American Renaissance

A civil rights activist and key figure in African American literary history, Alice Dunbar-Nelson made her mark during the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Violets and Other Tales is her debut (included here in full, save for three stories later updated in The Goodness of St. Rocque). The collection includes poetry, short stories, and essays offering a varied examination of class differences, racial identity, oppression, intolerance, and women’s societal roles. The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories assembles 14 of Dunbar’s short works of fiction.

When writer John Chapter is found dead, it's the words he didn't write that might hold the key. In the heart of the roaring twenties, Harlem is a nexus of intellectual verve and literary prowess. Esteemed writers hold court at elegant soirées, critics debate the merits of the newest works, and ambition is the lifeblood of every aspiring novelist and poet. But as autumn casts its golden-red spell over the city, Harlem murmurs with mysteries that remain unseen beneath its vibrant surface. Lanie Price, a society reporter with unparalleled access to Harlem's elite, is accustomed to uncovering ...

On a sweltering summer night in 1925, beauties in beaded dresses mingle with hepcats in dapper suits on the streets of Harlem. The air is thick with reefer smoke, and jazz pours out of speakeasy doorways. Ben Charles and his devoted wife, Angeline, are among the locals crammed into a basement club to hear jazz and drink bootleg liquor. For aspiring poet Ben, the swirling, heady rhythms are a revelation. So is Baby Back Johnston, an ambitious trumpet player who flashes a devilish grin and blasts jazz dynamite from his horn.

Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) is regarded by many as a seminal work in the history of African American writing. It is generally called a novel, but it could more accurately be described as a collection of short stories, poems and dramatic pieces whose stylistic indeterminacy is part of its unique appeal. The ambiguities and seeming oddities of Toomer’s text make Cane a difficult work to understand, which is why this lucid, accessible guide is so valuable. Exploring some of the difficulties that both the writer and his work embody, Gerry Carlin offers an enthralling account of Toomer’s ...

Old loves, festering hatreds, and buried family secrets collide in this sweeping tale of Jazz Age New York. David McKay has returned from the dead, and he's on a mission to uncover the truth about his sister's brutal death in the glittering world of the Harlem Renaissance. As a civil rights attorney, he disappeared while investigating a lynching, but now he's back and determined to expose the lies, hypocrisy, and betrayal that lurk behind the facade of the Jazz Age. But with each day that passes, he gets closer to the dangerous secrets that could lead to his downfall. Will his enemies ...

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Brautigan was a counter-cultural celebrity, a writer that the would-be hip just had to read. The problem was that his fame did not rest on the considerable literary virtues of his work but, to a great extent, on a mediated image of cool hippie/rock star exemplified by the photograph of him on the cover of his breakthrough novel, Trout Fishing in America. When nobody wanted tie-dye shirts and gurus any more, they didn’t want Brautigan either. Academics have followed the public’s lead: this is the first book-length study of Brautigan in English ...

For 1920's society reporter Lanie Price, the photographer found shot through the eye in the back of his studio isn't just another story. It's personal. On a dank night in September, Lanie is called to the scene of a grisly double murder. The victims: a beloved neighborhood photographer and a dazzling Cotton Club beauty. The suspect: the dead man's jealous wife. The cops say she did it and an outraged community believes them. Can Lanie save an innocent woman from a date with the electric chair—or is this innocent woman not so innocent after all? Join Lanie for another suspenseful trip ...

Poet Jean Toomer’s short-story and poetry collection.

Eric Walrond was a singular voice of the Harlem Renaissance, and Tropic Death is his most famous work - a collection that highlights his particular strength as a writer of short fiction. Over the course of these ten stories, Walrond vividly details the punishing realities of life and labor across the Caribbean, and yet the overall effect is far from grim. These are unsentimental yet startlingly beautiful portraits of the migrant experience, full of distinctive voices striving for an audience in a seemingly implacable world.

When the body of N’Gana Frimbo, the African conjure-man, is discovered in his consultation room, Perry Dart, one of Harlem’s 10 Black police detectives, is called in to investigate. Together with Dr Archer, a physician from across the street, Dart is determined to solve the baffling mystery, helped and hindered by Bubber Brown and Jinx Jenkins, local boys keen to clear themselves of suspicion of murder and undertake their own investigations.

Melody, Asia, and Sasha are successful women working in the careers they've always wanted. They excel in life, they excel in their chosen professions, but in their relationships, they fail miserably. From scandalous affairs and drug-induced sexcapades to secret pregnancies and death in a love triangle, these cousins have the personal drama on lock. But when backstabbing and betrayal infiltrate their relationships with one another, the once-tight trio quickly finds that blood is nowhere near as thick as water.

Romantic Dialogues, first published in 2000, contributed to the modern recovery of a transatlantic dimension in literary studies. Part 1 of the book reassesses the events of 1776 as a painful amputation, severing one part of a close-knit republican community from the other. It looks at English visions of America, from Blake’s America, to Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, and at Romantic Americans such Samuel Williams, William Ellery Channing, Gilbert Imlay and Estwick Evans, who absorbed England’s Romantic revolution long before America’s literary awakening took place. It ...

Adam’s Belle” is the memoir of the late Isabel Washington Powell -Cotton Club dancer and movie star in the 1920’s, political activist and “Queen of Harlem” in the 1930’s and 40’s, and the first wife of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. It is an exceptional story of the Harlem Renaissance and the early life of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. as the Pastor of the largest African-American church in the U.S. at the time – Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem , his early civil rights battles, his time as a member of the New York City Council and later running for Congress. Told by the woman who ...

A young military couple from Indiana is separated by a deployment and haunted by secrets. Shamar Jackson, a sergeant in the US Army, struggles to maintain a long-distance relationship, while his wife, Jelisa, fights to escape the past she never told him about. Lies and deceit stand to ruin this young couple's family, but will the truth make things better or worse? Still tied to the streets, Shamar is determined to keep his family intact by any means necessary. After returning home from war, he is now faced with the fact that the battlefield has been at home the whole time.

À la fois roman historique et thriller, 1542: La colonie maudite s’inspire d’un fait réel aussi fascinant que méconnu : l’expédition Cartier-Roberval. Bien qu’aux prises avec la montée des troubles religieux en France, François 1er doit assurer son emprise en Amérique. Il ordonne donc à Jacques Cartier et au Sieur de Roberval d’aller fonder une colonie en Nouvelle-France. Un étonnant amalgame de catholiques et de protestants, ainsi que de repris de justice et d’aristocrates, s’embarque alors pour une formidable épopée.