Literary Criticism

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." Thus speaks W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls Of Black Folk, one of the most prophetic and influental works in American literature. In this eloquent collection of essays, first published...

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race--and promises to change the way we read American literature. Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and...

Rich continues: Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents...

James Baldwin's critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, and police brutality to a new generation of readers.   Available for the first time in a stand-alone...

Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin   "I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only." When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy...

Featuring 117 full-color photos and eight breathtaking essays on a force that fuels Black life all around the globe, this is Humans of New York meets The Black Book "A patchwork quilt of visually stunning images, captured moments of triumph, antidotes...

"Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . . Race is the story of my...

Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible...

In this dazzling anthology (Publishers Weekly), Daryl Cumber Dance has collected the often hard-hitting, sometimes risqué, always dramatic humor that arises from the depth of black women's souls and the breadth of their lives. The eloquent wit and...

A recently discovered collection of folktales celebrating African American oral tradition, community, and faith...”splendidly vivid and true.”--New York Times Every Tongue Got to Confess is an extensive volume of African American folklore that...

A scalding, uplifting, sorrowful, and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater, The Amen Corner is a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons. In his first work for the...

Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS's American Masters.   Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as...

"Knowledge is what's important, you know? Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it." -- TONI MORRISON In this wide-ranging collection of thought-provoking interviews -- including her first and last -- Toni Morrison (whom President Barrack Obama...

NOW A NETFLIX FILM STARRING VIOLA DAVIS AND CHADWICK BOSEMAN From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson comes the extraordinary Ma Rainey's Black Bottom--winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. The...

Introduction by Arnold Rampersad. Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in...

Toni Morrison's readers and critics typically focus more on the "what" than the "how" of her writing. In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison's expressed narrative intention of...