Download or read book The Days of Afrekete written by Asali Solomon and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I didn't feel like I was reading this novel—I felt like I was living it.” —Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House From award-winning author Asali Solomon, The Days of Afrekete is a tender, surprising novel of two women at midlife who rediscover themselves—and perhaps each other, inspired by Mrs. Dalloway, Sula, and Audre Lorde's Zami Liselle Belmont is having a dinner party. It seems a strange occasion—her husband, Winn, has lost his bid for the state legislature—but what better way to thank key supporters than a feast? Liselle was never sure about her husband becoming a politician, never sure about the limelight, never sure about the life of fundraising and stump speeches. Then an FBI agent calls to warn her that Winn might be facing corruption charges. An avalanche of questions tumbles around her: Is it possible he’s guilty? Who are they to each other; who have they become? How much of herself has she lost—and was it worth it? And just this minute, how will she make it through this dinner party? Across town, Selena Octave is making her way through the same day, the same way she always does—one foot in front of the other, keeping quiet and focused, trying not to see the terrors all around her. Homelessness, starving children, the very living horrors of history that made America possible: these and other thoughts have made it difficult for her to live an easy life. The only time she was ever really happy was with Liselle, back in college. But they’ve lost touch, so much so that when they ran into each other at a drugstore just after Obama was elected president, they barely spoke. But as the day wears on, memories of Liselle begin to shift Selena’s path. Inspired by Mrs. Dalloway and Sula, as well as Audre Lorde’s Zami, Asali Solomon’s The Days of Afrekete is a deft, expertly layered, naturally funny, and deeply human examination of two women coming back to themselves at midlife. It is a watchful celebration of our choices and where they take us, the people who change us, and how we can reimagine ourselves even when our lives seem set.
Download or read book Afrekete written by Catherine E. McKinley and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1995-04 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of black lesbian writing. Twenty essays in prose and verse on subjects ranging from abortion to men's attitudes to family life.
Download or read book Disgruntled written by Asali Solomon and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Novel about a young black girl coming of age in Philadelphia in the late '80s and early '90s"--
Download or read book Get Down written by Asali Solomon and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asali Solomon's characters are vivid misfits—a heathen at Jesus camp, a scheming prep-school student, a middle-aged mom pining for her salsa-dancing salad days, a scheming twentysomething virgin, a college stud in love with his weight-lifting partner, a lonely girl in love with a yellow dress. The kids in Get Down are trapped between their own good breeding and their burning desire to join the house party of sex, romance, and bad behavior that seems to be happening on some other block, down some other more dangerous street. The adults in Get Down are just trying to hold it together. Here is a debut that will make you laugh and cringe in equal measure. Set mostly in middle-class black Philadelphia during the crack and Reagan years, the stories in Get Down are antic, poignant, and utterly universal—they'll bring back memories for anyone who has ever stood in the corner of a darkened school gym wondering whether to dance . . . or duck for cover. They announce a sparkling new talent, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop whose work has been featured in Vibe, Essence, and the anthology Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts.
Download or read book The Kindest Lie written by Nancy Johnson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recommended by O Magazine * GMA * Elle * Marie Claire * Good Housekeeping * NBC News * Shondaland * Chicago Tribune * Woman's Day * Refinery 29 * Bustle * The Millions * New York Post * Parade * Hello! Magazine * PopSugar * and more! “The Kindest Lie is a deep dive into how we define family, what it means to be a mother, and what it means to grow up Black...beautifully crafted.” —JODI PICOULT "A fantastic story...well-written, timely, and oh-so-memorable."—Good Morning America “The Kindest Lie is a layered, complex exploration of race and class." —The Washington Post Every family has its secrets... It’s 2008, and the inauguration of President Barack Obama ushers in a new kind of hope. In Chicago, Ruth Tuttle, an Ivy-League educated Black engineer, is married to a kind and successful man. He’s eager to start a family, but Ruth is uncertain. She has never gotten over the baby she gave birth to—and was forced to leave behind—when she was a teenager. She had promised her family she’d never look back, but Ruth knows that to move forward, she must make peace with the past. Returning home, Ruth discovers the Indiana factory town of her youth is plagued by unemployment, racism, and despair. As she begins digging into the past, she unexpectedly befriends Midnight, a young white boy who is also adrift and looking for connection. Just as Ruth is about to uncover a burning secret her family desperately wants to keep hidden, a heart-stopping incident strains the town’s already searing racial tensions, sending Ruth and Midnight on a collision course that could upend both their lives. Powerful and unforgettable, The Kindest Lie is the story of an American family and reveals the secrets we keep and the promises we make to protect one another.
