Jesmyn Ward

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New Jersey

A Novel

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

Sing, Unburied, Sing

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#hardcover #africanamerican #biography #model

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Illinois

From Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel

Since the day she was scouted by a modeling agent while shopping at a London street fair when she was just nineteen, Alek Wek's life has been nothing short of a fantasy. When she's not the featured model in print campaigns for hip companies, or gracing the cover of Elle, she is working the runways of Paris, New York, and Milan to model for the world's leading designers, including Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. But nothing in her early years prepared her for the life of a model.

Born in Wau, in the southern Sudan, Alek knew only a few years of peace with her family before they were caught up in a ruthless civil war that pitted outlaw militias, the Muslim-dominated government, and southern rebels against each other in a brutal conflict that killed nearly two million people. Here is her daring story of fleeing the war on foot and her escape to London, where her rise from young model to supermodel was all the more notable because of Alek's non-European looks.

A probe into the Sudanese conflict and an inside look into the life of a most unique supermodel, Alek is a book that will inspire as well as inform.

Alek

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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

California

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom. “This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.”—San Francisco Chronicle IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • Vanity Fair • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • Paste • Town & Country • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures. This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen. Praise for The Water Dancer “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations—and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy.”—Rolling Stone

The Water Dancer

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Sarah M. Broom

Virginia

A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.

The Yellow House

2243921a-f34a-464b-821c-2dec2d46bb3b-1

Nebraska

Working cotton

Indiana

#paperback #sisters #fiction #historicalfiction #sistersinarms #africanamerican #wwii #women

Utah

A Novel of the Daring Black Women Who Served During World War II

Includes "P.S. insights, interviews & more" with reading group guide discussion questions.

Sisters in Arms

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Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. #fiction #africanamericanwomen #africanamerican #black #Blackmagic #hardcover #historical #zadiesmith 

Swing Time

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#paperback #classics #fiction #africanamerican #blackboy #richardwright

Hawaii

A Record of Childhood and Youth

The author relates his life as an African American growing up in the South during the Jim Crow years

Black Boy (American Hunger)

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#hardcover #fiction #middlegrade #ya #youngadult #historical #bipoc #culture #africanamerican #girls

Pennsylvania

Ex-library 

Rose Lee Carter, a 13-year-old African-American girl, dreams of life beyond the Mississippi cotton fields during the summer of 1955. Her world is rocked when a 14-year-old African-American boy, Emmett Till, is killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. A powerful middle-grade debut perfect for readers who enjoyed "The Watsons Go to Birmingham" and "Brown Girl Dreaming."

Midnight Without a Moon (Rosa Lee Carter book 1)

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#paperback #eastside #calebalexander #urban #africanamerican 

Maryland

Eastside is a coming-of-age tale set among the backdrop of inner-city gang violence in the early '90s.

Eastside is about mothers struggling and supporting one another as they match in a seemingly endless procession to the cemetery to bury their children. After his brother's death, Travon "Tre" Robinson tries keep his brother's dying wish to stay straight and narrow as he struggles to distance his life from deeper entanglement with the Wheatley Courts Gangstas.

Unrepentantly crooked police officers, violent gangland shoot-outs, blazing car chases, petty drug dealing, ruthless armed robberies, a psychotic seventeen-year-old albino gang member, and the haunting legacy of a long dead brother, complete the complex panoply that is Eastside.

Eastside

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Richard Wright

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Texas

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.

Native Son

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#hardcover #fiction #africanamerican #womenwriters

Oregon

Severely traumatized after suffering genital mutilation in her native Africa, Tashi Johnson spends much of her adult life in North America seeking help through psychoanalysis, desperate to regain the ability to feel. 150,000 first printing. $150,000 ad/promo.

Possessing the Secret of Joy

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From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War. “‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’” —Inferno, Dante Alighieri Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation. From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.

Let Us Descend

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James McBride

Mississippi

Now a Showtime limited series starring Ethan Hawke and Daveed Diggs Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction From the bestselling author of Deacon King Kong (an Oprah Book Club pick) and The Color of Water comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as a girl to survive. Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1856--a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces--when legendary abolitionist John Brown arrives. When an argument between Brown and Henry's master turns violent, Henry is forced to leave town--along with Brown, who believes Henry to be a girl and his good luck charm. Over the ensuing months, Henry, whom Brown nicknames Little Onion, conceals his true identity to stay alive. Eventually Brown sweeps him into the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859--one of the great catalysts for the Civil War. An absorbing mixture of history and imagination, and told with McBride's meticulous eye for detail and character, The Good Lord Bird is both a rousing adventure and a moving exploration of identity and survival.

The Good Lord Bird (TV Tie-In)

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Toni Cade Bambara

Louisiana

In these fifteen superb stories, this essential author of African American fiction gives us compelling portraits of a wide range of unforgettable characters, from sassy children to cunning old men, in scenes shifting between uptown New York and rural North Carolina. A young girl suffers her first betrayal. A widow flirts with an elderly blind man against the wishes of her grown-up children. A neighborhood loan shark teaches a white social worker a lesson in responsibility. And there is more. Sharing the world of Toni Cade Bambara's "straight-up fiction" is a stunning experience.

