by Dalton Conley
This is the coming-of-age story of a white boy growing up in a neighborhood of predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. Vividly evoking the details of city life from a child's point of view--the streets, buses, and playgrounds--Honky poignantly illuminates the usual vulnerabilities of childhood complicated by unusual circumstances.
by Alan Lomax
The bluesmen were the bards of America's last frontier, the rowdy Mississippi Delta, in the days of the cotton boom, of levee and railroad building. Alan Lomax takes us on an adventure into the "bad old days" of the Delta.
by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate, dangerous, and remarkable ways in which a community survives. We find there an entire world of unregulated, unreported, and untaxed work, a system of living off the books that is daily life in the ghetto.
Winner of the 1988 Pulitizer Prize for fiction, Beloved is the story—set in post-Civil War Ohio—of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved.
Blackberries,
Blackberries, Crystal E. Wilkinson
A collection of lyrical short stories about women from Kentucky.
Color
of Water: a black man’s tribute to his white mother, James McBride
Around the narrative of Ruth McBride Jordan, a.k.a. Rachel Deborah Shilsky,
the daughter of an angry, failed Orthodox Jewish rabbi in the South, her
son James writes of the inner confusions he felt as a black child of a
white mother and of the love and faith with which his mother surrounded
their large family. The result is a powerful portrait of growing up, a
meditation on race and identity, and a poignant, beautifully crafted hymn
from a son to his mother.
Winner of the American Book Ward and the Pulitzer Prize, and the basis for a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, Color Purple is the story of Celie, an African American woman who is one of “those American heroes who came to recognize herself recovering her identity and rescuing her life in spite of the disfiguring effects of a particularly dreadful and personal sort of oppression.
Winner of the 2004 Coretta Scott King Award and the Printz Award, First Part Last is the compassionate story of a teenage father in New York City.
Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection of the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
This "bold...extraordinary...blockbuster..." (Newsweek magazine) begins with a birth in an African village in 1750, and ends two centuries later at a funeral in Arkansas. And in that time span, an unforgettable cast of men, women, and children come to life, many of them based on the people from Alex Haley's own family tree.
This story takes place in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act, in Sylvan, S.C. Lily (14 years old) and her friend and servant Rosaleen flee Lily’s abusive father and police who battered Rosaleen for defending her new right to vote. Three black sisters take them in and Lily discovers her past and herself through sincere and loving friendships.