Download or read book The Annotated Mrs Dalloway written by Merve Emre and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel, in a lushly illustrated hardcover edition with illuminating commentary from a brilliant young Oxford scholar and critic. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” So begins Virginia Woolf’s much-beloved fourth novel. First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway has long been viewed not only as Woolf’s masterpiece, but as a pivotal work of literary modernism and one of the most significant and influential novels of the twentieth century. In this visually powerful annotated edition, acclaimed Oxford don and literary critic Merve Emre gives us an authoritative version of this landmark novel, supporting it with generous commentary that reveals Woolf’s aesthetic and political ambitions—in Mrs. Dalloway and beyond—as never before. Mrs. Dalloway famously takes place over the course of a single day in late June, its plot centering on the upper-class Londoner Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing to throw a party that evening for the nation’s elite. But the novel is complicated by Woolf’s satire of the English social system, and by her groundbreaking representation of consciousness. The events of the novel flow through the minds and thoughts of Clarissa and her former lover Peter Walsh and others in their circle, but also through shopkeepers and servants, among others. Together Woolf’s characters—each a jumble of memories and perceptions—create a broad portrait of a city and society transformed by the Great War in ways subtle but profound ways. No figure has been more directly shaped by the conflict than the disturbed veteran Septimus Smith, who is plagued by hallucinations of a friend who died in battle, and who becomes the unexpected second hinge of the novel, alongside Clarissa, even though—in one of Woolf’s many radical decisions—the two never meet. Emre’s extensive introduction and annotations follow the evolution of Clarissa Dalloway—based on an apparently conventional but actually quite complex acquaintance of Woolf’s—and Septimus Smith from earlier short stories and drafts of Mrs. Dalloway to their emergence into the distinctive forms devoted readers of the novel know so well. For Clarissa, Septimus, and her other creations, Woolf relied on the skill of “character reading,” her technique for bridging the gap between life and fiction, reality and representation. As Emre writes, Woolf’s “approach to representing character involved burrowing deep into the processes of consciousness, and, so submerged, illuminating the infinite variety of sensation and perception concealed therein. From these depths, she extracted an unlimited capacity for life.” It is in Woolf’s characters, fundamentally unknowable but fundamentally alive, that the enduring achievement of her art is most apparent. For decades, Woolf’s rapturous style and vision of individual consciousness have challenged and inspired readers, novelists, and scholars alike. The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, featuring 150 illustrations, draws on decades of Woolf scholarship as well as countless primary sources, including Woolf’s private diaries and notes on writing. The result is not only a transporting edition of Mrs. Dalloway, but an essential volume for Woolf devotees and an incomparable gift to all lovers of literature.
Download or read book The Perishing written by Natashia Deón and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Black immortal in 1930's Los Angeles must recover the memory of her past in order to discover who she truly is in this extraordinarily affecting novel for readers of N. K. Jemisin and Octavia E. Butler. Lou, a young Black woman, wakes up in an alley in 1930s Los Angeles with no memory of how she got there or where she’s from. Taken in by a caring foster family, Lou dedicates herself to her education while trying to put her mysterious origins behind her. She’ll go on to become the first Black female journalist at the Los Angeles Times, but Lou’s extraordinary life is about to take an even more remarkable turn. When she befriends a firefighter at a downtown boxing gym, Lou is shocked to realize that though she has no memory of meeting him, she’s been drawing his face for years. Increasingly certain that their paths previously crossed—and beset by unexplainable flashes from different eras haunting her dreams—Lou begins to believe she may be an immortal sent here for a very important reason, one that only others like her can explain. Setting out to investigate the mystery of her existence, Lou must make sense of the jumble of lifetimes calling to her, just as new forces threaten the existence of those around her. Immersed in the rich historical tapestry of Los Angeles—Prohibition, the creation of Route 66, and the collapse of the St. Francis Dam—The Perishing is a stunning examination of love and justice through the eyes of one miraculous woman whose fate seems linked to the city she comes to call home.
