"Tell me what happened while there's still time," demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. Bliss's history encompasses the joys of young southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker, lovemaking in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals?

Every escapade of the pragmatic career girl is told through Lorelei’s delirious diary (complete with dicey spelling and tortured grammar). Follow along as she and her hard-boiled friend Dorothy bounce from hometown Little Rock to Hollywood, crisscross Europe from Paris to London to Vienna, and fall into the arms of flush benefactors, libidinous lawyers, and marriage-minded millionaires. 

At his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison left behind roughly 2000 pages of his unfinished second novel, which he had spent nearly four decades writing. Long awaited, it was to have been the work Ellison intended to follow his masterpiece, Invisible Man. Five years later, Random House published Juneteenth, drawn from the central narrative of Ellison’s unfinished epic. Three Days Before the Shooting... gathers together in one volume, for the first time, all the parts of that planned opus, including three major sequences never before published.

These extensive and revealing letters span the life of Ralph Ellison and provide a remarkable window into the great writer’s life and work, his friendships, rivalries, anxieties, and all the questions about identity, art, and the American soul that bedeviled and inspired him until his death. They include early notes to his mother, written as an impoverished college student; lively exchanges with the most distinguished American writers and thinkers of his time, from Romare Bearden to Saul Bellow; and letters to friends and family from his hometown of Oklahoma City.

Irene Redfield is a woman with an enviable life. She and her successful husband, Brian, share a comfortable Harlem townhouse with their sons. But everything changes on the day she encounters a long-lost childhood friend. Clare Kendry - light-skinned, charming and beautiful - tells Irene how she left behind the black neighbourhood of her adolescence and began passing for white, hiding her true identity from everyone, including her racist husband....

Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery - in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms - continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III’s seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness.

Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race - and promises to change the way we listen to American literature. Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree - and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.

The autobiographical essays in The Girls in My Town create an unforgettable portrait of a family in Los Angeles. Reaching back to her grandmother's childhood and navigating through her own girlhood and on to the present, Angela Morales contemplates moments of loss and longing, truth and beauty, motherhood and daughterhood. 

Winner of the 2009 Tony Award®, God of Carnage is a brash and hilarious exploration of human nature. After one 11-year-old is hit by another, their parents meet to find a mature resolution. As the evening wears on, the veneer of civility degenerates. What begins as protective parenting ends as an excuse to let loose the primordial beast buried in each of us.

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is one of the great untold stories of American history: the migration of Black citizens who fled the south and went north in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, an exodus of almost six million people would change the face of America. With stunning historical detail, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson gives us this definitive, vividly dramatic account of how these journeys unfolded.

On April 16, 1963, as the violent events of the Birmingham campaign unfolded in the city's streets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in response to local religious leaders' criticism of the campaign. The resulting piece of extraordinary protest writing, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", was widely circulated and published in numerous periodicals. After the conclusion of the campaign and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, King further developed the ideas introduced in the letter in Why We Can't Wait.

God is change. That is the central truth of the Earthseed movement, whose unlikely prophet is 18-year-old Lauren Olamina. The young woman's diary entries tell the story of her life amid a violent 21st-century hell of walled neighborhoods and drug-crazed pyromaniacs - and reveal her evolving Earthseed philosophy. Against a backdrop of horror emerges a message of hope: if we are willing to embrace divine change, we will survive to fulfill our destiny among the stars.

Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives an astounding portrait of this hidden phenomenon. Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste - and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today. With clear-sighted rigour, Wilkerson unearths the eight pillars that connect caste systems across civilisations and demonstrates how our own era of intensifying conflict and upheaval has arisen as a consequence of caste.

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.