The Icarus Girl

The Icarus Girl
Author: Helen Oyeyemi
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307428737

The audacious first novel from the award-winning and bestselling author of Boy, Snow, Bird and What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours • “Oyeyemi brilliantly conjures up the raw emotions and playground banter of childhood. . . . A masterly first novel.”–The New York Times Book Review "Remarkable. . . . As original as it is unsettling, The Icarus Girl runs straight at the heart of what it means to belong."– O, The Oprah Magazine Jessamy “Jess” Harrison, age eight, is the child of an English father and a Nigerian mother. Possessed of an extraordinary imagination, she has a hard time fitting in at school. It is only when she visits Nigeria for the first time that she makes a friend who understands her: a ragged little girl named TillyTilly. But soon TillyTilly’s visits become more disturbing, until Jess realizes she doesn’t actually know who her friend is at all. Drawing on Nigerian mythology, Helen Oyeyemi presents a striking variation on the classic literary theme of doubles — both real and spiritual — in this lyrical and bold debut.

The Omni-Americans

The Omni-Americans
Author: Albert Murray
Publisher: Library of America
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1598536532

Rediscover the “most important book on black-white relationships” in America in a special 50th anniversary edition introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Walker Percy) “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people . . . Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.” These words, written by Albert Murray at the height of the Black Power movement, cut against the grain of their moment, and announced the arrival of a major new force in American letters. In his 1970 classic The Omni-Americans, Murray took aim at protest writers and social scientists who accentuated the “pathology” of race in American life. Against narratives of marginalization and victimhood, Murray argued that black art and culture, particularly jazz and blues, stand at the very headwaters of the American mainstream, and that much of what is best in American art embodies the “blues-hero tradition”—a heritage of grace, wit, and inspired improvisation in the face of adversity. Reviewing The Omni-Americans in 1970, Walker Percy called it “the most important book on black-white relationships . . . indeed on American culture . . . published in this generation.” As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. makes clear in his introduction, Murray’s singular poetic voice, impassioned argumentation, and pluralistic vision have only become more urgently needed today.

The Cultural Matrix

The Cultural Matrix
Author: Orlando Patterson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 686
Release: 2015-02-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0674728750

The Cultural Matrix seeks to unravel an American paradox: the socioeconomic crisis and social isolation of disadvantaged black youth, on the one hand, and their extraordinary integration and prominence in popular culture on the other. This interdisciplinary work explains how a complex matrix of cultures influences black youth.

Force Fields

Force Fields
Author: Martin Jay
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1136643176

Force Fields collects the recent essays of Martin Jay, an intellectual historian and cultural critic internationally known for his extensive work on the history of Western Marxism and the intellectual migration from Germany to America.

Ethnic Chauvinism

Ethnic Chauvinism
Author: Orlando Patterson
Publisher: New York : Stein and Day
Total Pages: 347
Release: 1977
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780812821802

Decries the inherent tribalism and segregationist tendencies of current arguments for ethnic pluralism and the integrity of ethnic neighborhoods and calls for a celebration of universally shared values and creative individualism rather than group differen

Emancipation

Emancipation
Author: John Clay Smith (Jr.)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 764
Release: 1999
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780812216851

"Emancipation is an important and impressive work; one cannot read it without being inspired by the legal acumen, creativity, and resiliency these pioneer lawyers displayed. . . . It should be read by everyone interested in understanding the road African-Americans have traveled and the challenges that lie ahead."—From the Foreword, by Justice Thurgood Marshall

The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom

The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom
Author: Wilbur Henry Siebert
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-01-09
Genre: Fugitive slaves
ISBN: 9781522792444

First published in 1898, this comprehensive history was the first documented survey of a system that helped fugitive slaves escape from areas in the antebellum South to regions as far north as Canada. Comprising fifty years of research, the text includes interviews and excerpts from diaries, letters, biographies, memoirs, speeches, and a large number of other firsthand accounts. Together, they shed much light on the origins of a system that provided aid to runaway slaves, including the degree of formal organization within the movement, methods of procedure, geographical range, leadership roles, the effectiveness of Canadian settlements, and the attitudes of courts and communities toward former slaves.

Hotel London

Hotel London
Author: Barbara Black
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-10-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9780814255612

Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories examines Victorian London's grand hotels as both an institution and a culture intimately connected to the urban landscape. In her new study, Barbara Black argues that London's grand hotels provided an essential space for socializing, fashioned by concerns relating to class, gender, and nationality. Rooted in Walter Benjamin's "new velocities" of the nineteenth century and Wayne Koestenbaum's hotel theory, Hotel London explores how the emergence of the grand hotel as a physical and metaphorical space helped to construct a consumer economy that underscored London's internationalism and, by extension, England's global status. Incorporating the works of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Arnold Bennett, Florence Marryat, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, as well as contemporary depictions of the hotels in Mad Men, American Horror Story, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, Black examines how the hotel supported a corporate identity that would ultimately assist in the rise of modern capitalist structures and the middle class. In this way, Hotel London exposes the aggravations of class stratifications through the operations of status inside hotel life, giving a unique perspective on Victorian London that could only come from the stories of a hotel.

How I Became Hettie Jones

How I Became Hettie Jones
Author: Hettie Jones
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0802196780

“A thoughtful, intimate memoir of life in the burgeoning movement of new jazz, poetry, and politics . . . in Lower Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s” (Alix Kate Shulman, The Nation). Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who’d been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who’d chosen to cross racial barriers to marry African American poet LeRoi Jones. This is her reminiscence of life in the awakening East Village in the era of the Beats, Black Power, and bohemia. “As the wife of controversial black playwright-poet LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Hettie Cohen, a white Jew from Queens, NY, plunged into the Greenwich Village bohemia of jazz, poetry, leftish politics and underground publishing in the late 1950s. Their life together ended in 1965, partly, she implies, because of separatist pressures on blacks to end their interracial marriages. In this restrained autobiographical mix of introspection and gossip, the author writes of coping with racial prejudice and violence, raising two daughters, and of living in the shadow of her husband. When the couple divorced, she became a children’s book author and poet. The memoir is dotted with glimpses of Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, Franz Kline, among others.” —Publishers Weekly

Skin Folk

Skin Folk
Author: Nalo Hopkinson
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2015-01-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1504001192

The SFWA Grand Master’s award-winning collection “combines a richly textured multicultural background with incisive storytelling” (Library Journal). In Skin Folk, with works ranging from science fiction to Caribbean folklore, passionate love to chilling horror, Nalo Hopkinson is at her award-winning best, spinning tales like “Precious,” in which the narrator spews valuable coins and gems from her mouth whenever she attempts to talk or sing. In “A Habit of Waste,” a self-conscious woman undergoes elective surgery to alter her appearance; days later she’s shocked to see her former body climbing onto a public bus. In “The Glass Bottle Trick,” the young protagonist ignores her intuition regarding her new husband’s superstitions—to horrifying consequences. Hopkinson’s unique pacing and vibrant dialogue sets a steady beat for stories that illustrate why she received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Entertaining, challenging, and alluring, Skin Folk is not to be missed. Praise for Nalo Hopkinson and the World Fantasy Award–winning Skin Folk “Hopkinson’s prose is vivid and immediate.” —The Washington Post Book World “An important new writer.” —The Dallas Morning News “Her descriptions of ordinary people finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances ring true, the result of her strong evocation of place and her ear for dialect.” —Publishers Weekly “A marvelous display of Nalo Hopkinson’s talents, skills and insights into the human conditions of life, especially of the fantastic realities of the Caribbean . . . Everything is possible in her imagination.” —Science Fiction Chronicle