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African American Fiction & Non-Fiction May/June 2017
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Main Library Renovation Click on the image below to learn more about Transformation Main.
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New and Recently Released Fiction
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Augustown: a Novel
by Kei Miller
"In the wake of Marlon James's Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, Augustown--set in the backlands of Jamaica--is a magical and haunting novel of one woman's struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth. Ma Taffy may be blind but she sees everything. So when her great-nephew Kaia comes home from school in tears, what she senses sends a deep fear running through her. While they wait for his mama to come home from work, Ma Taffy recalls the story of the flying preacherman and a great thing that did not happen. A poor suburban sprawl in the Jamaican heartland, Augustown is a place where many things that should happen don't, and plenty of things that shouldn't happen do. For the story of Kaia leads back to another momentous day in Jamaican history, the birth of the Rastafari and the desire for a better life."
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A Blessing & A Curse
by ReShonda Tate Billingsley
Baptist church first ladies and sworn frenemies Rachel and Jasmine find their rivalry further complicated by a murky murder cover-up, an outrageous reality television show and a shocking revelation about their shared family ties.
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Black President: the World Will Never Be the Same
by Brenda Hampton
Born and raised in the rough streets of St. Louis, where he learned how to silence his enemies with knowledge and power, the new president of the United States, with his brash words, no-nonsense attitude and sexiest-man-alive status heats up Capitol Hill like never before.
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Boss
by Tracy Brown
The wild success of Crystal Scott's magazine career is thrown into chaos by the return of a man who broke her heart a decade earlier and who risks everything, including the ire of their vengeful families, to win her back. By the best-selling author of the White Lines series.
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The Date
by J. J. Murray
Sometimes our dreams have to die before true love can begin ... William Wise, 50, lives a brokenhearted yet ordered life with his dog Bump in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in a log "mansion" he built by hand as therapy after his wife unexpectedly divorced him. William had re-purposed his grief into a memoir that became a National Book Award finalist, and he is content to lead a silent, unfulfilled life & until Brittany Taylor limps off the Appalachian Trail onto his property, enters the uncharted depths of William's soul, and turns William's orderly world completely upside down. ~ Horizon
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Detective Cross
by James Patterson
When an anonymous caller promises to detonate bombs throughout Washington D.C., Alex Cross and his wife, Bree Stone, investigate the threat before it's too late
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An Extraordinary Union
by Alyssa Cole
During the Civil War two undercover agents, Elle Burns, a former slave, and Malcolm McCall a detective in Pinkerton’s Secret Service uncover a plot that could lead to a Confederate victory and vow to preserve the Union at any cost.
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Finding Gideon
by Eric Jerome Dickey
Calling in support from the beautiful Hawks when his latest job takes an unprecedented toll, jet-setting contract killer Gideon launches a plan to take down his nemesis, Midnight, who has assembled a team of mercenaries targeting Gideon's loved ones. By the best-selling author of The Blackbirds.
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Her Secret Life
by Tiffany L Warren
After being dumped by her rich boyfriend who traded her in for a newer model, Onika Lewis finds herself broke and homeless at a women’s shelter, where she makes a new start and finds an instant connection with a handsome and kind commuter.
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Hope Blooms
by Jamie Pope
Destroyed by tragedy, schoolteacher Cassandra Miller, riddled with guilt, finds solace in the arms of the one man she wants to forget—ex-Marine Wylie Everett, her secret lover who left her without explanation, and who now won’t let her go down without a fight as he challenges her to take a fresh perspective—and a chance on love.
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The Holland Family Saga: Part Two, Undying Love
by Clever Black
Undying Love is the second installment to the Holland Family Saga, a saga that will chronicle the Holland Family's history along with the people who would shape their lives over many years. The on-going family saga will continue to reveal over time, the Holland Family's struggles, injustices and inner demons as their lives come full circle and many secrets are revealed. ~Book Cover
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The Inheritance
by Rochelle Alers
A widowed attorney, still stinging from her late husband’s infidelities, returns home to the Garden District in New Orleans and convinces three of her friends to help her turn her family’s 200 year-old DuPont House into an inn.
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Insert Groom Here
by K. M Jackson
When her fiancé backs out of their wedding on air and cameraman Aidan Walker makes sure her private meltdown goes viral, Eva Ward, to save face, stars in a new “find-a-groom” reality segment that forces her to work with Aidan, who shows her a different side to him that changes everything.
