General Fiction

Both a deeply compelling bestselling novel and an epic milestone of American literature.   Originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - In this Pulitzer Prize-winning follow-up to The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim...

In this honest and stunning novel that inspired the award-winning major motion picture of the same name, James Baldwin has given America a moving story of love in the face of injustice.   A major work of Black American fiction. -The New...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - An official Oprah Winfrey's "The Books That Help Me Through" selection - With this brilliantly imagined novel, the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker's iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book.   A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in...

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick "A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." --Zadie...

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." Thus speaks W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls Of Black Folk, one of the most prophetic and influental works in American literature. In this eloquent collection of essays, first published...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this #1 New York Times bestseller chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon Prime Video...

A dazzling debut novel from an exciting new voice, The Mothers is a surprising story about young love, a big secret in a small community and the things that ultimately haunt us most. Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit...

In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in...

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of...

Set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, this groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction (The Atlantic).   In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and...