Cultural Literature

Critically acclaimed historian of slavery in the Americas The Reckoning offers the first rounded account of the rise and fall of the Second Slavery--largescale plantation slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, Cuba and the US South. Robin Blackburn shows...

Honor Titus (born 1989) is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. A self-taught painter, Titus is deeply influenced by his creative past as a musician and poet. Titus's paintings, often suffused with a sense of romance, are embedded with...

In this searing, honest memoir, a Black queer emergency-room nurse works the front lines of care during COVID-19."Can I have a white nurse?" the patient asked Britney Daniels."Sorry ma'am," Britney replied, "we are fresh out of white nurses."Britney...

An unforgettable memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents. When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom...

"Profound and revelatory, Racial Innocence tackles head-on the insidious grip of white supremacy on our communities and how we all might free ourselves from its predation. Tanya Katerí Hernández is fearless and brilliant . . . What fire!"--Junot Díaz The...

As a cultural and political commentator, Stanley Crouch in unapologetically contentious and delightfully iconoclastic. Whether he is writing on the uniqueness of the American South, the death of Tupak Shakur, the O.J. Simpson verdict, or the damage done...

A new offering from the author of the hugely successful Mother of Black Hollywood.Walking in My Joy is a collection of electric stories by the one and only, super hilarious Jenifer Lewis. Her commentary on what's happening in the world today, told...

"When we speak of our origins, that which made us, we speak of our roots. We acknowledge how our identities are intertwined with land, whether it's the one we are standing on or another we lay claim to." Unearthed is the story of how Claire Ratinon found...

On the themes found in the work of Lorraine O'Grady: Black female subjectivity, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, music, and translation. Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? is the fourth book in the annual series A Series of Open Questions...

Discover a Better Standard of ExcellenceYou're not good enough. How many of us internalize this belief before we even reach adulthood? How many of us feel unworthy and unable to live up to what seem like impossible-yet-completely-arbitrary standards?...

A kaleidoscopic account of the crack cocaine era and a community's ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic   The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the...

The New Yorker, Best Books of 2022 Vanity Fair, Best Books of 2022 Booklist, Best Books of 2022 Singer. Actress. Beauty. Spy. During WWII, Josephine Baker, the world's richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France. ...