Originally published in 1864, "Moods" was the first book produced by Louisa May Alcott under her real name and pre-dated her hugely popular novel "Little Women". Written for a noticeably more mature audience then her most famous works, "Moods" revolves around the intersecting lives of an abolitionist spinster and a fallen Cuban beauty. Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888) was an American short story writer, novelist, and poet most famous for writing the...

From the author of the bestselling novel The Street, comes a powerful collection of stories that captures a remarkably diverse panorama of African American experience in the 1950s and 1960s. A small-town pharmacist's decision to take a day off leads his wife to an agonizing encounter with the police. A retired Black college professor teaching at a predominately white high school is kidnapped and forced to witness an unthinkable horror. A young Black...

"First published in 1892, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is written as the secret journal of a woman who, failing to relish the joys of marriage and motherhood, is sentenced to a country rest cure. Though she longs to write, her husband and doctor forbid it, prescribing instead complete passivity. In the involuntary confinement of her bedroom, the hero creates a reality of her own beyond the hypnotic pattern of the faded yellow wallpaper--a pattern that has...

Written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, this is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl from Philadelphia who discovers she can pass for white.

Nella Larsen was an important writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. While she was not prolific, her work was powerful and critically acclaimed. Collected here are both, of her novels, 'Passing' and 'Quicksand'. 'Quicksand', was autobiographical in nature and examined a woman's need for sexual fulfilment balanced against respectability and acceptance amid a deeply religious society. The novel is deeply pessimistic and ends as the protagonist...