Stirring, heroic, and wonderfully laced with the musical languages of the Bayou, A Gathering of Old Men is a breathtaking saga from Ernest J. Gaines—the foremost voice in contemporary African-American literature.When Sheriff Mapes is summoned to a sugarcane plantation, he finds a dead Cajun farmer. He knows who committed the crime, but Mapes finds himself powerless when nearly 20 elderly black men confess to the murder. Can justice be served, or will the dead man’s brutish...

The Authentic Journey Continues -- for Women to Understand Men, and for Men to Understand Themselves.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman has sold over a million copies nationwide since its publication in 1971, making the fictional character of Miss Jane so real many people don't know she exists only in the imagination of Louisiana-born author Ernest J. Gaines. Miss Jane is 100 years old when she is interviewed by an area high school teacher looking to teach his students more about plantation society in the deep South. Her story is not only a vivid picture of the South before the dawn o...

Decades after its original publication, James Agee’s last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man’s death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a ...

""Simply the most exciting book on black folklore and culture I have ever read."" --Roger D. AbrahamsMules and Men is the first great collection of black America's folk world. In the 1930's, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her ""native village"" of Eatonville, Florida to record the oral histories, sermons and songs, dating back to the time of slavery, which she remembered hearing as a child. In her quest, she found herself and her history ...

‘The most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read this year’ The Washington PostA dark and socially provocative Southern-fried comedy about four UC Berkeley students who stage a dramatic protest during a Civil War reenactment – a fierce, funny, tragic work from a bold new writerLONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2015LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION 2015Born and raised in the heart...

To listen to this audiobook is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow...

‘Eleanor Henderson is in possession of an enormous talent’ Ann Patchett ‘A superb novel whose roots can be traced to Harper Lee and Carson McCullers‘ Oprah MagazineGenus Jackson was killed in Cotton County, Georgia, on a summer midnight in 1930, when the newborn twins were fast asleep.They lay head to toe in a cradle meant for one, Winnafred on one side and Wilson on the other.Only if you looked closely – and people did – could you see that the girl was pink a...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENTHailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a ...

“An excellent novel. A lovely and moving portrait of society’s outcasts…affirms the essential humanity of its poor and stubborn residents, for whom each day of survival is a victory” (The New York Times Book Review).Set on the high ground at the heart of Cape Ann in the early 1800s, the village of Dogtown is peopled by widows, orphans, spinsters, scoundrels, whores, free Africans, and “witches.”Among the inhabitants of this hamlet are Black Ruth, w...

In this provocative and starkly beautiful historical novel, a Quaker family moves from Pennsylvania to the Virginia frontier, where slaves are the only available workers and where the family' s values and beliefs are sorely tested. In 1798, Daniel Dickinson, recently widowed and shunned by his fellow Quakers when he marries his young servant girl to help with his five small children, moves his shaken family down the Wilderness Road to the Virginia/Kentucky border. Although determined to ho...

'The opening pages of Ayana's debut took my breath away. I can't remember when I read anything that moved me quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison.' Oprah WinfreyFifteen years old and blazing with the hope of a better life, Hattie Shepherd fled the horror of the American South on a dawn train bound for Philadelphia.Hattie’s is a tale of strength, of resilience and heartbreak that spans six decades. Her American dream is shattered time and again:...