T. Geronimo Johnson

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Louisiana

A riveting debut--a black Afghanistan veteran in search of his lost brother amid the chaos of Hurricane Katrina.

Hold It 'Til It Hurts

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Matthew Anderson

The Kingdom on the Waves

Sequel to the National Book Award Winner! "A novel of the first rank, the kind of monumental work Italo Calvino called ‘encyclopedic’ in the way it sweeps up history into a comprehensible and deeply textured pattern." — The New York Times Book Review Fearing a death sentence, Octavian and his tutor, Dr. Trefusis, escape through rising tides and pouring rain to find shelter in British-occupied Boston. Sundered from all he knows — the College of Lucidity, the rebel cause — Octavian hopes to find safe harbor. Instead, he is soon to learn of Lord Dunmore's proclamation offering freedom to slaves who join the counterrevolutionary forces. In Volume II of his unparalleled masterwork, M. T. Anderson recounts Octavian's experiences as the Revolutionary War explodes around him, thrusting him into intense battles and tantalizing him with elusive visions of liberty. Ultimately, this astonishing narrative escalates to a startling, deeply satisfying climax, while reexamining our national origins in a singularly provocative light.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II

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M. T. Anderson

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

The Pox Party

Various diaries, letters, and other manuscripts chronicle the experiences of Octavian, a young African American, as he is brought up as part of a science experiment in the years leading up to and during the Revolutionary War.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I

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Chris Abani

"A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new."--T. Coraghessan Boyle The sprawling, swampy, cacophonous city of Lagos, Nigeria, provides the backdrop to the story of Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator hoping to make his way out of the ghetto. Nuanced, lyrical, and pitch perfect, this is a remarkable story of a son and his father, and an examination of postcolonial Nigeria, where the trappings of American culture reign supreme.

Graceland

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Bertice Berry

A Novel

Owner of a small African-American bookshop, Miss Cozy has an unique gift: Customers who walk through her door rarely leave without a book that speaks directly to their life. But when Josephine--"Fina"--and Ross arrive in search of an obscure, unpublished manuscript written by a slave woman, Miss Cozy knows that all her visions have been leading her to this magical day.

Yet Miss Cozy has no intention of selling the manuscript--no matter the price. So she offers Fina and Ross an alternative. They can read it together at the store. It was not what they hoped for, but their interest in the extraordinary love story is about as strong as their uncanny attraction for one another . . . one they both sense runs much deeper than a kiss. In the course of a few days, Fina and Ross realize that this powerful book has special meaning for the two of them--and that the path to their shared future may be linked to something that happened more than a century ago. . . .

Redemption Song

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T. C. Boyle

New York Times bestselling author T.C. Boyle speaks to a brand-new audience in this anthology of his classic, richly imagined short fiction about teenagers. 

His many, varied novels are part of the American literary landscape--but one of the best ways to appreciate T. C. Boyle is through his richly imagined short fiction. Boyle's kaleidoscopic humor and wit, his keen, unforgiving take on American life, and his all-too-human protagonists all combine to make his a singular voice. Here is a collection of classic Boyle stories about teenagers (including the O. Henry Award-winning "The Love of My Life") that will speak directly to them, as well as to anyone who was once a teenager. Includes the previously uncollected story, "Almost Shooting an Elephant."


"Boyle repeatedly demonstrates his masterful grasp of human nature, exposing his characters' foibles and eccentricities."--Publishers Weekly 

The Human Fly and Other Stories

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Austin Clarke

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

When Mary-Mathilda, one of the most respected women of the island of Bimshire (also known as Barbados) calls the police to confess to a crime, the result is a shattering all-night vigil that brings together elements of the island's African past and the tragic legacy of colonialism in one epic sweep. Set in the West Indies in the period following World War II, The Polished Hoe -- an Essence bestseller and a Washington Post Book World Most Worthy Book of 2003 -- unravels over the course of twenty-four hours but spans the collective experience of a society characterized by slavery.

The Polished Hoe

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Eowyn Ivey

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

The Snow Child

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Tanwi Nandini Islam

For as long as she can remember, Ella has longed to feel at home. Orphaned as a child after her parents' murder, and afflicted with hallucinations at dusk, she's always felt more at ease in nature than with people. After travelling from Bangladesh to Brooklyn to live with distant family, she meets Maya, an Islamic cleric's runaway daughter, and the two embark on a summer of clandestine adventure and sexual awakenings that forces them to reckon with the past, their extended family and each other.

Bright Lines

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Julia Alvarez

At last A zesty, exuberant follow-up to the wildly popular How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, full of Julia Alvarez's keen observations and tender affection for her characters.

The Garcia Girls are back, most notably Yolanda, or Yo, who has grown up to be a writer. In the process, she has managed to get kicked out of college, break more than a few hearts, have her own heart broken many times, return for extended visits to the Dominican Republic her family fled when she was a child, and marry three times. She has also infuriated her entire family by publishing the intimate details of their lives as fiction.

The injured parties--her mother, her sisters, the Dominican cousins, the maid's daughter, her teachers, her lover, want to tell their side of the story, and Yo hands the microphone to them. Cousin Lucinda shrugs off Yo's characterization of her as a "Latin American Barbie" with "a size three soul," saying, "Looking at her in her late 30s, knocking around the world without a husband, house, or children, I think you are the haunted one who ended up living your life mostly on paper."

