Books of Soul

Around the Way Girls 8

June 28, 2011
Get ready for the latest streetwise installment of this off-the-hook street series, with sizzling stories told by three of your favorite authors! In Got Me Twisted, New York diva Ebony Queen heads south after her mother’s murder and tries to reinvent country bumpkin Reshunda — but it won’t be easy! In Arrested Development, Kelly joins the police force to get in the good graces of her love interest, Dante — but what happens when her brother gets out of prison and finds out her boyfriend is the same cop that brought him down? And in Greed, Jackie and her parents escaped the projects and now live the high life — but what’s going to happen to her if they get murdered? These latest Around the Way Girls stories will leave you breathless!

Around the Way Girls 8
by Tina Brooks McKinney, B.L.U.N.T., Meisha Camm

Urban Books
Available June 1, 2011 in Paperback

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

October 26, 2010




Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as “one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years” (Baltimore Sun), with “prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes” (The Boston Globe); The Washington Post called her “the twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe.” Her award-winning Half of a Yellow Sun became an instant classic upon its publication three years later, once again putting her tremendous gifts — graceful storytelling, knowing compassion, and fierce insight into her characters’ hearts — on display. Now, in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.

In “A Private Experience,” a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she’s been pushing away.

In “Tomorrow is Too Far,” a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother’s death.

The young mother at the center of “Imitation” finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home.

And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to reexamine them.

Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.

Anchor
Available June 1, 2010 in Paperback

A Taste of Honey: Stories by Jabari Asim

April 10, 2010

Broadway
Available 03/02/10 in Paperback

Poignant and powerful, this debut collection from preeminent writer and critic Jabari Asim heralds his arrival as an exciting new voice in African American fiction.

Through a series of fictional episodes set against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent years in modern history, Asim brings into pin-sharp focus how the tumultuous events of ’68 affected real people’s lives and shaped the country we live in today. The sixteen connected stories in this exciting debut are set in the fictional Midwestern town of Gateway City, where second generation off-spring of the Great Migrators have pieced together a thriving, if fragile existence. With police brutality on the rise, the civil rights movement gaining momentum, and wars raging at home and abroad, Asim has conjured a community that stands on edge.  But it is the individual struggles with love, childrearing, adolescence, etc, lyrically chronicled here, that create a piercing portrait of humanity.

In I’d Rather Go Blind and Zombies, young Crispus Jones, who while sensitive to the tremors of upheaval around him is still much more concerned with his crush on neighbor Polly and if he’s ever going to be as cool as his brother. When Ray Mortimer, a white cop, kills the owner of his favorite candy store, Crispus becomes aware of malice even more scary than zombies and the ghost that he thinks may be haunting his house.

In The Wheat from the Tares and A Virtuous Woman, Rose Whittier deals with her abusive husband with a desperate resignation until his past catches up with him and she’s given a second chance at love.  And Gabriel, her suitor, realizes that his whole-hearted commitment to The Struggle may have to give way for his own shot at romance.

And in Ashes to Ashes we see how a single act of despicable violence in their childhoods cements a lasting connection between two unlikely friends.

From Crispus’ tender innocence to Ray Mortimer’s near pure evil, to Rose’s quiet determination, the characters in this book and their journeys showcase a world that is brimming with grace and meaning and showcases the talents of a writer at the top of his game.

Some Like It Hot by Brenda Jackson

March 22, 2009

Some Like It Hot by Brenda Jackson

Available 04/28/09

In this first ever short story collection, New York Times bestselling author Brenda Jackson takes us on five steamy, sexy adventures. From a freelance writer whose interview with a ruthless, ambitious, and very handsome millionaire turns into something so much more to an attorney’s explosive encounter with a sexy club owner.  From an event planner’s very steamy night with an old flame to a businesswoman who wants to get back the man she let slip away while climbing the ladder of success. Experience just how much Brenda Jackson can turn up the heat!

The Darker Mask

June 6, 2008

The Darker Mask

The Darker Mask
by Gary Phillips, Christopher Chambers (Author)
To be released on August 19, 2008.

Expanding on the concept behind Byron Preiss’s Weird Heroes from the 1970s, George R. R. Martin’s Wild Card series, and Michael Chabon’s McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, The Darker Mask is a collection of original prose stories recalling the derring-do of the beings we call Superheroes and the worlds they fight to save. But unique to The Darker Mask stories is that these plots and characters color a literary universe outside of what has been predominantly white, idiosyncratic, and male in previous homages to pulp. This is the stuff of urban legends, new mythos, and extraordinary folks who might live in a soon-to-be-gentrified ghetto, the dreary rust-belt of the city, or in another dimension. The Darker Mask offers an eclectic mix of popular fiction writers exploring worlds gritty, visceral, and fantastic.

Including stories by: Walter Mosley, L. A. Banks, Naomi Hirahara, Lorenzo Carcaterra, Tananarive Due and Stephen Barnes, Mike Gonzales, Gar Anthony Haywood, Ann Nocenti, Jerry Rodriguez, Reed Farrell Coleman, Doselle Young, Mat Johnson, Peter Spiegelman, Alexandra Sokoloff, Christopher Chambers, Gary Phillips, Victor LaValle, and Wayne Wilson.