Literary Criticism

One of the most provocative and original voices in contemporary literature, Chinua Achebe here considers the place of literature and art in our society in a collection of essays spanning his best writing and lectures from the last twenty-three years. For...

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 Encyclopedia of Black Comics, focuses on people of African descent who have published significant works in the United States or have worked across various aspects of the comics industry. The book focuses on creators in the field of comics: inkers,...

This close study of the first six novels of Toni Morrison--The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz--situates her as an African American writer within the American literary tradition who interrogates national identity and...

By the time of her death, at the tragically young age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of...

Easy Rawlins is on the verge of losing everything--until he gets an offer from the FBI that he has no choice but to accept. For most Black Americans, the 1960s were times of hope. For former P.I. Easy Rawlins, Los Angeles's mean streets were never...

"Dispels the myth that people of color are somehow predisposed to poor health, blaming systemic injustice in the health care system." --New York Times Book ReviewLegendary comedian D.L. Hughley uses his "hilarious yet soul-shaking" (Black Enterprise)...

An expansive lexicon of words, terms, concepts, and ideas that takes the multiplicity of Black life as its point of departure. Thinking from Black: A Lexicon is an unusual reference book. Its contributors--the Practicing Refusal Collective--are visual...

Scholars and critics have long understood the writing of nineteenth-century Black women as critiquing the figure of Topsy, an enslaved girl in Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Many interpret the works of authors such as...

With clear, conversational prose, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's writings on translation. Through his many critically acclaimed novels, stories, essays, plays, and memoirs, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa...

A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work. As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science...

"An engaging, introspective view of poet Langston Hughes and curates a compelling narrative of Hughes as an activist, advocate, and champion of justice through his poetry." --Library Journal "By resisting a sanitized version of Hughes, My America...