Fiction

With Trouble in Queenstown, Delia Pitts introduces private investigator Vandy Myrick in a powerful mystery that blends grief, class, race, and family with thrilling results. Evander "Vandy" Myrick became a cop to fulfill her father's expectations. After...

"A canonical collection, splendidly and sensitively edited by Rudolph Byrd."-Henry Louis Gates, Jr. One of the leading voices of the Harlem Resaissance and a crucial literary figure of his time, James Weldon Johnson was also an editor, songwriter,...

From one of the greatest writers of the modern era, an intimate and essential collection of personal essays on home, identity, and colonialism Chinua Achebe's characteristically eloquent and nuanced voice is everywhere present in these seventeen...

Exuberant and heart-warming, J. California Cooper is the embodiment of the simple folk tradition in black writing associated most often with Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. The author of seventeen plays and two novels, it is her stories of black...

A woman's journey back home takes her life in a new direction in this inspirational New York Times bestseller from the author of Brothers and Sisters. Maxine McCoy's life is going just fine. She's the executive producer of a popular talk show, married...

A crime would bring them together, grief would bind them and love would make them famous.   Parish "Pain" Wells is a man freshly reintroduced to society, after serving time in state prison. Prior to his fall, Pain had been a heist man who showed...

The "revelatory" (The New York Review of Books) story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home. Jamaica Kincaid's first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate chauffeur who makes his...

An explosive and emotional story of four siblings--each fighting their own personal battle--who return home in the wake of their father's death in order to save their family's home from being sold out from under them, from the author of One Summer in...

In one of the best-loved volumes of her work, J. California Cooper tells exuberant tales full of wonder at the mystery of life and the hardness of fate. Awed, bedeviled, bemused, all of Cooper's characters are borne up by the sheer power of life itself.

Albert French lights up the monstrous face of American racism in this harrowing tale of ten-year-old Billy Lee Turner, who is convicted and executed for murdering a white girl in Banes County, Mississippi, in 1937. Constructed in a series of powerfully...