The chronicle of the tragic lives of a poor black family in 1940s America. Every night Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays for blue eyes like those of her white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty.
Milkman 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. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman fro...more
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous t...more
The sequel to the classic, Things Fall Apart, tells of a troubled young African whose formal education separates him from his roots and makes him part of a corrupt ruling elite he despises. Reprint.
By the renowned author of Things Fall Apart, this novel foreshadows the Nigerian coups of 1966 and shows the color and vivacity as well as the violence and corruption of a society making its own way between the two worlds.
Set in the Ibo heartland of eastern Nigeria, one of Africa's best-known writers describes the conflict between old and new in its most poignant aspect: the personal struggle between father and son.
Using the conflict between the city and tribal villages, the ravages of the great African drought, and Third World politics as a compelling backdrop, Achebe weaves a potent drama of modern Africa.
When Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery was originally released in 1994, it won critical praise and solidified bell hooks' reputation as one of the leading public intellectuals of her generation. Today, the book is considered a classic in African American and feminist circles.In Sisters of the Yam, hooks examines how the emotional he...more
In this attractive South End Press Classics edition, featuring a new preface, hooks maintains that mainstream feminism's reliance on white, middle-class, and professional spokeswomen obscures the centrality of women of color and poor women in the movement for women's liberation.
In this classic study, cultural critic Bell Hooks examines how black women, from the seventeenth century to the present day, were and are oppressed by both white men and black men and by white women. Illustrating her analysis with moving personal accounts, "Ain't I a Woman" is deeply critical of the racism inherent in the thought of many middle-cla...more