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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 García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers...
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English
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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
He describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from...
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
He describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from...
Author
Language
English
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Black Voices | Adults PEQ
JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
JEF - Historical Fiction - Adults
JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
JEF - Historical Fiction - Adults
Description
A novel about black Americans in Florida that centers on the life of Janie and her three marriages.
Author
Language
English
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Black Voices | Adults PEQ
JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
JEF - Historical Fiction - Adults
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JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
JEF - Historical Fiction - Adults
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Description
In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as...
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English
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"EITHER AMERICA WILL DESTROY IGNORANCE OR IGNORANCE WILL DESTROY THE UNITED STATES." -- W.E.B. Du Bois This classic groundbreaking work of American literature first published in 1903 is a cornerstone of African-American literary history and a seminal work in the field of sociology. W.E.B. Du Bois, who drew from his own experiences as an African-American living in American society, explores the concept of "double-consciousness" -- a term he uses to...
Author
Series
Language
English
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Beginner's Luck - Literary Debuts
JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
JEF - Classic Literature
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JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
JEF - Classic Literature
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Description
Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity.--from...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
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Description
A first book by the prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist shares personal essays that chronicle his childhood, adolescence and college years as a Black queer youth, exploring subjects ranging from gender identity and toxic masculinity to structural marginalization and Black joy.
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The exclusive beach community of Oak Bluffs is a mecca for the crème de la crème of black society. Thirty years ago Amelia Vaux Tanner and her husband built Chateau Laveau, a house high on the bluffs. Ama's favorite guests have always been her three "goddaughters:" Esperanza "Perry" Soto, a talented Afro-Latina lawyer; Olivia Jones, a Wall Street analyst; and Billie Hayden, a marine biologist. This summer Ama, now nearing seventy-one, is moving...
11) On the come up
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English
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When sixteen-year-old Bri, an aspiring rapper, pours her anger and frustration into her first song, she finds herself at the center of a controversy.
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English
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From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime—"a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless" (The New York Times Book Review).
"One of the best books Baldwin has ever written—perhaps the best of all." —The...
"One of the best books Baldwin has ever written—perhaps the best of all." —The...
13) Becoming
Author
Series
Oprah's Book Club 2.0 volume 2018
Language
English
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Description
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private. A deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily...
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English
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"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...
15) Home
Author
Language
English
Description
"The story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister"--
Author
Language
English
Description
"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can't seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has...
17) Native son
Author
Language
English
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Description
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, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what...
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English
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"Before Billy Porter was slaying red carpets and giving an iconic Emmy-winning performance in the celebrated TV show Pose; before he was the groundbreaking Tony and Grammy Award-winning star of Broadway's Kinky Boots, ... Porter was a young boy in Pittsburgh who was seen as different, who didn't fit in. At five years old, Porter was sent to therapy to 'fix' his effeminacy. He was endlessly bullied at school, sexually abused by his stepfather, and...
Author
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Language
English
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Description
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...
20) Beloved
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Black Voices | Adults PEQ
JEF - Classic Literature
JEF - Historical Fiction - Adults
MCL - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
JEF - Classic Literature
JEF - Historical Fiction - Adults
MCL - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Description
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose...
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