Catalog Search Results
1) Swing time
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English
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Two dancers with different approaches to their craft share a complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, in a story that transitions from northwest London to West Africa.
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English
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Two Jamaican-Trinidadian sisters in Brooklyn, Zora and Sasha Porter, drifting apart as they bear witness to their father's violence and their mother's worsening illness, must come together to answer to something more ancient and powerful than they know--and confront a long-buried family secret.
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It is Paris, 1815. An extraordinarily shaped South African girl known as the Hottentot Venus, dressed only in feathers and beads, swings from a crystal chandelier in the duchess of Berry’s ballroom. Below her, the audience shouts insults and pornographic obscenities. Among these spectators is Napoleon’s physician and the most famous naturalist in Europe, the Baron George Cuvier, whose encounter with her will inspire a theory of race that...
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"Magnolia Brown is nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, her predatory landlord, and the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown. One night, while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia's luck around with a lucrative "modeling" job at his family's funeral home. She accepts. But despite things...
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Series
Black girls must die exhausted volume 1
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English
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Tabitha Walker is a black woman with a plan to 'have it all.' At 33 years old, the checklist for the life of her dreams is well underway. With a coveted position as a local news reporter, a 'paper-perfect' boyfriend, and even a standing Saturday morning appointment with a reliable hairstylist, everything seems to be falling into place. Then Tabby receives an unexpected diagnosis that brings her picture-perfect life crashing down, jeopardizing the...
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English
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When Ikemefuna is put on a plane from Lagos to Texas, she anticipates her newly arranged All-American life: a handsome husband, a beautiful red-brick mansion in Sugar Land, pizza parlors, and dance classes. Desperate to please, she'll happily cater to her family's needs. But Ikemefuna soon discovers what it actually means to live with her in-laws. Demands fro a grandson grow urgent, her every move comes under scrutiny, and the America she imagined...
8) Dishonorable
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English
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Markita "Kita" Jones is a young woman with plans for revenge. Her survival mode mentality forces her to make desperate decisions that might flip friends into foes and leave her at the mercy of her enemies."--
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"Acclaimed historical novelist Vanessa Riley is back with another novel based on the life of an extraordinary Black woman from history: Haiti's Queen Marie-Louise Coidavid, who escaped a coup in Haiti to set up her own royal court in Italy during the Regency era, where she became a popular member of royal European society"--
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"Lou, a young Black woman, wakes up in an alley in 1930s Los Angeles, nearly naked and with no memory of how she got there or where she's from, only a fleeting sense that this isn't the first time she's found herself in similar circumstances. Taken in by a caring foster family, Lou dedicates herself to her education while trying to put her mysterious origins behind her. She'll go on to become the first Black female journalist at the Los Angeles Times,...
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English
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"Cinnamon Haynes has fought hard for a life she never thought was possible--a good man by her side, a steady job as a career counselor at a local community college, and a cozy house in a quaint little beach town. It may not look like much, but it's more than she ever dreamed of or what her difficult childhood promised. Her life's mantra is to be good, quiet, grateful. Until something shifts and Cinnamon is suddenly haunted by a terrifying question:...
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"Reminiscent of the works of Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, and Octavia Butler, a biting social commentary from the acclaimed author of Lakewood that speaks to our times--a piercing dystopian novel about the unbreakable bond between a young woman and her mysterious mother, set in a world in which witches are real and single women are closely monitored." --
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Basking in Singapore's nonstop sunshine, Dara, Amaka, and Lillian are living the glamorous expat dream--until a mysterious (not to mention handsome) new arrival infiltrates their tight-knit community and ruins everything. The Lion City has gone by many names and is famous for many things--its decadent street food, its world-class shopping, its lush gardens that burst with tropical blooms. But paradise is always hiding a snake. For Dara, a workaholic...
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""Mika, you sit at our feet all these hours and days, hearing us tell our tales. You have all these stories inside you: all the stories everyone in our family knows and all the stories everyone in our family tells. You write 'em in your books and show everyone who we are." So begins DéLana R.A. Dameron's stunning novel-in-stories, Redwood Court. The baby of the family, Mika Mosby spends much of her time in the care of loved ones, listening to their...
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"A multilayered and rhythmic debut novel about her life as a Black German woman living in Berlin and New York during the chaos of the 2016 U.S. presidential election from playwright Olivia Wenzel. A young woman attends a play about the fall of the Berlin Wall--and realizes she is the only Black person in the audience. She and her boyfriend are hanging out by a lake outside Berlin--and four neo-Nazis show up. In New York, she is having sex with a stranger...
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"In this magisterial, intimate novel, debut writer Lakiesha Carr captures the essence of Black womanhood, richly articulating the private lives of a cast of women from East Texas, illuminating the grief that is carried inside them, as well as the bonds of love that both define them and give them strength. A middle-aged colon hydrotherapist feeds the slots at a secret parlor, fighting memories of gendered violence with plastic cups of Crown Royal....
17) Francisco
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume NDP1554
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English
Description
"Alison Mills Newman's innovative, genre-bending novel has long been out of print and impossible to find. A 'fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English,' as the poet and scholar Harryette Mullen once put it, Francisco is the first-person account of a young actress and musician and her growing disillusionment with her success in Hollywood. Her wildly original and vivid voice chronicles a free-spirited life with her filmmaker lover, visiting...
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English
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"Girl, Woman, Other is a celebration of the diversity of Black British experience. Moving, hopeful, and inventive, this extraordinary novel is a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her black lesbian identity; her...
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"Ranita Atwater is wrapping up her four-year sentence for opioid possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center, near Boston. With three years of sobriety, she is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children from her aunts who have been raising them. My name is Ranita, and I'm an addict, she has said again and again at [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings. But who else is she? Who might she choose to become? She is gaining her freedom, but...
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"A fiercely original debut collection centers Black women in moments of imminent change. Giada Scodellaro's stories range in length, style, and tone-a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, and art. What brings them together is a focus on experiences of black women in moments of dislocation, and a cinematic prose style saturated with detail: a child's legs bent upon the small bosom of their mother, three-piece suits floating...