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America is in the heart: a personal history (Classics of Asian American Literature)
By Carlos Bulosan. 2014
Memoir by Filipino poet reflecting on his life in the Philippines and America. Describes the poverty his family faced and…
the loss of family members through sickness and other events. Examines the experience of immigrants to America who are made to feel as if they are criminals. Some violence. 1946The polished hoe: a novel
By Austin Clarke. 2003
Award-winning novel set on a small Caribbean island, mid-twentieth century. Mary-Mathilda, servant and mistress of the village's plantation owner, summons…
detective Percy Stuart to confess to murder. Her nightlong statement, complicated by Percy's romantic feelings, reveals a sordid history. Explicit descriptions of sex, strong language, and some violence. 2003Nine short stories set in Hawaii featuring the nuanced voices and interior lives of housewives, mechanics, cabdrivers, aging hippies, and…
bargirls. The worlds of Pak's Hawaiians, Asian locals, and the haoles sometimes intersect and collide and other times remain parallel, but each world is haunted by the past. Whether Pak evokes shadows of World War II, the Vietnam War, the radical 60's, or the military dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan in Korea, the larger historical context looms ominously in the background. Contains explicit descriptions of sexGospel Choirs
By Derrick A. Bell. 1996
Just like the songs of a gospel choir, the pieces in this book give voice to the hardships faced by…
African Americans. Through allegorical stories and fictional encounters, dreams and dialogues, it presents fresh perspectives on the different issues that concern blacks. Despite their tough subjects, however, these stories resound with laughter and compassion and a continuing theme of Christian love.Kobo and the Wishing Pictures
By Yoshie Noguchi, Dorothy W. Baruch. 1964
Kobo is a small Japanese boy whose father paints ema, or wishing pictures, for so many customers that he finds…
no time to paint a single one for his own family-not even for Kobo, who wants one so badly to take to the shrine on Wishing Day. As the customers come and go, Kobo has a chance to observe many types of people and to consider many different kinds of wishes, none of which seems quite right for him. It is all very discouraging until, at last, he begins to get an idea, and then . . . But that is the secret of the story.In meeting Kobo and the many other interesting people in this book, the young reader is introduced to a number of the charming manners and customs of rural Japan, as well as to a number of situations that parallel those experienced by children almost everywhere. As the author expresses it in her introduction: "In this book there are many pictures of ema. We hope that the wishes shown with them, along with the story of Kobo and his family, will bridge customs and culture through our children's seeing that the children of Japan have the same human feeling of affection, of rivalry, of sadness and joy."Molecular Biology and Cultural Heritage
By C. Saiz-Jimenez. 2003
This book contains forty reviewed papers delivered at the International Congress on Molecular Biology and Cultural Heritage held in Seville,…
March 2003. It is divided in four parts, the first one presents the state-of-the-art and reviews molecular techniques applied to the study of microbial communities colonizing monuments and cultural heritage assets. Part two covers specific molecular techniques used in biodetereoration studies, part three includes an updated overview on on-going biodetereoration European Commission projects, and part four presents selected biodetereoration case studies from all over the world.The Essential Clarence Major: Prose and Poetry
By Clarence Major. 2020
Clarence Major is one of America's literary masters. He has published numerous books, from novels to poetry and short story…
collections. Among his many accolades, he was a finalist for the National Book Award and a Fulbright scholar and received the PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award. His work has been featured in many literary journals, newspapers, and magazines, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Ploughshares.Whether you've known Major's work for decades or are new to his singular style, The Essential Clarence Major offers a thrilling overview of an exceptional career, from his early groundbreaking fiction to his most recent poems. Included here are excerpts from Major's best novels, a selection of his finest short stories and poetry, more than a dozen thought-provoking essays, a taste of his autobiography. Award-winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Kia Corthron introduces the collection, artfully illuminating Major's importance as one of the foremost and original voices in contemporary American literature.Red at the Bone: Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020
By Jacqueline Woodson. 2019
