What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Short Stories
Langston Hughes · 309 pages
Langston Hughes was a master of many literary forms - poetry, plays, essays, novels, and memoirs. But it is as a short-story writer that his talents combined in an especially vibrant way: his gift for humor and irony, his love of the vernacular, his brilliance in depicting character, and his profound perceptions about American life. This new collection of forty-seven stories written between 191
All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories
Edward P. Jones · 403 pages
A collection of fourteen short stories is set in Washington, D.C., and follows morally complex characters caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations of modern city life
In Love Trouble: Stories of Black Women
Alice Walker · 147 pages
The Complete Stories
Zora Neale Hurston · 320 pages
"This landmark gathering of Zora Neale Hurston's short fiction - most of which appeared only in literary magazines during her lifetime and some of which has never been published - reveals the evolution of the talents of one of the most important African-American writers. Spanning the years from 1921, when Howard University's literary magazine published "John Redding Goes to Sea," to 1955, when Hur
Foreign Soil
Maxine Beneba Clarke · 265 pages
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
Z.Z. Packer · 238 pages
Drinking coffee elsewhere takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong, from a Girl Scout camp, where a troupe of black girls are confronted with a group of white girls, whose defining feature turns out to be not their race but their disabilities; to the Million Man March on Washington, where a young man must decide where his allegiance to his father lies; an
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Danielle Evans · 240 pages
Fearless, funny, and ultimately tender, Evans's stories offer a bold new perspective on the experience of being young and African-American or mixed-race in modern-day America.
Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories
Nadine Gordimer · 184 pages
Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories
Sherman Alexie · 465 pages
Combines fifteen of the author's classic short stories with fifteen new stories in an anthology that features tales involving donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, and marriage. In these comfort-zone-destroying tales, including the masterpiece, War Dances, characters grapple with racism, damaging stereotypes, poverty, alcoholism, diabetes, and the tragic loss of languages and customs. Q
The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he
The Thing Around Your Neck
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 240 pages
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as "one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years" (Baltimore Sun), with "prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes" (The Boston Globe); The Washington Post called her "the twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe." Her award-winning Ha
This Is How You Lose Her
Junot Diaz · 240 pages
This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.
Maud Martha
Gwendolyn Brooks · 180 pages
September 2003 marked the 50th anniversary of Maud Martha, the only novel published by esteemed poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Initially entitled "American Family Brown" the work would eventually come to symbolize some of Brooks' most provocative writing. In a novel that captures the essence of Black life, Brooks recognizes the beauty and strength that lies within each of us.
Disappearing Earth
Julia Phillips · 312 pages
Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories
Flannery O'Connor · 269 pages
The death of Flanner O'Connor at thirty-nine marked the loss of one of America's most gifted contemporary writers at the height of her powers. This volume is the collection on which she was working at the time of her death. Each of the nine stores carries her highly individual stamp, and could have been writte by no one else. Everything That Rises Must Converge is the most worth memorial that Flan
Eight Men: Short Stories
Richard Wright · 250 pages
Here, in these powerful stories, Richard Wright takes readers into this landscape once again. Each of the eight stories in Eight Men focuses on a black man at violent odds with a white world, reflecting Wright's views about racism in our society and his fascination with what he called "the struggle of the individual in America." These poignant, gripping stories will captivate all those who loved B
Cane
Jean Toomer, Rudolph P. Byrd · 224 pages
Published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane was widely heralded as one of the first masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, and its author as “a bright morning star” of the movement. Toomer himself, however, was reluctant to embrace an explicitly racialized identity, preferring to define himself as simply an American writer. Inspired in part by Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio , T
African Stories
Doris Lessing · 565 pages
Collection of the best of Doris Lessing's short stories and a couple of novellas all set in her native Africa. From Rhodesia to Kenya and such we see many different stories and perspectives. We meet colonial Boers, English farmers, native legends, native peoples, miners, scholars, women, children, men, hunters, animals- just about everything! Her stories begin in the early part of the 1900s and as
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
Walter Mosley · 208 pages
Socrates Fortlow is Walter Mosley's most compelling character since Easy Rawlins, a tough, brooding ex-convict and is set to be a bold and original new hero.
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
Kathleen Collins · 175 pages
A never-before-published collection of stories from Kathleen Collins. These short stories, discovered only recently, highlight Collins's masterfully blend of the personal issues-- race, gender, family, and sexuality-- with the ordinary moments that shape our lives. Also known as an artist and filmmaker, her stories create full-bodied men, women, and children who justify their lives while integrat
Go Down, Moses
William Faulkner · 383 pages
Contains: [Wash](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16245840W/Wash) The Fire and the Hearth Pantaloon in Black The Old People The Bear Delta Autumn Go Down, Moses
Shifting Colours
Fiona Sussman · 304 pages
This is the first memory I have of my mamma, the first sweet memory. Sometimes her laughter bursts into my head and I hear her call me - my name full and round in her mouth. Frustratingly though, as with all the memories I have of her, Mamma's face -always her face - blurs under the pressure of my focus. Shifting Colours is a story of secrets, love and loss. Set against the violent backdrop of apa
Long Division
Kiese Laymon · 304 pages
Kiese Laymon's debut novel is a Twain-esque exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in Post-Katrina Mississippi, written in a voice that's alternately funny, lacerating, and wise. The book contains two interwoven stories. In the first, it's 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, 14-year-old Citoyen "City" Coldson becomes an