American Literature

When the dead body of a Latino woman is found in a reservoir about 50 miles north of Manhattan, with a photo of a baby in her purse nearby, the police try to determine who the child is and if it is still alive. Along with the photo, they also find a disturbing note in the purse: "Go back to your country. You don't belong here."

A bag of chips. That's all 16-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galluzzo, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad's pleadings that he's stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad's resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad's every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered.

Picking up where the suspenseful Payback with Ya Life left off, we’re plunged back into the hip-hop drama, where the men are hot and dangerous, the women know their shoes from their Choos, and they will stop at nothing to get what they want. In a game of power and intrigue where the stakes are high and the rewards are dazzling, the losers are gonna discover there’s always a price to pay.

Former "player" Terrell thinks he's got it going on. Then the past comes calling, and suddenly his best prospects are endangered.

Cashmere and Demarco are married, own three hair salons, and have a big house in Inglewood, CA, with their timid 13-year-old daughter, Dominique, but things are far from perfect or even normal. Demarco holds deep resentment toward Cashmere and wants out of the marriage. His anger toward his wife makes him unable to have a close relationship with Dominique, who looks for a father’s love elsewhere.

Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.

In this ninth installment in the award-winning and New York Times best-selling Walt Longmire mystery series, the Wyoming sheriff follows his cowboy code of ethics in a religious range war that strikes a little too close to home.

For a thousand years, Doro has cultivated a small African village, carefully breeding its people in search of seemingly unattainable perfection. He survives through the centuries by stealing the bodies of others, a technique he has so thoroughly mastered that nothing on Earth can kill him. But when a gang of New World slavers destroys his village, ruining his grand experiment, Doro is forced to go west and begin anew. He meets Anyanwu, a centuries-old woman whose means of immortality are as kind as his are cruel. Now they begin a struggle that will last centuries.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

Culture and Anarchy is a series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold, first published in Cornhill Magazine 1867-68 and collected as a book in 1869. Arnold's famous piece of writing on culture established his High Victorian cultural agenda which remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s. According to his view advanced in the book, ‘Culture [...] is a study of perfection’.

The British-born Punjabi Shergill sisters Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirnia were never close and barely got along growing up and now have grown even further apart as adults. Rajni, a school principal, is a stickler for order. Jezmeen, a 30-year-old struggling actress, fears her big break may never come. Shirina, the peacemaking "good" sister, married into wealth and enjoys a picture-perfect life. On her deathbed, their mother voices one last wish: that her daughters will make a pilgrimage together to the Golden Temple in Amritsar to carry out her final rites.

A young man painting nails at the local salon. A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant. A father who packs furniture to move into homes he'll never afford. A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas. In her stunning Giller Prize-winning debut book of fiction, Souvankham Thammavongsa focuses on characters struggling to make a living, illuminating their hopes, disappointments, love affairs, acts of defiance, and above all their pursuit of a place to make their own.

Baxter’s name isn’t George. But it’s 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he’ll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with “George.” On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days.

Blake Crystal has the best of almost everything. She's at the top of her game at work, she has four wonderful daughters, and at 50 she's more financially secure than she's ever been. In and out of the bedroom, her new younger lover takes her in breathtaking directions that force her to make decisions she never imagined.... On the surface,Alexis Crystal is an ideal daughter. As confident as she is beautiful, she can have any man or woman she wants, so she has both in her collection of bed partners.

There can be only one: one man with two loyal friends and secrets from the past that will ultimately shake up the entire hood in Chicago; one man on a mission to destroy anyone who doesn't abide by his rules, including tricky bitches who drop to their knees behind closed doors yet stand tall against him when the time comes to collect the almighty dollar; one man with enough swagger in his walk and confidence in his talk and the skills and mindset to build an empire.

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and 13-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.

Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment.

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.

A great listen for children! American Fairy Tales by L. Frank Baum includes classic stories that will keep your child riveted. In fact, it will keep the average adult entranced! The story lines and scenery created by the author are a thing of beauty. Vivid conversations between characters create an imaginary paradise your son or daughter can wander through for ages to come.

Author Naomi Chase leaves readers breathless with hearty helpings of naughty gossip and juicy scandal in her novels. Anticipating a coveted promotion, Tamia Luke will finally have the glamorous life she’s always wanted. But the sexy Dominic Archer recognizes Tamia from her days as an adult film mistress. Now Tamia will have to satisfy Dominic’s every desire in order to keep him quiet—and she’ll have to figure out how to stop her rage from becoming lust.