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Legacy
by Jacquelin Thomas
Eleanor Toussaint Blakemore makes a decision that she believes will ensure the kind of life she wants for herself and offers no apologies for the choices she's made. However, a car accident places Eleanor in a comatose state where she comes face-to-face with the past. Despite her blond hair and blue eyes, Myra Toussaint Madison embraces her blackness. She accuses her sister of being a traitor to her race when she decides to disconnect from the African American community. When Eleanor comes out of her coma, will she and Myra finally be able to come together in unity and love?
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Lust
by Victoria Christopher Murray
A tale inspired by the seven deadly sins follows the experiences of a woman caught between an entertainment mogul with a shady past and his vengeance-seeking childhood friend. By the NAACP Image Award-winning author of Stand Your Ground.
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Lust & Loyalty
by Shelly Ellis
Torn between his pregnant fiancée and his soon-to-be ex-wife who is fighting their divorce at every turn, Evan Murdoch must harbor a dangerous secret, while his party-boy brother recovers from a car accident and his half-brother sets in motion a plan to destroy them all.
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The Mark
by Kiki Swinson
Identity thief Lauren Kelly vows revenge on her ex-lover Matt Connors, but will her vengeance make her blind to the trap he is setting for her?
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Memoirs of an Accidental Hustler
by J. M. Benjamin
Follows Kamil from his childhood to adult life as makes a pact with his friends to stay in school and off the streets, has his childhood crush develop into something more, and vows to avoid the mistakes of his father.
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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. A first novel by the author of We Are Taking Only What We Need.
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Old Bones
by Trudy Nan Boyce
When a peaceful demonstration at a black women's college is thrown into chaos by a racially motivated drive-by shooting, detective Sara Alt investigates a nearby murder only to discover that the victim is someone she arrested two years earlier.
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A Pleasing Temptation
by Deborah Fletcher Mello
An ambitious daughter of a close-knit Louisiana clan, Kamaya Boudreaux is making a name for herself in the business world, pursuing lucrative opportunities across the country. But when her best-kept-secret venture--an exclusive male strip club--is threatened to be exposed, the all-work-no-play entrepreneur needs to do some serious damage control. Her plans don't include giving in to temptation with sexy Southerner Wesley Walters, whose buff six-pack body was made for pleasure.. ~ Horizon
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Return to Flint
by Treasure Hernandez
After burning bridges and leaving dead bodies across the country, former district attorney Tiphani Fuller, on the run for her life, is forced to return to the home she ran from in her youth where she finds herself in the middle of a drug war with nowhere left to hide and must decide just how far she is willing to go to survive.
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The Prada Plan 5
by Ashley Antoinette
After using YaYa’s Prada Plan to land the man of her dreams, Disaya is still unhappy and pursues a plan B to get what she really wants in the latest addition to the series following Love and War.
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Stalker
by Brenda Hampton
After a brutal divorce, Abigal Wilson vowed to never love again, but when Brent Carson crosses her path, she simply can't resist his good-guy persona that exemplifies perfection, but then he gives her the bad news.
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The Streets Have No King
by JaQuavis
"A street thriller of kidnapping, murder, trickery, and love that will have you at the edge of your seat. After 7 years of prison, multi-millionaire drug mogul Kane Garrett is back on the streets. But instead of diving back into the drug game, he's teaching a college class, infusing business principles with his signature ruthless edge he developed in the streets. When a student--and heavy heroin dealer--named Basil catches Kane's eye, Kane takes him on as a and together, they build the biggest, smartest drug trafficking business the state has ever seen. But when Basil meets Moriah, Kane's only daughter, lines get crossed and their dominant business union becomes a deadly rivalry. Welcome to a world where the kings meet their end and no one stays at the top for long. The crown always lies heavy on he who commands the streets--and Kane and Basil will fight to claim their rule, before power is toppled again, in The Streets Have No King by New York Times bestselling author JaQuavis Coleman"
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To Me I Wed
by K. M Jackson
Tired of being nagged to find a husband, and even more tired of being burned by “nice guys,” Lily Perry, happy with her life as it is, decides to marry herself and have a blow-out party at celebrated chef Vincent Caro’s restaurant, but gets more than she bargained for when things unexpectedly heat up between her and Vincent—in and out of the bedroom.
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What It Means When A Man Falls from the Sky: Stories
by Lesley Nneka Arimah
A debut collection by a prize-winning writer explores the ties that bind people to each other and their homes as reflected in stories featuring generations of women haunted by the ghosts of war, a daughter who is outraged by the return of her believed-dead mother and a decimated refugee world where resolutions have unforeseen consequences.
