#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS
In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World).
 
“Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison 
 
In...

Julian Castro, 2020 Presidential candidate, keynote speaker at the 2012 DNC, and former San Antonio mayor and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, tells his remarkable and inspiring life story.
In the spirit of a young Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father comes a candid and compelling memoir about race and poverty in America. In many ways, there was no reason Julian Castro would have been expected to be a success. Born to...

"Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler was six years old when his father disappeared during Kristallnacht--the night their family lost everything. Samuel's mother secured a spot for him on the last Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to the United Kingdom, which he boarded alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin. Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita Diaz, a blind seven-year-old girl, and her mother board another train,...

"An eye-opening odyssey through the South's past, present, and future that is a moving and gripping tribute to America's forgotten rural working-class black folks. The small town of Denmark was once a thriving hub of South Carolina's idyllic Low Country. Yet today, this majority African-American town with a population of 3,500 is emblematic of the "Forgotten South" -- small communities of color stretching from Appalachia to the Sunbelt. For CNN political...

A novel on two black sisters whose father forbids teen sex and when one engages in it gives her a hiding. The novel explores "the ways in which a woman's denied sexuality leads to the loss of the much-prized and necessary original self." By the author of The Color Purple. A family from the United States goes to the remote Sierras in Mexico-the writer-to-be, Susannah; her sister, Magdalena; her father and mother. And there, amid an endangered band...

"Funny Farm is an inspiring and moving memoir of the author's turbulent life with 600 rescue animals. Laurie Zaleski never aspired to run an animal rescue; that was her mother Annie's dream. But from girlhood, Laurie was determined to make the dream come true. Thirty years later as a successful businesswoman, she did it, buying a 15-acre farm deep in the Pinelands of South Jersey. She was planning to relocate Annie and her caravan of ragtag rescues-horses...

"We Live in Water, the first collection of short fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jess Walter, is a suite of diverse, often comic stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit and generosity of spirit that has made him one of our most talked-about writers. In "Thief," a blue-collar worker turns unlikely detective to find out which of his kids is stealing from the family vacation fund. In "We...

When Pablo Escobar died in 1993, his seventeen-year-old son initially vowed revenge. But Juan Pablo quickly recognized that reaction entailed following in his father's footsteps--something neither he nor his father ever wanted. Their lives in immense danger, Juan Pablo, his mother, and his sister assumed new identities and fled to Argentina, where he would spend the next two decades grappling with his father's legacy. Now an architect and advocate...

CROCODILE DREAMING is a modern day supernatural myth about two estranged brothers, played by iconic Indigenous actors DAVID GULPILIL and TOM LEWIS. Separated at birth, they have different fathers. One is readily accepted as a fully-fledged member of the tribe and is looked on to fulfill the duties of jungaiy, an important ceremonial role which obliges him to be caretaker for his mother's dreaming, the crocodile totem. The other, whose father was white,...

From beloved and bestselling author Roxane Gay, "a strikingly fresh cultural critic" (Washington Post) comes an exhilarating collection of her essays on culture, politics, and everything in between. Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society--state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, womens rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy--alongside...