When is a marriage worth saving and when is it best to let go? When do half-truths turn into full-blown lies? When does betrayal end and passion begin?Say When is a compelling, complex novel that tak
Paris, 1947: Colette Rossant returns to Paris after waiting out World War II in Cairo among her father's Egyptian-Jewish relatives. Initially, the City of Light seems gray and forbidding to the teena
W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the twentieth century, published Darkwater -- a powerful collection of essays, verse and fiction -- in 1920, two decades after his most fam
Natchez, Mississippi, 1965: Racial tension is running high, the Ku Klux Klan holds a community captive, and many local blacks -- impoverished and apathetic -- are resigned to a fate decided by Jim Cr
May 24, 1941: Alexeï Berg, a classical pianist, is set to perform his first solo concert in Moscow. But just before his début, his parents -- his father a renowned playwright, and his mothe
In Rock My Soul, world-renowned scholar and visionary bell hooks takes an in-depth look at one of the most critical issues facing African Americans: a collective wounded self-esteem that has prevaile
In her long and illustrious career, Alice Adams turned the short story into an art form by offering telling glimpses into the lives of "ordinary people made extraordinary by [her] perception" (Newswe
The patient is an ascetically pretty 15½-year-old white female. She is intelligent, fearful, extremely anxious, and depressed.Her rage is poorly controlled and inappropriately expressed. Diagnos
"...these essays are jewels of the unexpected, and in introducing them, I don't want to steal any of their surprise. Suffice it to say that family life...is alive and well, but it is not like anythin
Ezekiel Rawlins now has a steady job as senior head custodian of Sojourner Truth High School, a nice house with a garden, a loving woman, and children. He counts the blessings of leading a law-abidin
WINNER OF THE 2003 PEN OAKLAND JOSEPHINE MILES AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING WRITING AND THE BLACK CAUCUS OF THE ALA LITERARY AWARDFrederick Douglass, the great African-American abolitionist, was a man who c
When Odessa Blackburn is three years old her beloved grandmother dies, and so begins her story, set in St. Louis,Missouri, and rural Mississippi. As the Azfth born of eight children, Odessa loses her
Danny Cassidy couldn't remember if he'd killed the cop. So begins one man's journey through his fifty-year-old history and conscience in Long Time Gone, Denis Hamill's gripping novel set in the back
This critically acclaimed debut is a modern Huckleberry Finn, a heartrending tale of wit and grace that charts the coming of age of a color-blind white boy struggling to find meaning in a world divid
To stripe a surface serves to distinguish it, to point it out, to oppose it or associate it with another surface, and thus to classify it, to keep an eye on it, to verify it, even to censor it.Throug
By all appearances, Lizzie Simon was perfect. She had an Ivy League education, lots of friends, a loving family, and a dazzling career as a theater producer by the age of twenty-three. But that wasn'
The child and grandchild of slaves - and therefore forbidden by law to read and write - Harriet Jacobs was defiant in her efforts to gain freedom and to document her experience in bondage. She suffer
Frederick Douglass was born a slave and escaped to freedom in his twenties. My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) was written after he had established himself as a newspaper editor. In this book, Douglass
As a child, Gina Cascone would hide under her bed, in the closet, and run away from her parents, hoping somehow to escape her worst fear. But she couldn't hide from the awful truth...She had to go to
Katie Nash -- the beloved heroine of Elizabeth Berg's previous novels Durable Goods and Joy School -- is thirteen years old in 1961, and she's facing a summer full of conflict. Her father has enliste
Forty-two years and five books into her life, Charlotte Dearborn abandons her noncommittal boyfriend and her sinking-ship writing career, and becomes an elementary school teacher. Sure, she's giving
East meets West in acclaimed author Gina B. Nahai's mesmerizing story of a journalist on a search for the truth about his father's death -- and his own past -- among the mystical, snake-handling Holy
Everybody wondered why the Sanders family had come back to Rosalita, Texas, and moved in next door to Lou Jean Perry. It was apparently the absolute last place they should want to be, though thirteen-
Julianna Baggott has contributed dozens of short stories and poems in such publications as Ms. Magazine, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2000, as well as reading her work on NPR's "Talk of the Natio
What does it mean to be a good mother?How far would you go in the name of love -- and justice?Perfect MatchIn the course of her everyday work, career-driven assistant district attorney Nina Frost pro
Washed-up Hollywood producer Charlie Berns has mailed in his updated obit and is about to suck his Mercedes tailpipe and fade to black when a miracle materializes: his nephew, a wannabe screenwriter
It's 1953 in Red-baiting, blacklisting Los Angeles, a moral tar pit ready to swallow Easy Rawlins. Easy is out of "the hurting business" and into the housing (and favor) business when a racist IRS age
The police don't show up on Easy Rawlins's doorstep until the third girl dies. It's Los Angeles, 1956, and it takes more than one murdered black girl before the cops get interested. Now they need Eas
When twelve-year-old Sidney Henderson pushes his friend Connie off the roof of a local church in a moment of anger, he makes a silent vow: Let Connie live and I will never harm another soul. At that v
Clutching her pink trunk filled with the relics of a lost childhood, twelve-year-old Jenny steps off a bus in Reno and into the wide-open future. Separated from her brother, Bryan, and passed from ca
In this stirring debut novel, Rebecca Reisert enters the world of Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which a young woman's search for vengeance plunges her into a legendary tale of deceit, murder, and retribut
In the beginning...there was Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and Raymond "Mouse" Alexander -- two young men setting out in life, hitting the road in a "borrowed" '36 Ford headed for Pariah, Texas. The volatil
Filled with soulful humor and quiet pathos, Abby Bardi's boldly drawn first novel marks the debut of a joyfully talented chronicler of the quest for connection in contemporary life.Mary Fred Anderson
In The Tempest, long considered one of Shakespeare's most lyrical plays, Prospero -- a magician on an enchanted island -- punishes his enemies, brings happiness to his daughter, and comes to terms wi
The gap that divides those of us born in the 1970s and the older generation has never been so wide.Dark and edgy, deliciously naughty, an intoxicating cocktail of sex and the search for love, Shangha
Love can redeem a man...but secrets and lies can condemn him.A handsome stranger comes to the sleepy New England town of Salem Falls in hopes of burying his past: Once a teacher at a girls' prep scho
All his life, Alexander defied the limits the gods gave mortals. That passion overwhelmed cities and armies...and united a vast empire. Alexander was no longer simply King of Macedonia: The Pan-Helle
In the annals of seafaring and exploration, there is one name that immediately evokes visions of the open ocean, billowing sails, visiting strange, exotic lands previously uncharted, and civilization
Dubbed by The New York Times as "the secret love child of Edith Wharton and Woody Allen," Stephen McCauley presents his fourth deftly comic, critically acclaimed novel.Jane Cody imagined she'd lead a
A self-anointed spinster at fifty-one, Myra Lipinski is reasonably content with her quiet life, her dog, Frank, and her career as a visiting nurse. But everything changes when Chip Reardon, the golde