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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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New and Recently Released Non-Fiction
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Are All the Women Still White?: Rethinking Race, Expanding Feminisms
by Janell Hobson
More than thirty years have passed since the publication of All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Given the growth of women’s and gender studies in the last thirty-plus years, this updated and responsive collection expands upon this transformation of consciousness through multiracial feminist perspectives. The contributors here reflect on transnational issues as diverse as intimate partner violence, the prison industrial complex, social media, inclusive pedagogies, transgender identities, and (post) digital futures. This volume provides scholars, activists, and students with critical tools that can help them decenter whiteness and other power structures while repositioning marginalized groups at the center of analysis. ~Amazon
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Around the Way Girl: a Memoir
by Taraji P Henson
The Academy Award nominee, Golden Globe winner and star of the hit show Empire recalls her beloved screen characters while tracing the story of her life and career, sharing coverage of such topics as her father's Vietnam service, her rise from the violence of the streets of Washington, D.C., and her experiences as a single mother.
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At Mama's Knee: Mothers and Race in Black and White
by April Ryan
Looks at race and race relations through the lessons that mothers transmit to their children. As a single Africa-American mother in Baltimore, the author has struggled to convey the right lessons to her daughters. To better understand how mothers transfer to their children wisdom on race and race relations, she reached out to other mothers—prominent political leaders, civil rights activists, celebrities, and those whose lives have been impacted by prominent race related events.
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The Blood of Emmett Till
by Timothy B Tyson
Draws on previously untapped firsthand testimonies and recovered court transcripts to present a scholarly account of the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till and its role in launching the civil rights movement. By the award-winning author of Blood Done Sign My Name.
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Cling: Choosing a Lifestyle of Intimacy With God
by Kimberly Cash Tate
By God's design, the desire to be wanted and loved runs deep inside everyone He created. In an engaging and down-to-earth way, author Kim Cash Tate encourages you to satisfy that desire by living in the fullness of God's love. Cling shares wisdom from biblical examples and the author's personal experiences to help you cultivate an ongoing closeness with the Lord through prayer and Bible study. Discover how to have an intimacy with God that will sustain you through the imperfect, the disappointing, and the trying times of life. ~ Horizon
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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation―the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments―that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. ~ Horizon
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Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family
by Bruce D. Haynes
"Down the Up Staircase tells the history of three generations of a black middle-class family against the backdrop of the three-story brownstone at 411 Convent Avenue in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. The home once belonged to its patriarch, George Edmund Haynes, a migrant from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who went on to become the first African American to earn a PhD at Columbia University and found the National Urban League. He was the first prominent black economist in the country, the first to predict the great sweeping migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North, a power broker of the Harlem Renaissance, and the first black to serve in a federal sub-cabinet post, where he mobilized the new Black migrants for the war effort. His wife, Elizabeth Ross Haynes, was a noted children's author of the period and a prominent social scientist. Yet these early advances and gains provided little anchor to the succeeding generations. Their son had dreamed of becoming an engineer but spent his entire career as a parole officer in the Bronx. Their eldest grandson graduated from the prestigious Horace Mann High School but spent much of his adult life in and out of drug rehabilitation clinics, psychiatric hospitals, and the streets. Their second grandson was slain on the streets of the Bronx during his last semester of college, at age twenty-three. Only the youngest grandson--the book's author, Bruce Haynes--was able to build on the gains of his forefathers. Haynes brings sociological insight to a familiar American tale, one where the notion of social mobility and black middle class is a tenuous term." ~ Provided by publisher
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Drop the Ball: Achieving More By Doing Less
by Tiffany Dufu
An inspiring memoir by a leading figure in the women's leadership movement counsels women on how to cultivate the essential skills of reevaluating expectations, setting realistic goals and meaningfully engaging with others in order to thrive in personal and professional arenas.
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Incendiary Art: Poems
by Patricia Smith
A National Book Award finalist and the author of six critically acclaimed volumes of poetry presents a compelling new collection that envisions, re-envisions and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas and sonnets.
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In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World
by Rachel Dolezal
Seen by the media in 2015 as a white woman who had knowingly been passing as black, the author shares her nuanced and complex story, from being a child of white evangelical parents to an NAACP chapter president and respected educator and activist who identified as black, forcing readers to reconsider race and identity.
