court judge who has spent her life making tough calls, Diane Tate must make the toughest one yet in her own life when her 68-year-old husband is diagnosed with early onset dementia and, along with her children, must reexamine her connection to the man he once was—and learn to love the man he has become.
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The Spook Who Sat by the Door
by Sam Greenlee
An explosive, award-winning novel in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a satire of the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy. Dan Freeman, the "spook who sat by the door," is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program. Upon mastering agency tactics, however, he drops out to train young Chicago blacks as "Freedom Fighters." As a story of one man's reaction to ruling-class hypocrisy, the book is autobiographical and personal. As a tale of a man's reaction to oppression, it is universal.
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Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two half sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations.
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Alex Haley and the Books That Changed a Nation
by Robert J. Norrell
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Roots (1976) changed the way white and black America viewed each other and the country's history. This first biography of Haley follows him from his childhood in relative privilege in deeply segregated small town Tennessee to fame and fortune in high powered New York City. This deeply researched book examines the life and work of the Haley, including his career as one of the first African-American star journalists during a dramatic time of change in American history.
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A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
First produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and hailed as a watershed in American drama. Not only a pioneering work by an African-American playwright - Lorraine Hansberry's play was also a radically new representation of black life, resolutely authentic, fiercely unsentimental, and unflinching in its vision of what happens to people whose dreams are constantly deferred. In her portrait of an embattled Chicago family, Hansberry anticipated issues that range from generational clashes to the civil rights and women's movements. She also posed the essential questions - about identity, justice, and moral responsibility - at the heart of these great struggles. The result is an American classic.
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Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s
by
Leads off with Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), a unique fusion of fiction, poetry, and drama rooted in Toomer's experiences as a teacher in Georgia. Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928), whose freewheeling, impressionistic, bawdy kaleidoscope of Jazz Age nightlife made it a best seller, traces the picaresque adventures of Jake, a World War I veteran, within and beyond Harlem. Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) is the psychological portrait of a woman caught between the two worlds of her mixed Scandinavian and African American heritage. Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun (1928) is richly detailed account of a young art student's struggles to advance her career in a society full of obstacles both overt and insidiously concealed; and Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929), with its provocative look at prejudice and exclusion, tells of a new arrival in Harlem searching for love.
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Harlem Renaissance: Four Novels of the 1930s
by
Traces the flowering of the Renaissance in diverse genres and forms. It opens with Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter (1931), an elegantly realized coming-of-age tale that follows a young man from his rural origins to the big city. Suffused with childhood memories, it is the poet's only novel. George S. Schuyler's Black No More (1931), a satire founded on the science fiction premise of a wonder drug permitting blacks to change their race, skewers public figures white and black alike in a raucous, carnivalesque send-up of American racial attitudes. Considered the first detective story by an African American writer, Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies (1932) is a mystery that comically mixes and reverses stereotypes, placing a Harvard-educated African "conjureman" at the center of a phantasmagoric charade of deaths and disappearances. Black Thunder (1936), Arna Bontemps's stirring fictional recreation of Gabriel Prosser's 1800 slave revolt, which, though unsuccessful, shook Jefferson's Virginia to its core, marks a turn from aestheticism toward political militancy in its exploration of African American history.
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My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir
by Jessica B Harris
The author describes her life in 1970s New York as part of the Black intelligentsia, including listening to James Baldwin's early drafts of his work, cooking with Maya Angelou, and a chance encounter with Nina Simone.
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Someone Knows My Name
by Lawrence Hill
Kidnapped at the age of 11 by British slavers, Aminata survives the Middle Passage and is reunited in South Carolina with Chekura, a boy from a village near hers. Her story gets entwined with his, and with those of her owners: nasty indigo producer Robinson Appleby and, later, Jewish duty inspector Solomon Lindo. During her long life of struggle, she does what she can to free herself and others from slavery, including learning to read and teaching others to, and befriending anyone who can help her, black or white.
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Cotton Comes to Harlem
by Chester B. Himes
Set in Harlem's underside in the 1950s, a fast-paced tale of mystery and intrigue unfolds as Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones work to halt the theft of thousands of dollars marked for the Back-to-Africa movement.
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Selected Letters of Langston Hughes
by Langston Hughes
A comprehensive selection from the correspondence of the canonical African-American author reflects his private struggles, intellectual relationships and extraordinary achievements in a segregated America.
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The Weary Blues
by Langston Hughes
Presents Hughes' first poetry collection, published when the author was just twenty-four, that captures the experiences of African Americans in the early twentieth century.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston's beloved 1937 classic is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose.
