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African-American Fiction and Non-Fiction August 2019
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Freshwater
by Akwaeke Emezi
Traces the experiences of a deeply troubled young woman who alarms her devout Nigerian family as she succumbs to multiple personality disorder and begins to display increasingly dark and dangerous traits in accordance with her fractured personalities. A first novel.
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This mournable body : a novel
by Tsitsi Dangarembga
The protagonist of Nervous Conditions struggles to make a life for herself in Harare, Zimbabwe, eventually taking an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents' impoverished homestead, leading to an unforgivable betrayal.
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In West Mills : a novel
by De'Shawn Charles Winslow
A woman in mid-20th-century rural North Carolina, determined to live on her own terms in spite of community gossip, finds unexpected support from a veteran fixer who struggles with an inability to correct his own troubled past.
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Gingerbread
by Helen Oyeyemi
The award-winning author of Boy, Snow, Bird draws on the classic fairy-tale element of gingerbread in the story of a British family whose surprising legacy and secret past are tied to a favorite recipe
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Kinky gazpacho : life, love & Spain
by Lori L. Tharps
Recounts the author's experiences living in Spain as a young black woman, where she learns about the country's racial prejudices against blacks and falls in love with a Spaniard
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Taking the arrow out of the heart : new poems
by Alice Walker
Presented in both English and Spanish, Alice Walker shares a timely collection of nearly seventy works of passionate and powerful poetry chronicling a life well-lived. From poems of painful self-inquiry,to celebrating the simple beauty of baking frittatas, Walker offers us a window into her magical, at times difficult, and liberating world. Whether she's urging us to preserve an urban paradise or behold the delicate necessity of beauty to the spirit, she encourages us to honor the divine that lives inside all of us.
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Pride
by Ibi Aanu Zoboi
After the wealthy Darcy family moves in across the street, Zuri is forced to find common ground with Darius, while struggling with her four wild sisters, a handsome boy vying for her attention, and college applications. A young adult update of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
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From the outside : my journey through life and the game I love
by Ray Allen
The record-holding, two-time NBA champion reflects on his work ethic, on-the-court friendships and rivalries and what he has learned about what is needed for a long and successful career in a memoir that includes coverage of his military upbringing and his unforgettable 2013 Game Six three-pointer. 75,000 first printing.
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Not that bad : dispatches from rape culture
by Roxane Gay
Covering a vast array of topics and experiences, from an exploration of the rape epidemic embedded in the refugee crisis to accounts of child molestation, a series of authors, in this thought-provoking collection of first-person essays edited by the author of Bad Feminist, tackle rape, assault and harassment head on.
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How not to get shot : and other advice from white people
by D. L. Hughley
The comedian host of the nationally syndicated radio program, The Original Kings of Comedy, builds on conversations he had with his children in a cutting satire of race relations in the era of Trump and Black Lives Matter
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Air traffic : a memoir of ambition and manhood in America
by Gregory Pardlo
The Pardlos were an average, middle-class African American family living in a New Jersey Levittown. When his father loses his job after participating in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Strike of 1981, he succumbs to addiction. Greg Jr. rebels then yields to alcoholism. In chronicling his path to recovery and adulthood Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gregory Pardlo gives us a compassionate, loving ode to fatherhood and to the frustrating-yet-redemptive ties of family as well as a scrupulous, searing examination of how African American manhood is shaped by contemporary American life
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African-American science fiction and fantasy
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The 2019 Hugo Awards were announced August 18. Check out classic and modern genre authors!
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Children of blood and bone
by Tomi Adeyemi
Seventeen-year-old Zélie, her older brother Tzain, and rogue princess Amari fight to restore magic to the land and activate a new generation of magi, but they are ruthlessly pursued by the crown prince, who believes the return of magic will mean the end of the monarchy
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Parable of the sower
by Octavia E Butler
In 2025 California, an eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own, flees northward from her small community and its desperate savages
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My Soul to Keep
by Tananarive Due
After marrying David, Jessica becomes haunted by the violent, mysterious deaths of those close to her and discovers that her husband has traded his humanity for immmortality and is invoking a forbidden ritual to keep her and their daughter with him forever.
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Skin Folk
by Nalo Hopkinson
The award-winning author of Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber presents a powerful new collection of short fiction that draws on the folklore and legends of the Caribbean in sensual and disturbing tales that capture the dark worlds of the soucouyant (vampire) and lagahoo (werewolf).
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Black leopard, red wolf
by Marlon James
Hired to find a mysterious boy who disappeared three years before, Tracker joins a search party that is quickly targeted by deadly creatures, in the first novel of a trilogy from the author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
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The fifth season
by N. K Jemisin
A first entry in a new trilogy by the award-winning author of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms finds the sole continent of the earth threatened by murder, betrayal, a super-volcano and overlords who use the planet's power as a weapon.
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The best of all possible worlds : a novel
by Karen Lord
When their homeland is destroyed, the survivors of a proud and aloof alien society struggle to reach out to the rest of the galaxy for aid and understanding while striving to preserve their cherished way of life, a situation that leads to an unexpected bond between an alien man and a human woman. By the award-winning author of Redemption in Indigo.
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Akata witch
by Nnedi Okorafor
Twelve-year-old Sunny Nwazue, an American-born albino child of Nigerian parents, moves with her family back to Nigeria, where she learns that she has latent magical powers which she and three similarly gifted friends use to catch a serial killer
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Dark matter : a century of speculative fiction from the African diaspora
by Sheree R. Thomas
A remarkable, richly diverse anthology of African-American fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction features some forty short stories by Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Tanararive Due, Walter Mosley, Ishmael Reed, Steven Barnes, and other notable authors. Like this book? Check out the sequel Dark Matter: Reading the Bones.
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New Hanover County Library201 Chestnut Street Wilmington, North Carolina 28401 910-798-6301www.nhclibrary.org/ |
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