Everything Good Will Come Sefi Atta Interlink Books ISBN-10:1566567041 — ♦ — Sefi Atta’s debut novel is a beautiful stirring story on the concept of womanhood, family and love of country. Her protagonist, Enitan Twaio, is a woman of her generation struggling to express her voice in a land that […]
Sleepless Nights Norwood Holland Windmill Books Ltd. ASIN: B004P8JX4W — ♦ — Drew Smith has it all. By day, he’s a well-known Washington D.C. lawyer with a big house, a nice car, and an adventurist lifestyle. By night, his interest in ‘exotic dancers’ often leads to many club visits and […]
Small Melissa Brown Levine Brown Levine Productions ASIN:B008663XTU — ♦ — Small begins with A Portrait of Abuse, a marvelously written prologue that doubles as both a series of detached observations about the physical scars, called incidents, covering Ansar’s body and an intimate description of Ansar’s appearance. It’s one of […]
Freeman Leonard Pitts Jr. Agate Bolden ISBN-10: 1932841644 — ♦ — With the movie “Django Unchained” sparking so much debate in America about the “real” lives of slaves, I found Leonard Pitts Jr.’s novel Freeman to actually be a perfect companion to the movie, minus the extreme violence that Tarantino […]
x0 Sherrie Cronin Cinnabar Press ASIN: B007B5OLMA — ♦ — Though Lola and Somadina are hundreds of miles away from each other, they are as similar as they’re different. Lola is a geophysicist in America. She has a loving family – three kids and a husband – and a younger […]
From 92nd Street Y: “So what if we were born up a creek and knocked flat with the paddle, if we ain’t got a pot to piss in and nowhere to put it if we did? Our situation is intolerable, but what’s worse is to sit here and do nothing. […]
In celebration of Black History Month, we’ve gathered some newsworthy literary highlights from around the web, all of which that feature the artistry, achievements, and voices of African American poets, writers, and playwrights, as well as new books by and about some of the most influential leaders and thinkers of […]
Via The Huffington Post: February 1 would have been Langston Hughes’s 111th birthday. In celebration of this legendary poet, author, and social activist, The Huffington Post has pulled together eight of his most powerful quotes on race, life and love. Nearly a century later, the author’s words still resonate and […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.