Literary Criticism

Juha is an old Arab comic literary figure (known also to Persians and Turks) around whom countless popular anecdotes were written. He appears variously as preacher and beggar, porter and petty merchant, thief and honest man, judge and social critic, wise...

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, regarded as one of literature's first counter narratives. As a classic novel written two years before Nigeria's independence, Things...

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, written during his time in Folsom State Prison in 1965. As a memoir and collection of short stories, Soul on Ice guides the reader through...

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, one of the last books to come out of British Colonization in Africa. As an autobiographical narrative of the mid-twentieth century, Out of...

In this striking anthology 40 poets from the Soul Sister Revue reading series, including Evie Shockley, Hanif Abdurraqib, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Cathy Linh Che, José Olivarez, and Patricia Smith, commemorate culture, Motown, and community, while...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Feared and worshiped in equal measure, snakes have captured the imagination of poets, painters, and philosophers for centuries. From Ice Age cave...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Why do we sign our names? How can a squiggle both enslave and liberate? Signatures often require a witness-as if the scrawl itself is not enough...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The shipping container is all around: whizzing by on the highway, trundling past on rails, unloading behind a big box store even as you shop there,...

With the same intellectual incisiveness and supple, stylish prose he brought to his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His...

You know you're fine. Plus, you have a decent job, a nice place to live. You're smart and ambitious. So, where's your man? Because you're so well pulled together and without a partner, you may have developed an attitude toward men. Believe it or not,...

A wondrous novel (New York Times) by the winner of the 2018 Alternative Nobel prize in literature (the New Academy Prize) The year is 1797, and the kingdom of Segu is flourishing, fed by the wealth of its noblemen and the power of its warriors. The...

After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he...

These poems are about revolutionaries and lovers-about how, both in revolution and in love, loss of trust and compassion robs us of hope. They are also about (and for) those few embattled souls who remain painfully committed to beauty and to love even...

A unique and comprehensive collection of 26 literary essays that provides real evidence of the rich cultural history of black women in America. Black women's writing has finally emerged as one of the most dynamic fields of American literature. Here,...

The Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, is an outstanding figure in modernAfrican literature whose works can be taken as an early literary attempt tomove toward de-colonization. What distinguishes Achebe's novels is the wayhe relies on notions of...