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Early novels and stories : Early Novels and Stories
by James Baldwin
A collection of stories penned by one of the greatest African-American writers of the postwar era includes such works as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, and Going to Meet the Man.
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Americanah : a novel
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Separated by differing ambitions after falling in love in Nigeria, Ifemelu experiences triumph and defeat in America, while Obinze endures an undocumented status in London until the pair is reunited in their homeland years later.
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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 follows the boy's trail through ancient cities and into dense forests, and encounter creatures intent on destroying them.
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The water dancer : a novel
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation family, Thena, his chosen mother, a woman of few words and many secrets, and Sophia, a young woman fighting her own war even as she and Hiram fall in love, he becomes determined to escape the only home he's ever known. So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery that takes Hiram from thecorrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to return to the Walker Plantation to free the family he left behind--but to do so, he must first master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss. This is a bracingly original vision of the world of slavery, written with the narrative force of a great adventure. Driven by the author's bold imagination and striking ability to bring readers deep into the interior lives of his brilliantly rendered characters, The Water Dancer is the story of America's oldest struggle--the struggle to tell the truth--from one of our most exciting thinkers and beautiful writers.
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Another Brooklyn
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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Native son
by Richard Wright
Traces the fall of a young black man in 1930s Chicago as his life loses all hope of redemption after he kills a white woman.
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The travelers : a novel
by Regina Porter
Meet James Samuel Vincent -- an affluent Manhattan attorney who shirks his modest Irish American background but hews to his father's philandering ways. James muddles through a topsy-turvy relationship with his son, Rufus, which is further complicated when Rufus marries Claudia Christie. Claudia's mother -- Agnes Miller Christie -- is a beautiful African American woman who survives a chance encounter on a Georgia road that propels her into a new life in the Bronx. Soon after, her husband, Eddie Christie, is called to duty on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam, where Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead becomes his life anchor as he grapples with mounting racial tensions on the ship and counts the days until he will see Agnes again. These unforgettable characters' lives intersect with a cast of lovers and friends: the unapologetic black lesbian who finds her groove in 1970s Berlin; a moving man stranded in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, during a Thanksgiving storm; two half brothers who meet as adults in a crayon factory; and a Coney Island waitress whose Prince Charming is too good to be true. Written with piercing humor, exacting dialogue, and a beautiful sense of place, Regina Porter's debut is both an intimate family portrait and a sweeping exploration of what it means to be American today.
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Charcoal Joe
by Walter Mosley
Easy Rawlins is back, with a new detective agency and a new mystery to solve. Charcoal Joe has asked Easy to help clear Joe's son, who was found standing over a white man's dead body in his cabin home.
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Blood grove
by Walter Mosley
After being approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man, Easy embarks on an investigation that takes him from mountaintops to the desert, through South Central and into sex clubs and the homes of the fabulously wealthy, facing hippies, the mob, and old friends perhaps more dangerous than anyone else.
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The Good Lord Bird
by James McBride
Fleeing his violent master at the side of legendary abolitionist John Brown at the height of the slavery debate in mid-19th-century Kansas Territory, Henry pretends to be a girl to hide his identity throughout the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. By the best-selling author of The Color of Water. Winner of the National Book Award. Movie tie-in.
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Deacon King Kong
by James McBride
In the aftermath of a 1969 Brooklyn church deacon’s public shooting of a local drug dealer, the community’s African-American and Latinx witnesses find unexpected support from each other when they are targeted by violent mobsters.
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Lagoon
by Nnedi Okorafor
A famous rapper, a biologist and a rogue solder become world protectors after a first contact with an alien ambassador results in global chaos and an attack that threatens humanity with mass extinction. By the award-winning author of Who Fears Death.
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Short stories
by Langston Hughes
Offers a collection of stories written between 1919 and 1963 that follow Hughes' literary development and the growth of his personal and political concerns.
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The rib king : a novel
by Ladee Hubbard
Exploited by the white family that took him in as a servant 15 years earlier, a Black orphan becomes tragically enraged by how his employers mindlessly profit from the talents of a hired black cook.
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Imago
by Octavia E. Butler
After nearly being destroyed in a nuclear war, the remaining humans begin to rebuild by interbreeding with an alien race who have the ability to shapeshift in the third novel of the series following Adulthood Rites.
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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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The women of Brewster Place : a novel in seven stories
by Gloria Naylor
In her heralded first novel, Gloria Naylor weaves together the stories of seven women living in Brewster Place, a bleak inner-city sanctuary, creating a powerful, moving portrait of the strengths, struggles, and hopes of black women in America.
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Salvage the bones : a novel
by Jesmyn Ward
Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.
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Sing, unburied, sing : a novel
by Jesmyn Ward
Living with his grandparents and sister on a Gulf Coast farm, Jojo navigates the challenges of his mother's addictions and his grandmother's cancer before the release of his father from prison prompts a road trip of danger and hope.
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Fifty words for rain : a novel
by Asha Lemmie
Abandoned by a mother who instructs her never to fight or ask questions, an illegitimate child of mixed heritage in 1948 Kyoto forges a powerful bond with her older half-brother against the wishes of their formidable grandparents.
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The broken kingdoms
by N. K. Jemisin
After a band of killers begins murdering godlings, blind artist Oree Shoth wonders if her recent guest is at the heart of it, his presence putting her in danger. By the author of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.
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Hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick : stories from the Harlem Renaissance
by Zora Neale Hurston
In 1925, Barnard student Zora Neale Hurston--the sole black student at the college--was living in New York, "desperately striving for a toe-hold on the world." During this period, she began writing short works that captured the zeitgeist of African American life and transformed her into one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nearly a century later, this singular talent is recognized as one of the most influential and revered American artists of the modern period. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is an outstanding collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African American folk culture. Brought together for the first time in one volume, they include eight of Hurston's "lost" Harlem stories, which were found in forgotten periodicals and archives. These stories challenge conceptions of Hurston as an author of rural fiction and include gems that flash with her biting, satiric humor, as well as more serious tales reflective of the cultural currents of Hurston's world. All are timeless classics that enrich our understanding and appreciation of this exceptional writer's voice and her contributions to America's literary traditions.
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