American Literature Collection

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality - the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood - and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces", Smith writes, "some of us all at once."

An inventive and assured debut from an exciting new voice in poetry. In her striking collection of poems, Zoë Hitzig investigates how we seek certitude, power, and domination over the natural world and one another. Hitzig brings a scientific rigor to her poetry, as well as a raucous energy and...

James Brown. John Brown's raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prizewinning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things "brown" in this powerful new collection. “Vital and sophisticated ... sinks hooks into you that cannot be easily removed.” —The New York Times Divided into "Home...

Another story of Roma Eterna. A Roman nobleman is sent in punishment to a remote corner of the Empire–the Arabian city we know as Mecca...

A deliciously witty and entertaining ""variation"" on Diderot's novel Jacques le Fatalist, written for Milan Kundera's ""private pleasure"" in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. When the ""heavy Russian irrationality"" fell on Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera explains, he felt...

"We must all hang together," Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said to his revolutionary peers, "or we will assuredly all hang separately." This is a sentiment that's even more appropriate, and more urgent, when you're lost between the stars in a crippled and out-of-control ship, your...

A story from the collection FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES, a work of startling authority and imagination–an audiobook that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK “Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . . . A revelation of the human condition.”...

A story from the collection FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES, in which Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for the death camps and, in a deft, imaginative twist, turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm’s way. FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES...

Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins's ambitious debut collection, interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges's fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to offer a lyric history of the ways in which we process loss. "Memory is about the future, not the past", she writes, and rather than shying away from the anger, anxiety, and mourning of her narrators, Rollins's poetry seeks to challenge the status quo.

The Prophet is a masterpiece of poetic prose written by Lebanese born; American Poet: Kahlil Gibran - exploring social morality through the lense of a profoundly moving spirit. The audiobook invites the listener to reimagine The Prophet through the voice of Almitra as it was originally written. The words of The Prophet have been spoken in marriage ceremonies, used to explain birth and death, and given even more depth and breadth to love, joy and sorrow.

Following his captivating and popular A Hundred Lovers, Hofmann’s new collection is a queer coming-of-age, tinged with myth: poems that bring us into a fever dream of antiquity and desire at its limits Recognizing the fragility of the body and soul in a world of threat, these startling poems...

“The immutable fact of politics in America is this: liberals hate conservatives.” Ann Coulter, whose examination of the Clinton impeachment was a major national bestseller and earned widespread praise, now takes on an even tougher issue. At a time when Democrats and Republicans should be...

In this collection, you’ll find stories conveyed through poetry and song. Some of them will no doubt be familiar to you - like Francis Scott Key’s Star Spangled Banner and Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic (although many people are only familiar with the first verse). Other poems will be entirely new to you. My hope is that you’ll embrace both the familiar and the unfamiliar as pieces of the American story that deserve to be remembered.

A sharp, funny, delightfully unhinged collection of stories set in the dark world of domesticity, American Housewife features murderous ladies who lunch, celebrity treasure hunters, and the best bra fitter south of the Mason Dixon line. Meet the women of American Housewife: they wear lipstick...

This dynamic collection of Black voices, performed by Tony and Grammy Award-winning actor, rapper, and producer Daveed Diggs and Emmy Award-winning writer, creator, producer, and actor Lena Waithe, works like an incantation of origin, healing, and imagination. Born from a series of conceptual art exhibitions, the perspectives gathered here are nowhere near monochromatic.

This small collection of short stories of riveting and dark plots dabbles in politics, religion, martial arts, social identity, and various other facets of life like baby farms, revealing what man proves to be when he tries! Titles include "A Cold One", "Lagos Hustle", "Cornbread, Fried Chicken, and Sauerkraut", "Rest in Peace", "Alpine Nightmare", "My Style Is Better Than Yours", "Furqaan", "Turf", and "The Part: The Re-assassination of Abe Lincoln".

Lossyn Tyler was an all-star cheerleader with a promising future, until she is involved in accident that claims the life of her best friend. Suffering from physical and mental anguish, Lossyn is prescribed narcotics to ease the pain. Her life changes drastically causing issues within her once close knit family. Unable to cope with her home life, she turns to her new "friends", who she meets during her time on the West Side of Wilmington, also known as "Down Bottom".

Ambrose Bierce brings to life the heart rendering stories of divided loyalties, splitting families, states, countries, and individuals. He writes of the glory in beginning and savagery in the doing. Here is a moving anti-war series of stories if ever there was one. A must read by all students of American History and Literature, though perhaps best understood by older adults.

MacArthur Fellowship–winning poet Brad Leithauser returns with his first new collection in more than a decade, a collection that recalls the delicacy and intimacy of his early, award-winning volumes, and embraces the wisdom of age. As snappy as a dinner jacket’s red silk lining, as appealing...

Stopping time on the page to discover the poetic moment where past and present are one, Vincent Katz (called a poet of “vibrant cinematic hunger” by Eileen Myles) opens himself to the fleeting beauty of both culture and nature in this stunning gathering of new work. With his painterly eye...