Download or read book Legba s Crossing written by Heather Russell and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Haiti, Papa Legba is the spirit whose permission must be sought to communicate with the spirit world. He stands at and for the crossroads of language, interpretation, and form and is considered to be like the voice of a god. InLegba’s Crossing, Heather Russell examines how writers from the United States and the anglophone Caribbean challenge conventional Western narratives through innovative use, disruption, and reconfiguration of form. Russell’s in-depth analysis of the work of James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Earl Lovelace, and John Edgar Wideman is framed in light of the West African aesthetic principle ofàshe, a quality ascribed to art that transcends the prescribed boundaries of form.Àsheis linked to the characteristics of improvisation and flexibility that are central to jazz and other art forms. Russell argues that African Atlantic writers self-consciously and self-reflexively manipulate dominant forms that prescribe a certain trajectory of, for example, enlightenment, civilization, or progress. She connects this seemingly postmodern meta-analysis to much older West African philosophy and its African Atlantic iterations, which she calls “the Legba Principle.”
Download or read book Everything After written by Jill Santopolo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Light We Lost mixes with a touch of Daisy Jones and the Six in this novel of first love, passion, and the power of choice--and how we cannot escape the people we are meant to be. Two loves. Two choices. One chance to follow her dreams. Emily has come a long way since she lost her two passions fifteen years ago: music, and Rob. She's a psychologist at NYU who helps troubled college students like the one she once was. Together with her caring doctor husband, Ezra, she has a beautiful life. They're happy. They hope to start a family. But when a tragic event in Emily's present too closely echoes her past, and parts of her story that she'd hoped never to share come to light, her perfect life is suddenly upturned. Then Emily hears a song on the radio about the woman who got away. The melody and voice are hauntingly familiar. Could it be? As Emily's past passions come roaring back into her life, she'll find herself asking: Who is she meant to be? Who is she meant to love?
Download or read book Zami written by Audre Lorde and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem, weak and half-blind. On she stumbles - through teenage pain and loneliness, but then to happiness in friendship, work and sex, from Washington Heights to Mexico, always changing, always strong. This is Audre Lorde's story. A rapturous, life-affirming autobiographical novel by the 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet', it changed the literary landscape. 'Her work shows us new ways to imagine the world ... so many themes of Audre's work have endured' Renni Eddo Lodge, author of Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race 'I came across Audre Lorde's Zami, and I cried to think how lucky I was to have found her. She was an inspiration' Jackie Kay
Download or read book How We Stay Free written by Christopher R. Rogers and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the conceptual anchors of the Black Radical Tradition, How We Stay Free produces a Philly-driven literary mixtape/anthology-in-action.
Download or read book Sister Love written by Julie R. Enszer and published by Sinister Wisdom. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "African american women writer Audre Lorde and poet Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes. This book gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker as they discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer."--Publisher.
Download or read book The Book of Sarahs written by Catherine E. McKinley and published by Argo-Navis. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suffused with longing, this rueful, passionate memoir about an adopted woman''s search for her birth parents explores themes of race and family. Catherine McKinley was one of only a few thousand African American and bi-racial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raised in a small, white New England town, she had a persistent longing for the more diverse community that would better understand and encompass her. In an era shaped by the rhetoric of Black Power and Black Pride, McKinley''s coming of age entailed her own detailed investigation into her birth history, a search complicated by the terms of a closed adoption that denied her all knowledge of the circumstances of her birth. THE BOOK OF SARAHS traces McKinley''s own time of revelations: after a five-year period marked by dead ends and disappointments, she finds her birth mother and a half-sister named Sarah, the name that was originally given to her. When she locates her birth father and meets several of his eleven other children she begins to see the whole mosaic of her parentage-African American, WASP, Jewish, Native American-and then is confronted with a final revelation that threatens to destabilize all she has uncovered. At the center of the narrative is McKinley''s angry passion for her two mothers and her quest for self-acceptance in a world in which she seems to herself to be always outside the bounds of social legitimacy. In telling of her struggles both to fit into and to defy social conventions, McKinley challenges us to rethink our own preconceptions about race, identity, kinship, loyalty, and love. Catherine McKinley is the author of The Book of Sarahs and Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where she has taught Creative Nonfiction, and a former Fulbright Scholar in Ghana, West Africa. She lives in New York City. "McKinley writes beautifully