Major
A Black Athlete, a White Era, and the Fight to Be the World's Fastest Human Being
Written by Todd Balf

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
On Sale: January 27, 2009
Price: $14.00

The story of a man who transcended the handicaps of race to become America’s first African American mega sports celebrity

At the turn of the 20th century, hundreds of lightning-fast racers won the hearts and minds of a bicycling-crazed public. Scientists studied them, newspapers glorified them, and millions of dollars in purse... Read more >

Gender Talk
The Struggle For Women's Equality in African American Communities
Written by Johnnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Format: eBook, 336 pages
On Sale: January 16, 2009
Price: $13.99

Why has the African American community remained silent about gender even as race has moved to the forefront of our nation’s consciousness? In this important new book, two of the nation’s leading African American intellectuals offer a resounding and far-reaching answer to a question that has been ignored for far too... Read more >

What's Going On

Written by Nathan Mc Call

Format: eBook, 192 pages
On Sale: January 16, 2009
Price: $11.99

   With the same personal authority and exhilarating directness he brought to his account of his passage from a prison cell to the newsroom of The Washington Post, Nathan McCall delivers a series of front-line reports on the state of the races in today's America. The resulting volume is guaranteed to shake... Read more >

Sellout
The Politics of Racial Betrayal
Written by Randall Kennedy

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
On Sale: January 6, 2009
Price: $13.95

In this incisive and unflinching study, Randall Kennedy, author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, tackles another stigma of America's racial discourse: “selling out.” He explains the origins of the concept and shows how fear of this label has haunted prominent members of the black community—including, most recently... Read more >

Mississippi
An American Journey
Written by Anthony Walton

Format: eBook, 288 pages
On Sale: December 30, 2008
Price: $11.99

  To most Americans, Mississippi is not a state but a scar, the place where segregation took its ugliest form and struck most savagely at its challengers.  But to many Americans, Mississippi is also home.  And it is this paradox, with all its overtones of history and heartache, that Anthony Walton—whose...

Read more >

Nigger
The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
Written by Randall Kennedy

Format: eBook, 208 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2008
Price: $13.99

It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book the... Read more >

The End of Blackness
Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners
Written by Debra J. Dickerson

Format: eBook, 320 pages
On Sale: December 10, 2008
Price: $14.99

Debra Dickerson pulls no punches in this electrifying manifesto. Outspoken journalist and author of the critically acclaimed memoir An American Story, she challenges black Americans to stop obsessing about racism and start focusing on problems they can fix. The way out of the ghetto, she asserts, is to take a good... Read more >

Ghettonation
Dispatches from America's Culture War
Written by Cora Daniels

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
On Sale: September 9, 2008
Price: $15.00

From the Introduction:

ghet-to n. (Merriam-Webster dictionary) Italian, from Venetian dialect ghèto island where Jews were forced to live; literally, foundry (located on the island), from ghetàr, to cast; from Latin jactare to throw
1: a quarter of a city in which Jews were formerly required to live
2: a quarter of a... Read more >

Harriet Tubman
Imagining a Life
Written by Beverly Lowry

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
On Sale: June 10, 2008
Price: $18.95

From the award-winning novelist and biographer Beverly Lowry comes an astonishing re-imagining of the remarkable life of Harriet Tubman, the “Moses of Her People.”

Tubman was an escaped slave, lumberjack, laundress, raid leader, nurse, fund-raiser, cook, intelligence gatherer, Underground Railroad organizer, and abolitionist. In Harriet Tubman, Lowry creates a portrait enriched with... Read more >

Harriet Tubman
Imagining a Life
Written by Beverly Lowry

Format: eBook, 432 pages
On Sale: June 10, 2008
Price: $14.99

From the award-winning novelist and biographer Beverly Lowry comes an astonishing re-imagining of the remarkable life of Harriet Tubman, the “Moses of Her People.”

Tubman was an escaped slave, lumberjack, laundress, raid leader, nurse, fund-raiser, cook, intelligence gatherer, Underground Railroad organizer, and abolitionist. In Harriet Tubman, Lowry creates a portrait enriched with... Read more >

Sweet Release
The Last Step to Black Freedom
Written by James Davison, Jr., Ph.D.

