Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Oregon

More Than Anything Else 

Jayne Pettit

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Journey of the Heart

Poet, writer, activist, entertainer, professor: Maya Angelou is all of these. Her remarkable story includes a childhood trauma, a leading role in an opera, her activism in the civil rights movement, and her devotion to poetry, writing, and teaching to promote the cause of all African-Americans. Based in part on Maya's autobiography, this is the inspiring story of an extraordinary woman.

"Pettit makes [Angelou's] stirring story accessible...while retaining a strong sense of Angelou's personal voice. --Booklist

Maya Angelou

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Connecticut

A Novel

***2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER***

***THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER***

Winner of the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize Finalist, 2022 Chautauqua Prize Finalist, Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing Shortlist, and the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize shortlist

A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!

An Ebony Magazine Publishing Book Club Pick! 

One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction | One of Philadelphia Inquirer's Best Books of 2021 | One of Shelf Awareness's Top Ten Fiction Titles of the Year | One of TIME Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books | One of NPR.org's "Books We Love" | EW's "Guide to the Biggest and Buzziest Books of 2021" | One of the New York Public Library's Best Books for Adults | San Diego Union Tribune--My Favorite Things from 2021 | Writer's Bone's Best Books of 2021 | Atlanta Journal Constitution--Top 10 Southern Books of the Year | One of the Guardian's (UK) Best Ten 21st Century Comic Novels | One of Entertainment Weekly's 15 Books You Need to Read This June | On Entertainment Weekly's "Must List" | One of the New York Post's Best Summer Reading books | One of GMA's 27 Books for June | One of USA Today's 5 Books Not to Miss | One of Fortune's 21 Most Anticipated Books Coming Out in the Second Half of 2021 | One of The Root's PageTurners: It's Getting Hot in Here | One of Real Simple's Best New Books to Read in 2021


An astounding work of fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole

In Jason Mott's Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott's novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

As these characters' stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it's also about the nation's reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.

Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind?  Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists, it truly becomes its title.

Hell of a Book

c33cd6b4-cb72-4e49-b053-651e6e5edffd-1

Pennsylvania

Jason Mott

New Jersey

In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

As these characters’ stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.

Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind?  Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists, it truly becomes its title.

California

Jesmyn Ward

Maryland

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

24767cfc-5622-43a1-bd2b-bcdc4d990360-1

Virginia

Wisconsin

Debbie Rigaud

New York

An #ownvoices Point Paperback original that is like The Princess Diaries for this generation -- pure wish-fulfillment fun, from new talent Debbie Rigaud.

Truly Madly Royally

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R. H. Sin

The book cover is not hairy I promise 😅 it’s the grainy aesthetic created for the design aesthetic 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Massachusetts

r.h. Sin's This Day Is Dark is a blistering case study of when red flags are mistaken for passion and love falls in the hands of the wrong people, as explored in his signature poetic voice. From New York Times bestselling author r.h. Sin comes This Day Is Dark, a heartbreakingly relatable collection of poetry and prose that captures some of the darkest moments over an 18-year period. This Day Is Dark is an evocative exploration into what it means and how it feels when forever is temporary and once celebrated love becomes unrecognizable.

This Day Is Dark

156508d4-6651-4850-a420-18fd64394fc8-1

Lisa McNair

Poignant, honest, and heartfelt letters to a sister who perished in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing
 
Lisa McNair was born in 1964, one year after her older sister, Denise, was murdered in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Dear Denise is a collection of forty letters from Lisa addressed to the sister she never knew, but in whose shadow of sacrifice and lost youth she was raised. These letters offer an intimate look into the life of a family touched by one of the most heinous tragedies of the Civil Rights Movement.

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Letters to the Sister I Never Knew

Poignant, honest, and heartfelt letters to a sister who perished in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing Lisa McNair was born in 1964, one year after her older sister, Denise, was murdered in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Dear Denise is a collection of forty letters from Lisa addressed to the sister she never knew, but in whose shadow of sacrifice and lost youth she was raised. These letters offer an intimate look into the life of a family touched by one of the most heinous tragedies of the Civil Rights Movement. Written in a genuine, accessible, familiar, and easy-to-read voice, Lisa’s letters apprise her late sister of all that has come to pass in the years since her death. Lisa considers her own challenges and accomplishments as a student in remarkably different—and very racially complex—schools; the birth of their baby sister, Kim; their father’s election to the Alabama legislature; her evolving sense of faith and place, and sometimes lack thereof, within the Black church; her college experiences; and her own sense of self as she’s matured into adulthood. She reveals some of the family’s difficulties and health challenges, and shares some of their joys and celebrations. The letters are accompanied by 29 black-and-white photographs, most of them from the McNair family collection, many of them taken by her father, a professional photographer who documented the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama both before and after Denise’s murder. An unswervingly candid, gentle, and nuanced book, Dear Denise is a testament to one singular life lived bravely and truthfully (if sometimes confusedly or awkwardly), during decades of bewildering social change and in the shadow of one life never fully lived.