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Novels and Stories
by Zora Neale Hurston
Features the novels Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jonah's Gourd Vine, Moses Man of the Mountain, Seraph on the Suwanee, and selected stories. Includes a newly researched chronology of Hurston's life, detailed notes, and a brief essay on the texts.
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Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston
by Valerie Boyd
A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Wrapped in Rainbows illuminates the adventures, complexities, and sorrows of Hurston's life -- her youth in the country's first incorporated all-black town, her friendships with luminaries such as Langston Hughes, her sexuality and short-lived marriages, and her mysterious relationship with vodou. With the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II as historical backdrops, Wrapped in Rainbows not only positions Hurston's work in her time but also offers implications for our own.
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I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives
by Yuval Taylor
Between 1760 and 1902, more than 200 book-length autobiographies of ex-slaves were published; together they form the basis for all subsequent African American literature. I Was Born a Slave collects the 20 most significant “slave narratives.” They describe whippings, torture, starvation, resistance, and hairbreadth escapes; slave auctions, kidnappings, and murders; sexual abuse, religious confusion, the struggle of learning to read and write; and the triumphs and difficulties of life as free men and women. This unprecedented anthology presents them unabridged, providing each one with helpful introductions and annotations, to form the most comprehensive volume ever assembled on the lives and writings of the slaves.
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Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story
by Mat Johnson
Set in the days after Hurricane Katrina, two small-time ex-cons with big dreams get the idea that this would be the perfect time to rob a bank. Catch is, the bank is in New Orleans, and they're on parole in Houston. Now, as every sane person tries to get out of The Big Easy, Emmit and Dabny will do whatever it takes to get in. As they journey through a tide of human suffering, Dabny wants to help, and Emmit sees only the money. But a rogue commander of the ruthless security force "Dark Rain" has his sights set on taking down the same bank. If Emmit and Dabny don't outrace him, their last hope for a second chance could be washed away in the floodwaters.
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The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues.
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Passage: A Novel
by Khary Lazarre-White
Navigating the snowy streets of 1993 Harlem and Brooklyn, secure in the love of his family but confronted constantly by human and supernatural reminders about prejudice, a young black man struggles to graduate from an underprivileged school while becoming increasingly subject to the spirits of his oppressed ancestors.
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To Be a Slave
by Julius Lester
A compilation, selected from various sources and arranged chronologically, of the reminiscences of slaves and ex-slaves about their experiences from the leaving of Africa through the Civil War and into the early twentieth century.
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Bluebird, Bluebird: A Novel
by Attica Locke
Forced by duty to return to his racially divided East Texas hometown, an African-American Texas Ranger risks his job and reputation to investigate a highly charged double murder case involving a black Chicago lawyer and a local white woman. By the award-winning author of Pleasantville.
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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
by Ayana Mathis
In 1925, 15-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees her native Georgia and settles in Philadelphia. By age 16, she's stuck in a disappointing marriage to an unreliable man as she bitterly mourns the deaths of her firstborn twins. Although Hattie goes on to bear and raise nine more children, her determination to prepare them for the worst that the world has to offer takes precedence over maternal tenderness. Unfolding in 12 interlinked sections, each from the point of view of a different character, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie follows the (mis)fortunes of one African-American family through the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Era, and into the latter years of the 20th century.
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The Good Lord Bird
by James McBride
Mistaken for a girl on account of his curly hair, delicate features, and sackcloth smock, 12-year-old slave Henry Shackleford realizes that his accidental disguise affords him greater safety and decides to remain female. Dubbed "Little Onion" by his liberator, abolitionist John Brown, Henry accompanies the increasingly fanatical Brown on his crusade to end slavery -- a picaresque journey that takes them from Bloody Kansas to Rochester, New York, where they attempt to enlist the support of such notables as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman before embarking on the infamous, ill-fated 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
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The Book of Harlan
by Bernice L McFadden
Lured across the Atlantic Ocean to perform at a popular cabaret in the Parisian enclave of Montmartre during World War II, African-American musician Harlan and his best friend, Lizard Robbins, are thrown into a concentration camp when the City of Light falls under Nazi occupation, which changes the course of both their lives.