THE TIMES '100 BEST SUMMER READS'NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLERLONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2020'Sublime' Candice Carty-Williams'An epic in…
miniature' Tayari Jones 'A banger' Ta-Nehisi Coates'Generous and big-hearted' Brit Bennett 'A true spell of a book' Ocean Vuong 'A proclamation' R.O. Kwon'A little masterpiece' Paula Hawkins'I adored this book' Elizabeth MacNeal'Pure poetry' Observer'A sharply focused gem' Sunday Times'Will remind you why you love reading' Stylist'Haunting' Guardian'A wonderful, tragic, inspiring story' Metro'Prose that sings off the page... Gorgeous' Mail on Sunday'A nuanced portrait of shifting family relationships' Financial Times'As seductive as a Prince bop' O, The Oprah Magazine'Razor-sharp' Vanity Fair'Dazzling... With urgent, vital insights into questions of class, gender, race, history, queerness and sex' New York Times An unexpected teenage pregnancy brings together two families from different social classes, and exposes the private hopes, disappointments and longings that can bind or divide us. From the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming. Brooklyn, 2001. It is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress - the very same dress that was sewn for a different wearer, Melody's mother, for a celebration that ultimately never took place.Unfurling the history of Melody's family - from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to post 9/11 New York - Red at the Bone explores sexual desire, identity, class, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, as it looks at the ways in which young people must so often make fateful decisions about their lives before they have even begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be. *** ONE OF THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR FOR: New York Times; Washington Post; Time; USA Today; O, The Oprah Magazine; Elle; Good Housekeeping; Esquire; NPR; New York Public Library; Library Journal; Kirkus; BookRiot; She Reads; The Undefeated ***Interpreter of Maladies
By Jhumpa Lahiri. 1999
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories…
seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice.When My Name Was Keoko
By Linda Sue Park. 2002
Sun-hee and her older brother, Tae-yul, live in Korea with their parents. Because Korea is under Japanese occupation, the children…
study Japanese and speak it at school. Their own language, their flag, the folktales Uncle tells them-even their names-are all part of the Korean culture that is now forbidden. When World War II comes to Korea, Sun-hee is surprised that the Japanese expect their Korean subjects to fight on their side. But the greatest shock of all comes when Tae-yul enlists in the Japanese army in an attempt to protect Uncle, who is suspected of aiding the Korean resistance. Sun-hee stays behind, entrusted with the life-and-death secrets of a family at war.The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Second Edition (African American Life Series)
By Sam Greenlee. 1969
A classic in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a comment on the…
civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy. Dan Freeman, the "spook who sat by the door," is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program. Upon mastering agency tactics, however, he drops out to train young Chicago blacks as "Freedom Fighters" in this explosive, award-winning novel. As a story of one man's reaction to ruling-class hypocrisy, the book is autobiographical and personal. As a tale of a man's reaction to oppression, it is universal.Tales of the Out & the Gone: Short Stories
By Amiri Baraka. 2007
Comprising short fiction from the early 1970s to the twenty-first century—most of which has never been published—Tales of the Out…
& the Gone reflects the astounding evolution of America’s most provocative literary anti-hero. The first section of the book, “War Stories,” offers six stories enmeshed in the vola-tile politics of the 1970s and 1980s. The second section, “Tales of the Out & the Gone,” reveals Amiri Baraka’s increasing literary adventurousness, combining an unpredictable language play with a passion for abstraction and psychological exploration. Throughout, Baraka’s unique and constantly changing literary style will educate readers on the evolution of one of America’s most accomplished literary masters of the past four decades.Tales: Short Stories (AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series)
By Leroi Jones. 2014
"We owe profound thanks to Akashic Books for reissuing this important collection of Amiri Baraka's short stories. Baraka was, without…
