Catalog Search Results
Author
Formats
Summary
For Damon Young, existing while Black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions such as "How should I react here, as a professional black person?" and "Will this white person's potato salad kill me?" are forever relevant. What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker chronicles Young's efforts to survive while battling and making sense...
Author
Summary
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
"[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy."—The New Yorker
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines
Author
Series
Appears on these lists
Summary
In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity -- powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...
Author
Series
Easy Rawlins mystery volume 14
Summary
Life for Easy Rawlins is surprisingly... easy. He's living off the proceeds of his last case, trying to keep out of trouble. Of course it's not going to last. Because Easy's old friend Mouse knocks on his door. Mouse is one of the deadliest men in America. And Mouse wants a small favor. He wants Easy to help a man he says is wrongly imprisoned, a friend of Charcoal Joe. Charcoal Joe is a mythical figure in the LA underworld - he pulls all the strings...
Author
Series
Easy Rawlins mystery volume 7
Formats
Summary
Set in 1964, Easy is on a mission to lure Brawley Brown back to his mother. But not only is Brawley bad, he's big and not so easily swayed, especially since joining the Urban Revolutionary Party, a political group wary of strangers. Add to that a cache of stolen guns, secret government investigators, a payroll heist, several murders, problems with his son, and everybody lying about everything, plus his own crushing guilt over the apparent death of...
11) BlacKkKlansman
Formats
Summary
"In the early 1970s, Ron Stallworth becomes the first African-American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department. Determined to make a difference, he bravely sets out on a dangerous mission: infiltrate and expose the Ku Klux Klan. He recruits a seasoned colleague, Flip Zimmerman, into the undercover investigation. Together, they team up to take down the extremist organization aiming to garner mainstream appeal. BlacKkKlansman offers an unflinching,...
Author
Series
Easy Rawlins mystery volume 12
Summary
We last saw Easy Rawlins in Blonde Faith, fighting for his life after his car plunges over a cliff. True to form, the tough WWII veteran survives. Soon, he and his murderous sidekick, Mouse, are cruising the mean streets of L.A. in all their psychedelic 1967 glory to look for a young black man who disappeared during an acid trip. Fueled by an elixir called Gator's Blood, brewed by the conjure woman Mama Jo, Easy experiences a physical, spiritual,...
14) Chiefs
Author
Series
Summary
When a teenaged boy is found dead, the chief of police in a small Georgia town in 1920 begins an obsessive hunt for the boy's tormentor, which leads him to two former chiefs of police, one a murderer and the other the concealer of a secret.
Author
Summary
"A powerful, heart-wrenching debut novel about ambition, survival, and our responsibility toward one another. Dixon was once an Olympic-level runner. But he missed the team by two-tenths of a second, and ever since that pain decades ago, he hasn't allowed a goal to consume him. But when his charming older brother, Nate, suggests that they attempt to be the first Black American men to summit Mount Everest, Dixon can't refuse. The brothers are determined...
Author
Series
Two Medicine country volume 6
Summary
From one of the greatest novelists of the American West comes a surprising and riveting story set in Montana and New York during the Harlem Renaissance, drawing together an unlikely set of thwarted performers in one last inspired grasp at life's set of gold rings: love and renown. Susan Duff-the bossy, indomitable schoolgirl with a silver voice from the pages of Doig's most popular work, Dancing at the Rascal Fair-has reached middle age alone, teaching...
18) Native son
Author
Series
Summary
The story of a young African American man caught in a downward spiral after murdering a white woman in a monment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930's, it is an unsparing reflection of the poverty and hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and what it means to be black in America.
Author
Summary
""The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it -- and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America -- but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an...