American English Fiction

Ananda is on her way to the top. A frail heart and mistrust of men once took her soul to the bottom. Her sassy personality is how she forges her way through life and remains in control. Until she meets the man most women's dreams are made of. Ananda can't believe she'll finally get a happily ever after - until a tawdry secret reveal splits her world in two and forces her to realize that dreams are for children, and she is a grown woman now.

Denali Peters was sure her life would never get any better. She had two children with a man who showed her with time just how impure his intentions were. At the top of her priority list was being a great mom, but working two jobs and raising her man along with their kids began to take a toll on Denali. Eventually, she realized the importance of self-care and her own happiness…but that happiness came with a hefty price.

Jun Nakayama was a silent-film star in the early days of Hollywood. By 1964, he is living in complete obscurity, until a young writer, Nick Bellinger, tracks him down for an interview. When Bellinger reveals that he has written a screenplay with Nakayama in mind, Jun is intrigued by the possibility of returning to movies. But he begins to worry that someone might delve too deeply into the past and uncover the events that abruptly ended his career in 1922. Like the changing social and racial tides in California - and the unsolved murder of his favorite director.

I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier. Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

On a snowy Christmas Eve in an unnamed American city, the archangel Michael wanders the streets. He is alone and hungry, his clothes tattered, and when he sees his face reflected in a store window, it is that of a young African American boy. Who will offer him food and shelter and who will turn him away? And when he becomes a blonde, freckle-faced child, is his fate different?

Pike Logan and Jennifer Cahill are enjoying a sunny vacation down under when they get disturbing news: their friend and colleague Clifford Delmonty is in serious trouble. While working as a contractor at an Australian F-35 facility, the former Taskforce member—callsign Dunkin—saw something he shouldn’t have, and now he’s on the run from Chinese agents. Pike and Jennifer soon discover that Dunkin’s attackers are a dangerous link to a much larger scheme that could launch a full-on conflict between China and Taiwan.

Secular humanism has triumphed. Everything the late Victorians and Edwardians believed would bring human happiness has been achieved: Technology has made it so no one needs to work for a living, the social sciences ensure a smooth-running social order, and, in the name of tolerance, religious beliefs have been uprooted and eliminated except for a single holdout - a largely discredited and rapidly shrinking Catholic Church. Yet people are unhappy.

Zane Obispo spends every day exploring the sleeping volcano in his backyard. "The Beast", as he calls it, is the one place where he can escape other kids, who make fun of him because he has a limp and walks with a cane. After a plane crashes into The Beast, a mysterious girl named Brooks shows up at Zane's doorstep, insisting that they meet at the volcano, where she will reveal a terrible secret. Zane agrees. Brooks tells him that the volcano is actually a centuries-old prison for the Mayan god of death, whose destiny is directly tied to Zane's.

Best-selling author Rick Riordan presents Kwame Mbalia's epic fantasy, a middle grade American Gods set in a richly-imagined world populated with African American folk heroes and West African gods. Tristan is dreading the month he's going to spend on his grandparents' farm in Alabama, where he's being sent to heal from a tragedy. But on his first night there, he accidentally ripps open a chasm into the MidPass, a volatile place with a burning sea, haunted bone ships, and iron monsters that are hunting the inhabitants of this world.

Here is an entirely new side of Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut as a teacher of writing. Of course he's given us glimpses before, with aphorisms and short essays and articles and in his speeches. But never before has an entire book been devoted to Kurt Vonnegut the teacher. Here is pretty much everything Vonnegut ever said or wrote having to do with the writing art and craft, altogether a healing, a nourishing expedition.

A tour-de-force debut novel about a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer young man and proud NDN glitter princess who must reckon with his past when he returns home to his reserve. “You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine” is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling debut novel by poet Joshua Whitehead.

Miss Isadora Delafield may be an heiress, but her life is far from carefree. When her mother begins pressuring her to marry an elderly and uncouth duke, she escapes from the high-society world she's always known and finds herself to be an unlikely candidate for a housekeeper position in rural Pennsylvania. Mr. Ian MacKenzie is known for his savvy business sense and has built his reputation and fortune completely on his own merits. But when his adopted parents are in need of a new housekeeper and Isadora is thrown into his path, he's unexpectedly charmed by her unconventional manner.

These days, Tre Brun is happiest when he is playing basketball on the Red Lake Reservation high school team—even though he can’t help but be constantly gut-punched with memories of his big brother, Jaxon, who died in an accident. When Jaxon's former teammates on the varsity team offer to take Tre under their wing, he sees this as his shot to represent his Ojibwe rez all the way to their first state championship. This is the first step toward his dream of playing in the NBA, no matter how much the odds are stacked against him.

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, DC, this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation's Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event - which lasted eight days and resulted in 38 deaths and almost 500 injuries - through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

No matter how tough the odds, Ricky, Derrick, and Jamal learned to unite and fight during their time at the Branch Avenue Boys' Youth Institute. But their adult lives have driven them apart - and set off a series of events their friendship may not survive. All Jamal's political achievements can't erase his bargain with DC's corrupt mayor. And when he finds himself the latest target on Mayor Johnson's hit list, he'll risk everything to end the mayor's deadly reign - even if it's the last move he ever makes.

A writer resembling Zoé Valdés - a Cuban exile living in Paris with her husband and young daughter - is preparing a novel on the life of Dora Maar, one of the most promising artists in the Surrealist movement, until she met Pablo Picasso. The middle-aged Picasso was already the god of the art world's avant-garde. Dora became his lover, muse, and ultimately, his victim. She became The Weeping Woman captured in his famous portrait, the mistress he betrayed with other mistress-muses, and their affair ended with her commitment to an asylum at the hands of Picasso's friends.

Mayme and Katie have become friends, which is unusual given that their friendship has spouted at the end of the Civil War and that Mayme is a former slave, while Katie is the daughter of a plantation owner. Both girls have been orphaned by the war, left alone on Katie's family plantation. The land is the one thing they still share, and they don't want to leave it. But if anyone finds out the two of them live there alone, they will be forced to move.

After killing Rahaab, the most powerful dragon on Earth, Steven Drokharis knew he’d have to fight to keep what he’d won, but the cabal that killed his father was just the tip of the iceberg. He’ll have to fend off a cult of shapeshifters, magical constructs, and two devious, busty, machine-gun-toting twins, all while keeping his escort of human and dragon women satisfied. Meanwhile, the eyes of ancient demons are ever searching for signs of dragons, and the deadliest threat may be close to home.

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.