Literary Criticism

"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...

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race--and promises to change the way we read American literature. Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and...

Rich continues: Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents...

James Baldwin's critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, and police brutality to a new generation of readers.   Available for the first time in a stand-alone...

Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin   "I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only." When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy...

Featuring 117 full-color photos and eight breathtaking essays on a force that fuels Black life all around the globe, this is Humans of New York meets The Black Book "A patchwork quilt of visually stunning images, captured moments of triumph, antidotes...

Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible...

"Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . . Race is the story of my...

A recently discovered collection of folktales celebrating African American oral tradition, community, and faith...”splendidly vivid and true.”--New York Times Every Tongue Got to Confess is an extensive volume of African American folklore that...

In this dazzling anthology (Publishers Weekly), Daryl Cumber Dance has collected the often hard-hitting, sometimes risqué, always dramatic humor that arises from the depth of black women's souls and the breadth of their lives. The eloquent wit and...

A scalding, uplifting, sorrowful, and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater, The Amen Corner is a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons. In his first work for the...

This omnibus edition collects celebrated poet and activist Nikki Giovanni's adult prose: Racism 101, Sacred Cows and Other Edibles and seven (7) selections from Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black...