African American Anthology

Set in Soweto, the urban heartbeat of South Africa, Innards tells the intimate stories of everyday Black folks processing the savagery of apartheid with grit, wit, and their own distinctive bewildering humor. Rich with the thrilling textures of township language and life, it braids the voices and perspectives of an indelible cast of characters into a breathtaking collection flush with forgiveness, rage, ugliness, and beauty.

Justin C. Key has long been obsessed with monsters. Reading R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps as a kid, he imagined himself battling monsters and mayhem to a triumphant end. But when watching Scream 2, in which the movie’s only Black couple is promptly killed off, he realized that the Black and Brown characters in his favorite genre were almost always the victim or villain—if they were portrayed at all.

With its lush settings and a taste for the unknown, Another Time, Another Place is a treat for the adventurous soul. This delicious collection, featuring five of the hottest African-American authors today, brings whole new worlds to life. Led and edited by New York Times best-selling author Zane, Another Time, Another Place transports sensuous and steamy encounters across the world and through history.

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.

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 stunning collection of fiction, diary entries, screenplays, and scripts by the brilliant African American artist and filmmaker.

Following in the successful footsteps of its predecessors, Around the Way Girls 6 features three popular authors presenting their versions of the tough, street-smart girls that everyone loves.

Sassy, sophisticated, and sensual are the three adjectives Sugar uses to define her personality, her style, and her shapely curves. Fiercely confident about her luxurious, full-figured body, Sugar sashays through Chicago’s nightlife belting high notes as a well-known singing sensation. Idolized by many, only few know her secret: She and her longtime manager, Ace, share more than a common passion for Sugar’s career - they’re lovers. At Ace’s insistence, Sugar has always agreed to secrecy for the sake of her career, but now she’s tired of hiding.

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".

Did Mark mean what Alison Lind hoped? Was her boss declaring his passion for her? Did he really feel the same way she secretly felt for him? Apparently not. Instead of asking her to be his lover, he was asking her to be temporary nanny to his baby niece. Not an ounce of desire in sight. Or was there? Living together, spending time in intimate surroundings, created a sensual tension too powerful to ignore. How long before this strictly business relationship turned into a strictly passionate predicament?

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.

In her dynamic debut, Halle Hill’s Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South. A woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy’s mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he's seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living.

The collection contains 12 provocative tales that explore the emotional and mental terrain of a diverse cast of characters, from the innocent to the insane. In each, Jones displays her unflinching ability to dive into the most treacherous of psyches and circumstances: the title story examines the identity and relationship conundrums of a Black man who can pass for white, earning him the name “White Rat” as an infant; “The Women” follows a girl whose mother brings a line of female lovers to live in their home.

A group of women contemplate violence after they’re sent into foreign territory to make husbands of the enemy. A support network of traumatized joggers meets to discuss the bodies they’ve found on their runs. And a town replaces its Confederate monument with a rotating cast of local residents. Slippery but muscular, sly but electric, this stunning debut collection moves from horror to magical realism to satire with total authority. In these stories, characters build and remake their sense of home, be it with one another or within themselves.

Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career, and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles.

Raslyn and Cameron are friends who met in college. Years have passed. Ras is now an art exhibitor giving museum tours and Camay (Cameron) pursues music as a profession. In between, a lot takes place. Their friendship is tried when Ras accepts a modeling gig to satisfy her friends' curiosity. She's a big & beautiful woman with curves in the right place. She is serious about the modeling opportunity.

Humorous, poignant, perceptive, and full of grace, Kathleen Collins' stories masterfully blend the quotidian and the profound in a personal, intimate way, exploring deep, far-reaching issues - race, gender, family, and sexuality - that shape the ordinary moments in our lives.

Bound together by shared experience but pulled apart by their changing fortunes, four young friends coming of age in the postindustrial enclave of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, struggle to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as black men in America. With potent immediacy and bracing candor, this provocative debut follows a decade in the lives of Dub, Rolls, Rye, and Gio as they each grapple with the complexity of their family histories, the newfound power of sex and drugs, and the ferocity of their desires.

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.