Walk Through Darkness

Written by David Anthony Durham

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: August 12, 2003
Price: $13.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-72036-6 (0-385-72036-X)

When he learns that his pregnant wife has been spirited off to a distant city, William responds as any man might—he drops everything to pursue her. But as a fugitive slave in Antebellum America, he must run a terrifying gauntlet, eluding the many who would re-enslave him while learning to trust... Read more >

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison

Written by Ralph Ellison
Preface by Saul Bellow
Edited by John Callahan

Format: Trade Paperback, 904 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: September 9, 2003
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6826-2 (0-8129-6826-3)

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions... Read more >

Flying Home
and Other Stories
Written by Ralph Ellison

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 12, 1998
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-77661-1 (0-679-77661-3)

"A welcome addition to Ellison's oeuvre. . . . These stories soar." --Time

"A shining installment . . . distinctive . . . gripping." --The New York Times Book Review Read more >

Going to the Territory

Written by Ralph Ellison

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 14, 1995
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76001-6 (0-679-76001-6)

The seventeen essays collected in this volume prove that Ellison was not only one of America's most dazzling and innovative novelists, but perhaps also our most perceptive and iconoclastic commentator on matters of literature, culture, and race. In Going to the Territory, Ellison provides us with dramatically fresh readings of Faulkner... Read more >

Invisible Man

Written by Ralph Ellison

Format: Trade Paperback, 608 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 14, 1995
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-73276-1 (0-679-73276-4)

Winner of the National Book Award

First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that has changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison's nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of... Read more >

Juneteenth
A Novel
Written by Ralph Ellison
Preface by Charles Johnson

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 13, 2000
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70754-4 (0-375-70754-9)

Edited by Ellison's literary executor, John Callahan--aided by Ellison's widow, Fanny--Juneteenth is the most complete section of his much larger forty year "work-in-progress."  It is the story of the relationship between the larger work's two central characters Bliss (a.k.a. the self-named "Sunraider"), a race baiting New England senator, and his one-time adoptive... Read more >

Shadow and Act

Written by Ralph Ellison

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 14, 1995
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76000-9 (0-679-76000-8)

With the same intellectual incisiveness and supple, stylish prose he brought to his classic novel Invisible Man, Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing, illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His range is virtuosic, encompassing Mark Twain and Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie... Read more >

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
or, Gustavus Vassa, the African
Written by Olaudah Equiano
Edited by Shelly Eversley
Introduction by Robert Reid-Pharr

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: May 11, 2004
Price: $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-76115-7 (0-375-76115-2)

Edited and with Notes by Shelly Eversley
Introduction by Robert Reid-Pharr

“Equiano’s Narrative was so richly structured that it became the prototype of the nineteenth-century slave narrative.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

In this truly astonishing eighteenth-century memoir, Olaudah Equiano recounts his remarkable life story, which begins when he is kidnapped in Africa as a... Read more >

Watershed

Written by Percival Everett
Introduction by Sherman Alexie

Format: Trade Paperback, 216 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: May 15, 2003
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8361-1 (0-8070-8361-5)

A classic of politics, murder, and espionage.

On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets... Read more >

Plum Bun
A Novel without a Moral
Written by Jessi Redmon Fauset

Format: Trade Paperback, 408 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: December 15, 1999
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0919-2 (0-8070-0919-9)

Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement’s most important and prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to... Read more >

Waking from the Dream

Edited by Sam Fulwood, III

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: May 19, 1997
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-47823-6 (0-385-47823-2)

Sam Fulwood was an integration baby. He came of age during the post-civil rights era, a time when middle-class blacks--many carrying the scars of segregation and the struggles of the movement--wholeheartedly embraced a belief in the unlimited possibilities available to the new generation. The son of educated, prosperous parents, Fulwood shared... Read more >

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Written by Ernest J. Gaines

Format: Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Bantam
On Sale: July 1, 1982
Price: $6.99
ISBN: 978-0-553-26357-2 (0-553-26357-9)

A "fictional autobiography" of a Black woman, born in slavery, who lives for 100 more years to see the second emancipation of her race is the amazing novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

"Grand, robust, rich."—The New York Times Book Review

"This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded... Read more >

Bloodline
Five Stories
Written by Ernest J. Gaines

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 28, 1997
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-78165-3 (0-679-78165-X)

In these five stories, Gaines returns to the cane fields, sharecroppers' shacks, and decaying plantation houses of Louisiana, the terrain of his great novels A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. As rendered by Gaines, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering, and courage... Read more >

