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Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the 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 70 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....
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Pub. Date
2020.
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"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,...
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Poet Maya Angelou chronicles her early life, focusing on her childhood in 1930s rural Arkansas, including her rape at the age of five, her subsequent years of muteness, and the strength she gained from her grandmother and Mrs. Bertha Flowers, a respected African-American woman in her town.
5) Passing
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A NETFLIX BOOK CLUB PICK
Nella Larsen's powerful, thrilling, and tragic tale about the fluidity of racial identity that continues to resonate today. A New York Times Editors’ Choice. Now a major motion picture starring Tessa Thompson and Alexander Skarsgård
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant,...
Nella Larsen's powerful, thrilling, and tragic tale about the fluidity of racial identity that continues to resonate today. A New York Times Editors’ Choice. Now a major motion picture starring Tessa Thompson and Alexander Skarsgård
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant,...
Author
Description
First published in 1930, "Not Without Laughter" is the debut novel by Langston Hughes and a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical tale of an African-American family in rural Kansas. Langston Hughes, born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, spent much of his youth in Lawrence, Kansas and it is here that he set his first novel. "Not Without Laughter" tells the story of young Sandy Rogers as he grows from a boy to a young man and focuses on his "awakening...
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This volume includes all three of the author's dramatic, fast-paced novels about the Banks sisters.
The Banks sisters: Meet the Banks sisters--Simone, Bunny, Tallhya, and Ginger. The four beauties are living under the same roof, but they can't stand each other. Their only common denominator is their loving grandmother, Me-Ma. When she's not at work trying to make ends meet, she's home with her girls, trying to keep them from killing each other. Tragedy...
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"From acclaimed author Marita Golden comes a moving African-American family drama of love and devotion in the face of Alzheimer's disease. You just can't plan for this kind of thing. Diane Tate certainly hasn't. She never expected to slowly lose her talented husband to the debilitating effects of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. As a respected family court judge, she's spent her life making tough calls, but when her sixty-eight-year-old husband's...
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Eliza Harris, a slave whose child is to be sold, escapes her beloved home on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky and heads North, eludes the hirded slave catchers and is aided by the underground railroad. Another slave, Uncle Tom, is sent "down the river" for sale and ultimately endures a martyr's death under the whips of Simon Legree's overseers.
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"An updated edition of a classic African American autobiography, with new supplementary materials. The preeminent American slave narrative first published in 1845, Frederick Douglass's Narrative powerfully details the life of the abolitionist from his birth into slavery to his escape to the North in 1838. Douglass tells how he endured the daily physical and spiritual brutalities of his owners and drivers, how he learned to read and write, and how...
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"A harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American historyBorn a free man in New York, Solomon Northup was abducted in Washington, D.C., in 1841 and spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, he published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life--perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives. It became an immediate bestseller and today...
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Baby momma drama has taken over the Duncan clan in the form of a mad scramble to find out who fathered the Duncan sisters' new babies. Meanwhile Orlando Duncan, the family's new CEO, has just developed a new product that may turn the millionaire Duncans into billionaires. Orlando only faces one obstacle, and it's not the law or a rival. It's his mother, who may be his most formidable opponent yet because she's making the family take sides.
13) Lost daughters
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When her new husband Mel and her daughter Lorretta, an aspiring model, run off together, claiming they are in love, Maureen Montgomery must confront her tragic past to find the strength to overcome this devastating betrayal and make a new life for herself that is all her own.
14) The help
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In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another.
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Pub. Date
2012
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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...
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Best friends Lola Poole and Joan Proctor-Riley find the escape they've longed for by online-dating no-strings attached lovers. The hotter their secret activities get, the more reckless they become. Rugged trucker Calvin Ramsey is kind and responsible, and delivers sexual healing like Lola has never known. What Lola doesn't know is that Calvin loves women to death.
17) One house over
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"A solid marriage, a thriving business, and the esteem of their close-knit Alabama community--Joyce and Odell Watson have every reason to count their blessings. Their marriage has given well-off Joyce a chance at the family she's always wanted--and granted Odell a once-in-a-lifetime shot to escape grinding poverty. But all that respectability and status comes at a cost. Just once, Joyce and Odell want to break loose and taste life's wild side, without...
18) Bad blood
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"For Seth Garrett, there's no such thing as too rich or too beautiful. His family taught him that anything less than the best simply isn't an option. Now he's out to prove he can be the most successful Garrett--and Rachel McNeal fits the bill. She's pretty, hard-working, good in bed--and willing to finance his dreams. He thinks she's perfect wife material--until he meets her relatives and discovers they're far from perfect. No problem, Seth's got...
19) Over the fence
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Alabama, 1937. Bootlegging was Milton and Yvonne Hamilton's ticket out of poverty, prison time, and plain bad luck. Now they've moved on--to a bigger, richer pool of clientele--right in their own respectable new middle-class backyard. And their growing friendship with seemingly-perfect couple Joyce and Odell Watson is proving golden in more ways than one. As Milton soon learns, Odell is hiding an outside family and dubious business dealings. It's...
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Pub. Date
2018.
Description
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...