The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Author: Dinaw Mengestu

Category: African-American & Black Interest

Regular price: $11.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: October 19, 2024

Deal ends: October 19, 2024

Description:

Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C., his only companions two fellow African immigrants who share his bitter nostalgia and longing for his home continent. Years ago and worlds away Sepha could never have imagined a life of such isolation. As his environment begins to change, hope comes in the form of a friendship with new neighbors Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter. But when a series of racial incidents disturbs the community, Sepha may lose everything all over again.Watch a QuickTime interview with Dinaw Mengestu about this book.

Song of Solomon

Author: Toni Morrison

Category: African-American & Black Interest

Regular price: $11.99

Deal price: $2.99

Deal starts: October 16, 2024

Deal ends: October 16, 2024

Description:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An official Oprah Winfrey’s “The Books That Help Me Through” selection • The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imagined novel. Includes a new foreword by the author.One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsMilkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.“Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstances and personality, and revelling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs.” —The New Yorker

Mr. Loverman

Author: Bernardine Evaristo

Category: African-American & Black Interest

Regular price: $9.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: October 11, 2024

Deal ends: October 11, 2024

Description:

“[Evaristo’s] chef d’oeuvre; a masterful dissection of the life of a 74 year-old, British-Caribbean gay man.” —The Huffington Post  * Winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction* A Top Ten Favorite of the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table’s 2015 Over the Rainbow List   Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he’s lived in Hackney, London, for years. A flamboyant, wisecracking character with a dapper taste in retro suits, and a fondness for Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father, grandfather—and also secretly gay lovers with his childhood friend, Morris.   His deeply religious and disappointed wife, Carmel, thinks he sleeps with other women. When their marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away? With an abundance of laugh-out-loud humor and wit, Mr. Loverman explodes cultural myths and shows the extent of what can happen when people fear the consequences of being true to themselves.   “Evaristo’s confident control of the language, her vibrant use of humor, rhythm and poetry, and the realistic mix of Caribbean patois with both street and the Queen’s English . . . fix characters in the reader’s mind.” —The New York Times Book Review   “The novel proves to be revolutionary in its honest portrayal of gay men . . . and Evaristo’s writing is both intelligible and compelling.” —Library Journal   “Evaristo crafts a colorful look at a unique character confronting social normativity with a well-tuned voice and a resonant humanity.” —Publishers Weekly

Bud, Not Buddy

Author: Christopher Paul Curtis

Category: African-American & Black Interest

Regular price: $8.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: October 10, 2024

Deal ends: October 10, 2024

Description:

Hit the road with Bud in this Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award-winning classic about a boy on a journey to find his father—from Christopher Paul Curtis, recipient of the Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement.   It’s 1936, in Flint Michigan. Times may be hard, and ten-year-old Bud may be a motherless boy on the run, but Bud’s got a few things going for him: 1. He has his own suitcase full of special things. 2. He’s the author of Bud Caldwell’s Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself. 3. His momma never told him who his father was, but she left a clue: flyers advertising Herman E. Calloway and his famous band, the Dusky Devastators of the Depression!!!!!!   Bud’s got an idea that those flyers will lead him to his father. Once he decides to hit the road to find this mystery man, nothing can stop him—not hunger, not fear, not vampires, not even Herman E. Calloway himself. “[A] powerfully felt novel.” —The New York Times

My Vanishing Country

Author: Bakari Sellers

Category: African-American & Black Interest

Regular price: $17.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: October 10, 2024

Deal ends: October 10, 2024

Description:

New York Times Bestseller: This insightful and deeply personal portrait of African American working-class life “offers something so authentic . . . compelling” (Charleston Post and Courier).Part memoir, part historical and cultural analysis, My Vanishing Country is an eye-opening journey through the South’s past, present, and future.Anchored in Bakari Sellers’ hometown of Denmark, South Carolina, My Vanishing Country illuminates the pride and pain that continues to fertilize the soil of one of the poorest states in the nation. He traces his father’s rise to become a friend of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, civil rights hero, and member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in the process exploring the plight of the South’s dwindling rural black working class—many of whom can trace their ancestry back for seven generations.In his poetic personal history, we are awakened to the crisis affecting the other “forgotten men and women,” seldom acknowledged by the media. For Sellers, these are his family members, neighbors, and friends. He humanizes the struggles that shape their lives—to gain access to healthcare as rural hospitals disappear; to make ends meet as the factories they have relied on shut down and move overseas; to hold on to precious traditions as their towns erode; to forge a path forward without succumbing to despair. My Vanishing Country is also a love letter to fatherhood—to Sellers’ father, his lodestar, whose life lessons have shaped him, and to his newborn twins, who he hopes will embrace the Sellers family name and honor its legacy.“An engaging memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews“Family trauma—even inherited trauma—can take a tremendous toll on children. But as Bakari Sellers makes plain in My Vanishing Country, family trauma can also be a source of strength.” —BookPage

Kiss and Spell

Author: Celestine Martin

Category: African-American & Black Interest

Regular price: $9.99

Deal price: $2.99

Deal starts: October 08, 2024

Deal ends: October 08, 2024

Description:

In this spellbinding romantic comedy from a series about a family of witches, a lovelorn small-town witch helps a handsome prince break free from a curse—all while trying not to let their feelings for each other bubble to the surface.A witch without a spell All Ursula Caraway wished for was to live happily ever after in her hometown of Freya Grove. The self-proclaimed Jersey Shore Witch Princess was set to begin her perfect life—until a twist of fate changed everything. Now, she's telling fortunes to the lovelorn, selling crystals at the local psychic shop, and reclaiming her missing magic. Ursula desperately wishes to shake up her life—so much so, that she’ll do just about anything. Including befriending a very cute, very enchanted prince.    A prince in search of a kiss  Prince Xavier Alder needs to find The One, but his lack of social skills has made that a challenge—and being cursed by the Faerie Queen isn’t helping either. So when Ursula, eager to believe in magic again, agrees to help Xavier find a perfect, curse-breaking kiss before Midsummer, it’s the ideal opportunity for them to get what they want. So long as they don’t let their mutual (and inconvenient) attraction get in the way.