Black by Popular Demand
An NBA star and a critically-acclaimed author team up again, and more!
Hope you all are having a marvelous September! We are headed to the Noir Bookshop of St. Louis!
Keep Reading!
Clutch Time: A Shot Clock Novel
Kofi "KO" Douglas knows how to handle pressure. After all, he is the newly announced #1 ranked AAU player in the country. On the court, his game is as good as it gets--even if his Wolves team lost to the Sabres in the national championship, KO always believes nobody can beat him one-on-one. That is, until his former best friend, Ripp, returns home, just in time for the biggest tournament of the summer, the McNabby. Ripp's dad plays professional basketball overseas, and Ripp has been tearing up courts there--KO now has his toughest competition yet.
As KO gears up for this latest challenge, there's game-changing news at home. KO's dad, who has been incarcerated for the last seven years, is getting out. It's been KO and his mom for as long as he can remember, only now his dad is ready to reconnect. It's another reunion KO isn't sure he wants to happen, especially as Ripp keeps calling out KO to play him in the McNabby.
With the tournament on the horizon, KO decides to turn to Coach James and the Sabres for help. He may not love the idea of playing with Tony Washington and his former teammates again, but he needs them now more than ever. Can KO prove he's still the best on the court as his family life turns upside down?
(Middle Grade)
The Night Market
The Night Market is here again, and all one girl needs is a bag of gold coins to enter. The market is alive with the sound of hawkers and traders. "A taste of tangy sweetness!" hollers a man behind a towering fountain of lemonade. "I'll trade you a joke for a coin," a little boy calls. "Home grown spices!" shouts a granny at a counter. What should the girl buy? But, wait! Do you hear that? It's the sound of an old African drum. Have a turn, then learn to make cards disappear when you shout Abracadabra! When the sun starts to rise and the night market winds down, the girl has one gold coin left--just enough to buy a return ticket to the night market.
(Children’s)
Rage: On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant . . . and Completely Over It
One romantic hopeful had greeted Lester Fabian Brathwaite on a dating app with this gem: "You into race play?" Being young, queer, gifted, and Black, Lester has found that his best tool for navigating American life is gallows humor. If you don't laugh, you cry--or, you summon your inner rage. With biting wit, Lester's book Rage interrogates all the ways that systemic racism and homophobia have shaped our society. All to pose that proverbial question: Can a gurl live?
Rage is one part memoir, one part cultural critique, one part live grenade. He contrasts his tragic-comedic love life with the ideals he had formed from bingeing (straight, white) Hollywood depictions. And he is quick to side-eye the misogyny and internalized homophobia that some people reveal in statements like "masc for masc" on dating profiles. Lester also dives deep into representations of queer life from RuPaul's Drag Race to The Birdcage (Robin Williams was a snack in Versace), and explores our cultural understanding of Black genius through stories of James Baldwin, Whitney Houston, and Nina Simone.
(Nonfiction)
Passiontide
The quiet calm of Ash Wednesday morning. Carnival is over. Everyone on the small island of St. Colibri is sleeping peacefully. Everyone except Sora Tanaka, a young pan player lying under the cannonball tree. Sora, a professional musician, had been visiting St. Colibri to take part in the island's famous steel pan competition. But Sora isn't asleep; she's dead: brutally murdered, and still in her costume. And as the women of this island know all too well, Sora is far from the first woman to be killed, and she probably won't be the last, either. In fact, the problem of women being killed on the island is so bad, there's even a dedicated unit within the police department: OMWEN, the Office for Murdered Women, headed by Inspector Cuthbert Loveday.
(Mystery)
The Love Habit: Daily Self-Care Practices for a Happier Life and Healthier Relationships
In The Love Habit, author and relationship expert Rainie Howard explores the profound connection between self-image and daily habits--emotional, mental, and physical--and how these actions shape our relationships with others. Whether you're seeking to enhance communication with loved ones, establish boundaries, or foster greater self-love and acceptance, The Love Habit is a persistent commitment to prioritizing yourself in mind, body, and spirit by aligning yourself with appreciation, peace, and joy above all else.
While many of us understand the effects of unhealthy relationships, we are often clueless about how to truly break free of them. This is because until we understand why people behave the way they do, and that we subconsciously teach others how to treat us, we are powerless to transform this important area of our lives. This book will empower you with a growth mindset to become the architect of your own destiny.
(Nonfiction)
I Once Was Lost: My Search for God in America
Renowned journalist Don Lemon always had a complicated relationship with God. He cherished the Southern Black church he was raised in, but struggled with the fundamentalist rejection of his right to exist as a gay man--one who wanted to marry his longtime love in a church wedding with all the traditional trimmings. In his work as a reporter, moreover, he saw his fellow Americans losing faith in a higher power, in institutions, and in each other.
