South American Literature

As a young man, Virgil Moody vowed he would never be like his father, he would never own slaves. When he moves from his father's plantation in Savannah to New Orleans, he takes with him Annie, a tiny woman with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, who he is sure would not survive life on the plantation. She'll be much safer with him, away from his father's cruelty. And when he discovers Annie's pregnancy, already a few months along, he is all the more certain that he made the right decision. As the years pass, the divide between Moody's assumptions and Annie's reality widens ever further.

Since the night Atlanta mayor, self-made millionaire, and womanizer Jamison Jackson plummeted from the top floor of a downtown hotel, everyone seems to have profited, from vicious criminals to corrupt politicians. Everyone except his jilted first wife Kerry. Once a socialite, she's now the prime suspect in Jamison's alleged murder. But she swears she's no killer - and surprisingly, Jamison's widow Val agrees. For all they know, it was Coreen, the mother of Jamison's secret love child.

At age 23, Cullen Thomas was, like most middle-class kids his age, looking for something meaningful and exciting to do before settling into the 9-to-5 routine. Possessed of a youthful, romantic view of the world, he set off for adventure in Asia and a job teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. But he got more than he ever bargained for when an ill-advised stunt led to a drug smuggling arrest and a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence.

An Iraq War veteran turned small-town homemaker, Colleen works hard to keep her deployment behind her - until pregnancy brings her buried trauma to the surface. She hides her mounting anxiety from her husband, Derby, who is in turn preoccupied with the retrial of his father, Hare Hobbs, for a decades-old civil rights-era murder. Colleen and Derby's community, including the descendants of the murder victim, still grapple with the fallout; Corrections Officer Doc and his wife, Jessica, have built their life in the shadow of this violent act.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, no one knows better than Titus that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface. But a year after Titus's election, a school teacher is killed by a former student. The student is then fatally shot by Titus's deputies. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes, and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight.

Iggy Guerra is out of prison, but his homecoming is anything but smooth. His beloved mother is gone, his grief-stricken father Armando is deep in debt, and they are about to lose the butcher shop that has been in their family for generations. Iggy must earn his father’s lost trust in order to save La Carnicería Guerra from the threats imposed by a new rival business, a vigilante activist, and big-game hunter Orin, who has dragged Armando into his dangerous money-making schemes deep in the Everglades, where more than secrets are buried.

Montgomery, Alabama. 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend has big plans to make a difference in her community. She wants to help women make their own choices for their lives and bodies. But when her first week on the job takes her down a dusty country road to a tumbledown cabin and into the heart of the Williams family, Civil learns there is more to her new role than she bargained for.

Pegasus Quincy, a rookie deputy on temporary assignment in a sleepy mountain town, expects a quiet summer citing jaywalkers and writing traffic tickets. Fate intervenes when a dead body turns up in an old copper mining pit. The man is a three-time loser disowned by even his own mother. Peg’s sheriff boss declares the death an accident and tells her to “move on”. She wants to agree, but then her office is ransacked and her assistant kidnapped...Will they find the killer before he strikes again?

El intenso relato del regreso clandestino del director de cine Miguel Littín a Chile, su patria.

Eleven-year-old Josephine knows that no one is good enough for her daddy. That's why she makes a habit of scaring his new girlfriends away. She's desperate to make it onto her school's cricket team because she'll get to play her favorite sport and use the cricket matches to distract Daddy from dating. But when Coach Broomes announces that girls can't try out for the team, the frustrated Josephine cuts into a powerful silk cotton tree and accidentally summons a bigger problem into her life.

A family emergency brings former rapper and current real estate mogul Ivan Spencer back to his long-abandoned hometown. While there, he must deal with his confused mother, his elderly, philandering father, his flaky sister, an unreliable aunt, and a face from the past who makes him question some of his earlier decisions. All he wants to do is to get things squared away and return to his life, but as it turns out, he must deal with his own issues first.

DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he’s called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle’s funeral, he’s hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amid prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders family, church, and the men in his life, prompting the question: Who deserves love?

Before being torn down in 2007, the Stateway Gardens public housing projects on Chicago’s South Side were ridden with deprivation and crime. But for some, like Tracy, the shy, intelligent young boy at the center of this enthralling collection of linked stories, they are simply home. Set in the mid-1980s and taking listeners up to the point of the destruction of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects, this collection gives an intimate look at the hopes, dreams, failures, and fortunes of a group of people growing up with the deck always stacked against them.

Working with Seoul’s premiere matchmaker, Jisu’s traditional South Korean parents are determined to ensure her success in life and love by matching her with the right boyfriend. After one too many slip-ups at school, Jisu finds herself shipped off to San Francisco to focus on her academics and approved dates, leaving her little space to figure out her own dreams. As her newly realized passion for photography lights her on fire, Jisu wonders...does she even want to find "The One"?

That brash decision lands Pegasus Quincy in the midst of a hostile murder situation. She alienates her new partner and almost gets him killed. She ignores regulations and jeopardizes an ongoing investigation. Just when she thinks things couldn’t get worse - they do! She encounters the Nettle family: an insanely jealous wife, a banished son, and a sister whose little girl has been traumatized by an explosion at the illicit family whiskey still.

Fanny and Dora's South American Adventure takes two fabulous and very glamorous ladies on a life-changing trip to Brazil (Sugar Loaf Mountain, an inspiration for cake), Argentina, Easter Island, Chile, and, finally, Peru (where you are given magical skills to fly up to the top of the world)!

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the listener’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother.

"I was born a slave, as was my father before me, but I shall die a free man." Thus begins the poignant story of Samuel Washburn, born a slave in 1850. A young master's cruelty leads to an unforeseen confrontation, which results in Sam and his cousin fleeing the plantation for their lives. They run north to freedom, only to return the South to fight for the greater cause in the Civil War.

Joan was only a child the last time she visited Memphis. She doesn't remember the bustle of Beale Street on a summer's night. She doesn't know she's as likely to hear a gunshot ring out as the sound of children playing. How the smell of honeysuckle is almost overwhelming as she climbs the porch steps to the house where her mother grew up. But when the front door opens, she does remember Derek. This house full of history is home to the women of the North family.

Self-educated and brown skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother's laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for "colored music" and dreams of life as a big-city radio star. These teenage girls are half-sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father's inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes on a road trip together to claim what's rightly theirs. In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the Deep South of the 1950s.