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A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick

"A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." —Zadie Smith

One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with

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"Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her mother, a physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie will go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie feels stifled by her mother's choices and is constantly reminded that, unlike her mother, Libertie has skin that is too dark. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be...

Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published...

"Teeming with life and crackling with energy - a love song to modern Britain, to black womanhood. Follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years. Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly...

New York Times bestselling author Mary Monroe returns to the 1930s era of her acclaimed novel The Upper Room with a dazzling portrait of two very different couples whose fast friendship is no match for shattering betrayal . . .

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...

The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyric essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders. Ross Gay's The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays-some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages-that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often...

"An epic biography of Malcolm X finally emerges, drawing on hundreds of hours of the author's interviews, rewriting much of the known narrative. Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X-all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures,...

In this "captivating saga" of the post-Reconstruction era, a black female journalist blazes her own trail—"unforgettable; gripping; an instant classic" (Elle).

Ivoe Williams, the precocious daughter of a Muslim cook and a metalsmith from central-east Texas, discovers a lifelong obsession with journalism when she steals a newspaper from her mother's white employer. Living in the segregated quarter of Little Tunis, Ivoe...

One sexy Morgan man may have finally met his match in a talented and beautiful young widow. But will their ambitions come between them?

When artist Anise Cartier leaves Nebraska for L.A., she's finally ready to put the past and its losses behind her. And she soon finds a welcoming committee in the form of one very handsome doctor, Gregory Morgan. Their attraction is instant. So is their animosity.

Gregory is in a fierce competition for a multimillion-dollar

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New York Times bestselling author Mary Monroe's extraordinary novel celebrates life, love, and the power of sisterhood--proving that friends, like fine wine, only get better with age. . . Gorgeous, successful executive Teri Stewart spends her days working for L.A.'s hottest record company--and her nights all alone. Her best friend Nicole is determined to find Teri a man, but she hasn't had much luck. . . because Teri wants more than Mr. Maybe. She's...