African American Anthology

Sassy, sophisticated, and sensual are the three adjectives Sugar uses to define her personality, her style, and her shapely curves. Fiercely confident about her luxurious, full-figured body, Sugar sashays through Chicago’s nightlife belting high notes as a well-known singing sensation. Idolized by many, only few know her secret: She and her longtime manager, Ace, share more than a common passion for Sugar’s career - they’re lovers. At Ace’s insistence, Sugar has always agreed to secrecy for the sake of her career, but now she’s tired of hiding.

A young Black girl watches as her aunt’s multiple suitors disrupt her family’s privacy. The same girl, now on the cusp of adulthood, shares her family’s growing fears that her father has disappeared. Acclaimed author Ann Petry penned these and the other unforgettable narratives in Miss Muriel and Other Stories more than 70 years ago, yet in them, contemporary listeners recognize characters who exist today and dilemmas that recur again and again.

What A Westmoreland Wants Mr. September: Callum Austell, sexy Australian ranch owner His Deepest Desire: The elusive Gemma Westmoreland The Seduction Plan: Get her on his turf—ASAP! He'd been biding his time, and now the perfect opportunity had arrived to pursue the ultimate object of his...

The Guggenheim Fellowship and Whiting Award-winning author Louis Edwards makes his long-awaited comeback with this epic tale of a New Orleans boy whose very creation is so filled with tension that it bedevils his destiny before he is even born. Spanning from the Deep South to the Middle East...

Jared’s Counterfeit Fiancée This confirmed bachelor is a heartbreak waiting to happen in this beloved Westmoreland novel from New York Times bestselling author Brenda Jackson Divorce attorney Jared Westmoreland has seen enough unhappy endings to avoid all the sticky entanglements that go with...

New York Times bestselling author and NAACP Image Award winner Stacey Abrams, writing under her pen name Selena Montgomery, tells a chilling tale of lost love, dark family secrets, and hard-won redemption. Mara Reed has been stirring up trouble since she was eighteen—running scams, living on...

New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our...

Solid Soul In the real world there was no way flower shop owner Kylie Hagan would ever meet up with millionaire Chance Steele. But the world of single parents and teenage hormones brought them together the first time—and a simmering passion they both tried to deny wouldn't keep them apart for...

Taming Clint Westmoreland In name only? The moment ex-Texas Ranger Clint Westmoreland learned he was still married, he set the limits for his wife's stay at his luxurious horse ranch. But when she arrived, Clint's boundaries began to blur. He and Alyssa Barkley had thirty days to untangle the...

A funny, fresh, and brilliantly insightful collection of stories from a beloved writer, with a new introduction by Francine Prose Johanna Kaplan’s beautifully written stories first burst on the literary scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today they have retained all of their depth...

“Passionate, personal, insightful, testy, and unique.” —Kirkus (starred review) ""Verdelle offers us testimony in praise and consideration of life as a literary citizen and Black woman alongside the guiding light of Toni Morrison. This is a holy testimony, indeed, one that deserves to be...

The author of Dancing on the Edge of the Roof, now a Netflix film starring Alfre Woodard, returns with a riveting, emotionally rich, novel that explores the complex relationship between mothers and daughters in a fresh, vibrant way—a stunning page-turner for fans of Terry McMillan, Tayari...

An enthralling literary tour-de-force that pays tribute to Detroit's legendary neighborhood, a mecca for jazz, sports, and politics, Black Bottom Saints is a powerful blend of fact and imagination reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow's classic novel Ragtime and Marlon James' Man Booker Award-winning...

The Reluctant Royals series returns with a good girl searching for the life that’s not too big, and not too small, and the bad boy prince who might be just right for her… Nya Jerami fled Thesolo for the glitz and glamour of NYC but discovered that her Prince Charming only exists in her...

Roberto "Papa" Huffington. Beloved husband. Father. Friend. This is a very short story in honor of his legacy that he has left behind.

In her dynamic debut, Halle Hill’s Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South. A woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy’s mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he's seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living.

Sasha is a single mother and the youngest of her two sisters. Drama followers her everywhere and her sister, Stacey and Randi are fed up with her short temper and untamed tongue. Their relationship with Sasha seems toxic due to her unbearable irresponsible lifestyle. She faces many trails but relies on her good looks to get her out of trouble. Until she finally gets a wake up call.

The collection contains 12 provocative tales that explore the emotional and mental terrain of a diverse cast of characters, from the innocent to the insane. In each, Jones displays her unflinching ability to dive into the most treacherous of psyches and circumstances: the title story examines the identity and relationship conundrums of a Black man who can pass for white, earning him the name “White Rat” as an infant; “The Women” follows a girl whose mother brings a line of female lovers to live in their home.

Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career, and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles.

Black Girl Magic continues and deepens the work of the first BreakBeat Poets anthology by focusing on some of the most exciting Black women writing today. This anthology breaks up the myth of hip-hop as a boys’ club and asserts the truth that the cypher is a feminine form.