in this debut memoir, never resorting to sentimentality or easy emotions within this tangled web of emotional and family secrets.” - Publishers Weekly "In recounting her long and arduous journey in search of her birth parents, McKinley (Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing) draws us into a page-turning treasure hunt. Along the way she skillfully describes her upbringing as a black (or so she believed) child adopted by a white family during the 1960s, her tenacious efforts to winnow information out of the bureaucratic agency that handled her adoption and her often startlingly candid reactions to each new revelation about her background. Ultimately, she discovered that her parentage includes African American, WASP, Jewish, and Native American forbears. The multiple Sarahs of the title are just another confounding bit of information in this painful, funny, and very human memoir about race and family. In the end, the treasure McKinley seems to have discovered is her own independent self. Recommended for all libraries." - Library Journal "In elegant, original prose that springs from a mind and heart at turns spirited and pensive, Catherine McKinley tells her dramatic story with defiant candor, precocious wisdom, and courageous sensitivity.” - Sarah Saffian, Author of Ithaka: A Daughter’s Memoir of Bing Found "What child doesn''t occasionally fantasize that maybe she''s been adopted and one day her real parents will show up to rescue her from the crazy clan she''s stuck in? Who doesn''t question the identity the world endeavors to tether her to even as she struggles to create her own self? And who isn''t fascinated by the dynamics of other people''s families? Or maybe it''s only me. Perhaps that''s why I regularly revisit the world inside Catherine McKinley''s The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts. The first time I picked up McKinley''s memoir, I felt like I had fallen into my own life, though in truth her narrative is far removed from my own. Catherine, the biracial adopted daughter of a white couple, sets out to find her "true" mom and dad and discovers a Jewish birth mother and an African American father. The Book of Sarahs questions everything from motherhood to transracial adoption to coming out. It''s written for adults, but inevitably takes me back to childhood reveries of escape. These days, though, I also appreciate the book from the other side--as a mother making choices that will change the course of my children''s lives." - Jacqueline Woodson, author of National Book Award winner Brown Girl Dreaming (c) O Magazine 2015
Download or read book Political Disappointment written by Sara Marcus and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sara Marcus argues for the emancipatory potential of political disappointment—the unrealized desire for liberation. Exploring literature and sound from Reconstruction to Black Power, from the Popular Front to second-wave feminism and the AIDS crisis, Marcus shows how moments of defeat have inspired new ensembles of art and activism.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature written by Yogita Goyal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a systematic and vibrant account of the range and achievements of contemporary Black writers.
Download or read book The Best Short Stories 2021 written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty prizewinning stories selected from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year—continuing the O. Henry Prize's century-long tradition of literary excellence. "Widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction." —The Atlantic Monthly. Now entering its second century, the prestigious annual story anthology has a new title, a new look, and a new guest editor. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has brought her own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and young emerging voices. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Adichie, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction. Featured in this collection: Daphne Palasi Andreades • David Means • Sindya Bhanoo • Crystal Wilkinson • Alice Jolly • David Rabe • Karina Sainz Borgo (translator, Elizabeth Bryer) • Jamel Brinkley • Tessa Hadley • Adachioma Ezeano • Anthony Doerr • Tiphanie Yanique • Joan Silber • Jowhor Ile • Emma Cline • Asali Solomon • Ben Hinshaw • Caroline Albertine Minor (translator, Caroline Waight) • Jianan Qian • Sally Rooney
Download or read book Buzz Books 2021 Fall Winter written by and published by Publishers Lunch. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buzz Books 2021 is a treasure-trove of what readers value the most: substantial excerpts from a curated selection of dozens of the most highly-touted books scheduled for publication this fall and winter. Such major bestselling authors as Mitch Albom, Noah Hawley, Natasha Lester, and Richard Osman are featured, along with literary greats Lauren Groff, Ruth Ozeki, Bernard Shlink and. Tiphanie Yanique. Other sure-to-be popular titles are by Patti Callahan, Anna Pitoniak and Shruti Swamy. Buzz Books has had a particularly stellar track record with highlighting the most talented, exciting debut authors, and this edition is no exception. Ash Davidson’s Damnation Spring, Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir, and Claire Oshetsky’s Chouette are among the literary standouts. Our nonfiction selections range from Yrsa Daley Ward’s inspirational guide that includes poetry to Gayle Jessup White, a descendant of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson on reclaiming her family’s legacy. Bestselling expert on the virtues, Ryan Holiday, addresses courage, while iconic naturalist Jane Goodall offers the Book of Hope. Be sure to look out for Buzz Books 2021: Romance, also out in May, and Buzz Books 2022: Spring/Summer, coming in January 2022.