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How Stella Got Her Groove Back
by Terry McMillan
Stella Payne is forty-two, divorced, a high-powered investment analyst, mother of eleven-year-old Quincy- and she does it all. In fact, if she doesn't do it, it doesn't get done. So what if there's been no one to share her bed with lately, let alone rock her world? Stella doesn't mind it too much; she probably wouldn't have the energy for love. But when Stella takes a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Jamaica, her world gets rocked to the core - not just by the relaxing effects of the sun and sea and an island full of attractive men, but by one man in particular. He's tall, lean, soft-spoken, Jamaican, smells of citrus and the ocean - and is half her age. The tropics have cast their spell and Stella soon realizes she has come to a cataclysmic juncture: not only must she confront her hopes and fears about love, she must question all of her expectations, passions, and ideas about life and the way she has lived it.
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Waiting to Exhale
by Terry McMillan
Four African-American women console and support one another in a complex friendship that helps each of them face the middle of their lives as single women. Savannah Jackson is single, and weary of men who can't make the transition from boyfriend to husband. Bernadine Harris is suddenly single - her husband has left her for a 24-year-old white woman. Marilyn Stokes is on the rebound, regretting the years she wasted on a dead-end relationship and mourning her recent miscarriage. And Gloria Matthews, a single mother whose 16-year-old son has just discovered sex, has spent most of her adult life driving men away with her none-too-subtle hunger for marriage.
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The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
by Edward Kelsey Moore
Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean have been friends since their childhood in the same Southern Indiana town in the 1960s. They've kept their friendship going through regular meals at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat, the town's first black-owned business. Nicknamed the Supremes, the three African-American women have been through a lot over the past 40 years, from racial tensions in the town to more direct problems like loss and betrayal in their personal lives, but through it all they've kept their sanity (mostly) and sense of humor. Emphasizing the bonds of friendship between three imperfect but unforgettable women over the decades, this witty, lively debut will appeal to fans of novels as different as Larry McMurtry's Terms of Endearment and Kathryn Stockett's The Help.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. 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.
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The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.
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Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Macon Dead, Jr., called "Milkman," the son of the wealthiest African American in town, moves from childhood into early manhood, searching, among the disparate, mysterious members of his family, for his life and reality. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Reader's Guide available.
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Devil in a Blue Dress
by Walter Mosley
Easy Rawlins, a tough World War II veteran and detective, is hired by a financier and gangster to locate Daphne Monet, a search that leads him from elegant boardrooms to the raucous jazz joints of late 1940s Los Angeles.
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The Women of Brewster Place
by Gloria Naylor
Once the home of poor Irish and Italian immigrants, Brewster Place, a rotting tenement on a dead-end street, now shelters black families. This novel portrays the courage, the fear, and the anguish of some of the women there who hold their families together, trying to make a home. Among them are: Mattie Michael, the matriarch who loses her son to prison; Etta Mae Johnson who tries to trade the 'high life' for marriage with a local preacher; Kiswana Browne who leaves her middle-class family to organize a tenant's union.
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Twelve Years a Slave
by Solomon Northup
Born a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841. He spent the next twelve harrowing years of his life as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. During this time he was frequently abused and often afraid for his life. After regaining his freedom in 1853, Northup decided to publish this gripping autobiographical account of his captivity. As an educated man, Northup was able to present an exceptionally detailed and accurate description of slave life and plantation society. Indeed, this book is probably the fullest, most realistic picture of the 'peculiar institution' during the three decades before the Civil War.
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The Norton Anthology of African American Literature
by Henry Louis Gates
An anthology of the work of 140 writers covering three centuries, this book covers the earliest known work by an African American, Lucy Terry's poem "Bars Fight", to the writing of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and Poet Laureate Rita Dove. It begins with blues, gospel, spirituals, rap, sermons, prayers, testimonies and speeches, and continues with writing of all genres: poetry, short fiction, novels, drama, autobiography, journals and letters, including the full text of 11 major works.
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Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin
by Phil Cushway
Illuminates the black experience in America today through selected writings by forefront poets, from Pulitzer Prize winners Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa to luminaries Ismael Reed and Sonia Sanchez, in a collection complemented by personal essays on race and iconic images from the Black Lives Matter movement.
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Balm: A Novel
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
At the end of the Civil War, Madge, who has the power to heal; Sadie, who can commune with the dead; and Hemp, who is searching for his family, arrive in Chicago where they are all caught up in a desperate battle for survival in a community desperate to lay the pain of the past to rest.
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New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006
by Ishmael Reed
Culled from four decades of writing, a volume of multicultural poetry offers insight into the MacArthur fellow's spiritual and political beliefs as well as his journeys throughout America, Japan, Africa, and other regions, in an anthology that includes pieces on such topics as war, prejudice, and George W. Bush.
