African American Anthology

Jacob is an old man who has secluded himself in an apartment convinced that something is after him. As he retells strange coincidences throughout his life, maybe he's right.

Afice is the last of nine generations of women who have survived enslavement, sickness, and hunger. Alone at age seventeen, she sets out through the Louisiana swamps to follow the trail of her ancestors and hear their songs anew. On this journey, Afice must decide how to honor her ancestors while embracing her own future.

This small collection of short stories of riveting and dark plots dabbles in politics, religion, martial arts, social identity, and various other facets of life like baby farms, revealing what man proves to be when he tries! Titles include "A Cold One", "Lagos Hustle", "Cornbread, Fried Chicken, and Sauerkraut", "Rest in Peace", "Alpine Nightmare", "My Style Is Better Than Yours", "Furqaan", "Turf", and "The Part: The Re-assassination of Abe Lincoln".

Lyla’s in love with Walter and believes she will do anything to keep him—at least she thinks she will. Rhonda loves to go partying and clubbing—especially on ladies' night. When one of the male dancers comes to her table, it doesn’t end well when he returns to the stage.

"No justice, no peace!" The crowd marched through the streets, chanting as their hearts and minds are weighed down heavily. Each individual’s soul has been tattered and worn. The Black and Brown faces that make up the group all house expressions of anguish, pain, and restlessness. The words—"We the Jury, find the defendant, Tyler Mitchell, not guilty"—sting as they fall upon the ears of those who have gathered on the courthouse steps. Another White male has mercilessly taken innocent and unarmed lives. When will it end?

Framed as a reference work of humorous “entries” that offer trenchant social commentary, Everything Abridged presages a dark vision of the near future but tells jokes in the face of it: An intelligence agency operative uncovers a conspiracy to generate conspiracies and realizes his participation in the scheme. A Caribbean monarch meets four decades of American presidents and adjusts his country’s foreign policy accordingly. Experiment participants are asked to bring back a gun as quickly as possible.

Seven great new erotic stories from Dante x: "The Navigator", "Thai Wife Shared with her Friend", "Black Man Fans Theme at the Swingers Club", "Thai Wife and Friends", "Dogging and Wife-Sharing with a Friend", "A Threesome with my Ex-Wife", "The Wife and the Driving Instructor".

Eric Walrond was a singular voice of the Harlem Renaissance, and Tropic Death is his most famous work - a collection that highlights his particular strength as a writer of short fiction. Over the course of these ten stories, Walrond vividly details the punishing realities of life and labor across the Caribbean, and yet the overall effect is far from grim. These are unsentimental yet startlingly beautiful portraits of the migrant experience, full of distinctive voices striving for an audience in a seemingly implacable world.

From a single mother who gets lured into her pastor’s twisted den of lies, to a deadly revenge plot gone wrong, and an illicit affair that leaves a bloody trail of evidence, author and filmmaker N’Tyse presents Chain of Fools: Prison Bids, her most gripping, collaborative work thus far - featuring crime-of-passion tales served by best-selling authors Briana Cole, Shakir Rashaan, Brandie Davis, Erick S. Gray, and India Williams.

A young Black girl watches as her aunt’s multiple suitors disrupt her family’s privacy. The same girl, now on the cusp of adulthood, shares her family’s growing fears that her father has disappeared. Acclaimed author Ann Petry penned these and the other unforgettable narratives in Miss Muriel and Other Stories more than 70 years ago, yet in them, contemporary listeners recognize characters who exist today and dilemmas that recur again and again.

In Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone, his sixth collection of stories, John Edgar Wideman imbues with energy and life the concerns that have consistently infused his fiction and nonfiction. How does it feel to grow up in America, a nation that - despite knowing better, despite its own laws, despite experiencing for hundreds of years the deadly perils and heartbreak of racial division - encourages (sometimes unwittingly, but often on purpose) its citizens to see themselves as colored or white, as inferior or superior.

A civil rights activist and key figure in African American literary history, Alice Dunbar-Nelson made her mark during the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Violets and Other Tales is her debut (included here in full, save for three stories later updated in The Goodness of St. Rocque). The collection includes poetry, short stories, and essays offering a varied examination of class differences, racial identity, oppression, intolerance, and women’s societal roles. The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories assembles 14 of Dunbar’s short works of fiction.

On the heels of the best seller success of her novel The Wedding, Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, presents a collection of essays and stories that explore both the realism of everyday life, and the fantastical, extraordinary circumstances of one woman's life in a mythic time.

In his sharply crafted, unnerving first collection of speculative short stories, Courttia Newland envisages an alternate future as lived by the African diaspora. Robots driven by all-too-human urges set out to colonize space; Kill Parties roam the streets of a postapocalyptic world; a matriarchal race of mer creatures depends on interbreeding with mortals to survive; mysterious seeds appear in cities across the world, growing into the likeness of people in their vicinity.

A girl who believes in UFOs; a boy who might have finally found his Prince Charming; a hopeful performer who dreams of being cast in her school’s production of The Sound of Music; a misunderstood magician of sorts with a power she doesn’t quite understand. These plotlines and many more compose the eclectic stories found within the pages of this dynamic, exciting, and expansive collection featuring exclusively Black characters.

As scholars of African American literature and cultural history, Bennett and McCarthy repeatedly find themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they come across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals, whose work has been neglected and, in some cases, entirely ignored, even by those academic circles devoted to the study of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that addresses this problem by recovering archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the 19th and 20th centuries.