American English Fiction

To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Ray Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.

A domineering force in Miami’s volatile criminal underworld, Brad Black is respected. Feared. His deadly accurate trigger finger and indestructible persona has earned him his intimidating reputation and, up until six months ago, hookers, drugs, and protecting the Black empire was the sum of his life’s purpose. Until he saved her.

The final novel from Richard Wagamese, the best-selling and beloved author of Indian Horse and Medicine Walk, centres on an abused woman on the run who finds refuge on a farm owned by an Indigenous man with wounds of his own. A profoundly moving novel about the redemptive power of love, mercy, and compassion - and the land's ability to heal us.

The compelling account of how two heritages united in their struggle to gain freedom and equality in America. The first paths to freedom taken by runaway slaves led to Native American villages. There, black men and women found acceptance and friendship among our country's original inhabitants. Though they seldom appear in textbooks and movies, the children of Native and African American marriages helped shape the early days of the fur trade, added a new dimension to frontier diplomacy, and made a daring contribution to the fight for American liberty.

“Short stories have to accomplish a nearly impossible magic trick: to introduce a world often much stranger than our own and make you care about it in a matter of pages,” writes R. F. Kuang in her introduction. “The most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird.” The stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 are brimming with bizarre and otherworldly premises.

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial even proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world. Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger.

Jaylin and Nokea Rogers have been married for almost four years. Jaylin has finally tamed his womanizing ways, and they're happily raising their children together. Things couldn't be more perfect, until an unforgettable kiss from Nokea's past has her wondering what could - or should - have been. The tender kiss was placed on her lips by Jaylin's best friend, Shane, and when Nokea is forced to spend a night alone with him, the unthinkable happens.

Small-business owner and financial advisor Samiyah Manhattan is mourning the death of her six-year marriage when she vows never to trust men again. Alone at a local bar, Samiyah attempts to put her situation in perspective when she is drawn inexorably to the presence of a nearby patron. Celebrity ex-boxer and heavyweight champion turned business mogul Jonas Alexander Rose never takes women too seriously. They only attach themselves to him because of his star-studded status. However, when he meets the beautiful Samiyah Manhattan, Jonas is overwhelmed by the heated attraction.

Born into a magical Cree world in snowy Northern Manitoba, Champion and Ooneemeetoo Okimasis are all too soon torn from their family and thrust into the hostile world of a Catholic residential school. Their language is forbidden, their names are changed to Jeremiah and Gabriel, and both boys are abused by priests. As young men, estranged from their own people and alienated from the culture imposed upon them, the Okimasis brothers fight to survive. Wherever they go, the Fur Queen - a wily, shape-shifting trickster - watches over them with a protective eye.

Joe doesn't care about politics, or what happened. The grid is down, and every day is a struggle to survive. He just knows his world went to Hell when the EMPs ended life as he knew it. Joe scrambled to hide from all of the craziness, but kept his sanity, and improved his lot in life by reading some witty survival notes that his dead grandma had left him. She'd been a prepper all her life, and she had been close to Joe. Joe grows and learns, but can he survive? Listen to this complete series to find out how a regular guy survives in a post-apocalyptic world.

In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how Black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds - the intertwinement of the mental and the physical - in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging Black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations.

In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Rebecca Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, "[W]ith so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later."

In 1809, at the age of 18, Henriette Faber enrolled herself in medical school in Paris - and since medicine was a profession prohibited to women, she changed her name to Henri in order to matriculate. She would spend the next 15 years practicing medicine and living as a man. Drafted to serve as a surgeon in Napoleon's army, Faber endured the horrors of the 1812 retreat across Russia. She later embarked to the Caribbean and set up a medical practice in a remote Cuban village, where she married Juana de León, an impoverished local.

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is the now-classic novel of two women in the 1980s; of gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women - of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Rut - -who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder.

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend. So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York.

Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are simple, ordinary people until 1939, when the Nazis invade their homeland. Providing shelter to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland is a death sentence, but Franciszka and Helena do exactly that. In their tiny home in Sokal, they hide a Jewish family in a loft above their pigsty, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen, and a defecting German soldier in the attic - each party completely unknown to the others.

From the Chelsea House Black Americans of Achievement series, this biography focuses on one of today’s most talented and popular screen stars. Denzel Washington rose to stardom, won an Academy Award, and was named one of the most popular movie stars in 1998.

Business lately has been deadly for Ike Kelly. Recent unexpected gunplay has left his agency to a single operative. John Henry Cole is that operative. Kelly has received a letter from former lover Lydia Winslow, who operates an escort service in the new mining camp of Deadwood in Dakota Territory. "Three young women have been murdered since they arrived in camp." It is obviously a dangerous assignment, and Cole is advised that he must take every precaution - as if he needed such advice.

Finnegans Wake is the greatest challenge in 20th-century literature. Who is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker? And what did he get up to in Phoenix Park? And what did Anna Livia Plurabelle have to say about it? In the rich nighttime and the language of dreams, here are history, anecdote, myth, folk tale and, above all, a wondrous sense of humor, colored by a clear sense of humanity. In this exceptional reading by the Irish actor Barry McGovern, with Marcella Riordan, the world of the Wake is more accessible than ever before.

Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.