Ruth Ozeki

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Mississippi

A Novel

A novelist on a remote island in the Pacific is linked to a bullied and depressed Tokyo teenager after discovering a Hello Kitty lunchbox that washed ashore.

A Tale for the Time Being

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Myah Ariel

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

In this sweeping second chance romance from debut author Myah Ariel, the unexpected spark of two former flames may force them to choose between their dreams and each other. Kaliya Wilson has paid her dues. But all the years behind the reception desk at a flashy film studio have only pushed her movie-making dreams further out of reach. That is, until a surprise reunion presents an opportunity that could make her career, or break her heart…a second time. It’s been seven years since Kaliya’s whirlwind college romance with Danny Prescott went up in flames. While her passions have stalled, his career is taking off. So when the hot shot director reappears to offer her a job on his next production, it’s a shock to the system. Working with Danny may recapture the intensity of their film school days, but trusting him again won’t come as easily. As the pair allows themselves the openness and vulnerability to entrust their deepest truths to each other, the possibility of a true connection draws ever closer. But when Hollywood politics and scandal threaten to sink the production and her career, Kaliya may have to risk everything to do what’s right—even if it means letting go of the second chance love of a lifetime.

When I Think of You

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Gloria Naylor

Some sticker residue on the back and signs of wear visible in photos. 

In a small Georgia town, Mama Day, uses her gifts as a seer and healer, but her powers are ultimately tested when her beloved niece's life hangs in the balance

Mama Day

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A motley group of misfits takes on a magical aura at Bailey's Cafe+a7 as each character describes his or her motivations, desires, obsessions, and idiosyncracies. By the author of The Women of Brewster Place. 40,000 first printing. National ad/promo. Tour.

Bailey's Café

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Zadie Smith

We live in a world of signs. But not everybody has to trade in them.... Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. A small blip in a huge worldwide network of desire, his business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them--all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the reinstatement of some kind of all-powerful, benevolent God-type figure, the end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of forties movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries. The Autograph Manis a deeply funny existential tour around the hollow things of modernity: celebrity, cinema, and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience. Through London and then New York, searching for the only autograph that has ever mattered to him, Alex follows the paper trail while resisting the mystical lure of Kabbalah and Zen, and avoiding all collectors, con men, and interfering rabbis who would put themselves in his path. Pushing against the tide of his generation, Alex-Li is on his way to finding enlightenment, otherwise known as some part of himself that cannot be signed, celebrated, or sold.

The Autograph Man

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Jesmyn Ward

This is one of my favorite books! It’s a used library book. Selling because I bought a newer copy 

"A searing and profound Southern odyssey through Mississippi's past and present"--

Sing, Unburied, Sing

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Colson Whitehead

As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men." In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back." Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King's ringing assertion "Throw us in jail and we will still love you." His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. The tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys' fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy.

The Nickel Boys

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Marsha Hunt

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Uncovering the Secret History of an American Family

Hunt, an African-American novelist, actress, and singer, explores the role color has had in her family's history as she searches for a long-lost grandmother.

Repossessing Ernestine

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Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is an award-winning literary voice praised for her fearless and vivid prose, and her debut collection Ayiti exemplifies the raw talent that made her "one of the voices of our age" (National Post, Canada).

The powerful debut collection exploring the Haitian diaspora experience from New York Times-bestselling powerhouse Roxane Gay, now widely available for the first time in Grove Press paperback.

Clever and haunting by turns, Ayiti explores the Haitian diaspora experience. A married couple seeking boat passage to America prepares to leave their homeland. A mother takes a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder, and into her bed. And a woman conceives a daughter on the bank of a river while fleeing a horrific massacre, a daughter who later moves to America for a new life but is perpetually haunted by the mysterious scent of blood. 

Wise, fanciful, and daring, Ayiti is the book that put Roxane Gay on the map and now, with two previously uncollected stories, confirms her singular vision.

Ayiti

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Walter Mosley

Having served twenty-seven violent years in prison, Socrates Fortlow finds a home in an abandoned building and takes a job in a supermarket before meeting a troubled Darryl, whom he attempts to save from a fate like his own. Reprint. TV tie-in.

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

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Mesha Maren

“A heady admixture of explosive plot and taut, burnished prose . . . Mesha Maren writes like a force of nature.” —Lauren Groff, author of Florida In 1989, Jodi McCarty is seventeen years old when she’s sentenced to life in prison. When she’s released eighteen years later, she finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom but determined to chart a better course for herself. Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian Mountains, she heads south in search of someone she left behind, as a way of finally making amends. There, she meets and falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother living in a motel room with her children. Together they head toward what they hope will be a fresh start. But what do you do with your past—and with a town and a family that refuses to forget, or to change? Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Mesha Maren’s Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a break for another life, the use and treachery of makeshift families, and how, no matter the distance we think we’ve traveled from the mistakes we’ve made, too often we find ourselves standing in precisely the place we began.

