Literary Criticism

"Jefferson's candor, and the courage and rigor of her critic's mind, recall a number of America's greatest thinkers. --Tracy K. Smith, The New York Times Book Review The award-winning critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. What is silence? In a series of short meditations, novelist and playwright John Biguenet considers silence as a servant of power, as a lie, as a...

'A searing, triumphant story. A testament to the tenacity of the human spirit as well as a beautiful ode to an iconic figure' IRENOSEN OKOJIE Letters to Gil is Malik Al Nasir's profound coming of age memoir - the story of surviving physical and...

Renowned novelist, poet, playwright, and literary critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was a student at a prestigious, British-run boarding school near Nairobi when the tumultuous Mau Mau Uprising for independence and Kenyan sovereignty gripped his country...

Borrowing from Romare Bearden's aesthetic palette and inspired by his Odysseus series, Bearden's Odyssey gathers, for the first time, poems from thirty-five of the most revered African diaspora poets in the United States. Poetic echoes come forth in...

Martin Luther King, Jr., may be America's most revered political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names around the world. On the fiftieth anniversary of King's assassination, the man and his activism are as close to public...

Written in the early 1960s, Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is widely considered to be the apex of the modernist poetry movement in the Arab world, a radical departure from the rigid formal structures that had dominated Arabic poetry until the 1950s...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. It's happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidized substance, showing how...

With forty million copies sold, To Kill a Mockingbird's poignant but clear-eyed examination of human nature has cemented its status as a global classic. Tom Santopietro's book Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters takes a 360-degree look at the Mockingbird...

The Desert and the Drum is the first novel ever to be translated into English from Mauritania. It won the Ahmadou-Kourouma Prize in 2016. Everything changes for Rayhana when foreigners with strange machines arrive to mine for metal near her Bedouin camp...

Many people consider Morrison's novels difficult to read. Most of her readers have at least one book on their shelves that they couldn't finish or, when they did finish one, just scratched their heads in confusion. And when we think we are sure we know...

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New England (published 1 September 1773) is a collection of 39 poems written by Phillis Wheatley, the first professional...

Included in this extraordinary volume are the poems of 43 of America's most talented African American wordsmiths, including Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Rita Dove, Natasha Tretheway, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Tracy K. Smith, as well as the work of other...

With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current...

A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events -- the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African...

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...