This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Time flows unevenly during the long hot blue days as the madness of the island swirls around the villages, and Telumee, raised in the shelter of wide skirts, must learn how to navigate the ...

Great-granddaughter of Minerve, first woman of the Guadeloupean branch of the Lougandor family to be freed from slavery in 1848, the elderly Telumée tells the story of her own difficult life and that of her ancestors. It is a poor black woman's tale of heroic survival, set in the early 20th century, harsh agrarian environment of a Caribbean island.Through the richly imaged narration of a constantly evolving, cultural significant and always entertaining saga, the author leads the re...

"The Girl Who Fell from the Sky can actually fly." — The New York Times Book ReviewRachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop.Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African American grandmother as her guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty...

Henry Miller's famously banned book is "a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one's dreary life and following your heart to Paris" (Richard Price).Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in...

A Taste of Honey is the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus finalist novella that N. K. Jemisin calls "a love story as painful as it is beautiful and complex". Find out why Wired named it one of the 20 Best Books of the Decade!Long after the Towers left the world but before the dragons came to Daluça, the emperor brought his delegation of gods and diplomats to Olorum. As the royalty negotiates over trade routes and public serv...

This companion volume to Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, chronicles his life in 1920s New York City.Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn’s ethnic neighborhoods and Miller’s outrageous sexual exploits, The Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature.“Miller has once and for all blasted away the very foundation of human hyp...

He is the chieftain leader of the Khoikhoi, a nomadic people derogatorily called "Hottentot"' by European colonists. She is a white woman left behind by Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's crew when they rounded Africa's southern tip in 1498. Their romance is the core of this powerful novella.According to Portuguese myth, Zeus turned Adamastor into the rocky cape of the South African peninsula. André Brink's parable suggests that white Europeans have punished native Africans in the...

Beautiful and meticulously wrought, set in both Toronto and the Caribbean, this astonishing novel gives voice to the power of love and belonging in a story of two women, profoundly different, each in her own spiritual exile.

Set on the snaking, sinuous Danube River, Algernon Blackwood's tale "The Willows" represents a high point in the development of the horror genre. Indeed, acknowledged master H.P. Lovecraft regarded it as the best supernatural tale ever written. More awe-inspiring and thought-provoking than gory or terrifying, "The Willows" is a must-read for fans of classic ghost stories.

The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the vio...

In this beautifully crafted, Rashomon-like novel, Maryse Conde has written a gripping story imbued with all the nuances and traditions of Caribbean culture. Francis Sancher--a handsome outsider, loved by some and reviled by others--is found dead, face down in the mud on a path outside Riviere au Sel, a small village in Guadeloupe. None of the villagers are particularly surprised, since Sancher, a secretive and melancholy man, had often predicted an unnatural death for himself. As the villa...

On an Aegean island one summer, an English traveller meets an enigmatic elderly Frenchwoman. He is captivated by a painting she owns of a busy Caribbean port overlooked by a volcano, and, in time, she shares the story of her youth there in the early twentieth century.Set in the tropical luxury of the island of Saint-Jacques, hers is a tale of romantic intrigue and decadence amongst the descendents of slaves and a fading French aristocracy. But on the night of the annual Mardi Gras ...