Sugar Run

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Ernest J. Gaines

In very good condition, few light pencil highlights throughout and notes on inside back cover (pictured)

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

A Lesson Before Dying

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Trying to locate a family friend who has become involved with a radical resistance group, Easy Rawlins stumbles onto a murder scene only to be named a suspect, and he finds himself exploring a world of betrayal, trying to stay alive. 275,000 first printing.

Bad Boy Brawly Brown

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Bernice L. McFadden

Despite being born to a broken-hearted mother and a faithless father, Campbell still believes in the power of love?if she can ever find it. Living in the same neighborhood, but unknown to Campbell until a chance meeting brings them together, is Donovan, the ?little man? of a shattered home?a family torn apart by anger and bitterness. In the face of these daunting obstacles, Donovan dreams of someday marrying, raising a family, and playing for the NBA. But, deep inside Campbell and Donovan live the histories that have shaped their lives. What they discover?together and apart?forms the basis of this compelling, sensual, and surprising novel.

Loving Donovan

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Toni Morrison

Former library book, library stamps pictured. 

Captures the dreams, memories, conflicts, and complex interior lives of the citizens of a small, all-Black town as four young women are brutally attacked in a convent near the town during the 1970s, in a novel that blends past, present, and future

Paradise

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Minimal signs of wear, nothing affecting readability. Shown in photo

To commemorate Morrison's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Knopf here republishes her full canon of novels. This edition of The Bluest Eye (1970) contains a new afterword by the author.

The Bluest Eye

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Z. Z. Packer

Excellent condition, one mark on bottom of book (pictured)

The acclaimed debut short story collection that introduced the world to an arresting and unforgettable new voice in fiction, from multi-award winning author ZZ Packer

Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decide where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream.

With penetrating insight, ZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision. Fresh, versatile, and captivating, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking and unforgettable collection, sure to stand out among the contemporary canon of fiction. 

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

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Charlotte Nicole Davis

In an alternate Old West, the Good Luck Girls reunite to undertake a wildly ambitious plan to free all dustbloods who live as prisoners to Arketta's landmasters and debt slavery.

The Sisters of Reckoning

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Zora Neale Hurston

Some dog-eared pages, very minimal writing inside (pictured the only mark I found)

John Buddy Pearson, a young Black man who becomes a popular pastor at Zion Hope, is unable to reconcile his good intentions and his natural instincts

Jonah's Gourd Vine

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Mildred D. Taylor

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

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Edwidge Danticat

An unforgettable novel that shimmers with the wonder and terror of its author's native Haiti. Set in the island's impoverished villages and in New York's Haitian community, this is the story of Sophie Caco, who was conceived in an act of violence, abandoned by her mother and then summoned to America. In New York, Sophie discovers that Haiti imposes harsh rules on its own. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Breath, Eyes, Memory

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Paule Marshall

Paints a compassionate and satisfying portrait of a family trying to redeem itself after years of hurt and recrimination.

The Fisher King

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* WINNER of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work *

Alice Walker, author of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple--"an American novel of permanent importance" (San Francisco Chronicle)--crafts a bilingual collection that is both playfully imaginative and intensely moving.

Presented in both English and Spanish, Alice Walker shares a timely collection of nearly seventy works of passionate and powerful poetry that bears witness to our troubled times, while also 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 of activism, love, hope and, above all, gratitude. Whether she's urging us to preserve an urban paradise or behold the delicate necessity of beauty to the spirit, Walker encourages us to honor the divine that lives inside all of us and brings her legendary free verse to the page once again, demonstrating that she remains a revolutionary poet and an inspiration to generations of fans.

Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart

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Annotations on a handful of pages. 

From description: Mildred Peacock is the touch, funny, feisty heroine of "Mama, " a survivor who'll do anything to keep her family together. In Mildred's world, men come and go as quickly as her paychecks, but her five children are her dream, her hope and her future. Not since Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" has a black woman's story been portrayed with such rich power, honesty, and love.

Browse by categories

Ruth Ozeki

A Tale for the Time Being

Myah Ariel

When I Think of You

Gloria Naylor

Mama Day

Gloria Naylor

Bailey's Café

Zadie Smith

The Autograph Man

Jesmyn Ward

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Colson Whitehead

The Nickel Boys

Marsha Hunt

Repossessing Ernestine

Roxane Gay

Ayiti

Walter Mosley

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

Mesha Maren

Sugar Run

Ernest J. Gaines

A Lesson Before Dying

Walter Mosley

Bad Boy Brawly Brown

Bernice L. McFadden

Loving Donovan

Toni Morrison

Paradise

Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye

Z. Z. Packer

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Charlotte Nicole Davis

The Sisters of Reckoning

Zora Neale Hurston

Jonah's Gourd Vine

Mildred D. Taylor

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Edwidge Danticat

Breath, Eyes, Memory

Paule Marshall

The Fisher King

Alice Walker

Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart

Terry McMillan

Mama

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