Black by Popular Demand
Books by Black authors releasing each week!
Let’s head to Reader’s Block of Stratford, Connecticut before July’s over.
Happy Reading this summer!
The Bookshop Sisterhood
After years of hard work, four best friends--Celeste, Yasmeen, Toni and Leslie--are finally on the verge of opening the bookstore of their dreams. A place where their community can find solace with an intriguing new read, a comforting beverage and book-loving friends.
But before they can cut the ribbon, their worlds are upended.
Toni receives devastating news just months before her wedding, while Celeste's struggling marriage threatens to collapse completely. Leslie learns a shocking secret about her family, and a lotto ticket changes Yasmeen's life--but not for the better.
As the bookstore's grand opening fast approaches, the four women must lean on each other now more than ever to navigate their grief and uncertainty. And together, they'll learn that sometimes, even life's most unexpected plot twists can lead to beautiful new beginnings.
(Romance)
Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)?: Adventures in Boyhood
What to do when you're the perpetual new kid, only child, and military brat hustling school to school each year and everyone's looking to you for answers? Make some shit up, of course! And a young Jay Ellis does just that, with help from his imaginary friend, Mikey.
A testament to the importance of invention, trusting oneself, and making space for creativity, Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)? is a memoir of a kid who confided in his imaginary sidekick to navigate parallel pop culture universes (like watching Fresh Prince alongside John Hughes movies or listening to Ja Rule and Dave Matthews) to a lifetime of birthday disappointment (being a Christmas-season Capricorn will do that to you) and hoop dreams gone bad. Mikey also guides Ellis through tragedies, like losing his teenage cousin in a mistaken-target drive-by and the shame and fear of being pulled over by cops almost a dozen times the year he got his driver's license.
(Nonfiction)
Beyond Policing
It's evident that policing is a problem. But what is the best way forward? In Beyond Policing, distinguished scholar and writer Philip V. McHarris reimagines the world without police to find answers and reveal how we can make police departments obsolete.
Beyond Policing tackles thorny issues with evidence, including data and personal stories, to uncover the weight of policing on people and communities and the patterns that prove police reform only leads to more policing.
McHarris challenges us to envision a future where safety is not synonymous with policing but is built on the foundation of community support and preventive measures. He explores innovative community-based safety models (like community mediators and violence interrupters), the decriminalization of driving offenses, and the creation of nonpolice crisis response teams. McHarris also outlines strategies for responding to conflict and harm in ways that transform the conditions that give rise to the issues. He asks us to imagine a world where people thrive without the shadow of inequality, where our approach to safety is a collective achievement.
(Nonfiction)
The Blonde Dies First
Devon is always being left behind by her genius twin sister, Drew. At this point, it's a fact of life. But Devon has one last plan before Drew leaves for college a whole year early--The Best Summer Ever. After committing to the bit a little too much, the twins and their chaotic circle of friends learn why you don't ever mess with a Ouija board if you want to actually survive the Best Summer Ever, and soon find themselves being hunted down by...a demon?
But while there's no mistaking the creeping, venomous figure is not from around here, their method doesn't feel very demonic at all. In fact, it's downright human--going after them in typical slasher movie kill order. And that means Devon, the blonde, is up first and her decade-long crush, Yaya, is the Final Girl who must kill or be killed to end the cycle.
Devon has never liked playing by anyone else's rules though, not even a demon's, and the longer this goes on, the more she feels Drew and Yaya slipping away from her even as she tries to help them all survive. Can they use their horror movie knowledge to flip the script and become the hunters instead of the hunted? Or will their best summer ever be their last?
(Romance & Thriller)
Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow
Freshly out of Obafemi Awolowo University, 20-year-old Temi has a clear plan for her future: she is going to surgically enlarge her backside like all the other Nigerian women, move from Ile-Ife to Lagos, and meet a man who will love her senseless.
But when she finally finds the courage to tell her mother, older sister, and aunties, her announcement causes an uproar. As each of the other women try to cure Temi of what seems like temporary insanity, they begin to spill long-buried secrets, including the truth of Temi's older sister's mysterious disappearance five years earlier.
In the end, it seems like Temi might be the sanest of them all...
In Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow, Damilare Kuku brings her signature humor, boldness, and compassion to each member of this loveable but exasperating family, whose lives reveal the ways in which a woman's physical appearance can dictate her life and relationships and show just how sharp the double-edged sword of beauty can be.
(Fiction)
Someone Like Us
After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah--a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush's stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.
With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.
(Literary)
Harryette Mullen, Her Silver-Tongued Companion: Reading Poems by Harryette Mullen
Harryette Mullen is one of the most exciting innovative poets writing today. This landmark volume is the first of its kind, collecting Mullen's works from 1981 to the present day. Her Silver-Tongued Companion offers a full collection of Mullen's later poetry, with a sampler of poems from her early published work. The volume includes the collections Recyclopedia, Sleeping with the Dictionary, Urban Tumbleweed, Broken Glish: Five Prose Poems, a sampler of poems from Blues Baby, and several previously uncollected poems. Five compelling scholarly essays accompany the texts, offering new insight into Mullen's works, ranging beyond contemporary poetry to consider Mullen's works in wider contexts. Foregrounding Mullen's formal innovation, this Critical Edition will be indispensable to scholars and general readers of Mullen's poetry, and contemporary avant-garde writing more widely. Her Silver-Tongued Companion offers an expansive and illuminating curation of Mullen's extraordinary poetry, tracing the remarkable career of one of the major poets of the twenty-first century.
(Poetry)
Passion for the Heist
A crime would bring them together, grief would bind them and love would make them famous.
Parish "Pain" Wells is a man freshly reintroduced to society, after serving time in state prison. Prior to his fall, Pain had been a heist man who showed the promise of someone who could go on to be a legend. His trajectory changed on the night he had made the mistake of accepting a ride from a friend, and found himself behind bars for the one crime he hadn't committed. Several years later, Pain returns home to a world that wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire. The only one who still remains in his corner is his ailing grandmother. It's for her sake that Pain tries to stay on the straight and narrow. He's tired of breaking her heart and vows to be a good grandson, but when her medical bills start mounting he finds himself backed into a corner. He needs money, fast, and there's only one way he knows how to get it.
Since her parents died and Passion Adams found herself a ward of her estranged uncle, a gangster who everyone calls Uncle Joe, her life has been on a constant downward spiral. She moves like a ghost from one day to the next, numbing her pain with drugs and alcohol, while seeking thrills in unsavory places. One morning Passion finds herself the victim of a robbery and the thieves snatch from her the only thing of value that she has left in the world, a locket containing the ashes of her deceased parents. Passion is devastated, fearing she would never see the locket again until it shows up later in the hands of a handsome stranger, who brings something into Passion's life that has eluded her since the death of her parents... hope.
The two broken souls find themselves inescapably drawn into each other's orbits, and begin their journey of finding lives outside the ones of poverty and sorrow that their worlds had condemned them to. But when shadows from both their pasts threaten their happiness, Passion and Pain set out on an adventure that would make them hunted by law enforcement and celebrated by the underworld. What initially starts out as a mission of vindication quickly turns into a fight for survival.
(Fiction)