Gorilla, My Love

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Set in a diner where the food isn't very good and the ambience veers between heaven and hell, this bestselling novel from the author of Mama Day and The Women of Brewster Place is a feast for the senses and the spirit. "A virtuoso orchestration of survival, suffering, courage and humor."--New York Times Book Review.

Bailey's Cafe

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Name has been marked out of inside cover. Sticker on front cover. #hardcover #americans #history #baseball #africanamerican

Heroes of America: Jackie Robinson

Daniel Black

Michigan

They Tell Me of a Home is "a thrilling literary debut...Daniel Black wields a powerful pen, a sharp eye, and muscular prose in giving us a memorable, even haunting story of the ties that bind."--New York Times bestselling author Michael Eric Dyson

Twenty-eight-year-old protagonist Tommy Lee Tyson steps off the Greyhound bus in his hometown of Swamp Creek, Arkansas--a place he left when he was eighteen, vowing never to return. Yet fate and a Ph.D. in black studies force him back to his rural origins as he seeks to understand himself and the black community that produced him.

A cold, nonchalant father and an emotionally indifferent mother make his return, after a ten-year hiatus, practically unbearable, and the discovery of his baby sister's death and her burial in the backyard almost consumes him. His mother watches his agony when he discovers his sister's tombstone, but neither she nor other family members is willing to disclose the secret of her death. Only after being prodded incessantly does his older brother, Willie James, relent and provide Tommy Lee with enough knowledge to figure out exactly what happened and why.

Meanwhile, Tommy's seventy-year-old teacher--lying on her deathbed--asks him to remain in Swamp Creek and assume her position as the headmaster of the one-room schoolhouse. He refuses vehemently and she dies having bequeathed him her five thousand-book collection in the hopes that he will change his mind. Over the course of a one-week visit, riddled with tension, heartache, and revelation, Tommy Lee Tyson discovers truths about his family, his community, and his undeniable connection to rural Southern black folk and their ways.

They Tell Me of a Home

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#hardcover #fiction #youngadult #ya #africanamerican #bipoc 

North Carolina

This is the highly anticipated second novel by Angie Thomas, the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling, award-winning The Hate U Give. Sixteen-year-old Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. Or at least get some streams on her mixtape. As the daughter of an underground rap legend who died right before he hit big, Bri’s got massive shoes to fill. But when her mom unexpectedly loses her job, food banks and shut-off notices become as much a part of her life as beats and rhymes. With bills piling up and homelessness staring her family down, Bri no longer just wants to make it—she has to make it. On the Come Up is Angie Thomas’s homage to hip hop, the art that sparked her passion for storytelling and continues to inspire her to this day. It is the story of fighting for your dreams, even as the odds are stacked against you; of the struggle to become who you are, and not who everyone expects you to be; and of the desperate realities of poor and working class black families. Brilliant, insightful, full of heart, this novel is another modern classic from one of the most influential literary voices of a generation.

On the Come Up

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#paperback #nonfiction #biography #autobiography #barackobama #politicalscience #memoir #africanamerican #history 

A Story of Race and Inheritance

The son of an African father and white American mother discusses his childhood in Hawaii, his struggle to find his identity as an African American, and his life accomplishments.

Dreams from My Father

eb398080-1479-4ec4-bc84-1b1b53c8d0b1-1

#fiction #paperback #africanamerican #family #poorfamily 

Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s wildly original debut novel, Getting Mother’s Body, follows pregnant, unmarried Billy Beede and her down-and-out family in 1960s Texas as they search for the storied jewels buried—or were they?—with Billy’s fast-running, six-years-dead mother, Willa Mae. Getting Mother’s Body is a true spiritual successor to the work of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker—but when it comes to bringing hard-luck characters to ingenious, uproarious life, Suzan-Lori Parks shares the stage with no one.

Getting Mother's Body

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Life in Motion 

Elizabeth Yates

The life of the eighteenth-century African prince who, after being captured by slave traders, was brought to Massachusetts where he was a slave until he was able to buy his freedom at the age of sixty.

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Jesmyn Ward

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Alek Wek

Alek

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Water Dancer

Sarah M. Broom

The Yellow House

Shelley Anne Williams

Working cotton

Jesmyn Ward

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Kaia Alderson

Sisters in Arms

Zadie Smith

Swing Time

Richard Wright; Jerry W. Ward (Introduction by)

Black Boy (American Hunger)

Linda Williams Jackson

Midnight Without a Moon (Rosa Lee Carter book 1)

Caleb Alexander

Eastside

Richard Wright

Native Son

Alice Walker

Possessing the Secret of Joy

Jesmyn Ward

Let Us Descend

James McBride

The Good Lord Bird (TV Tie-In)

Toni Cade Bambara

Gorilla, My Love

Gloria Naylor

Bailey's Cafe

Joshua E. Hanft

Heroes of America: Jackie Robinson

Daniel Black

They Tell Me of a Home

Angie Thomas

On the Come Up

Barack Obama

Dreams from My Father

Suzan-Lori Parks

Getting Mother's Body

Misty Copeland

Life in Motion

Elizabeth Yates

Amos Fortune, Free Man