Setting out to understand the place that religion has in our lives today, Don turned a journalistic eye on ancient stories and found connections that sparked memories, conversations, and chance encounters. Then, suddenly, his world unraveled: In a blaze of inglorious headlines, Don was ousted from his high-profile network news job and tasked with redefining his role in the shifting media landscape. But through a year of personal changes and professional whiplash, he kept his "eyes on the prize" and ultimately found what he was seeking: grace, within himself and in this nation we call home.
Rich with humor and Louisiana realness, I Once Was Lost is a prayer for a country that reflects the multifaceted image of God and a clarion call to those who believe in our common humanity enough to fight for it.
(Memoir)
Kaleidoscope
When Isabella Washington discovers her estranged husband murdered and her ex-lover shot, she finds herself entangled in a mystery that leaves her with more questions than answers. Caught in a world full of government informants, witness protection and jealous lovers - Isabella becomes a desperate woman in search of the truth. Only, the last person she wants in her business is the elusive Sasha.
Recently widowed Sasha Borianni is now the sole owner of The Lodge at Sugar Hill, the only African American five-star ski resort in Park City, Utah. Trying to navigate her way through this new chapter of her life, she decides to take a much-needed vacation to Costa Rica, to clear her mind and heart. Only, clues her husband left behind have now emerged, giving Sasha reason to believe he didn't die of a heart attack after all...
Now, thrown into an endless cycle of betrayal, Sasha is desperate to uncover the truth of her husband's murder, but she finds herself at the hands of the last person she ever expected to ask for help.
(Mystery)
Strive: 8 Steps to Find Your Awesome
Throughout Venus Williams' incredible career in tennis, she's been asked almost every question imaginable. What she eats, how she trains, what she does to unwind, and most frequently, how does she manage to do it all?
Venus harnessed a rich blend of hard-won wisdom and core discipline to achieve her goals while keeping a simple promise to herself: to keep things fun. But after being diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disorder that affected her emotional and physical wellness, Venus's vow was put to the test. She came up with the STRIVE strategy--a winning combination of holistic and scientific approaches to wellness and performance that focuses on making self-improvements reachable and sustainable.
(Nonfiction)
Magically Black and Other Essays
In Magically Black and Other Essays Jerald Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique to create a bracing and often humorous examination of Black American life. He thoughtfully addresses the inherent complexities of topics as eclectic as incarceration, home renovations, gentrification, the crip walk, pimping, and the rise of the MAGA movement, approaching them through various Black perspectives, including husband, father, teacher, and writer. The collection's overarching theme is captured in the titular essay, which examines the culture of heroic action African Americans created in response to their enslavement and oppression, giving proof to Albert Murray's observation that the "fire in the forging process . . . for all its violence, does not destroy the metal that becomes the sword."
(Nonfiction)
Represent: The Unfinished Fight for the Vote
One of the most important and least understood true stories of our nation, the fight for representation is an ongoing and epic quest to build the democracy sketched out in the Constitution but unfinished in the twenty-first century. With impeccable research and exhilarating prose, Represent tells the story of voting rights in the United States from the American Revolution up to the present day.
Each chapter takes on a new battle between the forces of people power and forces opposed to it. Readers will meet champions of freedom, including formerly enslaved revolutionaries, a Chinese American teenager, a Lakota Sioux activist, Black World War II veterans, a Mexican American student, and others who fought for their right to vote.
Drawing clear lines from then to now, Represent weaves this important struggle into a single American drama that will help readers understand our past, present, and future.
(History)
Now You Owe Me
No one knew witnessing their first murder at seven would propel Ben and his twin toward a killing spree in Pennsylvania. Racked with guilt, they vow to take just one more victim. Too bad they snatched the wrong woman . . .
(Thriller)
Ida, in Love and in Trouble
Before she became a warrior, Ida B. Wells was an incomparable flirt with a quick wit and a dream of becoming a renowned writer. The first child of newly freed parents who thrived in a community that pulsated with hope and possibility after the Civil War, Ida had a big heart, big ambitions, and even bigger questions: How to be a good big sister when her beloved parents perish in a yellow fever epidemic? How to launch her career as a teacher? How to make and keep friends in a society that seems to have no place for a woman who speaks her own mind? And - always top of mind for Ida - how to find a love that will let her be the woman she dreams of becoming?
Ahead of her time by decades, Ida B. Wells pioneered the field of investigative journalism with her powerful reporting on violence against African Americans. Her name became synonymous with courage and an unflinching demand for racial and gender equality. But there were so many facets to Ida Bell and critically acclaimed writer Veronica Chamber unspools her full and colorful life as Ida comes of age in the rapidly changing South, filled with lavish society dances and parties, swoon-worthy gentleman callers, and a world ripe for the taking.
(Historical Fiction)
Sky Full of Elephants
One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he's now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn't even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.
Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly "post-racial" America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.
Heading south toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell's astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.
(Fiction)
