Joker, Joker, Deuce

Joker, Joker, Deuce
Author: Paul Beatty
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 129
Release: 1994-03-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0140587233

An electrifying collection of poems from the author of The Sellout, winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize Originally published in 1994, Paul Beatty’s second volume of poetry won praise for the way it “pushes the boundaries of free verse while assessing the landscapes of African American autobiography” (Bomb Magazine). In these poems, which explore aspects of race, identity, and popular culture, Beatty was honing the comic, satirical voice and vivid imagination that came to full realization in his acclaimed fiction. Joker, Joker, Deuce “moves to fierce urban rhythms, both cool and hot,” writes Jessica Hagedorn. “A rush of intense visual images and electric word music.”

Love's Game

Love's Game
Author: Harold L. Turley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 143912258X

Harold L. Turley II opens a revealing window into the male African American psyche in this captivating first novel about sex, relationships, marriage, and monogamy. Terry, Jeff, and Tyrelle manage a nightclub together, where the three cousins have their pick of any woman they desire. Terry is a former college basketball star married to Tracy—and cheating on her with Angie. But meaningless affairs are starting to leave Terry feeling hollow inside. He decides it's time to clean up his act...only to discover that it's too late. A lifetime player, Jeff has finally realized that he's ready to settle down with his current girlfriend. The problem is, he's feeling guilty about all the times he was unfaithful to her. Clearing his conscience would give him a clean slate, but will it cost him the most important relationship in his life? As for Ty, he's caught between a rock and a hard place: he loves his freedom but at the same time doesn't want to lose his girlfriend. And his lover is about to drop a bombshell that will reverberate across every area of his life. Funny, sensuous, and dead-on target when it comes to the games lovers play, Love's Game tells what happens when the tables are turned and the stakes are raised.

Playing the Cards You're Dealt (Scholastic Gold)

Playing the Cards You're Dealt (Scholastic Gold)
Author: Varian Johnson
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1338348582

“With a deft hand, Johnson shows us there's no such thing as "too young" when it comes to questioning big ideas like manhood, or even family.” –Jason Reynolds, New York Times bestselling author of Look Both Ways and Stamped Literary powerhouse and Coretta Scott King Honor- and Boston Globe / Horn Book Honor-winning author of The Parker Inheritance Varian Johnson explores themes of toxic masculinity and family legacy in this heartfelt, hopeful story of one boy discovering what it really means to be a man. SECRETS ARE ALWAYS A GAMBLE Ten-year-old Anthony Joplin has made it to double digits! Which means he's finally old enough to play in the spades tournament every Joplin Man before him seems to have won. So while Ant's friends are stressing about fifth grade homework and girls, Ant only has one thing on his mind: how he'll measure up to his father's expectations at the card table. Then Ant's best friend gets grounded, and he's forced to find another spades partner. And Shirley, the new girl in his class, isn't exactly who he has in mind. She talks a whole lot of trash -- way more than his old partner. Plus, he's not sure that his father wants him playing with a girl. But she's smart and tough and pretty, and knows every card trick in the book. So Ant decides to join forces with Shirley -- and keep his plans a secret. Only it turns out secrets are another Joplin Man tradition. And his father is hiding one so big it may tear their family apart...

Now and Then

Now and Then
Author: Robert Hass
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2010-05
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 145875958X

When a simple case turns into a treacherous and politically charged investigation, Spenser faces his most difficult challenge yet-keeping his cool while his beloved Susan Silverman is in danger. Spenser knows something's amiss the moment Dennis Do...

Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature

Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature
Author: Trudier Harris
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2014-11-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0817318445

Defiance of the law, uses of indirection, moral lapses, and bad habits are as much a part of the folk-transmitted biography of King as they are a part of writers' depictions of him in literary texts. Harris first demonstrates that during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, when writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) were rising stars in African American poetry, King's philosophy of nonviolence was out of step with prevailing notions of militancy (Black Power), and their literature reflected that division. In the quieter times of the 1970s and 1980s and into the twenty-first century, however, treatments of King and his philosophy in African American literature changed. Writers who initially rejected him and nonviolence became ardent admirers and boosters, particularly in the years following his assassination. By the 1980s, many writers skeptical about King had reevaluated him and began to address him as a fallen hero.

All the Flowers Kneeling

All the Flowers Kneeling
Author: Paul Tran
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0525508341

“Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel “This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence.” —New York Times Book Review A profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse, from a poet both “tender and unflinching” (Khadijah Queen) Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

Slumberland

Slumberland
Author: Paul Beatty
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 037460228X

The hip break-out novel from 2016 Man Booker Prize winning author, Paul Beatty, about a disaffected Los Angeles DJ who travels to post-Wall Berlin in search of his transatlantic doppelganger. Hailed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best writers of his generation, Paul Beatty turns his creative eye to man's search for meaning and identity in an increasingly chaotic world. After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, a little know avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city's dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods, the prevent defense, and Wynton Marsalis in search of his artistic-and spiritual-other. Ferocious, bombastic, and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is vintage Paul Beatty and belongs on the shelf next to Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Junot Diaz.

In Darwin's Room

In Darwin's Room
Author: Debora Greger
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0143131311

An artful new collection from a poet who sees the extraordinary within the everyday In her tenth volume of poetry, Debora Greger looks outward from the broadmindedness of the interior. Whether she finds herself in Venice, in London, or young again in the sagebrush desert of her childhood, the reader may feel Greger is both there and not there—her landscapes are haunted by memory, even in the act of experience. Not shying from the raw or savage in life, not ignoring the small moments of salvation or grace, she finds in every room an entrance to another world. Darwin’s college quarters prove not far from his cabin on the Beagle. A dress shop in Virginia reveals itself a Federal parlor through which a battle of the Civil War was fought. Returning to old scenes with a new eye, Greger proves herself a poet of quiet cunning, of grand scenes and small awakenings.

Moral Reality

Moral Reality
Author: Paul Bloomfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2001-09-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198031378

We typically assume that the standard for what is beautiful lies in the eye of the beholder. Yet this is not the case when we consider morality; what we deem morally good is not usually a matter of opinion. Such thoughts push us toward being realists about moral properties, but a cogent theory of moral realism has long been an elusive philosophical goal. Paul Bloomfield here offers a rigorous defense of moral realism, developing an ontology for morality that models the property of being morally good on the property of being physically healthy. The model is assembled systematically; it first presents the metaphysics of healthiness and goodness, then explains our epistemic access to properties such as these, adds a complementary analysis of the semantics and syntax of moral discourse, and finishes with a discussion of how we become motivated to act morally. Bloomfield closely attends to the traditional challenges facing moral realism, and the discussion nimbly ranges from modern medical theory to ancient theories of virtue, and from animal navigation to the nature of normativity. Maintaining a highly readable style throughout, Moral Reality yields one of the most compelling theories of moral realism to date and will appeal to philosophers working on issues in metaphysics or moral philosophy.

Trickster Feminism

Trickster Feminism
Author: Anne Waldman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2018-07-03
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0143132369

New from celebrated poet and performer Anne Waldman - an edgy, visionary collection that meditates on gender, existence, passion and activism Mythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, Anthropocene blues, litany and chance operation play inside the field of these intertwined poems, which coalesced out of months of protests with some texts penned in the streets. Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits patriarchy. She summons Tarot's Force Arcana, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance, creating an intersectionality of lived experience: class, sexuality, race, politics all enter the din. These are experiments of survival.