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1) Passing
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Restless Classics presents the ninetieth anniversary edition of an undersung gem of the Harlem Renaissance: Nella Larsen's Passing, a captivating and prescient exploration of identity, sexuality, self-invention, class, and race set amidst the pealing boisterousness of the Jazz Age.
When childhood friends Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry cross paths at a whites-only restaurant, it's been decades since they last met. Married to a bigoted white man who...
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The author and poet recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums.
"Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother...
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Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...
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In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and...
9) Home
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Presents the story of embittered Korean War veteran Frank Money, who struggles against trauma and racism to rescue his medically abused sister and work through identity-shattering memories.
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Celebrate Black History: J & YA Nonfiction Books
NYT - Children’s Middle Grade Paperback
Women's History Month
NYT - Children’s Middle Grade Paperback
Women's History Month
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"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...
11) Black boy
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A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author's grandson.
When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that "if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in
...12) Horse
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"A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history. Kentucky, 1850. Jarrett, an enslaved groom, and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. As the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young...
13) The help
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"Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. Aibileen is a wise, regal black maid raising her seventeenth white child. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, can cook like nobody's business but can't mind her tongue. It is 1962, and these three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step that forever changes a town and the way women --mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends -- view one another"--Page 4 of...
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Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years' experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she's been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don't want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress...
18) The color purple
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"Set in the deep American south between the wars, this is the classic tale of Celie, a young poor black girl. Raped repeatedly by her father, she loses two children and then is married off to a man who treats her no better than a slave. She is separated from her sister Nettie and dreams of becoming like the glamorous Shug Avery, a singer and rebellious black woman who has taken charge of her own destiny. Gradually Celie discovers the support of women...
19) Beloved
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Set after the American Civil War (1861-1865), the novel is inspired by the story of an African American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. In the novel, the protagonist Sethe is also a slave who escapes slavery, running to Cincinnati, Ohio. After twenty-eight days of freedom, a posse arrives to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave...
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Violet is smart, funny and biracial. Her African American father died before she was born, and she has grown up with just her white mother and white older sister. Now that she is eleven, she feels it is time to learn about her African American heritage, so she seeks out her paternal grandmother.
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