Classic African American Fiction

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER This "powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinching look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. With an afterword by the author and a new introduction by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. “A masterwork...

On a snowy Christmas Eve in an unnamed American city, the archangel Michael wanders the streets. He is alone and hungry, his clothes tattered, and when he sees his face reflected in a store window, it is that of a young African American boy. Who will offer him food and shelter and who will turn him away? And when he becomes a blonde, freckle-faced child, is his fate different?

In the aftermath of the Civil War, siblings Rena and John Walden seek a better life for themselves by passing as white in their new home state of South Carolina. John’s success as an attorney and marriage to a white Southerner help cement his own place, but Rena’s engagement to John’s best friend brings a new level of scrutiny that threatens to expose them both. As the rewards increase, so does the risk, and ultimately, the color line seems determined to re-exert itself.

One of Buzzfeed’s Most Anticipated Books of 2021. “This trailblazing work of fiction is notable for its depiction of Harlem’s African American society and culture in the 1930s” –Bookpage When the body of N’Gana Frimbo, the African conjure-man, is discovered in his consultation room...

This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who "shares the blood" by two women there, Gilda spends the next 200 years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story.

First published anonymously in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man became one of James Weldon Johnson’s most famous works, and remains a testament to the lives and experiences of both Johnson and his peers. Although primarily a work of fiction, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man offers many parallels with the life of Johnson himself. Set shortly after the Civil War, this powerful fictional memoir recounts the life of a biracial man, grappling with questions around identity, race and justice.

"So this is the little lady that made the big war." The authenticity of Lincoln's words have been questioned, but there is no question that the work fueled the passion and prejudices of countless numbers. It is a work of overwhelming power and persuasions which has outlived even the most severe critics. Notwithstanding its contribution to the abolitionist movement, the book offers a balanced treatment; there is admiration for the best of Southern gentility and the villain is a Vermonter.

June, 1957. One afternoon, in the backwater town of Sutton, a young black farmer by the name of Tucker Caliban matter-of-factly throws salt on his field, shoots his horse and livestock, sets fire to his house and departs the southern state. And thereafter, the entire African-American population leave with him. The reaction that follows is told across a dozen chapters, each from the perspective of a different white townsperson. These are boys, girls, men and women, either liberal or conservative, bigoted or sympathetic - yet all of whom are grappling with this spontaneous, collective rejection of subordination.  

A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner “Arresting images, fierce intelligence, poetic language . . . One becomes entranced by Toni Morrison’s story.” —The Washington Post Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model...

Uncle Tom's Cabin is centered on the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters - both fellow slaves and slave owners - revolve. This emotional novel portrays the reality of slavery while also stressing that Christian love can defeat something as damaging as enslavement of fellow human beings. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling book in the 19th century, and second best-selling following the Bible.

Warum hat Rufus Scott - ein begnadeter schwarzer Schlagzeuger aus Harlem - sich das Leben genommen? Wegen seiner Amour fou mit der weißen Leona, einer Liebe, die nicht sein durfte? Verzweifelt sucht Rufus' Schwester Ida nach einer Erklärung. Aber sie findet nur Wahrheiten, die neue Wunden schlagen - auch Wahrheiten über sich selbst. Wie ihr Bruder war Ida lange bereit, sich selbst zu verleugnen, um ihren Traum zu verwirklichen, den Traum, Sängerin zu werden. Wie ihr Bruder trägt sie eine Wut auf die Weißen in sich, die sie diskriminieren. Bis jetzt.

Brought to you by Penguin. A dark and witty work of hardboiled detective fiction set in the mean streets of New York, Chester Himes's A Rage in Harlem includes an introduction by Luc Sante in Penguin Modern Classics. Jackson's woman has found him a foolproof way to make money - a technique for...

Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him.

Drawing on the 1898 overthrow of the Wilmington, North Carolina, government by white supremacists, Charles W. Chesnutt’s classic novel unmasked the racism of the post-Reconstruction South.

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imagination A Penguin Classic For months, the philosopher Alain Locke wrestled with the idea of the Negro as America's most vexing problem. He asked how...

A fine, exclusive edition of one of literature’s most beloved stories. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a thirteen-year-old boy, Huck, is in search of adventure on the beautiful shores of the Mississippi River before the Civil War in the American south. When Huck escapes kidnapping by...

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) is considered the first important Black American novelist. The Conjure Woman is a collection of seven stories that began appearing in magazines in 1887 and were first published together in 1899. The narrator of The Conjure Woman is a White man from the North living in the South who passes along the stories told to him by the ex-slave Julius McAdoo. The narratives provide a realistic picture of the pre-Civil War South, including descriptions of brutish slave owners.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a 1912 novel by James Weldon Johnson, is a fictional autobiography which was originally published anonymously. It chronicles the intricacies of racial identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the life of its biracial narrator. The book portrays his journey through America's color lines, from his attendance of a black college in Florida to an elite New York nightclub, from the rural South to the suburbs of the Northeast, and a visit to Europe. The author employs places, character, and incidents from his own life....

Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature because of its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through a series of vignettes, Cane uses poetry, prose, and play-like dialogue to create a window into the varied lives of African Americans living in the rural South and urban North during a time when Jim Crow laws pervaded and racism reigned.

James Weldon Johnson's emotionally gripping novel is a landmark in black literary history and, more than eighty years after its original anonymous publication, a classic of American fiction. The first fictional memoir ever written by a black, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man influenced a generation of writers during the Harlem Renaissance and served as eloquent inspiration for Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright.