African Classics

On a snowy Christmas Eve in an unnamed American city, the archangel Michael wanders the streets. He is alone and hungry, his clothes tattered, and when he sees his face reflected in a store window, it is that of a young African American boy. Who will offer him food and shelter and who will turn him away? And when he becomes a blonde, freckle-faced child, is his fate different?

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was...

The ideal introduction to the genius of Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories contains ten of Hemingway's most acclaimed and popular works of short fiction. Selected from Winner Take Nothing, Men Without Women, and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, this...

The most intimate and elaborately enhanced addition to the Hemingway Library series: Hemingway’s memoir of his safari across the Serengeti—presented with archival material from the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library and with the never-before-published safari journal of...

Set against the international background of the late Victorian rich and privileged The African Millionaire is a far-fetched and farcical romp in which gullible Sir Charles Vandrift MP is slowly but steadily parted from his vast wealth by a series of confidence tricks and deceptions.

Both a revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953. Edited by his son Patrick, who accompanied his father on the safari, True at First Light offers rare insights...

“. . . a human and historical document of compelling interest.” — The Atlantic Powerful and inspirational, With God in Russia captures the heroic patience, endurance, and religious conviction of a man whose life embodied the Christian ideals that sustained him. While ministering in Eastern...

Following Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and My Freedom, this third memoir by the iconic abolitionist expands on Douglass’s time in bondage, his escape, and his reinvention as an influential statesman—providing many details that, in earlier years, would have endangered himself and others. It also offers a fascinating window into Douglass’s political activism and his connections to major American figures of the mid-nineteenth century, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, and three different US presidents.

Discover the cornerstone texts that shaped African-American literary history with this indispensable collection. Featuring three seminal works spanning the 19th and early 20th centuries—Booker T. Washington's journey "Up From Slavery", W. E. B. Du Bois' "The Souls of Black Folk" and Frederick Douglass's powerful "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass"—these iconic narratives offer profound insight into the struggle of African-Americans for equality and justice.

First published in 1962, Negroes with Guns is the story of a southern black community's struggle to arm itself in self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. Frustrated and angered by violence condoned or abetted by the local authorities against blacks, the small community of Monroe, North Carolina, brought the issue of armed self-defense to the forefront of the civil rights movement.

In this haunting historical novel, a light-skinned Black man goes undercover to investigate lynchings in the Jim Crow South, only to be confronted by the very evil that has pursued him since childhood. Clark Wendell White first encountered the Nightmare as a child during the Atlanta Race Riot of...

The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of Earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world....

For fans of Naguib Mahfouz's classic Cairo Trilogy and Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men, a beautiful and thought-provoking novel set in early twenty-first century Libya—winner of the 2022 Arabic Booker Prize—about a sensitive young man from a long line of bakers who tries to live up to...

'Dream Life and Real Life' is a haunting short story about a little orphan girl in servitude to a cruel Boer family. One night, following a beating, she runs away and hides in a cave. But there she overhears three men plotting to rob and burn down the Boer's farm and kill the family. What should she do? Warn them, or let them burn to death?

Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature because of its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through a series of vignettes, Cane uses poetry, prose, and play-like dialogue to create a window into the varied lives of African Americans living in the rural South and urban North during a time when Jim Crow laws pervaded and racism reigned.

A rediscovered "masterpiece" (Kirkus) of Black American literature first published in 1950, about an unlikely friendship in a West Virginia town After several years of seclusion in the Black quarter of Beetlecreek, West Virginia, in the precarious 1930s, a retired carnival worker named Bill...

A powerful, unsettling, and unflinching exploration that forces readers to confront lynching as a devastating legacy of white childhood conditioning, and to reckon with the corrupting force of a system that trained children to become its willing executioners Strung Up examines how the lynching...

The first-ever Black history to center queer voices, this landmark study traces the lives of LGBTQ+ Black Americans from slavery to present day Gender and sexual expression have always been part of the Black freedom struggle In this latest book in Beacon’s award-winning ReVisioning History...

In this historic memoir, Lee reflects on her life, her spiritual transformation, and her critical role in the Second Great Awakening - a movement that initiated a number of reforms. Today, it remains an important chronicle of faith and an invaluable record of a pioneer who broke through barriers of race, gender, and institutional inertia.

Inside this harrowing collection, you’ll uncover three thought-provoking and classic novels about slavery, civil rights, and the plight of African Americans before the abolition of slavery. With timeless narratives and poignant, dramatic prose, these books have stood the test of time to provide unique and moving accounts of life as a slave.