-American Literature
A Room on the Hill (Caribbean Modern Classics)
On an inward-looking island dominated by the Catholic Church, John Lestrade mourns both the death of friends and the inauthentic, suffocating quality of his own life. When he feels he can no longer find solace in his regular means of escape—a room on a hill—he forsakes his self-imposed exile and finds himself drawn to action and defiance. Opening himself up to change, John discovers hope and gleans the possibility of change and an escape from the inauthentic. Originally published in 1968, this intense and minimalist novel engages philosophical ideas, religious tradition, and colonial consciousness.
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An Unkindness of Ghosts
--One of Esquire magazine's 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time
"Solomon debuts with a raw distillation of slavery, feudalism, prison, and religion that kicks like rotgut moonshine . . . Stunning." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world.
Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot--if she's willing to sow the seeds of civil war.
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Beloved
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.
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Best Laid Plans
The only constant is change and that anything is possible.
Cristine and her partner have always approached their relationship like a business, and Cristine prides herself on her cool-headed and logical thinking. But when Cristine's partner decides he doesn't want to renew their relationship contract, Cristine is devastated...
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Binti
"Prepare to fall in love with Binti." --Neil Gaiman
Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs.
Knowledge comes at a cost, one that Binti is willing to pay, but her journey will not be easy. The world she seeks to enter has long warred with the Meduse, an alien race that has become the stuff of nightmares. Oomza University has wronged the Meduse, and Binti's stellar travel will bring her within their deadly reach.
If Binti hopes to survive the legacy of a war not of her making, she will need both the gifts of her people and the wisdom enshrined within the University, itself -- but first she has to make it there, alive.
The Binti Series
Book 1: Binti
Book 2: Binti: Home
Book 3: Binti: The Night Masquerade
PRAISE FOR BINTI
"Binti is a supreme read about a sexy, edgy Afropolitan in space! It's a wondrous combination of extra-terrestrial adventure and age-old African diplomacy. Unforgettable!" -- Wanuri Kahiu, award-winning Kenyan film director of Punzi and From a Whisper
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Everything Is Now: New and Collected Stories
'Everything is Now' brings together in one volume all of the short fiction of Jamaican born author Michelle Cliff. The stories examine the dualities of the modern world - black and white; America and the third world; past and present; femininity and masculinity and colonialism and revolution.
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Finding Me
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Invisible Man
"Invisible Man" is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for 16 weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood, " and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
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Lady Chatterley's Lover
'Connie was aware, however, of a growing restlessness...It thrilled inside her body, in her womb, somewhere, till she felt she must jump into water and swim to get away from it; a mad restlessness. It made her heart beat violently for no reason...'
Banned for many years for its frank depiction of sex, Lady Chatterley's Lover was first published by Penguin in 1960 and was at the centre of a sensational obscenity trial at the Old Bailey. D. H. Lawrence himself called it 'the most improper novel in the world'.
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Mystery Train
This text tries to identify how American music is one more stage in the production of American myth, which has become, through the mass media, a summation of the expression of a popular culture. Marcus discusses Robert Johnson, The Band, Sly and the Family Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley.
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas
This edition of the book, based on the authoritative text that appears in Yale University Press’s multivolume edition of the Frederick Douglass Papers, is the only edition of Douglass’s Narrative designated as an Approved Text by the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions.
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Parable of the Sower
This acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from an award-winning author "pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale" and includes a foreword by LeVar Burton and an afterword by N. K. Jemisin (John Green, New York Times).
Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.
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Paradise (Vintage International)
The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present--in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem.
"A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate." --Los Angeles Times
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Quicksand
Nella Larsen was an important writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. While she was not prolific her work was powerful and critically acclaimed. Collected here are both of her novels, Passing and Quicksand.
Quicksand, was autobiographical in nature and examined a woman's need for sexual fulfilment balanced against respectability and acceptance amid a deeply religious society. The novel is deeply pessimistic and ends as the protagonist is sucked into a life that is at odds with all that she had desired.
Passing confronts the reality of racial passing. The novel focuses on two childhood friends Clare and Irene, both of whom are light skinned enough to pass as white, who have reconnected with one another after many years apart. Clare has chosen to pass while Irene has embraced her racial heritage and become an important member of her community. The Novel examines how people pass on many different levels and in many different ways. Some forms of passing are perfectly acceptable while others can lead to disaster.
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The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story
A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea Light
Edwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. "Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses," Danticat notes in her introduction. "I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing." The book moves outward from the shock of her mother's diagnosis and sifts through Danticat's writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison's Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat's mother. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.
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The Beet Fields
For a 16-year-old boy out in the world alone for the first time, every day's an education in the hard work and boredom of migrant labor; every day teaches him something more about friendship, or hunger, or profanity, or lust--always lust. He learns how a poker game, or hitching a ride, can turn deadly.
