I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic Filled with rage and tenderness, Audre Lorde's most acclaimed poetry collection speaks of mothers and children, female strength and vulnerability, renewal and revenge, goddesses and warriors, ancient magic and contemporary America. These are fearless assertions of identity, told with incantatory power.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “An inspiring story that manages to be painful, honest, shocking, bawdy and hilarious.” —The New York Times Book Review From stand-up comedian, actress, and breakout star of Girls Trip, Tiffany Haddish, comes The Last Black Unicorn, a sidesplitting, hysterical, edgy, and unflinching collection of (extremely) personal essays, as fearless as the author herself. Growing up in one of the poorest neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles, Tiffany learned to survive by making people laugh. If she could do that, then her classmates would let her copy their homework, the other foster kids she lived with wouldn’t beat her up, and she might even get a boyfriend. Or at least she could make enough money—as the paid school mascot and in-demand Bar Mitzvah hype woman—to get her hair and nails done, so then she might get a boyfriend. None of that worked (and she’s still single), but it allowed Tiffany to imagine a place for herself where she could do something she loved for a living: comedy. Tiffany can’t avoid being funny—it’s just who she is, whether she’s plotting shocking, jaw-dropping revenge on an ex-boyfriend or learning how to handle her newfound fame despite still having a broke person’s mind-set. Finally poised to become a household name, she recounts with heart and humor how she came from nothing and nowhere to achieve her dreams by owning, sharing, and using her pain to heal others. By turns hilarious, filthy, and brutally honest, The Last Black Unicorn shows the world who Tiffany Haddish really is—humble, grateful, down-to-earth, and funny as hell. And now, she’s ready to inspire others through the power of laughter.
As a poet, playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and critic, Gayl Jones has always resisted labels in her quest to find a liberating voice for black women and herself. With a poet's lyricism and a musician's ear for rhythm, she continually seeks new ways to confront the barriers, traumas, insecurities, and prejudices oppressing black women, and, by extension, all women. After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones is the first comprehensive collection of essays dedicated solely to the exploration of Jones's work. Ranging from analyses of her use of language and music to reevaluations of her representation of sexuality and gender roles to examinations of the oft-overlooked connections between Latin America and African Americans, each of these essays investigates Jones's desire to continually complicate the process of identity formation.
In the age of fairies, Linwae is the sole survivor of a lost water fairy race and she narrates you through an extraordinary journey of how Princess Ethinia of the ice fairies and Prince Ardian of the fire fairies find each other, fall in love and then learn that their two opposite worlds can coexist; but they also realize that their love will also cause a war between the ice and fire fairies. Linwae has envisioned this fairy tale in a dream and she writes down her visions in this book that accurately shows the future. Since these visions haven't all happened yet, she can only call this her story about two fairies who will determine the fate of their races. They have the power to recreate a lost race of water fairies, but at what cost? Hopefully, they won't suffer the same fate that the water fairies did and will make the right decision. They will have to make the biggest choice of their young lives... love for each other or life for their civilizations
"[A] scintillating tour de force . . . in a free-ranging style as distinctive as its subject . . . Forgoing the strictures and linearity of traditional biography, Gumbs enlivens her narrative with unconventional flourishes that in lesser hands might feel like a gimmick but here come across as revelation . . . Gumbs is a master stylist with a knack for writing sentences at once direct and expansive (“The scale of the life of the poet is the scale of the universe”). This is a feast for the intellect—and the soul." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A celebration of a tireless advocate . . . Stars, hurricanes, and even whale songs feature in a narrative notable for lyrical prose and unabashed admiration . . . Gumbs offers thoughtful analyses of Lorde’s poems, as well as the pressures and pleasures of her life: friends and lovers; marriage to a white gay man; motherhood; divorce; and recurring cancer . . . A defiant woman sensitively and incisively portrayed." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Gumbs, one of our great poets, has delivered not only a masterful biography of Audre Lorde but a revolution in what a biography can be. Whether you only know Lorde through her most famous quotes or if you’ve read everything she wrote a thousand times, there is something new and exciting here for you. Structurally playful, deeply researched, vibrantly felt, it’s a masterwork all around." —LitHub A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde. We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today. Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive—to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands. In Survival Is a Promise, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.
