Sean Crisden

Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published...

This compelling oral history of the first ten years of the Civil Rights movement is a tribute to the men and women, both black and white, who took part in the fight for justice and kept their eyes on the prize of freedom.

Thelonius "Monk" Ellison is an erudite, accomplished but seldom-read author who insists on writing obscure literary papers rather than the so-called "ghetto prose" that would make him a commercial success. He finally succumbs to temptation after seeing the Oberlin-educated author of We's Lives in da Ghetto during her appearance on a talk show, firing back with a parody called My Pafology, which he submits to his startled agent under the gangsta pseudonym...

"David Champlin is a black man born into poverty in Depression-era New Orleans who makes his way up the ladder of success, only to sacrifice everything to lead his people in the civil rights movement. Sara Kent is the white girl who loves David from the moment she first sees him, and who struggles against his belief that a marriage for them would be wrong in the violent world he has to confront. And the "five smooth stones" are those the biblical...

A landmark in African-American literature, this powerful turn-of-the-century novel was among the first realistic depictions of ghetto life and language. Written by a renowned poet, essayist, and lecturer who was the son of former slaves, its fictional portrayal of social and political issues within an early-twentieth-century black community foreshadowed the later works of such luminaries as James Baldwin and Richard Wright.

As the story opens

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Gene Richards is haunted by a voice, and he doesn't like what it's saying. He's trying to ignore it-pretend it's not real-but the voice has plans for Gene. A long time ago, something bad happened in the town of Magnolia-something that Gene's grandfather and his friends want to keep quiet. The voice has started hurting those who were responsible, and it won't give up until Gene uncovers the town's eerie past. Determined to clear his grandfather's name,...

I can't have Elijah Iverson.

I can't have him because he's my older brother's best friend. I can't have him because I broke his heart five years ago; because he's now engaged to someone else—someone kind and dependable who deserves his whiskey eyes, his soft mouth, his fierce intellect.

I can't have Elijah because I've chosen God instead.

The Bell brothers, though . . . well, we don't exactly have

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Jay na Thalang is a demanding, driven genius. He doesn't know how to stop or even slow down. The instant he lays eyes on Maria Lopez, he knows that she is a sexy distraction he can't afford. He's done his best to keep her at arm's length, and he's succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Maria has always been cautious. Now that her once-tiny, apocalypse-centered blog is hitting the mainstream, she's even more careful about preserving her online

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New York Times bestselling author Joanna Wylde returns to the “wild and raw”* world of the Reapers MC with the story of Gage and Tinker…
 
The club comes first. I’ve lived by those words my whole life—assumed I’d die by them, too, and I never had a problem with that. My Reaper brothers took my back and I took theirs and it was enough. Then I met her. Tinker Garrett. She’s...

Sandor Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide a reader through their first experience making sauerkraut or yogurt, and in-depth enough to provide greater understanding and insight for experienced practitioners. While Katz contextualizes fermentation in terms of biological and cultural evolution, health and nutrition, and even economics, this is primarily a compendium of practical information...