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"Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been 'critically acclaimed.' He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited 'some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days.' Meanwhile, Monk struggles...
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Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from...
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"In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s." "A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...
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Discover the debut novel of James Lee Burke, before the creation of his now-famous Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux , as he weaves together the struggles of three very different men. Toussaint Boudreaux, a black docker in New Orleans, puts up with his co-workers' racism because he has to, and moonlights as a prize-fighter in the hope of a better life-but the only break he gets lands him in penal servitude. J.P. Winfield, a hick with a...
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Among these biographies, readers will find aviators and artists, politicians and pop stars, athletes and activists. The exceptional men featured include artist Aaron Douglas, civil rights leader John Lewis, dancer Alvin Ailey, filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, musician Prince, photographer Gordon Parks, tennis champion Arthur Ashe, and writer James Baldwin. The legends in this book span centuries and continents, but what they have in common is that each one...
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"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...
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In a small Florida town, a young lawyer is shot to death. A young black man, a former client, named Quincy Miller is charged and convicted. For 22 years, Miller maintains his innocence from inside prison. Finally, Guardian Ministries takes on Miller's case, but the Episcopal minister in charge gets more than he bargained for as powerful people do not want Miller exonerated.
10) Mother of Pearl
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A novel on a town in 1950s Mississippi and the characters who populate it. They include a witch who communicates with the moon, an orphaned girl who writes poetry, and the men in their lives.
13) Blonde Faith
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Easy Rawlins comes home to find that a friend has left his daughter at Easy's house without so much as a note. Easy's closest friend, the man known as Mouse, has disappeared too. Mouse's wife tells Easy that he is wanted for murder. Worst of all, Easy's longtime lover tells him that she plans to marry another man.
14) The human stain
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Coleman Silk, a distinguished professor at a small New England college where he has managed over the course of fifty years to make a lot of enemies, experiences a sort of personal liberation when he is forced from his job on false claims of racism -- a charge made all the more ironic due to a secret Silk has been keeping nearly his entire life.
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In 1863, as the War Between the States creeps inevitably toward its bloody conclusion, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson ventures west into unknown territory with this wife, Mary, and their three children, searching for a life and a future. But their dreams are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the Johnsons' settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to find his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest...
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"It was the early 1900s when Obadiah (Oba) and Merriweather's (May's) parents died tragically, leaving them orphans at ten and eleven years old. When none of their nearby relations volunteer to take them in, they are set on a train to Arkansas to go live on their Amish aunt and uncle's cotton farm. Once there, it didn't take long to discover they would be treated cruelly, no matter what they did. May, always anxious to be a godly young lady, took...
17) Blackkklansman
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Ron Stallworth, an African-American police officer from Colorado, successfully managed to infiltrate the local Ku Klux Klan and became the head of the local chapter.
18) Prairie Nocturne
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Teaching voice lessons to the privileged members of society during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Susan Duff is hired by a man who once harbored political ambitions to teach his African American chauffeur how to sing.
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The man at Charles Blakey's door has a proposition almost too strange for words. He wants to spend the summer in charles's basement, and Charles cannot even begin to guess why. Charles is black and Anniston Bennet is white, and it is clear that the stranger wants more than a basement view.