question, the central figure of the Black Arts Movement, and was the most important theorist of that movement's expression of the 'Black Aesthetic,' which took hold of the African American cultural imagination in earnest in the late sixties. While known primarily for his plays, poems, and criticism of black music, Baraka was also a master of the short story form, as this collection attests. Tales first appeared in 1967 and is an impressionistic and sometimes surrealistic collection of short fiction, showcasing Amiri Baraka's great impact on African American literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Tales is a critical volume in Amiri Baraka's oeuvre, and an important testament to his remarkable literary legacy."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr."A clutch of early stories from the poet, playwright, and provocateur, infused with jazz and informed by racial alienation...Worth reading to see the way [Baraka] feverishly tinkered with ways to explore a multiplicity of black experiences. An intense and button-pushing collection."--Kirkus ReviewsPraise for Amiri Baraka:"Baraka's stories evoke a mood of revolutionary disorder, conjuring an alternative universe in which a dangerous African-American underground, or a dangerous literary underground still exists...Baraka is at his best as a lyrical prophet of despair who transfigures his contentious racial and political views into a transcendent, 'outtelligent' clarity."--New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) on Tales of the Out & the GoneThe sixteen artful and nuanced stories in this reissue of Amiri Baraka's seminal 1967 collection fall into two parts: the first nine concern themselves with the sensibility of a hip, perceptive young black man in white America. The last seven stories endeavor to place that same man within the context of his awareness of and participation in a rapidly emerging and powerfully felt negritude. They deal, it might be said, with the black man in black America. Yet these tales are not social tracts, but absolutely masterful fiction--provocative, witty, and, at times, bitter and aggressive.All or Nothing: A Novel
By Preston L. Allen. 2007
Preston L. Allen's witty, charming, and very likable school bus driver--named P--is a desperate gambler. He has blown the hundred…
thousand dollars he won at the casino six months ago, but his wife and family still think he's loaded. P spins out of control on the addict's downward spiral of dependency, paranoia, and depression, as he must find ways to keep coming up with the money to fool his family and fund his growing addiction. The bets get bigger and bigger, until finally, faced with the ultimate financial crisis, he hits it really big. Yet winning, he soon learns, is just the beginning of a deeper problem.The one constant for P--who rises from wage-earner to millionaire and back again in his roller-coaster-ride of a life--is that he must gamble. That his son has died, that his wife is leaving him, that his girlfriend has been arrested, that he has no money, that he has more money than he could ever have dreamed--are all lesser concerns for P as he constantly seeks out new gambling opportunities.While other books on gambling seek either to sermonize on the addiction or to glorify it by highlighting its few prosperous celebrities, All or Nothing is an honest, straightforward account of what it is like to live as a gambler--whether a high-rolling millionaire playing $1,000-ante poker in Las Vegas or a regular guy at the local Indian casino praying for a miracle as he feeds his meager life savings into the unforgiving slot machine. All or Nothing is the first novel to dig beneath the veneer to explore the gambler's unique and complex relationship with money. If you've ever wanted to get into the heart and psyche of a compulsive gambler, here is your chance.Preston L. Allen is a recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship and author of the thriller Hoochie Mama, as well as the collection Churchboys and Other Sinners. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Brown Sugar (Penguin) and Miami Noir (Akashic). He lives in South Florida.New York Times Book Review, Sun., June 15, 2008"As a cartographer of autodegradation, Allen takes his place on a continuum that begins, perhaps, with Dostoyevsky's Gambler, courses through Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, William S. Burroughs's Junky, [and] the collected works of Charles Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr...Like Dostoyevsky, Allen colorfully evokes the gambling milieu...Like Burroughs, he is a dispassionate chronicler of the addict's daily ritual, neither glorifying nor vilifying the matter at hand. Yet he never wallows like Lowry nor amuses like Bukowski. His spare, efficient prose could be called medium-boiled."Library Journal, Nov. 15, 2007"Allen's new novel poignantly depicts the life of P . . . Told without preaching or moralizing, the facts of P's life express volumes on the destructive power of gambling. This is strongly recommended and deserves a wide audience; an excellent choice for book discussion groups."Kirkus Reviews, Sept., 15, 2007"A gambler's hands and heart perpetually tremble in this raw story of addiction . . . Allen's brilliant at conveying the hothouse atmosphere of hell-bent gaming."ForeWord, Jan/Feb. 2008"All or Nothing is funny, relentless, haunting, and highly readable."The Hungered One: Short Stories (AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series)
By Ed Bullins. 2012
