Urban African American

Raised in complete poverty, 14-year-old Banks Wales' world is rocked when his mother is murdered. If not for his best friend Mason, the son of a kingpin, Banks would be alone. One rich, the other poor, the two do their best to stay alive and navigate the murderous streets of Baltimore. There's one problem. Banks' father sees the young king's affluent lifestyle as a reminder that he is lacking as a father and a man. So he makes a vicious move. One that puts his and Banks' life in extreme danger.

It is the end of days. A nuclear strike hits New York. Alfie, a young black male, survives but with no memory of what has happened. The only thing he can remember with any clarity is how to play his guitar and a few snatches of old blues and folk songs. Another survivor, Meg, has taken refuge in the hills of Vermont, and she, too, is the victim of near absolute amnesia. Her only hope is to survive these darkest of days.

Mama Black Widow tells the tragic story of Otis Tilson, a stunning black drag queen trapped in a cruel queer ghetto underworld. In hopes of escaping the racial bigotry andeconomic injustice of the South, Otis' family journeys north from their plantation to an urban promised land. Once in Chicago, Otis and his siblings become prisoners to a wasteland of violence, crime, prostitution, and rape. This is the gut-wrenching tale of the destruction of a family and the truest portrayal of homosexuality in the ghetto ever told.

From her first days at Virginia’s Hampton University, impressionable, creative Nia falls smitten with Chris Eidos Alleyne, an athlete and a scholar. “Love is sweet nothings and beautiful promises”, Nia writes in her journal. What her girlfriends know, and her mother doesn’t, is that Chris’s expression of love is deeply physical. Wielding powerful charisma, Chris soon has Nia abandoning innocence for experience.

While Jaylin fights his battle to stay out of jail for giving Felicia a major beat-down, he also has to do what it takes to maintain his marriage to Nokea. This time, she’s skeptical about standing by her man, and when she finds out that Scorpio and Jaylin can’t quite keep their feelings under control, throwing in the towel just might be the best thing to do. Till death do us part, Jaylin confirms, as losing his wife is not an option. For everyone, Scorpio’s cravings for the one man she’ll never be able to conquer must come to an end.

Animal 4 Re-Issue featuring Bonus material. Also includes a sneak peek at Hoodlum 2: The Good Son: From the moment Animal's former lover Red Sonja showed up on his doorstep, he knew trouble wouldn't be far behind. It wasn't because the last time he'd seen her, he had been fleeing for his life from a strange island. Nor was it because of the little girl she had in tow, claiming Animal was the father. It was because women like Red Sonja carried trouble around with them like designer purses.

It started with a proposition (in a hotel bar of all places). The brooding drug lord. The beautiful damsel with jagged edges. You know the rest, right? It’s a page straight out of a hood fairy tale. But our story is far from a classic romance. Because Ahsan Patton isn’t your typical gangsta. He’s the kind that’ll order a hit then rearrange your guts to a slow jam. So, tell me why I agreed to be his fake girlfriend again?

Amber Halloway is what some would call “forbidden fruit” because she is so stunning. When her father is murdered by the local kingpin’s mob, she uses her beauty to her advantage. Step 1: Infiltrate. With the help of her older brother, Dawg, she gets a job at the biggest strip club in the city to gain the attention of the man responsible for killing her father. Step 2: Make him fall in love. Amber just never anticipated that he would be so charming. Step 3: Rob him blind and deliver the same fate as he did her father.

At the end of part two, Camarih learned a startling secret involving two men she used to love. What she doesn't know is that the messenger is harboring another shocking secret that they aren't quite willing to let her in on just yet. Feeling confused and overwhelmed, she turns to the only person who has had her back since her first love was murdered, even though unsure if he'd be willing to involve himself due to the circumstances. In addition to such a heavy weight, suspicious leeches resurface, ready to suck Camarih and her beau dry unless she complies with their wishes.

