Books, Movies, & More
All Time Faves: Classic African American Fiction
Printer friendly version |
If Beale Street Could Talk In this honest and stunning novel, Baldwin has given America a moving story of love in the face of injustice. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin creates two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche. ...More |
 |
Kindred This 25th anniversary edition, about a modern black woman who is snatched away to the antebellum South, celebrates a classic work with "much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now" ("Los Angeles Herald Examiner"). ...More |
 |
Stories, Novels, and Essays This collection of essential writings from a pioneer of African-American literature features two stories newly restored to print. Eight essays highlight Chesnutt's prescient views on the paradoxes of race relations in America and the definition of race itself. ...More |
 |
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 sixteen 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. ...More |
 |
Lesson Before Dying From the author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. ...More |
 |
Cotton Comes to Harlem Black flim-flam man Deke O'Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta's state penitentiary than he's back on the streets working the scam of a lifetime. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement he's counting on the big Harlem rally to produce a big collection--for his own private charity. But the take ($87,000) is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everyone wants to get his hands on. With Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones on everyone's trail and piecing together the complexity of the scheme, Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of Himes's hardest-hitting and most entertaining thrillers. ...More |
 |
Not Without Laughter Langston Hughes, long recognized as a major American poet and an influential force in African-American literature, brought to this, his first novel, the lyricism, humor, and sureness of touch that characterizes his award-winning poetry. This story reflects the joys and hardships of an African-American boy growing to manhood. ...More |
 
|
Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston's beloved classic--one of the most important American novels of the 20th century--follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman who was married three times and had been tried for the murder of one of her husbands in the black town of Eaton, Florida. ...More |
 |
Dreamer: A Novel about Martin Luther King, Jr. Political visionary, human rights leader, preacher, scholar, and martyr, Martin Luther King, Jr., remains one of the most fascinating and significant historic figures. In "Dreamer", a brilliantly realized historical novel that re-imagines the last two years of King's life, Charles Johnson pays homage to this man who forever changed the meaning of the word "equality". ...More |
 |
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standard -- and double consciousness -- that ruled the lives of black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man became a groundbreaking document of Afro-American culture; the first first-person novel ever written by a black, it became an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. |
 |
Do Lord Remember Me First published in 1984, this "rich and satisfying" ("Chicago Sun-Times") classic novel of an African-American family's history is re-released to coincide with Lester's new novel, "The Autobiography of God." ...More |
 |
Brown Girl, Brownstones This beloved coming-of-age story set in Brooklyn during the Depression and World War II follows the life of Selina Boyce, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants. Author Danticat explores the novel's themes of identity, sexuality, and values as well as Selina's struggle against the racism and poverty surrounding her. ...More |
 
|
Song of Solomon Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world. ...More |
 |
The Women of Brewster Place The women of Brewster Place are "hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased". In their stories, Gloria Naylor has created a community of women that has touched thousands of readers across the country. Now the basis for a November 1988, ABC-TV, three-hour movie, starring Oprah Winfrey. ...More |
 |
The Color Purple This new edition celebrates the 10th anniversary of Walker's Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winner. "If it is true that it is what we run from that chases us, then The Color Purple is the book that ran me down while I sat with my back to it in a field".--from Walker's new preface. ...More |
 |
Jubilee A spirited novel, based on the true story of Vyry--a Southern Civil War heroine to rival Scarlett O'Hara--the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. "A revelation".--"Milwaukee Journal". ...More |
|
The Wedding The publication of "The Wedding by Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, was not only a landmark literary event, but a commercial success as well. Readers across America responded to West's delicat weaving of North and South, black and white, past and present in this "fascinating and engrossing tale" ("People) of race and class set in Martha's Vineyard.In her first novel in forty-seven years, West offers a window into the rise of the black middle class as she lived it. Wise, heartfelt, and shattering, "The Wedding is Dorothy West's crowning achievement, and one of the last books edited for Doubleday by the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. ...More |
|
Native Son Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. "Native Son" tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America. ...More |
Signup or unsubscribe to library's eNews or New Book Alerts! © 2009 BookLetters LLC - Privacy Policy