African American category: 7736 books

“A funny, fresh novel about growing up African-American in 1960s Chicago” by an author who “writes like Terry McMillan’s kid sister” (Entertainment Weekly). In this hilarious and insightful coming-of-age novel, author April Sinclair introduces the charming Jean “Stevie” Stevenson,...

A new edition of Alice Childress’s classic novel about African American domestic workers, featuring a foreword by Roxane Gay First published in Paul Robeson’s newspaper, Freedom, and composed of a series of conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge, Like One...

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection   James Baldwin’s commanding prose remains as pressing in its compassionate portrayal of marginalized figures today as it was during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement.   In “Come Out the Wilderness,” an essential and tremendous classic...

A shining star of the Harlem Renaissance movement, Langston Hughes is one of modern literature's most revered African-American authors. Although best known for his poetry, Hughes produced in Not Without Laughter a powerful and pioneering classic novel. A fascinating chronicle of a family's joys and...

At an early age Jasmine Johns's lifelong ambition is to become a nurse. When she turns eighteen years old and preparing to begin her college career, she meets Paul Shelton, a suave African-American businessman-entrepreneur, who is juggling a legitimate and successful restaurant and a questionable...

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play It is the spring of 1948. In the still cool evenings of Pittsburgh's Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. The laughter of...

The extraordinary writings of Phillis Wheatley, a slave girl turned published poet In 1761, a young girl arrived in Boston on a slave ship, sold to the Wheatley family, and given the name Phillis Wheatley. Struck by Phillis' extraordinary precociousness, the Wheatleys provided her with an education...

Instead of one black America, today there are four. “There was a time when there were agreed-upon 'black leaders,' when there was a clear 'black agenda,' when we could talk confidently about 'the state of black America'—but not anymore.” —from Disintegration The African American...

A preeminent sociologist of race explains a groundbreaking new framework for understanding racial inequality, challenging both conservative and liberal dogma. In this timely and provocative contribution to the American discourse on race, William Julius Wilson applies an exciting new analytic...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An explosive and absorbing discussion of race, politics, and the history of American sports.”—Ebony From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired...

The author of A Stone of Hope, called “one of the three or four most important books on the civil rights movement” by The Atlantic Monthly, turns his attention to the years after Martin Luther King’s assassination—and provides a sweeping history of the struggle to keep the civil rights movement...

Informed and driven by his experience as an upper-middle-class African American who lives and works in a predominately white environment, provocative author Lawrence Otis Graham offers a unique perspective on the subject of race. An uncompromising work that will challenge the mindset of every reader,...

Here in one omnibus edition are Booker T. Washington's most important books. Washington was constantly, and often bitterly, criticized by his contemporaries for being too conciliatory to whites and not concerned enough about civil rights. It would not be until after his death that the world would...

I have never been particularly interested in slavery, perhaps because it is such an obvious fact of my family's history. The fact that I am descended from slaves is hard to acknowledge on a day-to-day basis, because slavery does not fit with my self-image. Perhaps this is because I am pretty certain...