Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates, boldly and brilliantly, African-American culture and heritage....

In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. But, suddenly, three women, Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter, realize that they are suffocating within the lines. Aibileen is a black maid, raising her seventeenth white child. Her best friend, Minny, is the sassiest woman in Mississippi. And Skeeter Phelan is just back from college, a white woman with a degree but, to her mother's chagrin, no ring on her finger. With the civil rights...

First published in 1930, "Not Without Laughter" is the debut novel by Langston Hughes and a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical tale of an African-American family in rural Kansas. Langston Hughes, born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, spent much of his youth in Lawrence, Kansas and it is here that he set his first novel. "Not Without Laughter" tells the story of young Sandy Rogers as he grows from a boy to a young man and focuses on his "awakening...

Buck Duane is a famous gunfighter and outlaw, who's recruited by the Texas Rangers to help clean up a border town plagued by crime. It's a rare opportunity to do good in the eyes of the law and its people. The son of an outlaw, Buck Duane, unexpectedly follows in his father's footsteps when he kills a man in self-defense. Despite the context, he chooses to run from the authorities and goes into hiding. He encounters many dark and violent characters,...

From the New York Times Bestselling Author of An American Marriage "A love story . . . Full of perverse wisdom and proud joy . . . Jones's skill for wry understatement never wavers." -O: The Oprah Magazine "Silver Sparrow will break your heart before you even know it. Tayari Jones has written a novel filled with characters I'll never forget. This is a book I'll read more than once." -Judy Blume With the opening line of Silver Sparrow,...

Born in the Hispanic barrio of Los Angeles, Gregory Reeves grew up in poverty, survived the killing fields of Vietnam, and is now a lawyer in San Francisco. Though he has successfully survived this hard journey, Gregory's life has suddenly gone off the rails thanks to an illusory and wrongheaded quest that has left him feeling lost and listless. To find what he is missing and what his heart truly wants, he must return to his roots. Only by excavating...

"If one had to identify the single most influential shaping force in modern Black literary history, one would probably have to point to Wright and the publication of Native Son." – Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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

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"When the humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful, seductive photojournalist, he is confronted with a dangerous landscape of poverty, corruption, and voodoo."--Publisher's website

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...

"Henry Adams has had its fair share of drama ever since Bernadine Brown bought the town with her divorce settlement. Now just when things are starting to settle down, it's about to get crazy again... Cephas Patterson doesn't just want to be left alone-if you dare step onto his property, he'll meet you with a shotgun and a warning to stay away from his gold. He reminds Zoey of the lonely time she spent living on the streets, so she quietly begins leaving...