Beacon: 545 books

Bury those easy-to-read Black romance books. Mosquito is where African-American literature is heading as we approach the twenty-first century.--E. Ethelbert Miller, Emerge

Here is Gayl Jones's classic novel, the tale of blues singer Ursa, consumed by her hatred of the nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both her grandmother and mother.

Gayl Jones's special gift is to shape experience and make it seem unshaped. -John Alfred Avant, The New Republic Gayl Jones's first novel, Corregidora, won her recognition as a writer whose work was gripping, subtle, and sure. It was praised, along with her second novel, Eva's Man, by writers...

Gayl Jones's special gift is to shape experience and make it seem unshaped. -John Alfred Avant, The New Republic Gayl Jones's first novel, Corregidora, won her recognition as a writer whose work was gripping, subtle, and sure. It was praised, along with her second novel, Eva's Man, by writers...

In Teaching toward Freedom, William Ayers illuminates the hope as well as the conflict that characterizes the craft of education: how it can be used in authoritarian ways at the service of the state, the church, or a restrictive existing social order-or, as he envisions it, as a way for students...

Searing verses set on the Mexican border about war and addiction, love and sexual violence, grief and loss, from an American Book Award–winning author. Selected by Gregory Pardlo as winner of the National Poetry Series. El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States, while across...

One of the earliest known autobiographies by a woman, this is the extraordinary tale of Catalina de Erauso, who in 1599 escaped from a Basque convent dressed as a man and went on to live one of the most wildly fantastic lives of any woman in history. A soldier in the Spanish army, she traveled to...

This is a brilliant and revelatory first novel by a woman who is both an Arab and an American, who speaks with both voices and understands both worlds. Through the narratives of four cousins at the brink of maturity, Laila Halaby immerses her readers in the lives, friendships, and loves of girls struggling...

An acclaimed writer on her mother’s tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in Latvia ** ** A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s...

Within these pages Mary Oliver collects twenty-six of her poems about the birds that have been such an important part of her life-hawks, hummingbirds, and herons; kingfishers, catbirds, and crows; swans, swallows and, of course, the snowy owl, among a dozen others-including ten poems that have never...

Sindiwe Magona's novel Mother to Mother explores the South African legacy of apartheid through the lens of a woman who remembers a life marked by oppression and injustice. Magona decided to write this novel when she discovered that Fulbright Scholar Amy Biehl, who had been killed while working to...

This collection of poems by Mary Oliver once again invites the reader to step across the threshold of ordinary life into a world of natural and spiritual luminosity. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? —Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day" (one of the...

Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Mary Oliver offers us poems of arresting beauty that reflect on the power of love and the great gifts of the natural world. Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth,...

The Truro Bear and Other Adventures, a companion volume to Owls and Other Fantasies and Blue Iris, brings together ten new poems, thirty-five of Oliver's classic poems, and two essays all about mammals, insects, and reptiles. The award-winning poet considers beasts of all kinds: bears, snakes, spiders,...