American English Fiction

Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep.

For months, Mitch Rapp has been steadily working his way through a list of men, bullet by bullet. With each kill, the tangled network of monsters responsible for the slaughter of 270 civilians becomes increasingly clear. He is given his next target: a plump Libyan diplomat who is prone to drink and is currently in Paris without a single bodyguard. Rapp finds him completely unprotected and asleep in his bed. With confidence in his well-honed skills and conviction of the man’s guilt, he easily sends a bullet into the man’s skull. But in the split second it takes the bullet to leave the silenced pistol, everything changes.

Ashley Antoinette, of the Ashley & JaQuavis writing duo, steps out on her own once again with the next installment of her scandalously sexy Prada Plan series! When you've been labeled crazy all of your life, it's easy to commit a murder, and now street fiction's most infamous bad girl, Leah Richards, holds the fate of an entire family in her hands. After coming insecond place to YaYa in the race to win Indie's affection, Leah decides that enough is enough and kidnaps the loving couple's baby girl.

First published in 1875, General William T. Sherman's memoir was one of the first from the Civil War and was offered to the public because, as Sherman wrote in his dedication, "no satisfactory history" of the war was yet available. Although Memoirs has been revised and corrected many times over the years, Sherman famously never changed the original text of his recollections.

Aster lives in the low-deck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations the Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster, whom they consider to be less than human.

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.

Some of the best-known and most influential pieces of crime fiction have been from African American writers. Be it Walter Mosley's great Detective Easy Rawlins, or the mean streets of Harlem at the hands of Chester Himes, the stories and characters in this anthology have shaped the mystery genre with their own unique viewpoints and styles. Contributors to the collection include Robert Greer, Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Cary Phillips, Frankie Bailey, and Richard Wright.

Leah's crazy scheming has finally paid off. Now that YaYa is out of the picture, Leah has everything she's ever wanted. She steps into YaYa's shoes, and now she has money, family, and, most importantly, she has Indie. She's the queen of his empire, and no one suspects a thing. There's only one problem: Disaya Morgan isn't dead. Newly initiated into a powerful circle of women, YaYa is out for blood, and when she comes gunning for her spot, the streets will never be the same.

With his mother in jail, Sequoyah, a 15-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his unstable upbringing, Sequoyah has spent years mostly keeping to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface - that is, until he meets the 17-year-old Rosemary, another youth staying with the Troutts. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American backgrounds and paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah's feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.

Yoshi is young, fine, and larcenous. She lives her life playing on men's hearts as well as their pockets. But she learns the hard way that all that glitters isn't gold. Billy, a former high school basketball star, is at the end of her rope with the opposite sex. To her, all men are dogs, so she secretly seeks comfort in the arms of women - until she meets a man who makes her reevaluate her feelings.

Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

Sister Carrie is about a young country girl who moves to the big city, where she begins to realize her own American Dream by embarking on a life of sin rather than hard work and perseverance. At the time of its first publication, the novel caused a minor scandal, and Dreiser had difficulty finding a publisher for it. This was due to its blurred division between good and bad and the fact that, at the end, Carrie is rewarded rather than punished for her immoral life.

Taught by her drug-addict mother to get hers by any means necessary, Tionna's heart is cold, but she holds a warm place in it for Duhan, the father of her two sons, her on-again-off-again boyfriend since they were teenagers, her knight in shining armor. But with Dunham behind bars and everything she loves seized, she finds herself starting over in the same neighborhood that she swore she'd never return to.

Eighty centuries ago, in the frozen land that is now Alaska, a clubfooted male child had been left to die, when a woman named K’os rescued him. Twenty years later and no longer a child, Chakliux occupies the revered role as his tribe’s storyteller. In the neighboring village of the Near River people, where Chakliux will attempt to make peace by wedding the shaman’s daughter, a double murder occurs that sends him on a harsh, enthralling journey in search of the truth about the tragic losses his people have suffered, and into the arms of a woman he was never meant to love.

In this shocking novel of a young girl alone on the streets, Donald Goines delves into yet another facet of the ghetto experience - the dark, despair-ridden world of a black girl's soul.

Sandra took to the streets when she was eight years old and tried to fight off the hunger pangs by shoplifting and moving into the profits of drug pushing. Then she met Chink, and with him she discovered love and affection...as well as rape and murder.

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale.

A Zuni Indian boy dies in a bizarre ritual slaying - and his best friend, a Navajo youth, is missing. Navajo police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn tracks the friend from Zuni village to Navajo hogan, from anthropological dig to hippie commune, across the desert of New Mexico and Arizona.

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People". His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian.

Dark figures in the night. An owl's cry on the wind. Monsters watching from the edge of the wood. Some of the creatures in this book might only have a message for you, but some are the stuff of nightmares. These 32 short stories - from tales passed down for generations to accounts that could have happened yesterday - are collected from the thriving tradition of ghost stories from American Indian cultures across North America. Prepare for stories of witches and walking dolls, hungry skeletons, la llorona, and deer woman, and other supernatural beings ready to chill you to the bone.

Travel back to a small Southern town where, before there was Duncan Motors, there were the Duncan brothers: Louis, aka Sweet Lou, a lover of ladies and life and a man you did not want to cross; Lawrence, aka Larry, a screw-up as attracted to trouble as it was to him; and Lavernius, better known as LC, the soft-spoken college boy who simply wanted to sell cars.