Literary Criticism

Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS's American Masters.   Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as...

"Knowledge is what's important, you know? Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it." -- TONI MORRISON In this wide-ranging collection of thought-provoking interviews -- including her first and last -- Toni Morrison (whom President Barrack Obama...

This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin's 100th-year anniversary, revealing and critiquing the realities of Black life in mid-century US   Originally published in Notes of a Native Son, the essays "The Harlem Ghetto," "Journey to...

NOW A NETFLIX FILM STARRING VIOLA DAVIS AND CHADWICK BOSEMAN From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson comes the extraordinary Ma Rainey's Black Bottom--winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. The...

Introduction by Arnold Rampersad. Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in...

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history,...

The landmark book about being black in America, now in an expanded edition commemorating the 150th anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois's birth and featuring a new introduction by Ibram X. Kendi, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an...

A deluxe hardcover edition of one of James Baldwin's most admired works, exploring what it means to be Black in America and his own search for identity Part of the Beacon Classics series Originally published in 1955, James Baldwin's timeless and moving...

Toni Morrison's readers and critics typically focus more on the "what" than the "how" of her writing. In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison's expressed narrative intention of...

In Revolutionary Poetics, Sarah RudeWalker details the specific ways that the Black Arts Movement (BAM) achieved its revolutionary goals through rhetorical poetics--in what forms, to what audiences, and to what effect. BAM has had far-reaching influence,...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, this modern American classic is about family, and the legacy of slavery in America. August Wilson has already given the American theater such...

#26 on The Guardian's list of 100 best nonfiction books of all time, the essays explore what it means to be Black in America   In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African...