This brilliant novel is a full and true exploration of a woman's soul, a meditation on the writing life, and a lyrical account of the immigrant's search for identity and a place in the world. Yo 's bright colors, zesty dialogue, warm feeling, and genuine insight could only come from the palette of Julia Alvarez.

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J. M. Coetzee

A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee. His latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state. J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency. Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall, Bridge of Spies), Ciro Guerra and producer Michael Fitzgerald are teaming up to to bring J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to the big screen.

Waiting for the Barbarians

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Al Young

Loquacious ne'er-do-well and opinionated drifter Sidney J. Prettymoon, meanders around San Francisco, surviving on part-time jobs and easy-touch friends, managing touch relationships with various women, including his ex-wife, and ruminating on the attract

Sitting Pretty

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Tana French

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Faithful Place

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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Hazel V. Carby

Iola Leroy

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Marita Bonner

The Collected Works of Marita Bonner

Frye Street and Environs

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Jessie Redmon Fauset

Deborah E. McDowell

A Novel Without a Moral

Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of its most prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl from Philadelphia who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don't fade with the color of one's skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation. "This novel was Fauset's call to the community to open itself to discussion and criticism and to aggressive intellectual pursuit of knowledge and experience. That call is just as necessary today. Plum Bun is a fine example of the hidden Harlem Renaissance-- where the women were writers too." -- Marie Elsie St. Leger, Emerge "A fascinating glimpse of a now-vanished Harlem culture." -- Rosalind Warren, New Directions for Women

Plum Bun

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Alice Childress

Trudier Harris

Conversations from a Domestic's Life

Originally published: Brooklyn, N.Y.: Independence Publishers, 1956.

Like One of the Family

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Andrei Codrescu

Twenty Years of Writings from the City

For two decades NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has been living in and writing about his adopted city, where, as he puts it, the official language is dreams. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots, the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable, and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu's essays have been called "satirical gems," "subversive," "sardonic and stunning," "funny," "gonzo," "wittily poignant," and "perverse"—here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous, bohemian character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly's on Decatur, does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras, befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics, and exposes the city’s underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost. New Orleans, Mon Amour is an epic love song, a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.

New Orleans, Mon Amour

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Paulette Boudreaux

Faced with her mother's absence and father's neglect, eleven-year-old Maddy struggles to care for brothers in the Jim Crow South.

Mulberry

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Dionne Brand

Acclaimed by Adrienne Rich as "fierce, sensuous . . . a work of great beauty and moral imagination," In Another Place, Not Here tells of two contemporary Caribbean women who find brief refuge in each other on an island in the midst of political uprising. Elizete, dreaming of running to another place to escape the harshness of her daily life on the island, meets Verlia, an urban woman in constant flight who has returned to her island birthplace with hopes of revolution. Their tumultuous story moves between city and island, past and future, fantasy and reality.

In Another Place, Not Here

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Louis de Bernieres

Birds Without Wings traces the fortunes of one small community in southwest Turkey (Anatolia) in the early part of the last century — a quirky community in which Christian and Muslim lives and traditions have co-existed peacefully over the centuries and where friendship, even love, has transcended religious differences. But with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of the Great War, the sweep of history has a cataclysmic effect on this peaceful place: The great love of Philothei, a Christian girl of legendary beauty, and Ibrahim, a Muslim shepherd who courts her from near infancy, culminates in tragedy and madness; Two inseparable childhood friends who grow up playing in the hills above the town suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of the bloody struggle; and Rustem Bey, a wealthy landlord, who has an enchanting mistress who is not what she seems. Far away from these small lives, a man of destiny who will come to be known as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is emerging to create a country from the ruins of an empire. Victory at Gallipoli fails to save the Ottomans from ultimate defeat and, as a new conflict arises, Muslims and Christians struggle to survive, let alone understand, their part in the great tragedy that will reshape the whole region forever.

Birds Without Wings

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John Henrik Clarke

A Century of the Best

A new introduction complements this classic collection of stories by African Americans that features pieces by Charles W. Chestnut, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Frank Yerby, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and others. Original.

Black American Short Stories

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Tonino Benacquista

Imagine The Sopranos transplanted to the French countryside....
 
This thrillingly comic, internationally bestselling Mafia farce is the inspiration for the major motion picture The Family starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Tommy Lee Jones, and produced by Martin Scorsese.

The Blakes are newcomers to a small town in Normandy. Fred is a historian researching the Allied landings, Maggie enjoys charity work, and their kids are looking forward to meeting other teenagers at the local lycée. Or so it seems.

In fact, Fred is really Giovanni Manzoni, an ex-goodfella turned stool pigeon who's been relocated from New Jersey to France by the FBI's witness protection program. He's got a two-million-dollar bounty on his head, but he and his family can't help attracting attention (imagine the Sopranos in Normandy). And when imprisoned mobster Don Mimino gets wind of their location, it's Mafia mayhem à la Josh Bazell's Beat the Reaper, or like The Godfather as if written by Carl Hiaasen. Because while you can take the man out of the Mafia, you can't take the Mafia out of the man.

Malavita

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Cristina García

The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature

The first book of its kind, "Cubansimo!" is a vibrant glimpse into a rich culture, compiled by a bestselling Cuban-American novelist. This book is a sparkling discovery, a celebration of Cuban culture from the island to its farthest flung voices.

Cubanisimo!

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Monica Tyran

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