In My Father's House

Written by Ernest J. Gaines

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 30, 1992
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-72791-0 (0-679-72791-4)

This is the compelling novel of a man brought to reckon with his buried past. In a small rural black community in Louisiana, Rev. Phillip Martin comes face to face with the sins of his youth in Robert X, a young sinister stranger who arrives in town for a mysterious meeting... Read more >

A Lesson Before Dying
A Novel
Written by Ernest J. Gaines

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 28, 1997
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70270-9 (0-375-70270-9)

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

A Lesson Before Dying, set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, is about the bond forged between two men--Jefferson, convicted of murder and sentenced to die; and Grant Wiggins, a college graduate returning to his hometown to teach... Read more >

Mozart and Leadbelly

Written by Ernest J. Gaines

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 17, 2006
Price: $12.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-9645-9 (1-4000-9645-6)

In this collection of stories and essays, the beloved author of the classic, best-selling novel A Lesson Before Dying shares the inspirations behind his books and his reasons for becoming a writer. Told in the simple and powerful prose that is a hallmark of his craft, these writings by Ernest J... Read more >

Of Love and Dust

Written by Ernest J. Gaines

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 31, 1994
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-75248-6 (0-679-75248-X)

This is the story of Marcus: bonded out of jail where he has been awaiting trial for murder, he is sent to the Hebert plantation to work in the fields. There he encounters conflict with the overseer, Sidney Bonbon, and a tale of revenge, lust and power plays out between Marcus... Read more >

The Middle Sister
A Novel
Written by Bonnie Glover

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: May 31, 2005
Price: $12.95
ISBN: 978-0-345-48090-3 (0-345-48090-2)

“As Kwai Chang moved through the arid desert of the American West, I would move through the equally desolate ghettos of Brooklyn, and we would each search: he for his family and I for my father. . . .”

The middle of three sisters, Pamela is a quiet, thoughtful girl with a... Read more >

And Do Remember Me

Written by Marita Golden

Format: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: July 19, 1994
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-38271-9 (0-345-38271-4)

Critically acclaimed novelist, Marita Golden, explores passion, politics, and sisterhood in this rich and poignant tale of the intimate friendship between two courageous African-American women, from 1963 freedom summer to today.

Two very different African-American women meet, each to discover in the other an elegant completion of herself. Jessie, running from... Read more >

The Word
Black Writers Talk About the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing
Written by Marita Golden

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: January 11, 2011
Price: $14.99
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2991-2 (0-7679-2991-8)

Critically acclaimed Black writers reveal how books have shaped their personal lives—in often unexpected ways.

In these thirteen strikingly candid interviews, bestselling authors, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, and writers picked by Oprah’s Book Club discuss how the acts of reading and writing have deeply affected their lives by expanding the conceptual... Read more >

Imperium in Imperio

Written by Sutton Griggs
Preface by A.J. Verdelle
Introduction by Cornel West

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: January 6, 2004
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7160-6 (0-8129-7160-4)

Self-published in 1899 and sold door-to-door by the author, this classic African-American novel—a gripping exploration of oppression, miscegenation, exploitation, and black empowerment—was a major bestseller in its day. The dramatic story of a conciliatory black man and a mulatto nationalist who grow up in a racist America and are driven to... Read more >

Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays
The Drinking Gourd/What Use Are Flowers?
Written by Lorraine Hansberry

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 13, 1994
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-75532-6 (0-679-75532-2)

Before her death at age thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry revolutionized American drama with plays that presented the black experience directly, unapologetically, and often with anger. Her work shook the complacency of white audiences even as it laid the ground for subsequent debates about racism, feminism, and African-American struggles for self-determination. In Les... Read more >

A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

Written by Lorraine Hansberry

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 13, 1995
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75531-9 (0-679-75531-4)

By the time of her death at age thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun she gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of black family life in the inner city. Barely five years later, with The Sign in... Read more >

A Raisin in the Sun

Written by Lorraine Hansberry
Introduction by Robert Nemiroff

Format: Hardcover, 176 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: August 22, 1995
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-60172-2 (0-679-60172-4)

"Never before, the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage," observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959.

Indeed Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling... Read more >

A Raisin in the Sun

Written by Lorraine Hansberry

Format: Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 29, 2004
Price: $7.50
ISBN: 978-0-679-75533-3 (0-679-75533-0)

When it was first produced in 1959 A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and hailed as a watershed in American drama. Not only was it a pioneering work by an African-American playwright--Hansberry's play was also a radically new representation of black life, one... Read more >