Literary Criticism

The Goddess of Beauty is an exciting new children's book that takes you on a journey to ancient Africa where Goddess Oshun is loved and admired by everyone for her inner and outer beauty. When a young insecure girl on the island of Trinidad runs away...

The Ghosts of Birds offers thirty-five essays by Eliot Weinberger: the first section of the book continues his linked serial-essay, An Elemental Thing, which pulls the reader into "a vortex for the entire universe" (Boston Review). Here, Weinberger...

Paule Marshall, the highly acclaimed author of the classic Brown Girl, Brownstones, returns to a Brooklyn setting in this moving and revelatory story of jazz, class, and family conflict over four generations. In 1949, Sonny-Rett Payne, a jazz pianist,...

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison's literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964),...

Nestled on the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, the city of Khartoum has, for two centuries, been a focal point for both imperialism and rebellion, a breeding ground for revolutionary fervor, begrudging target for international criticism, and a...

"The claim of The Black Poets to being... an anthology is that it presents the full range of Black-American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is the root and inspiration of later,...

Compelling evidence that the events of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey took place in the Baltic and not the Mediterranean - Reveals how a climate change forced the migration of a people and their myth to ancient Greece - Identifies the true geographic sites of...

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...