Literary Criticism

The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage, by the New York Times bestselling author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee   Written when...

Palestine as Metaphor consists of a series of interviews with Mahmoud Darwish, which have never appeared in English before. The interviews are a wealth of information on the poet's personal life, his relationships, his numerous works, and his tragedy...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo Trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt. In this beguiling novel, originally published in Arabic in 1985, Mahfouz...

Mystic and poet Abū al-Hasan al-Shushtarī (1212-1269) remains a towering figure in North African Sufism. His verses are still well loved and often recited, and his songs are arguably the most vibrant element of Islamic Spain's cultural legacy...

Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Until now, Dunbar-Nelson has largely been viewed only in relation to...

A thrilling story about a young black male, his angry triumph over abandonment is made by committing the ultimate sin. In a tale of murder and sexuality, Heart- a southern Black college student filled with bitterness and resentment, finds in the error of...

Montreal writer Dany Laferrière became Immortal in 2015, when he was inducted into the Académie française, the highest honour in all French literature - and the first Quebecer and only second Black writer to receive such an honour. In these wide-ranging...

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title "Who will write about the way my people talk, the way my people sing?" Mary Ellen Doyle gathers and makes audible the voices arising from all of Ernest J. Gaines's fiction to date--the indelible characters who inhabit...

The perfect introduction to one of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s, featuring a career-spanning collection of poems and three of his most powerful stories. Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in...

"Undersong is a remarkable poetic document. It comprises a thoroughgoing revision of Lorde's early poems, 1950-1979, along with nine hitherto unpublished poems from that period, and an essay describing the revision process." --Adrienne Rich

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Once upon a time, the news was only 15 minutes long and middle-class families huddled around a tiny black-and-white screen, TV dinners on their...

A literary history of walking From Dickens to Zizek There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where...

A literary history of walking From Dickens to Zizek There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where...

Science has given us several explanations for how humans evolved from walking on four limbs to two feet. by product, however, is as riveting as what master storyteller Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o offers in The Upright Revolution. Blending myth and...

Through the story of the universal tree, representing the complete human being, and the four birds, representing the four essential aspects of existence, Ibn 'Arabi explains his teaching on the nature and meaning of union with God. Providing an excellent...