American Literature Anthology

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Originally published in 1938, Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of novellas, was the first book from Richard Wright, who would go on to win international renown for his powerful and visceral depiction of the Black experience. Set in the American Deep South, each of the powerful and devastating stories in Uncle Tom's Children concerns an aspect of the lives of Black people in the post-slavery era, exploring their resistance to white racism and oppression. The collection also includes a personal essay by Wright titled "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow."

Mara is teamed up with KATT, a female AI inside a super-up sports car—who is not only eager to help Mara on her missions but also eager to pleasure Mara in every way possible. Will Mara and KATT be able to stop the world's sexiest thief, Carla Santiago, and her band of beautiful criminals from committing the crime of the century? Will Mara submit to KATT's wonderfully kinky toys? And how far will she be willing to take her relationship with her new AI partner?

How does a Mexican American, the son of poor immigrants, leave his border home and move to the heart of gringo America? How does he adapt to the worlds of wealth, elite universities, the rush and power of New York City? How does he make peace with a stern, old-fashioned father who has only known hard field labor his whole life? Troncoso tells his luminous stories through the lens of an exile adrift in the 21st century, his characters suffering from the loss of culture and language, the loss of roots and home as they adapt to the glittering promises of new worlds that seem so empty.

Like Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Sidik Fofana’s electrifying collection of eight interconnected stories showcases the strengths, struggles, and hopes of one residential community in a powerful storytelling experience. Each short story follows a tenant in the Banneker Homes, a low-income high rise in Harlem where gentrification weighs on everyone’s mind. We root for these characters and more as they weave in and out of each other’s lives, endeavoring to escape from their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love.

Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.

These 13 stories by the author of The Invisible Man "approach the elegance of Chekhov" ( The Washington Post) and provide "early explorations of [Ellison's] lifelong fascination with the 'complex fate' and 'beautiful absurdity' of American identity" (John Callahan).

Culinary creator, writer and community advocate, Sohla El-Waylly selects the best twenty articles published in 2021 that celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country.

“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.

A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist, and activist. During her life, Brant’s work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering.

In Mules and Men, some of the rich cultural heritage of black America is revealed and preserved. In the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her home town of Eatonville, Florida, to collect and record the oral histories, songs, and sermons, many dating back to slavery times, that she remembered hearing as a child. These highly metaphorical folktales, "big old lies", and powerful songs helped her to recover her history, and preserve an important part of American culture.

This Accident of Being Lost is the knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love. Provocateur and poet, she continually rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization.

Two Colombian expats meet as strangers on the rainy streets of New York City, both burdened with traumatic pasts. In Cuba, a woman discovers her deceased brother’s bones have been stolen, and the love of her life returns from Ecuador for a one-night visit. A cash-strapped couple hustles in Miami, to life-altering ends.

A celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry, the five stories in Fidelity return listeners to Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and the familiar characters who form a tight-knit community within.

Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas. In Cowboy Graves, Arturo Belano - Bolaño's alter ego - returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism.

Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi and featuring some of the most acclaimed best-selling black authors writing for teens today - Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it’s like to be young and black in America. A selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List.

Comprising two distinct short novels - Monroe's Nightmare in Paradise and Bad Luck Shadow from critically acclaimed Victor McGlothin - Borrow Trouble is a hot double-feature that perfectly showcases each author's unique style.

An American cult figure, Paul Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Tobias Wolff. From “The Delicate Prey” to “Too Far from Home,” this definitive collection celebrates the Bowles’s masterful artistry in short fiction.

Around the Way Girls 10, like its predecessors, is a fast-paced look at the lives of some street-smart women who think they know it all but are about to get the lessons of their lives.

This collection is full of gritty stories of strong, spirited women who deal with everything from homicide and drugs to all sorts of turmoil - all while showing the men of the streets of Brooklyn that they are not afraid of anything. Perhaps the edgiest of all the Girls from da Hood books, this drama-filled installment follows a drug-fueled crime operation, which could put the girls and their extravagant lifestyles in permanent danger. But these girls from da hood are trying to find a way out of their troubles, by any means necessary.