Literary Criticism

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...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In an election year, political signs can be impossible to avoid. They're in front yards, on bumper stickers, and in some places you might never...

The Tales Of Miles Grey goes deep into many real-life challenges faced in inner-city Brooklyn. Through the experiences of this young man trying to break free of his rough environment, light is shed on the impact fathers and mentors hold in becoming the...

With this appreciation of three very different black writers, novelist Darryl Pinckney reminds us that marginal or neglected literary figures have a lot to tell us about the history of a people who are always outsiders. Born in Jamaica in 1883, J. A...

Poetry. OUR ONE-WAY STREET is a series of poetic snapshots of a working-class neighborhood and its quirky inhabitants. Schumejda zooms the lens in and out on herself as well as neighbors trying to make it through the day in hopes of a better tomorrow...

This first volume of poetry established Walker as a poet of unusual sensitivity and power. All of the poems in this collection were written either in East Africa, where Walker spent the summer of 1965, or during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College...

Within a rich cultural and political context, Miller proposes that as the centuries turned and the nation became more diverse, the great Chicago Renaissances-especially the literary and cultural ones-never really ended. The nation's cities simply became...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our...

In meditative and passionate prose, these provocative essays explore feminist, environmental, and political issues and shed new light on racial debates, including the controversy surrounding Walker's bestseller, The Color Purple.

Frederick Douglass's fluid, changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in the many conflicting accounts he gave of key events and relationships during his journey from slavery to freedom. Nevertheless, when these differing self-presentations are...

The Limba are rice farmers living in the hills of northern Sierra Leone who have, until recently, been somewhat despised by their neighbours. Yet they possess a subtle and fascinating literature, as illustrated by this detailed study of their stories,...