African American Ghost

Former SEAL Michael Harmon, Team Name ''Ghost'', retired for service injuries, is not enjoying college life. But things are about to change, if not for the better. When he sees a kidnapping, a series of, at the time logical, decisions leave him shot to ribbons and battling a battalion of Syrian commandos with only the help of three naked co-eds who answer to the names ''Bambi,'' ''Thumper'' and ''Cotton Tail.'

Whether weaving family life and history into dark fiction or writing speculative Afrofuturism, American Book Award winner and Essence best-selling author Tananarive Due’s work is both riveting and enlightening. In her debut collection of short fiction, Due takes us to Gracetown, a small Florida town that has both literal and figurative ghost; into future scenarios that seem all too real; and provides empathetic portraits of those whose lives are touched by otherness. Featuring an award-winning novella and 15 stories, Ghost Summer: Stories is sure to haunt and delight.

A bad best man’s speech can ruin a wedding. Why do we plan every detail of a perfect day and then give the groom’s idiot best friend five minutes of total power? Enter Nate (Glen Powell), a speechwriter-for-hire who helps people write incredible best man speeches. To keep the best man from embarrassing himself (and the newlyweds), Nate uses his list of don’ts: Don’t mention the exes, don’t be rated R, and don’t bum everyone out. Nate’s system never fails. That is, until he meets Dan (Nicholas Braun).

They call me Ghost for a reason. Silent and in the shadows, I don't make my move until I am absolutely sure of everything. Four years ago I was sure about Jenna. My best friend's kid sister had grown up into a spitfire I couldn't resist. One night we stopped resisting. We promised we'd keep it a secret. It was a one-time mistake, but we'd put it behind us. Jenna tried to get out of our corrupt town, but it pulled her back in again. Now she needs help. I'll do all of that for her, if she'll just shut the hell up and let me. She can even keep all of her secrets, except for one.

A heartbreaking and powerful story about a black boy killed by a police officer, drawing connections through history, from award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes. Only the living can make the world better. Live and make it better. Twelve-year-old Jerome is shot by a police officer who...

Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie. When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act.

Aster lives in the low-deck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations the Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster, whom they consider to be less than human.

Three starred reviews! In this companion to Jason Reynolds’s award-winning and New York Times bestselling Track series, meet Coach as a boy striving to come into his own as a track star while facing upheaval at home. Before Coach was the man who gave caring yet firm-handed guidance to Ghost...

The Caucasus mountains rise at the intersection of Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. A land of astonishing natural beauty and a dizzying array of ancient cultures, the Caucasus for most of the 20th century lay inside the Soviet Union, before movements of national liberation created newly independent countries and sparked the devastating war in Chechnya.

Sixteen-year-old Jake Livingston sees dead people everywhere. But he can't decide what's worse: being a medium forced to watch the dead play out their last moments on a loop or being at the mercy of racist teachers as one of the few Black students at St. Clair Prep. Both are a living nightmare he wishes he could wake up from. But things at St. Clair start looking up with the arrival of another Black student - the handsome Allister - and for the first time, romance is on the horizon for Jake. Unfortunately, life as a medium is getting worse.

An AudioFile Earphones Award winner Read by a full cast of narrators, featuring LeVar Burton and Aja Naomi King “A badass debut by any measure—nimble, knowing, and electrifying.” —Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle "...'My Monticello' is...

""A beautiful and subversive take on the afterlife, as razor-sharp as it is deeply moving."" —Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of The Many Daughters of Afong Moy Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Amerie’s dazzling, satirical adult debut tells the story of a Black man who...

"This magical audiobook echoes the desire to truly understand yourself and be seen as you are, and the twist ending will leave listeners stunned." -AudioFile Magazine This program is read by the author. A debut YA novel-in-verse by Amber McBride, Me (Moth) is about a teen girl who is grieving...

Pain is a survival mechanism of fundamental importance. It plays a crucial role in our lives, and eventually molds us into whoever it is that we become. At least it did for Zuri. After her world is brutally destroyed, she feels she has nothing left to hold on to but the fading dream of escaping the ghetto. Young, beautiful, and naïve, she is drawn into the world of sex and money, working at a hole in the wall strip club in South Philly.

“I'm obsessed. Lyrical prose, relatably complex characters, a steamy love story with mounting dread that is at once sensual and full of yearning...Die for Me is utterly unique and still at its core about the most universal of stories: about a woman vanquishing fear through love.” —Ali...

Eve L. Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures - they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings.

The dead are relentless gossips, or at least these dead are. An impulsive and heartbroken woman inherits her father’s share of a Tennessee farm that is rich in family secrets and occupied with busybody ghosts in this sweeping family portrait. At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling into...

“Never Can Say Goodbye is deliciously woven from threads of guidance, memory, and devotion to the sacred labor of holding space at the end of life."" —Alua Arthur, author of Briefly Perfectly Human Compelling narrative that highlights the importance of a death doula and generational...

Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with "separate but equal", created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their near-unanimous decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the 19th century, whose outcome embraced and protected segregation, and whose reverberations are still felt into the 21st. Separate spans a striking range of characters and landscapes, bound together by the defining issue of their time and ours - race and equality.

A group of women contemplate violence after they’re sent into foreign territory to make husbands of the enemy. A support network of traumatized joggers meets to discuss the bodies they’ve found on their runs. And a town replaces its Confederate monument with a rotating cast of local residents. Slippery but muscular, sly but electric, this stunning debut collection moves from horror to magical realism to satire with total authority. In these stories, characters build and remake their sense of home, be it with one another or within themselves.