In Jason Mott's Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott's novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour. As these characters' stories build and build...

This book presents selected writings representing a variety of perspectives on women's social issues that are highlighted in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."

Haunted and haunting, Jones's memoir tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence--into tumultuous relationships with his mother and grandmother, into passing flings with lovers,...

Twenty years after the disappearance of his father and the Ninth Legion in the mountains of Scotland, young centurion Marcus Aquila travels from Rome to solve the mystery, retrieve the lost legion's golden emblem, and restore his father's honor.

Presents an overview of African-American writers from 1746 to the present discussing their thoughts, attitudes, and experiences in a variety of genres.

A treasury of memorable verse embracing every moral from bitter protest to pure lyricism.

In the early eighties, the peaceful, reclusive life of poet and writer Alice Walker was interrupted by the appearance of three extraordinary gifts: a widely praised best-selling novel (The Color Purple), the Pulitzer Prize, and an offer from Steven Spielberg to make her novel into a film that would become a major international event. This last gift, which Walker identifies as "the knock at the door," led her into the labyrinth of a never-before-experienced...

Starting with a Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, and including many out-of-print and limited edition chapbooks and broadsides, Transblusency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka concisely illuminates Baraka's almost single-handed renovation of both the nature and form of post-WWII African American literature, and his profound influence on a generation of poets of all ethnic backgrounds.

Leonid McGill, a New York City private detective, tries to put his past life behind him. But it's not that easy when someone like Tony "The Suit" Towers expects you to do a job; when an Albany PI hires you to track down four men known only by their youthful street names; and when your 16-year-old son, Twill, is getting in over his head with a suicidal girl.