Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 216
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
#ReadInColor: Black Main Characters
10 to Try - The Book Was Better
African American Authors
More Lists...
10 to Try - The Book Was Better
African American Authors
More Lists...
Description
"The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning nearly thirty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity.--from...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates, boldly and brilliantly, African-American culture and heritage....
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father, a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man, has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey, first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of...
6) Copycat
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
"Befriending Traci Calloway Cole is the best thing Simone Phillips has ever done. Traci is the kind of woman Simone wants to be-in every way possible. She begins copying her role model. Not because she wants to be Traci. She just wants to be exactly like Traci. Traci doesn't worry, though. She knows Simone doesn't mean any harm and that her mimicry is only sincere admiration. Until she discovers how far Simone's obsession has gone."--
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for television. The Awkward Black Man collects seventeen of Mosley's most accomplished short stories to display the full range of his remarkable talent. Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories-heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE * AMAZON'S TOP 20 HISTORY BOOKS OF 2023 * B&N BEST OF EDUCATIONAL HISTORY * THE ROOT'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023 * CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023
From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences
...Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...
Author
Language
English
Description
The Mothers meets An American Marriage in this dazzling debut novel about mothers and daughters, identity and family, and how the relationships that sustain you can also be the ones that consume you. The Butler family has had their share of trials, as sisters Althea, Viola, and Lillian can attest, but nothing prepared them for the literal trial that will upend their lives. Althea, the eldest sister and substitute matriarch, is a force to be reckoned...
14) Nightcrawling
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"A dazzling, unforgettable novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system-a debut that announces a blazingly original voice. Kiara Johnson and her brother Marcus are barely scraping by in a squalid East Oakland apartment complex that calls itself, optimistically, the Royal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus...
16) Mrs. Wiggins
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"The daughter of a prostitute mother and an alcoholic father, Maggie Franklin knew her only way out was to marry someone upstanding and church-going. Someone like Hubert Wiggins, the most eligible man in Lexington, Alabama--and the son of its most revered preacher. Proper and prosperous, Hubert is glad to finally have a wife, even one with Maggie's background. For Hubert has a secret he desperately needs to stay hidden. And Maggie's unexpected charm,...
Author
Pub. Date
2012.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for...
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 206
Language
English
Description
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction.
19) A mercy
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith.
20) Ruby: a novel
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Ephram Jenkins has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, "the kind of pretty it hurt to look at," is already quite damaged, but Ephram is forcibly drawn to her. As soon as she becomes a young woman and has any power of her own, Ruby flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York City. Years later, when a funeral forces her to return...
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request