"A richness of language and observation pervades this collection of short stories by a black writer about real black people."--The…
New York Times Book ReviewThese early writings from award-winning playwright Ed Bullins explore loneliness and despair in beautifully crafted stories.Ed Bullins has written numerous plays and fiction, including In the Wine Time, Goin' a Buffalo, Clara's Ole Man, and The Taking of Miss Janie, which received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play of the 1974-1975 season. His book of short fiction, The Hungered One: Early Writings, was originally published in 1971.The Lunatic
By Anthony C. Winkler. 2007
In this outrageously out-of-order, hilarious novel, the reader discovers that lunacy is by no means restricted to the village madman,…
and that goodness and forgiveness may be rarer qualities, found in unexpected places.Aloysius is tolerated by neighbors but forced to eke out a living by doing odd jobs, using the hospitable woodlands for shelter. He is starved of human companionship; instead he has running conversations with trees and plants. Then love, or a peculiar version of it, comes to Aloysius in the form of a solidly built German lady, Inga Schmidt, who has come to Jamaica to photograph the flora and fauna.A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid (A Novel): A Novel
By James Kincaid, Percival Everett. 2004
Praise for Percival Everett:"If Percival Everett isn't already a household name, it's because people are more interested in politics than…
truth."--Madison Smartt Bell, author of The Washington Square Ensemble"Everett's talent is multifaceted, sparked by a satiric brilliance that could place him alongside Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison . . ."--Publishers Weekly"I think Percival Everett is a genius. I've been a fan since his first novel. He continues to amaze me with each novel--as if he likes making 90-degree turns to see what's around the corner, and then over the edge . . . He's a brilliant writer and so damn smart I envy him."--Terry McMillan, author of MamaA fictitious and satirical chronicle of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond's desire to pen a history of African-Americans--his and his aides' belief being that he has done as much, or more, than any American to shape that history. An epistolary novel, The History follows the letters of loose cannon Congressional office workers, insane interns at a large New York publishing house and disturbed publishing executives, along with homicidal rival editors, kindly family friends, and an aspiring author named Septic. Strom Thurmond appears charming and open, mad and sure of his place in American history.Percival Everett is the author of 15 works of fiction, among them Glyph, Watershed and Frenzy. His most recent novel, Erasure, won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and did little to earn him friends.James Kincaid is an English professor at the University of Southern California and has written seven books in literary theory and cultural studies. These books and Kincaid himself have gradually lost their moorings in the academic world, so there was nothing left for him to do but to adopt the guise of fiction writer. Writing about madness comes easy to him.She's Gone
By Kwame Dawes. 2007
A prominent Jamaican reggae singer falls in love with an African American woman while on tour in South Carolina. The…
two struggle to forge a relationship across a cultural and psychological divide in a story that spans from Jamaica to South Carolina to New York City.The Living is Easy
By Dorothy West, Adelaide M. Cromwell. 1975
One of only a handful of novels published by black women during the forties, the story of ambitious Cleo Judson…
is a long-time cult classic. The Living Is Easy is delightfully wry and ironic humor--even bitchiness--of the novel coexists with a challenging moral and social complexity. "A powerful work."--Essence"Dorothy West is a brisk storyteller with an eye for ironic detail...a deft stylist and writer of social satire."--Ms."Long beloved for its wry and ironic humor, this novel continues to delight and challenge readers."--Feminist Bookstore News* Alternate of the Book-of-the-Month and Quality Paperback Book Clubs *Suggested for course use in:African-American studies20th-century U.S. literatureThe System of Dante's Hell: A Novel (AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series #0)
By Amiri Baraka. 2016
"Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age...the special agony of…
the American Negro."--New York Times Book Review"A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno....Other writers addressed race more directly, but for all its linguistic slipperiness, Baraka's language conveys the feelings of fear, violation, and fury with a surprising potency. A pungent and lyrical portrait of mid-'60s black protest."--Kirkus ReviewsWith a new introduction by Woodie King Jr.This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, treachery. With a poet's skill Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul--lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.