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The Plays
by Ishmael Reed
An anthology of the Otto-winning writer's plays offers insight into his use of historical, political, and social satire, in a collection that includes such works as "Body Parts," "Mother Hubbard," and "The Preacher and the Rapper."
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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. This modern classic was the inspiration for the film Precious. To continue the story, check out the sequel, The Kid.
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A Kind of Freedom: A Novel
by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through the story of three generations of an African American family in New Orleans.
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For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf
by Ntozake Shange
From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing . . . every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” this groundbreaking dramatic prose poem is written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
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Forty Acres
by Dwayne Smith
Befriended by some of America's most successful and wealthy black men, a talented African-American lawyer working out of a Queens storefront accepts their invitation to a weekend getaway only to learn that they are part of a secret organization that would promote white slavery. A first novel.
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Citizens Creek: A Novel
by Lalita Tademy
Buying his freedom after serving as a translator during the American Indian Wars, Cow Tom builds a remarkable life and legacy that is sustained by his courageous granddaughter. By the best-selling author of Cane River and Red River.
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Red River
by Lalita Tademy
The lives of three generations of two African-American families intertwine in the tumultuous and bloody aftermath of the Civil War as newly freed slaves fight for their individual liberties as they struggle to build new lives in The Bottom, a poor settlement just down Red River from Colfax, Louisiana.
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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
by Mildred D. Taylor
Facing a year of night riders and burnings, Cassie and her family continue their struggle to keep their land and hold onto what rightfully belongs to them, despite the difficult battles they must continue to endure. Winner of the Newbery Medal.
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The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Reading this novel, which is written as a series of letters, is much like reading someone's diary, so personal are the entries and so complete the writer's transformation. Fourteen when the book opens, Celie is a young black teen abused (physically, sexually, and emotionally) by her father, who takes away her children and marries her off to a man who doesn't treat her much better. It is through this man's mistress, however, that Celie finds the courage to educate herself, to stand up for herself, and to demand to be treated as a human being. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple is a difficult but nevertheless inspiring read.
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Jubilee
by Margaret Walker
A novel based on the life of the author's great-grandmother follows the story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and one of his slaves, through the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
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Salvage the Bones
by Jesmyn Ward
Winner of the 2011 National Book Award. A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch, fourteen and pregnant, and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
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No One is Coming to Save Us: A Novel
by Stephanie Powell Watts
A tale inspired by The Great Gatsby is set in the contemporary South and follows the difficulties endured by an extended black family with colliding visions of the American dream.
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The Wedding
by Dorothy West
Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, offers an intimate glimpse into African American middle class. Set on bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, The Wedding tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie. Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society," we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community. With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.
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The Underground Railroad: A Novel
by Colson Whitehead
The award-winning author of The Noble Hustle chronicles the daring survival story of a cotton plantation slave in Georgia, who, after suffering at the hands of both her owners and fellow slaves, races through the Underground Railroad with a relentless slave-catcher close behind.
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Another Brooklyn: A Novel
by Jacqueline Woodson
Torn between the fantasies of her youth and the realities of a life marked by violence and abandonment, August reunites with a beloved old friend who challenges her to reconcile her past and come to terms with the difficulties that forced her to grow up too quickly.
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Black Boy: American Hunger: A Record of Childhood and Youth
by Richard Wright
Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi amid poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those around him; at six he was a "drunkard," hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. This powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment—a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering.
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Early Works
by Richard Wright
Native Son, the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in the raw, noisy, crowded slums of Chicago's South Side, captured the hopes and yearnings, the pain and rage of black Americans. The text printed in this volume restores the changes and cuts that Wright was forced to make. This volume also contains Wright's first novel, Lawd Today! and his collection of stories, Uncle Tom's Children. Lawd Today! interweaves news bulletins, songs, exuberant wordplay, and scenes of confrontation and celebration into a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the events of one day—February 12—in the life of a black Chicago postal worker. In Uncle Tom's Children, the characters in these tales struggle to survive the cruelty of racism in the South. Wright's autobiographical essay "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" is also included.
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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, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what it means to be black in America.
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Book of Hours
by Kevin Young
An award-winning poet presents a searing collection of emotional poems that acknowledges life's passages, including the tragic death of his father and the birth of his son.
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Michigan City Public Library 100 E. 4th Street Michigan City, Indiana 46360 219-873-3044mclib.org/ |
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