Cotton, the Silver Fleece, could be the answer to Zora and Bles' prayers for overcoming poverty. While attending school in Rural Alabama, they lovingly nurture their crop. but the white aristocracy is determined to control the price of cotton and monopolize the market. Can these two lovers prevail despite the daunting obstacles before them?

Mama Ruby's known for taking things that aren't rightfully hers, like her best friend's stillborn infant, who she brought back to life and christened Maureen. She's also rumored to have done away with her husband. Some fear her, others try their best to avoid her. But Mama Ruby doesn't pay them any mind. Not when she's got the one gift God gave her--her precious baby girl.

"At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary...

"A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with new introduction, excerpt, and discussion guide Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle's, estimation, but she's also the brightest. Rozelle--beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned--exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment,...

"Remarkable. . . . Iweala never wavers from a gripping, pulsing narrative voice. . . . He captures the horror of ethnic violence in all its brutality and the vulnerability of youth in all its innocence." -Entertainment Weekly (A) The harrowing, utterly original debut novel by Uzodinma Iweala about the life of a child soldier in a war-torn African country As civil war rages in an unnamed West-African nation, Agu, the school-aged protagonist of...

Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and a single mother of three, recounts her life as a political activist, feminist, and environmentalist in Kenya. Born in a rural village in 1940, she was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most girls were uneducated. We see her become the first woman both in East and Central Africa to earn a PhD and to head a university department in Kenya. We witness her...

Award-winning journalist Herb Boyd, author of Sugar Ray Robinson's biography Pound for Pound, combines impeccable research with astute literary criticism in Baldwin's Harlem. Packed with telling anecdotes, this concise volume illuminates Baldwin's diverse views and his impressions of the community that would remain a consistent presence in virtually all his writing.

A collection of twelve stories includes the tale of a medical student in hiding with a poor Muslim woman, and a woman who discovers a devastating secret about her brother's death.

"A moving African-American family drama of love and devotion in the face of Alzheimer's disease. You just can't plan for this kind of thing. Diane Tate certainly hasn't. She never expected to slowly lose her talented husband to the debilitating effects of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. As a respected family court judge, she's spent her life making tough calls, but when her sixty-eight-year-old husband's health worsens and Diane is forced to move...

"Sylvia Blackwell has it all, or so she thinks. She and her handsome husband, Garrett, are the epitome of success: an immaculate house of their dreams, a beautiful and talented 17-year-old daughter, flourishing careers, and nearly twenty years of perfectly wedded bliss. Just as they are making plans for their vow renewal celebration, a call in the middle of the night interrupts their picture-perfect lives. Now Sylvia has to deal with the reality of...