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Mark Twain's darkly comic short classic set in the antebellum South stands as a literary condemnation of slavery and racial inequality. Each enriched classic edition includes: A concise introduction that gives readers important background information. A chronology of the author's life and work. A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context. An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations....
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Coleman Silk is a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeply into Silk's life. Eventually, matters are made worse when Coleman's affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley is exposed. But amid...
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The House Behind the Cedars (1900) is African-American writer Charles Chesnutt's debut novel. Inspired by his own experience as a Black man capable of passing for white-which Chesnutt consciously chose not to do-as well as by Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, The House Behind the Cedars explores themes of identity, race, and class in the post-Civil War South.
Controversial for its portrayal of interracial romance, Chesnutt's novel was critically acclaimed...
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Looking for adventure in her life, Harriet, the Duchess of Berrow, dresses as a man and accompanies other nobles to the estate of Lord Justinian Strange, where he hosts a rollicking fete that would mean scandal to any proper lady. When the two finally meet, they fall in love, but can he see past all her disguises?
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"From the prizewinning author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Peaces comes a brilliant recasting of the Snow White fairy tale as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity. In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries Arturo Whitman, a local widower, and becomes stepmother to...
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Originally published in 1912, this novel was one of the first to present a frank picture of being black in America. Masked in the tradition of the literary confession practiced by such writers as St. Augustine and Rousseau, this "autobiography" purports to be a candid account of its narrator's private views and feelings as well as an acknowledgment of the central secret of his life: that though he lives as a white man, he is, by heritage and experience,...
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In Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Adam Sunraider, a senator from New England, is mortally wounded by an assassin's bullet while making a speech on the Senate floor. To the shock of all who think they know him, Sunraider calls out from his deathbed for Alonzo Hickman, an old black minister, to be brought to his side. The reverend is summoned; the two are left alone. “Tell me what happened while there's still time,” demands the dying Sunraider....
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Luna--or depending on who's asking, Rose--is the white-passing daughter of an immigrant mother who has seen what happens to people from her culture. This world is prejudicial, and she must hide her identity in pursuit of owning an illegal jazz club. Using her cunning powers, Rose negotiates with dangerous criminals as she climbs up Kansas City's bootlegging ladder. Luna, however, runs the risk of losing everything if the crooked city councilmen and...
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From the bestselling author of "Tracks" comes a dramatic sequel--a story of suspect miracles, tests of faith, and the corrosive and redemptive power of secrecy. Over the years, Father Damian has seen the reservation through its most severe crises, yet he is more than a heroic priest. He has lived with and served the Ojibwa people as a man of the cloth, and also as a woman. However, where does fact end and reality begin? NPR sponsorships. Deals with...
11) Mislaid: a novel
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"Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The two are mismatched from the start--she's a lesbian, he's gay--but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind....
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An orphan caring for her heavily pregnant sibling disguises herself as a boy to take a job on the Pony Express, where she partners with a young man hiding his own secrets and a mixed-race youth trying to defend his freedom.
When Jessamine Murphy finds a recruitment poster for the Pony Express, she's looking for adventure-- and a chance to track down her wayward father in California. Eager to reunite her fractured family, Jessamine cuts her hair,...
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Marty McKidrict and Stuart Brodie are outcasts in the turbulent colonial backcountry of the 1780s. Trying to escape a brutal, sadistic husband, McKidrict disguises herself as a man and reluctantly joins the Patriot cause led by John Sevier and the Overmountain Men. Meanwhile, Brodie, a freedman, joins the Loyalists after Brodie's brother is lynched by a gang of Patriot renegades. In the heat of the American Revolution, fate will bring the two together...
15) Passin': a novel
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Essence best-selling author and winner of the Nubian Literary Award, Karen E. Quinones Miller was also named Author of the Year by Turning Pages Book Club.
Passin' introduces Shanika Ann Jenkins, a light-skinned black woman who decides to remake herself. Shanika is blonde and beautiful. But after being rejected for a job she makes an incredible choice: to use her God-given assets to become the white woman she always imagined she could be.
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Victorian mysteries (Karen Odden) volume 1
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Nineteen-year-old Nell Hallam lives in a modest corner of Mayfair with her brother Matthew, an inspector at Scotland Yard. An exceptionally talented pianist, she aspires to attend the Royal Academy; but with tuition beyond their means, Nell sets out to earn the money herself-by playing piano in a popular Soho music hall. And the fact that she will have to disguise herself as a man and slip out at night to do it doesn't deter her. Spending evenings...
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Sweeping from post WWII rural Romania to the cosmopolitan Budapest of 1990, Christina Shea's Smuggled is the story of Eva Farkas, who loses her identity, quite literally, as a young child when she is smuggled in a flour sack across the Hungarian border to escape the Nazis. Five-year-old Eva is trafficked from Hungary to Romania at the end of the war, arriving in the fictional border town of Crisu, given the name Anca Balaj by her aunt and uncle and...
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The American humorist's classic novel depicting human nature under slavery. At the beginning of Pudd'nhead Wilson a young slave woman, fearing for her infant son's life, exchanges her light skinned child with her master's. From this rather simple premise Mark Twain fashioned one of his most entertaining, funny, yet biting novels. On its surface, Pudd'nhead Wilson possesses all the elements of an engrossing nineteenth century mystery, reversed identities,...
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Black Authors - Fiction
Black Voices
Black Voices in Fiction (adults)
HPL Black History Month - Adult Fiction 2024
Black Voices
Black Voices in Fiction (adults)
HPL Black History Month - Adult Fiction 2024
Description
"A ferociously talented writer makes his stunning debut with this richly woven tapestry, set in a small Nova Scotia town settled by former slaves, that depicts several generations of one family bound together and torn apart by blood, faith, time, and fate. Structured as a triptych, Africaville chronicles the lives of three generations of the Sebolt family--Kath Ella, her son Omar/Etienne, and her grandson Warner--whose lives unfold against the tumultuous...
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Generación tras generación, la comunidad negra del pueblo de Mallard, en Luisiana, ha intentado aclarar el tono de su piel favoreciendo los matrimonios mixtos. Las inseparables gemelas Desirée y Stella Vignes, con su color níveo, sus ojos castaños y su cabello ondulado, son un buen ejemplo de ello. Tan distintas y tan iguales, decidieron huir juntas del diminuto pueblo creyendo que también podrían escapar de su sangre. Años después y ante...
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