Dear Denise

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Joseph Earl Thomas

A stirring, unsparing debut novel about black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student, from the "extraordinary [and] insightful" author of Sink (New York Times Book Review). After a deployment in the Iraq War, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a MD/PhD student at The University of Pennsylvania, and an emergency department tech at a hospital in North Philly, he becomes interested in the Holmesburg Prison Experiments, in which the prison conducted scientific trials on their inmates. Through this curiosity he comes to know his estranged father, who is serving time for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, his best friend Murray, a fellow vet, judges the journey he sets out upon, while simultaneously pushing him towards a ruinous self-discovery. Balancing single fatherhood, his studies, and long shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his more storied friends and colleagues. GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life--of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.

God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

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Comes from a smoke free and pet free home.

Colorado

August Wilson

From legendary playwright August Wilson comes the powerful, stunning dramatic bestseller that won him critical acclaim, including the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. Troy Maxson is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less. This is a modern classic, a book that deals with the impossibly difficult themes of race in America, set during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Now an Academy Award-winning film directed by and starring Denzel Washington, along with Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Viola Davis.

Fences

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#paperback #africanamerican #blackamerican #diverse #international #romance #royalromance #summer #ya #arc

Truly Madly Royally ARC

West Virginia

Faye M. Smith

In her remarkable debut novel, Faye McDonald Smith gives us a portrait of American family life in the nineties that is at once startlingly realistic and superbly entertaining. In it we meet the Burkes, an upwardly mobile, attractive, near-perfect family made up of Mel, an accomplished Atlanta executive who is beloved by her friends and family; her husband Builder, a hard working entrepreneur who is also a loving husband and a wonderful father; and their twelve-year-old daughter, Sasha, an only child who is an excellent student, popular and happy. All appears well in this African-American household, whose inhabitants have pretty much achieved the American dream. But one day Mel walks into her boss's office at the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and by the time she walks out again everything has changed; she is told that the office is being downsized and that her position will be eliminated. This event triggers a downward spiral in the life of the Burke family and it soon seems that the foundation upon which their American dream has been built is not very solid. Mel and Builder begin to question everything about their heretofore seemingly idyllic lives and it is on this journey that we accompany them.

Tennessee

The difficult adjustment of an upper-middle class, black couple to a fall in their standard of living after their business collapses. He beats her, she takes off for an affair, but the marriage survives.

Flight of the Blackbird

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Zalika Reid-Benta

Set in the neighbourhood of "Little Jamaica," Frying Plantain follows a girl from elementary school to high school graduation as she navigates the tensions between mothers and daughters, second-generation immigrants experiencing first-generation cultural expectations, and Black identity in a predominantly white society.

Kara Davis is a girl caught in the middle -- of her North American identity and her desire to be a "true" Jamaican, of her mother and grandmother's rages and life lessons, of having to avoid being thought of as too "faas" or too "quiet" or too "bold" or too "soft." In these twelve interconnected stories, we see Kara on a visit to Jamaica, startled by the sight of a severed pig's head in her great-aunt's freezer; in junior high, the victim of a devastating prank by her closest friends; and as a teenager in and out of her grandmother's house, trying to cope with ongoing battles of unyielding authority.

A rich and unforgettable portrait of growing up between worlds, Frying Plantain shows how, in one charged moment, friendship and love can turn to enmity and hate, well-meaning protection can become control, and teasing play can turn to something much darker.

Frying Plantain

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David Bradley

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award

"The Chaneysville Incident rivals Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon as the best novel about the black experience in America since Ellison's Invisible Man." -- Christian Science Monitor

The legends say something happened in Chaneysville. The Chaneysville Incident is the powerful story of one man's obsession with discovering what that something was a quest that takes the brilliant and bitter young Black historian John Washington back through the secrets and buried evil of his heritage.

Returning home to care for and then bury his father's closest friend and his own guardian, Old Jack Crawley, John comes upon the scant records of his family's proud and tragic history, which he drives himself to reconstruct and accept. This is the story of John's relationship with his family, the town, and the woman he loves; and also between the past and the present, between oppression and guilt, hate and violence, love and acceptance.

The Chaneysville Incident

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In very good condition, no writing or damage inside book

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Marie Bradby

More Than Anything Else

Jayne Pettit

Maya Angelou

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Jesmyn Ward

Let Us Descend

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Debbie Rigaud

Truly Madly Royally

R. H. Sin

This Day Is Dark

Lisa McNair

Dear Denise

Joseph Earl Thomas

God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

August Wilson

Fences

Debbie Rigaud

Truly Madly Royally ARC

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Faye M. Smith

Flight of the Blackbird

Zalika Reid-Benta

Frying Plantain

David Bradley

The Chaneysville Incident

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book