Literary Criticism

Two years ago, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered an unpublished manuscript, The Bondwoman's Narrative, By Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Recently Escaped From North Carolina, which turned out to be the first novel by a female African-American slave ever...

The most successful African-American playwright of his time, August Wilson is a dominant presence on Broadway and in regional theaters throughout the country. Herrington traces the roots of Wilson's drama back to the visual artists and jazz musicians who...

How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse offers a much needed corrective to the usual dry and uninspired creative writing pedagogy. The collection asks us to consider questions, such as "What does it mean to work through resistance...

Alice Walker has always turned to poetry to express some of her most personal and deeply felt concerns. She has said that her poems-even the happy ones-emerge from an accumulation of sadness, when she stands again "in the sunlight." "[This collection]...

Vivid poems of "breakdown and spiritual disarray." Writing these, Walker says, "led me eventually into a larger understanding of the psyche, and of the world." What finally marks this volume is the strong sense of change and, ultimately, of forgiveness...

The work of one of the most formidable figures in American intellectual life." -- Washington Post Book World The seventeen essays collected in this volume prove that Ralph Ellison was not only one of America's most dazzlingly innovative novelists but...

'I cannot help but see the bodies of my near ancestors in the current caravans of desperate souls fleeing from place to place, chased by famine, war and toxins. Ideas honed in slavery - of the otherness, the boorishness, the inferiority of thy neighbour...

Gilgamesh is considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, but until now there has not been a version that is a superlative literary text in its own right. Acclaimed by critics and scholars, Stephen Mitchell's version allows us to enter an...

Composed over 2,500 years, lost in the deserts of Iraq for 2,000 more, Gilgamesh presents a palimpsest of ancient Middle Eastern cultic and courtly lyrics and lore. The story of a visionary journey beyond the limits of human experience, Gilgamesh is a...

Tracy Ellison, the sizzling heroine of the bestselling Flyy Girl, returns in this razor-sharp sequel from acclaimed author Omar Tyree. From hard-knocks Philly to glamorous Hollywood, Tracy Ellison has truly walked the walk. Now twenty-eight years old and...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Public enemy. Crucial macronutrient. Health risk. Punchline. Moneymaker. Epidemic. Sexual fetish. Moral failing. Necessary bodily organ. Conveyor...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The electric candle and faux fur, coffee substitutes and meat analogues, Obama impersonators, prosthetics. Imitation this, false that. Humans have...

On a Caribbean island, the morning after a full moon, Felix Hobain tears through the market in a drunken rage. Taken away to sober up in jail, all that night he is gripped by hallucinations: the impoverished hermit believes he has become a healer,...

In her first posthumous work, the revered poet crafts a personal history of Black dance and captures the careers of legendary dancers along with her own rhythmic beginnings. Many learned of Ntozake Shange's ability to blend movement with words when her...

Six incendiary stories that reflect the rage and frustration -- and the determination to survive -- of America's disenfranchised inner-city youth Concrete Candy marks the debut of an astonishing new writer -- notable both for the authenticity and...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Coffee--it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing--the beverage, the break, the ritual--we choose to slow ourselves down...