Format: Hardcover, 277 pages
On Sale: April 30, 2008
Price: $26.99

African Americans have come a long way in the difficult upward struggle from slavery to the relatively broad freedoms enjoyed today. Together, as a potent and well-knit group, they have battled endlessly in their march toward freedom.
Finally, according to psychologist James Davison Jr., the last step to freedom for black... Read more >

Major
A Black Athlete, a White Era, and the Fight to Be the World's Fastest Human Being
Written by Todd Balf

Format: eBook
On Sale: February 26, 2008
Price: $11.99

At the turn of the 20th century, hundreds of handsome, lightning-fast racers won the hearts and minds of a bicycling-crazed public. Scientists studied them, newspapers glorified them, and millions of dollars in purse money was awarded to them. Major Taylor aimed to be the fastest of them all. A prominent black... Read more >

Saviors or Sellouts
The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism, from Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice
Written by Christopher Bracey

Format: eBook
On Sale: February 1, 2008
Price: $22.95

What exactly is a black conservative, and why would anyone choose to be one? This question, deemed largely irrelevant in years past, is one that liberals can no longer afford to leave unanswered. While the 2006 midterm elections buoyed liberals, Democrats have in fact been losing ground with their African American... Read more >

Ralph Ellison
A Biography
Written by Arnold Rampersad

Format: Trade Paperback, 704 pages
On Sale: January 8, 2008
Price: $17.95

Ralph Ellison is justly celebrated for his epochal novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and has become a classic of American literature. But Ellison’s strange inability to finish a second novel, despite his dogged efforts and soaring prestige, made him a supremely enigmatic figure. Arnold Rampersad... Read more >

Sellout
The Politics of Racial Betrayal
Written by Randall Kennedy

Format: eBook
On Sale: January 8, 2008
Price: $9.99

In this incisive and unflinching study, Randall Kennedy, author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, tackles another stigma of America's racial discourse: “selling out.” He explains the origins of the concept and shows how fear of this label has haunted prominent members of the black community—including, most recently... Read more >

At the Hands of Persons Unknown
The Lynching of Black America
Written by Philip Dray

Format: eBook, 544 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $11.99

It is easy to shrink from our country’s brutal history of lynching. Lynching is called the last great skeleton in our nation’s closet: It terrorized all of black America, claimed thousands upon thousands of victims in the decades between the 1880s and the Second World War, and leaves invisible but deep... Read more >

Having It All?
Black Women and Success
Written by Veronica Chambers

Format: eBook, 240 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $11.99

A behind-the-scenes look into the lives of successful middle- and upper-middle class African American women, the groundbreaking HAVING IT ALL? is sure to spark discussions from cocktail parties to boardrooms.

In a single generation, black women have made extraordinary strides academically, professionally, and financially. They’ve entered the workplace at a far greater... Read more >

Homelands and Waterways
The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926
Written by Adele Logan Alexander

Format: eBook, 720 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $11.99

This monumental history traces the rise of a resolute African American family (the author's own) from privation to the middle class. In doing so, it explodes the stereotypes that have shaped and distorted our thinking about African Americans--both in slavery and in freedom.

Beginning with John Robert Bond, who emigrated from England... Read more >

The House Behind the Cedars

Written by Charles Chesnutt
Introduction by Judith Jackson Fossett

Format: eBook, 256 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $11.99

The House Behind the Cedars, which many consider Charles Chesnutt’s finest novel, tells of John and Lena Walden, mulatto siblings who pass for white in the postbellum American South. The drama that unfolds as they travel between black and white worlds constitutes a riveting portrait of the shifting and intractable nature... Read more >

Imperium in Imperio

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

Format: eBook, 208 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $13.99

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 >

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: eBook, 336 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $9.99

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

In this truly astonishing eighteenth-century memoir, Olaudah Equiano recounts his remarkable life story, which begins when he is kidnapped in Africa as a boy and sold into slavery and culminates when he has achieved renown as a British antislavery advocate. The narrative... Read more >

My Bondage and My Freedom

Written by Frederick Douglass
Introduction by John Stauffer

Format: eBook, 384 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $11.99

“My Bondage and My Freedom,” writes John Stauffer in his Foreword, “[is] a deep meditation on the meaning of slavery, race, and freedom, and on the power of faith and literacy, as well as a portrait of an individual and a nation a few years before the Civil War.” As his... Read more >

Who's Gonna Take the Weight?
Manhood, Race, and Power in America
Written by Kevin Powell

Format: eBook, 160 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $11.99

“A mighty wind of fresh air. His pitiless self-examination—and his equally honest exploration of the racial, sexual, cultural, and class fault lines that thread our psychic and social landscape—is not only brave but necessary if our nation is to survive.”
—Michael Eric Dyson

“Kevin Powell is pushing to bring, as he has so... Read more >

On the Courthouse Lawn
Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century
Written by Sherrilyn Ifill

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
On Sale: December 1, 2007
Price: $16.00

Nearly 5,000 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1960. Over forty years later, Sherrilyn Ifill's On the Courthouse Lawn examines the numerous ways that this racial trauma still resounds across the United States. While the lynchings and their immediate aftermath were devastating, the little-known contemporary consequences, such as the marginalization... Read more >

Hair Wars

Text by Johanna Lenander
Photographed by David Yellen

Format: Hardcover, 96 pages
On Sale: November 1, 2007
Price: $39.95

“Hair Wars is a different idea of fashion and glamour than what is shown in the world of runway shows and magazines. That world ends up looking bland and anemic in comparison. The Fantasy Hairstyles in this book are proudly loud and outrageous. They express a desire to surpass the ordinary... Read more >