In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private. A deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily...

"Ray McMillian loves playing the violin more than anything, and nothing will stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional musician. Not his mother, who thinks he should get a real job, not the fact that he can't afford a high-caliber violin, not the racism inherent in the classical music world. And when he makes the startling discovery that his great-grandfather's fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius, his star begins to rise....

From the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance author of Passing, a novel of one mixed-race woman's far-reaching quest to discover identity and happiness.   At twenty-three, Helga Crane teaches in 1920s Georgia at one of the country's finest colleges for African Americans, and she's engaged to a fellow teacher. Yet happiness eludes her. And when she can't take the snobbish, conformist atmosphere one second more, she breaks off her relationship with her...

Early in his career, Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) wrote a series of plays revolving around characters obsessed with the sea. This period culminated in the 1922 production of Anna Christie, a Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of social realism that was among the first of the author's plays to explore characters searching for their own identities. Centering on the reunion of a barge captain and his daughter after a twenty-year separation, the play derives...

The Story of an African Farm (1883) is a novel by South African political activist and writer Olive Schreiner. Her first published novel, The Story of an African Farm was a bestseller upon its release despite being criticized for its portrayal of controversial social, religious, and political themes. Part Bildungsroman, part philosophical fiction, the novel is recognized as a groundbreaking work for its exploration of feminism, atheism, and the influence...

"Brooklynite Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer, who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning literary author who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York. When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and...

First Published in 1920, "Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil" is the first of three autobiographical works by W. E. B. Du Bois, the American sociologist, educator, author, historian, and civil rights activist. Presented as a collection of essays, poems, and spiritual songs, "Darkwater" is part personal memoir and part social commentary and criticism. Du Bois was deeply spiritual and relied heavily on his Christian beliefs throughout his life....

In Moon and the Mars, set in the impoverished Five Points district of New York City in the years 1857-1863, we experience neighborhood life through the eyes of Theo from childhood to adolescence, an orphan living between the homes of her Black and Irish grandmothers. Throughout her formative years, Theo witnesses everything from the creation of tap dance to P.T. Barnum's sensationalist museum to the draft riots that tear NYC asunder, amidst the daily...

"When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well. The crime was never solved--and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England--the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans...

NAACP nominee and bestselling author Beverly Jenkins returns to the charming town of Henry Adams, Kansas-a place that always feels like home-in this heartwarming story of family, friendship, and the surprises hidden in our lives. Henry Adams has had its fair share of drama ever since Bernadine Brown bought the town with her divorce settlement. Now just when things are starting to settle down, it's about to get crazy again . . . Cephas Patterson doesn't...