Literary Criticism

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...

Following his essential writing guide, This Year You Write Your Novel, award-winning author Walter Mosley delivers an eloquent treatise on the craft of fiction writing--part writing guide, part study of the mechanics of the genre. In his essential...

An elegant biography of a prescient author whose novels portray Black women's experiences across the African diaspora Growing up in World War II-era Brooklyn among West Indian immigrants, Paule Marshall (1929-2019) was fiercely driven to become a writer,...

Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison, investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation's collective unconscious In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a...

A history of Black poets in Washington, DC, reveals how they have reflected and transformed American cultural discourseWashington, DC, has long been home to a dynamic and vibrant African American literary community, despite often being overshadowed by...

The origins and influence of Jim, Mark Twain's beloved yet polarizing literary figure "Astute. . . . Sheds new light on a much-studied character."--Publishers Weekly Mark Twain's Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd,...

A landmark book--the first complete publication of Langston Hughes's translations of thirty-three stories by eighteen Mexican and Cuban writers In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to...

In Breaking the World, Justin L. Mann argues that Black speculative fictions are an essential but overlooked archive for understanding the modern security ambitions of the United States. Foregrounding how the contemporary security state renders Black...

In Breaking the World, Justin L. Mann argues that Black speculative fictions are an essential but overlooked archive for understanding the modern security ambitions of the United States. Foregrounding how the contemporary security state renders Black...