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"Virtuosic ... glorious in its exploration." —The New York Times A singular and powerful debut novel about a young black American learning the difficulties of forming your own identity when society has already assigned you one Like most recent college graduates, Jonah Winters is unsure of what's next. A young black American raised in France and living in New York City, he tries on a couple of careers only to find that nothing feels right. And as Jonah struggles to envision his future, he feels pressured by his friends and family to put the struggles of his community before his search for self. But then a chance encounter with an ex-NBA player with his own regrets, inspires Jonah to take his life into his own hands. Deciding to leave the country entirely, he sets off for Brazil. And as he makes and breaks friendships on the way, reflects on his past relationships, and learns to rely on himself, Jonah slowly forms an understanding of self, community, and freedom that is rarely afforded to young black men.
It was at the Airplane Club in Denver, Colorado, right after World War II, that Leland, on the drums, and Josephine, handling the vocals, first met and fell in love. That marked the beginning of a long and fruitful lifeone that would include the births of nine children. As the children grew up surrounded by family, they were the center of their own universe, and their home was the center of their community. Their upbringing was different than most, but the siblings found unique ways to entertain themselves and challenge their intellect, their musical talents, and their wiles. In 9 Voices, each of the children, now grown, presents a chapter narrating events from his or her life, from his or her perspective; their stories encompass their childhoods, from their earliest memories to their departures from home. Their testimonies and colorful anecdotes pay tribute to their parents and an extraordinary childhood. Told from nine distinct viewpoints, this memoir shares a lively, touching, and candid portrait of one remarkable family.
"Genius--brilliant, polished and of considerable depth." --Ishmael Reed
“Astonishing … an uncommonly rich picture of Black American family life in early 20th century Jim Crow America.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) This “vibrant portrait of African American life” in Jazz Age Kansas City captures the magic of childhood and parental love through the eyes of a remarkable boy (New York Times) This must-read rediscovery, published in an elegant and unabridged paperback edition with a new foreword, is a literary masterpiece poised to take its rightful place in the American literary canon. Such Sweet Thunder immerses readers in the life of a precocious infant, Amerigo Jones, and then tells the story of his first 18 years as he becomes aware of the ad...
Nominated for a 34th annual Lambda Literary Award • An essential and revelatory coming-of-age novel from a thrilling new voice, Rainbow Milk follows nineteen-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of his Jehovah's Witness upbringing. In the 1950s, ex-boxer Norman Alonso has immigrated to Britain from Jamaica with his wife and children in order to secure a brighter future. Blighted with unexpected illness and racism, Norman and his family are resilient but are all too aware that their family will need more than just hope to survive in their new country. At the turn of the millennium, Jesse seeks a fresh start in London, escaping a broken immediate family, a repressive religious community, and his depressed hometown in the industrial Black Country. But once he arrives he finds himself at a loss for a new center of gravity and turns to sex work, music, and art to create his own notions of love, masculinity, and spirituality. A wholly original novel as tender as it is visceral, Rainbow Milk is a bold reckoning with race, class, sexuality, freedom, and religion across generations, time, and cultures.
The debut collection from a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient whose “astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable” (Tracy K. Smith) The Sobbing School, Joshua Bennett’s mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.
In 1950, Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, announced that communists were working in the State Department. This anthology focuses on the hearings that resulted from McCarthy's famous efforts to expose communists in government positions and his use of dubious tactics such as smearing and guilt by association.
The Bern Book is a travelogue, a memoir, a “diary of an isolated soul” (Darryl Pinckney), and a meditation on the myth and reality of race in midcentury Europe and America. In 1953, having left the US and settled in Bern, Switzerland, Vincent O. Carter, a struggling writer, set about composing a “record of a voyage of the mind.” The voyage begins with Carter’s furiously good-humored description of how, every time he leaves the house, he must face the possibility of being asked “the hated question” (namely, Why did you, a black man born in America, come to Bern?). It continues with stories of travel, war, financial struggle, the pleasure of walking, the pain of self-loathing, and, through it all, various experiments in what Carter calls “lacerating subjective sociology.” Now this long-neglected volume is back in print for the first time since 1973.
Treasured for centuries by karate's top masters, the Bubishi is a classic Chinese work on philosophy, strategy, medicine, and technique as they relate to the martial arts. Referred to as the "bible of karate" by famous master Chojun Miyagi, for hundreds of years the Bubishiwas a secret text passed from master to student in China and later in Okinawa. All of karate's legendary masters have studied it, applied its teachings, or copied passages from it. No other classic work has had as dramatic an impact on the shaping and development of karate as the Bubishi. Karate historian and authority Patrick McCarthy spent over ten years researching and studying the Bubishi and the arts associated with i...
At sixteen, Jesse James began his fighting career by killing Unionist neighbours on their doorsteps. In the bloodshed and bitterness that followed the South's surrender at Appomattox, Jesse and his fellow guerillas, with their gunfights and hold-ups, became part of the intensely brutal struggle by the White South against the racial egalitarianism and Federal power fostered by Reconstruction. In the first serious biography of Jesse James in forty years, T. J. Stiles paints a strikingly new and vivid portrait of the period before the American Civil War, during the conflict and its aftermath. With groundbreaking scholarship and dazzling reinterpretation, T. J. Stiles has refashioned one of the great legends of American history.