Look up the word "playa" in a dictionary, and you'll find a description of Jaylin "Naughty Boy" Rogers. He's always lived up to his bad boy persona, and there doesn't appear to be a woman in the world who can wash her hands of this addictive man. Now, the time has come for him to make some critical changes, or else his playing days are about to get him played.

Robyn and Aries are "The Murder Mamas", contract killers from Los Angeles who take no prisoners. It doesn't take them long to link up with Hollywood's biggest drug kingpin, who hires them to take out a snitch and a judge. But the plans backfire, and they complete only half the job. Robyn is caught and put on death row, and Aries goes on the run. She winds up in the islands, where she takes up a new life as a mother and wife and tries to forget who she once was.

Detective Houser wants nothing more than his retirement, but when a murder case involving the WMM firm lands on his desk, he can’t avoid it. All of law enforcement knows that WMM Advertising, also known as We Make Millionaires, is one of the biggest and hardest-to-penetrate fraudulent telemarketing firms in the state of Georgia. A tape recording of a man’s death may finally help Houser make a case against the firm. Calling in Alexis Greenspan, a.k.a. Nina Coles, the top sales associate in the company, Houser is determined to use her to find out the company’s secrets.

Las Vegas: a city built on obscene wealth and corrupt deals, cunning entrepreneurs, and the ruthless mob. The Cartel's plan to open a casino will rake in cash, but it comes with great sacrifice. The stakes have never been this high, and the rules of the game have never been this hard to manipulate. And when one dead girl, one scorned wife, and one hole in the desert launch a chain of catastrophic events, the Cartel is sent on a downward spiral as they battle the Arabian mob and fight traitors within their circle.

At the time of its publication, Wallace Thurman’s debut novel was deeply provocative. This was due not only to its frank considerations of race and sex, but also to its vivid portrait of a Harlem that few other writers had dared to explore. At the heart of this journey into new terrain is Emma Lou Morgan, a Black woman who leaves her “color-struck” Idaho hometown behind and strikes out, first for Los Angeles and later for Harlem—where, unfortunately, discrimination simply takes on a new form.

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.

In Making the Second Ghetto, Arnold Hirsch argues that in the post-depression years Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation. Hirsch shows that the legal framework for the national urban renewal effort was forged in the heat generated by the racial struggles waged on Chicago's South Side.

Azu Wilson gave his oldest daughter the name Snow because she was born amongst his snowfall on the city of Gary, Indiana in 2001. Then, Azu had just began to drop tons kilos of coke on the city, starting the birth of his empire. Fast forward 18 years later, Snow is Azu's favorite girl and only daughter. She has been doted on by her father. Now, she is off to college with her best friends, Tristan and Bae. They hope that their move out of the violent streets of Chicago to Tallahassee will bring positive change to the brutally savage lives they have lived.

In 1983 Chicago elected Harold Washington as the city's first black mayor. This is the story of Washington's improbable victory over Jane Byrne, heir to the late Richard J. Daley's political empire, and over Daley's eldest son. It's the story of a coalition outside the party's mainstream coming to power and ruling in the country's most political of cities. In Fire on the Prairie, Gary Rivlin reveals the personalities and philosophies of those who were at the center of events, from black separatists such as Lu Palmer to community organizers such as Jesse Jackson....

A birder strolling in Central Park. A college student lounging on a university quad. Two men sitting in a coffee shop. Perfectly ordinary actions in ordinary settings—and yet, they sparked jarring and inflammatory responses that involved the police and attracted national media coverage. Why? In essence, Elijah Anderson would argue, because these were Black people existing in white spaces. In this book, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level.

As a painter travels the world and creates his art, he also mourns the death of his queen, his wife. He is secluded from the world and finds an escape through the drawings in his work. Not until he gets an unexpected knock at his door does his life take a drastic turn. The guest presents a problem that traps them inside of a home for 72 hours and this quiet suburban estate becomes the devil’s playground. The painter is then thrown into a psychological game that has twists and turns, which leads to an unforeseeable ending.