He discovers the secret sadness and generosity to be found on a lonely farm in the middle of nowhere. Then he joins up with a carnival and becomes a grunt, running a ride and shilling for the geek show. He's living the hard carny life and beginning to see the world through carny eyes. He's tough. Cynical. By the end of the summer he's pretty sure he knows it all. Until he meets Ruby.
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The Bell Jar
A vulnerable young girl wins a dream assignment on a big-time New York fashion magazine and finds herself plunged into a nightmare. An autobiographical account of Sylvia Plath's own mental breakdown and suicide attempt, "The Bell Jar" is more than a confessional novel, it is a comic but painful statement of what happens to a woman's aspirations in a society that refuses to take them seriously... a society that expects electroshock to cure the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search for identity becomes a terrifying descent toward madness.
"A fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems -- the kind of book Salinger's Fanny might have written about herself ten years later, if she had spent those ten years in Hell." -- Robert Scholes, "The New York Times Book Review."
"By turns funny, harrowing, crude, ardent and artless. Its most notable quality is an astonishing immediacy, like a series of snapshots taken at high noon." -- "Time."
"A special poignance... a special force, a humbling power, because it shows the vulnerability of people of hope and good will." -- "Newsweek."
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The Bell Jar
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels
A realistic and emotional novel about a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by the iconic American writer Sylvia Plath.
"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." -- USA Today
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: young, brilliant, beautiful, and enormously talented, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's neurosis becomes completely understandable and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such thorough exploration of the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche - and the profound collective loneliness that modern society has yet to find a solution for - is an extraordinary accomplishment, and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
This P.S. edition features extra insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
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The Bluest Eye
THE BLUEST EYE chronicles the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in 1940s Ohio: Pauline, Cholly, Sam and Pecola. Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged blond white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty as the novel moves toward a savage but poignant resolution.
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The Color Purple
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The Farming of Bones
It is 1937, the Dominican side of the Haitian border. Amabelle, orphaned at the age of eight when her parents drowned, is a maid to the young wife of an army colonel. She has grown up in this household, a faithful servant. Sebastien is a field hand, an itinerant sugarcane cutter. They are Haitians, useful to the Dominicans but not really welcome. There are rumors that in other towns Haitians are being persecuted, even killed. But there are always rumors. Amabelle loves Sebastien. He is handsome despite the sugarcane scars on his face, his calloused hands. She longs to become his wife and walk into their future. Instead, terror enfolds them. But the story does not end here: it begins. "The Farming of Bones" is about love, fragility, barbarity, dignity, remembrance, and the only triumph possible for the persecuted: to endure.
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The Human Stain
Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with a woman half his age. And it's not the secret of his alleged racism, which provoked the college witchhunt that cost him his job. Coleman's secret is deeper, and lies at the very core of who he is, and he has kept it hidden from everyone for fifty years. Set in 1998, with the backdrop of the impeachment of a president, "The Human Stain" shows us an America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions result in public denunciations and houndings, and where innocence is not always a good enough excuse.
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The Torturer's Wife
Nominated for the 2010 Stonewall Book Award, the oldest book award given for outstanding achievement in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Literature
A woman is haunted by the atrocities committed by her husband, and makes a heart-wrenching decision about atonement; secret fears and unspoken desires reveal the profound ambivalence at the heart of an interracial couple's relationship; a Jamaican man mourns his friend's death at the hands of anti-gay vigilantes; and two extraordinary young men escape the horrors of slavery when they leave their bodies behind on the Middle Passage.
Known for his courageous explorations into the heavily mined territories of race and sexuality, Thomas Glave offers a series of profound portraits of the traumas of war, the ravages of homophobia and racism, and the ultimate triumph of desire.
"The Torturer's Wife is one of the most interesting American books I have read. . . . a literary text that incites the reader to become a conscious and seduced re-reader."--Juan Goytisolo, The Marx Family Saga
"Glave's disruption of form is a powerful metaphor for sexual, racial and geopolitical disjunctions. Glave is a gifted stylist . . . blessed with ambition, his own voice and an impressive willingness to dissect how individuals actually think and behave."--New York Times Book Review
"Thomas Glave walks the path of such greats in American literature as Richard Wright and James Baldwin . . ."--Gloria Naylor, The Women Of Brewster Place
"Glave is a brilliant writer of startingly fresh prose . . . his stories are intricate tapestries of life rendered through a triumphant act of the imagination."--Clarence Major, My Amputations
Thomas Glave is an O. Henry award-winning author and was named a Village Voice Writer on the Verge in 2001. He is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction) and editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. He has taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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