Clear Word and Third Sight examines the strands of a collective African diasporic consciousness represented in the work of a number of Black Caribbean writers. Catherine A. John shows how a shared consciousness, or “third sight,” is rooted in both pre- and postcolonial cultural practices and disseminated through a rich oral tradition. This consciousness has served diasporic communities by creating an alternate philosophical “worldsense” linking those of African descent across space and time. Contesting popular discourses about what constitutes culture and maintaining that neglected strains in negritude discourse provide a crucial philosophical perspective on the connections between folk practices, cultural memory, and collective consciousness, John examines the diasporic principles in the work of the negritude writers Léon Damas, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor. She traces the manifestations and reworkings of their ideas in Afro-Caribbean writing from the eastern and French Caribbean, as well as the Caribbean diaspora in the United States. The authors she discusses include Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, and Edouard Glissant, among others. John argues that by incorporating what she calls folk groundings—such as poems, folktales, proverbs, and songs—into their work, Afro-Caribbean writers invoke a psychospiritual consciousness which combines old and new strategies for addressing the ongoing postcolonial struggle.
What do we now know about the origins of plants on land, from an evolutionary and an environmental perspective? The essays in this collection present a synthesis of our present state of knowledge, integrating current information in paleobotany with physical, chemical, and geological data.
The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature is a comprehensive collection of poems, short stories, novellas, novels, plays, autobiographies, and essays authored by African Americans from the eighteenth century until the present. Evenly divided into two volumes, it is also the first such anthology to be conceived and published for both classroom and online education in the new millennium. Reflects the current scholarly and pedagogic structure of African American literary studies Selects literary texts according to extensive research on classroom adoptions, scholarship, and the expert opinions of leading professors Organizes literary texts according to more appropriate periods of literary history, dividing them into seven sections that accurately depict intellectual, cultural, and political movements Includes more reprints of entire works and longer selections of major works than any other anthology of its kind This second volume contains a comprehensive collection of texts authored by African Americans from the 1920s to the present The two volumes of this landmark anthology can also be bought as a set, at over 20% savings.
She's a former thief. He's an enslaved werewolf. Together, they will change everything. Seventeen years ago, the human realm collided with a magic world. Now, the land is fractured between opposing factions. The witches rule the cities. Werewolves live under the boot of the witches. And unicorns and fugitive humans roam the abandoned wilderness. Once, Bree West was a scavenger and thief. Now, she leads a group of wild unicorns. Bonded to the powerful beasts, she is awed by both their ethereal beauty and their savage grace. The unicorns are the only things the witches fear. Bree and her herd, organized and strong, are a threat the witches can’t tolerate. Once, Jack Bastian tried to resist being the witches’ plaything. Now, the werewolf does what he’s told, seduces who he’s asked, and doesn’t give a damn who he hurts or how his body is used. He’s good, too. There’s not a witch in the city that can resist Jack’s charms. The high witch is sure he’ll be able to make quick work of Bree. After all, there’s only one thing that can sever the bond between a virgin and her unicorns. Usually, Jack wouldn’t give a damn. But then he sees Bree. And everything changes. For fans of Anne Bishop, Laurell K. Hamilton, Anne Rice, and Pippa daCosta urban fantasy, unicorns, werewolves, fairy tales, legends, jack of the lantern, will of the wisp, post-apocalyptic, magic, fantasy romance, witch, witches, witch fantasy, contemporary fantasy, shapeshifter, shifter, unicorns, paranormal, paranormal romance, urban fantasy series, love, cheap first in series, cheap paranormal, cheap urban fantasy, cheap romance, gothic, dark fantasy, new adult, alpha wolf, alpha, dystopian, anti-hero, strong female lead, lycan, free, freebie