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In the Midnight Hour: the Life & Soul of Wilson Pickett
by Tony Fletcher
Looks at the life and music career of prominent soul singer Wilson Pickett, chronicling the performer's rise to stardom and his self-destructive fall into alcohol and drug addiction before ending his career on a high note with a Grammy-nominated album
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Jane Crow: the Life of Pauli Murray
by Rosalind Rosenberg
"Euro-African-American activist Pauli Murray was a feminist lawyer who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements, and later become the first woman ordained a priest by the Episcopal Church. Born in 1910 and identified as female, she believed from childhood that she was male. Jane Crow is her definitive biography, exploring how she engaged the arguments used to challenge race discrimination to battle gender discrimination in the 1960s and 70s. Before there was a social movement to support transgender identity, she mounted attacks on all arbitrary categories of distinction. In the 1950s, her legal scholarship helped Thurgood Marshall to shift his course and attack segregation frontally in Brown v. Board of Education. In the1960s, Murray persuaded Betty Friedan to help her found an NAACP for women, which Friedan named NOW. Appointed by Eleanor Rossevelt to the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1962, she advanced the idea of Jane Crow, arguing that the same reasons used to attack race discriminatio n could be used to battle gender discrimination. In the early 1970s, Murray provided Ruth Bader Ginsberg with the argument Ginsberg used to persuade the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects not only blacks but also women--and potentially other minority groups--from discrimination. helping to propel Ruth Bader Ginsberg to her first Supreme Court victory for women's rights and greatly expanding the idea of equality in the process. Murray accomplished all of this as someone who would today be identified as transgender but who, due to the limitations of her time, focused her attention on dismantling systematic injustices of all sorts, transforming the idea of what equality means"
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Life's Work: from the Trenches, a Moral Argument for Choice
by Willie Parker
An outspoken Christian reproductive-justice advocate draws on his experiences as a physician and abortion provider to trace his fundamentalist upbringing in the American South while explaining why he believes that helping women in need without judgment is in accordance with Christian values.
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My Soul Looks Back: a Memoir
by Jessica B Harris
The award-winning writer describes what it was like growing up and hanging out with other members of the Black Intelligentsia in 1970s New York City, including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison and their ongoing friendships.
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Rising Star: the Making of Barack Obama
by David Garrow
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross presents a definitive account of Barack Obama's life before his presidency, sharing insights into his formative years in Honolulu and Jakarta, his influential associates and his community work in Chicago.
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Single Serving for Single Women: A Fifty Day Devotional
by Tamara B. Gibbs
In this memoir-style daily devotional for single women, Gibbs opens her heart and shares her life experiences in the service of encouraging single women to love their lives right this very moment. While many devotionals encourage women to pray for a husband, Single Serving for Single Women: A Fifty Day Devotional shows women the scriptural mandate for living full, contented lives, no matter their romantic prospects. ~Horizon
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There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyonce
by Morgan Parker
"There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé uses political and pop-cultural references as a framework to explore 21st century black American womanhood and its complexities: performance, depression, isolation, exoticism, racism, femininity, and politics. The poems weave between personal narrative and pop-cultural criticism, examining and confronting modern media, consumption, feminism, and Blackness. This collection explores femininity and race in the contemporary American political climate, folding in references from jazz standards, visual art, personal family history, and Hip Hop. The voice of this book is a multifarious one: writing and rewriting bodies, stories, and histories of the past, as well as uttering and bearing witness to the truth of the present, and actively probing toward a new self, an actualized self. This is a book at the intersections of mythology and sorrow, of vulnerability and posturing, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence." ~Publisher
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This Is Just My face: Try Not to Stare
by Gabourey Sidibe
The Oscar-nominated star of Precious and Empire delivers a much-awaited memoir that shares details about her childhood with a polygamous father in Harlem, her gifted mother who supported them by singing in the subway and her own unconventional rise to fame.
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This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
by Matthew Karp
A new portrait of the southern slaveholders who occupied the commanding heights of antebellum politics, this book explores the intimate relationship between American slavery and American power. From John C. Calhoun to Jefferson Davis, the South's leadingstatesmen understood the United States as the chief defender of bound labor in an Atlantic World still teetering between slavery and abolition. Overcoming traditional southern scruples about dangers of centralized authority, slaveholders harnessed the power of the United States to protect vulnerable slave regimes across the hemisphere, from Texas to Brazil.
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Looking for More Great Books? Contact your librarian or try...
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My Next 5 For personalized reading recommendations from Durham County librarians, you may want to try My Next 5! Simply complete an online form to tell us a little about what genres, books, and authors you like (or dislike). A DCL librarian will review your submission and reply within three days with a list of the next five books you should read.
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NoveList
NoveList is a comprehensive database of fiction and nonfiction titles for all ages, including recommendations, articles, and lists for your fiction and nonfiction needs. Durham County Library cardholders can access NoveList from any computer. |
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