Black Fiction
Black Fiction

Author: Roger Rosenblatt

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1974

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780674076228

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In this illuminating book Roger Rosenblatt offers both sensitive analyses of individual works and a provocative and compelling thesis. He argues that black fiction has a unity deriving not from any chronological sequence, or simply from its black authorship, but from a particular cyclical conception of history on which practically every significant black American novel and short story is based. Marked for oppression by an external physical characteristic, black characters struggle constantly against and within a hostile world. Rosenblatt's analysis of the way black protagonists try to break historical patterns provides an integrated and sustained interpretation of motives and methods in black fiction. The black hero, after starting on a circular track, may try to change direction by means of his youth, love, education, or humor; or he may try to escape into his own elusive and vague history. But, as Rosenblatt demonstrates, these attempts all fail. And the black hero discovers in the failure of his attempts that the society which caused all this failure is not only unattainable but undesirable. Neither a sociological study nor a routine survey, this is distinctly a work of literary criticism which concentrates on black fiction as literature.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Author: N. K. Jemisin

Publisher: Orbit

Published: 2010-02-25

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0316075973

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After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season. Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together.

Man Gone Down
Man Gone Down

Author: Michael Thomas

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1555847455

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A New York Times Notable Book: The award-winning debut novel of race and family that “casts a new light on urban life in Brooklyn” (Time Out New York). “Like the characters of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry . . . [our] unnamed narrator is a black man concerned with identity in a decidedly white America”. He’s a father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream (TheWashington Post). On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his wife and kids, and living in a friend’s spare bedroom in Brooklyn. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his family afloat, and four days to make sense of his past and his future in a country where he feels preprogrammed to fail. But he has a powerful urge to escape that sentence. “Man Gone Down charts a four-day, Homeric trek through what makes America and New York a social and racial nightmare as well as a dream that incredibly can still come true.” —Robert Sullivan, New York Times–bestselling author of Rats “Powerful and moving . . . recount[ing] the events of four desperate days in New York, [Man Gone Down] extends far beyond these boundaries of time and space.” —The New York Times Book Review “[A] jazzy, sinewy debut . . . Thomas’s urgent, quicksilver prose makes even the darkest moments of this novel shine.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

Intercepted
Intercepted

Author: Alexa Martin

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-09-11

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0451491955

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Series in development with Starz & G-Unit Films and Television by 50 Cent and La La Anthony One of NPR's Best Books of 2018 An Amazon Best Romance of 2018 Pick An iBooks “Best of September” Pick A GoodReads Best of the Month pick for September One of Booklist's Top 10 Romance Debuts for 2018 One of BookBubs Best Fall Romances of 2018 Marlee thought she scored the man of her dreams only to be scorched by a bad breakup. But there's a new player on the horizon, and he's in a league of his own... Marlee Harper is the perfect girlfriend. She's definitely had enough practice by dating her NFL-star boyfriend for the last ten years. But when she discovers he has been tackling other women on the sly, she vows to never date an athlete again. There's just one problem: Gavin Pope, the new hotshot quarterback and a fling from the past, has Marlee in his sights. Gavin fights to show Marlee he's nothing like her ex. Unfortunately, not everyone is ready to let her escape her past. The team's wives, who never led the welcome wagon, are not happy with Marlee's return. They have only one thing on their minds: taking her down. But when the gossip makes Marlee public enemy number one, she worries about more than just her reputation. Between their own fumbles and the wicked wives, it will take a Hail Mary for Marlee and Gavin's relationship to survive the season.

Redemption in Indigo
Redemption in Indigo

Author: Karen Lord

Publisher: Del Rey

Published: 2024-06-11

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0593724399

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The enchanting tale of mischief and myth—inspired by West African folklore—that became a fantasy classic, from the award-winning author of The Blue, Beautiful World Paama is a marvelous cook who’s had the bad fortune to marry Ansige. He was the least eligible bachelor in his village: self-centered, foolish, and food-obsessed. Paama has had enough of this miserable life with her gluttonous husband, and so leaves him to return to her old life with her family. But Paama does not know that this is the beginning of a remarkable adventure. Because the Undying Ones are watching her. These spirits observe the follies of mortal life . . . and sometimes meddle and make mischief. One of these beings presents her with a magical artifact known as the Chaos Stick, which he says is “great for stirring things up.” As Paama gets to know the powers of this marvelous gift, she learns that the Chaos Stick was stolen from a rival spirit, who decides to stir up some trouble of his own. But mastering this magical artifact is only the beginning of Paama’s quest. Although Paama has been granted great power by the Undying Ones, her real journey is to find the magic that lies within herself.

Tiny Imperfections
Tiny Imperfections

Author: Alli Frank

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0593085027

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The Devil Wears Prada meets Class Mom in this delicious novel of love, money, and misbehaving parents. One of The Daily Skimm's Reads Pick for May 2020 One of Good Housekeeping's 20 Best New Fiction Books of 2020 Good Morning America Mother's Day in Quarantine Books to Buy One of New York Post's Best Books of the Week in May 2020 PopSugars Most Exciting Books for May 2020 One of SheReads Most Anticipated Books of 2020 "Delightful . . . Hilarious, cringe-worthy, and all too relevant. I ate this book up like a box of candy; you will too." --Tara Conklin, author of The Last Romantics All's fair in love and kindergarten admissions. At thirty-nine, Josie Bordelon's modeling career as the "it" black beauty of the '90s is far behind her. Now director of admissions at San Francisco's most sought after private school, she's chic, single, and determined to keep her seventeen-year-old daughter, Etta, from making the same mistakes she did. But Etta has plans of her own--and their beloved matriarch, Aunt Viv, has Etta's back. If only Josie could manage Etta's future as well as she manages the shenanigans of the over-anxious, over-eager parents at school--or her best friend's attempts to coax Josie out of her sex sabbatical and back onto the dating scene. As admissions season heats up, Josie discovers that when it comes to matters of the heart--and the office--the biggest surprises lie closest to home.

Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction
Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction

Author: Keith Byerman

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2006-05-18

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 080787678X

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With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.

Black Pulp
Black Pulp

Author: Brooks E. Hefner

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2021-12-21

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1452966788

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A deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justice In recent years, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Marvel’s Black Panther, and HBO’s Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world—important progressive messages widely spread precisely because they are packaged in popular genres. But it turns out, such generic retooling for antiracist purposes is nothing new. As Brooks E. Hefner’s Black Pulp shows, this tradition of antiracist genre revision begins even earlier than recent studies of Black superhero comics of the 1960s have revealed. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s, to serialized (and sometimes syndicated) genre stories written by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s—spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas—and the pleasures they offer to readers—in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy. These popular stories differ significantly from contemporaneous, now-canonized African American protest novels that tend to represent Jim Crow America as a deterministic machine and its Black inhabitants as doomed victims. Widely consumed but since forgotten, these genre stories—and Hefner’s incisive analysis of them—offer a more vibrant understanding of African American literary history.