African American Literature Fiction

From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L: All women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the centre of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces - a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.

Trick Baby tells the story of White Folks, a blue-eyed, light-haired con artist whose pale skin allows him to pass in the streets as a white man. Folks is tormented early in life, rejected by other children and branded a "trick baby," a child conceived between a hooker and her trick. Refusing to abandon his life in the ghetto and a chance at revenge, Folks is taken under the wing of an older mentor, Blue. What happens next is unbelievable.

George Washington Carver wasn't just an inventor. He was also a botanist, a farmer, and a professor. Young listeners will discover how this teacher not only improved the way people farmed, but introduced the world to more than 300 uses for the peanut.

Continuously available in print since 1968, this novel has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture with wide circulation of the book and hotly debated film. A literary classic, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a strong comment on entrenched racial inequities in the United States in the late 1960s. With its focus on the “militancy” that characterized the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, this is the story of one man’s reaction to ruling-class hypocrisy.

Fred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up by the police after a brutal double murder and tortured until he confesses to a crime he did not commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from custody and flees into the city’s sewer system. This is the devastating premise of this scorching novel, a never-before-seen masterpiece by Richard Wright. Written at the height of his creative powers, it would see publication in Wright's lifetime only in drastically condensed and truncated form, and ultimately be included in the posthumous short story collection Eight Men.

Olivia Jones, hard-working and accomplished, has, against the odds, blazed an enviable career path in the finance world. But behind the veneer of her success, she is mourning several devastating losses and betrayals. Untethered from her life in New York City, Olivia moves to a summer home in The Hamptons. Here, Olivia finds a close-knit community of African American elites who escape New York City for the beautiful beaches of the Hamptons. Since the 1930s, very few have known about this Historically Black Beachfront Community, and the residents like it that way.

In 2003, Jay-Z retired from making music. He had made award-winning albums, founded a record label, and had his own line of clothing. He walked away, but he couldn't stop writing songs. Three years later, he was back on the charts with a hit album and the title of greatest MC of all time. Track this hip hop hero as he makes it in the music world and becomes one of the best known rappers in the world.

Richard Wright's powerful and eloquent memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance - a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate.

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews isn’t sure he’s been a good cop, but believes he’s got a shot at being a good man—if he manages to dodge the potential indictment hanging over his head and if he, from here on out, pledges allegiance to the truth. It’s a virtue the country appears to have wholly lost its grip on, but one Darren sees as his salvation. He is in the midst of remaking his life with the woman he loves when he is visited by his mother armed with a tall tale about a missing Black college student, Sera (whose white sorority sisters insist she isn’t missing at all).

Tabitha Knicely is overwhelmed with sorrow and exhaustion caring for her beloved great-aunt, whose dementia is getting worse. When her neighbor Marcus Whittington accuses Tabitha of elder neglect, he doesn't realize how his threats to have Aunt Tweet taken away add to Tabitha's pain. Then Marcus gets to know the exuberant elderly lady and sees up close how hard Tabitha is fighting to keep everything together. Tabitha finds herself leaning on Marcus more and more. And he's becoming more than happy to share her burdens.

After World War III, Earth is in ruins, and the final armies have come to a reluctant truce. Everyone must obey the law - in every way - or risk shattering the fragile peace and endangering the entire human race. Although Arika Cobane is a member of the race whose backbreaking labor provides food for the remnants of humanity, she is destined to become a member of the Kongo elite. After 10 grueling years of training, she is on the threshold of taking her place of privilege far from the fields. But everything changes when a new student arrives.

The world will never be the same! Get ready for something new, bold, sexy, and highly addictive! Stephen C. Jefferson and the first lady are prepared to pull you right into the mix. This is a new era, and things in the United States are not what they used to be. The man who now holds the keys to the Oval Office was born and raised in the rough streets of St. Louis, where he discovered how to silence his enemies by wielding knowledge and power.

When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost.

A piercingly raw debut story collection from a young writer with an explosive voice; a treacherously surreal and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it's like to be young and black in America.

"The Heroic Slave" is the only work of fiction by the eminent abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The narrative was inspired by Madison Washington, a slave on the Creole who led a rebellion on the ship in November 1841, and had it sail to Nassau in the Bahamas instead of New Orleans. The short story appeared in the collection Autographs for Freedom (1852).

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

She's smart, gorgeous, and mysterious. For business executive Nathan Carver, a man with everything, Jessica Bolton is the first woman he can't simply charm, buy, or seduce. And even before Jessica gets a taste of his luxurious lifestyle and irresistible moves, she's determined to eliminate the competition and become this handsome bachelor's one and only. But Jessica's deceptive allure is just the beginning.

It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

When a desperate woman escapes a dangerous situation and seeks refuge in Wintermoon, she finds herself irrevocably bonded to a possessive wolf shifter in this fated mates, forced proximity romance.

In this ingenious, sweeping novel, Phillip B. Williams introduces us to an enigmatic woman named Saint, a fearsome conjurer who, in the 1830s, annihilates plantations all over Arkansas to rescue the people enslaved there. She brings those she has freed to a haven of her own creation: a town just north of St. Louis, magically concealed from outsiders, named Ours. It is in this miraculous place that Saint’s grand experiment—a truly secluded community where her people may flourish—takes root.