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1) Native son
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"The restored text established by the library of America, 1908/2008 Centennial edition." Includes notes, chronology, and bibliographical references (p. 578). Contents include "How "Bigger" Was Born".
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"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...
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A Vintage book volume 715
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In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...
4) Blonde faith
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Easy Rawlins mysteries volume 11
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Easy Rawlins' life begins to fall apart around him when he arrives home from work to find a friend has left his daughter on Easy's doorstep, another friend has gone missing and is wanted by the police, and his girlfriend is leaving him to marry another man, forcing Easy to find a way to save his friends and protect his own heart.
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Traveling to recently unified Berlin in search of a little-known avant-garde jazzman whom he believes to be a musical kindred spirit, disaffected Los Angeles DJ Darky encounters the dramatic local changes that have transpired after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and ruminates on a range of cultural, social, and philosophical topics.
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Easy Rawlins, a private investigator in Vietnam-era Los Angeles, is in need of a source of quick money in order to secure a needed medical treatment for his daughter, so he agrees to take on what he knows is a shady case, trying to track down a storefront attorney who has disappeared along with a case of unspecified documents.
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Miller Packard, a Los Angeles police detective in 1953, becomes romantically involved with Norah, the sole survivor of a violent boat-jacking in which she was raped and her husband killed, but it becomes apparent her recovery is far from complete when Miller takes African-American caddy Lionel "Train" Walk under his wing, and the three of them embark on a path to disaster.
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In the Depression year of 1931, on the golf links at Krewe Island off Savannah's windswept shore, two legends of the game-Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen-meet for a mesmerizing thirty-six-hole showdown. Another golfer will also compete-a troubled local war hero, once a champion, who comes with his mentor and caddie, the mysterious Bagger Vance. It is Vance, sage and charismatic, who will ultimately guide the match, for he holds the secret of the Authentic...
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Benjamin January mysteries volume 4
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When slave owner Simon Fourchet asks Benjamin January to investigate sabotage, arson, and murder on his plantation, January is reluctant to do any favors for the savage man who owned him until he was seven. But he knows too well that plantation justice means that if the true culprit is not found, every slave on Mon Triomphe will suffer. Abandoning his Parisian French for the African patois of the field hand, cutting cane until his bones ache and his...
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Charles Blakey is a young black man whose life is slowly crumbling. He's fallen behind on the mortgage payments for the beautiful home that's belonged to his family for generations. Then a stranger offers him $50,000 in cash to rent out his basement for the summer. The stranger has a very particular, and bizarre set of requirements, and Charles tries to satisfy him. He sees an opportunity to understand secrets of the white world, and his summer with...
12) Man gone down
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A father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his Boston Brahmin wife and three children, and living in a friend's spare bedroom in Brooklyn. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his family afloat, and four days to make sense of his past and his future in a country where he feels preprogrammed to fail. But he has...
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When John Calvin Marshall graduated from Harvard in 1956, he was prepared for a life of teaching and relative tranquility. But history had another plan for him: here, a veteran author re-envisions the Martin Luther King Jr. story in fearful, exciting, and violent terms. Political and provocative, And All Our Wounds Forgiven is both a compelling political fable and a striking and tender love story about one of this century's most charismatic black...
14) Wet grave
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Benjamin January mysteries volume 6
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When a raddled bag lady is found slashed to death in New Orleans, few people care, except for Benjamin January, a musician and teacher who remembers the woman from her glory days as the jeweled mistress of a corsair, and vows to find her killer and bring him to justice.
15) Them: a novel
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This combination of superbly developed characters, a realistic story line, and descriptions that profoundly capture the essence of this country's urban experience—in black and white—is the formula for the making of this truly great American novel.
16) Little Scarlet
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Easy Rawlins agrees to help police find the murderer of a redheaded woman known as Little Scarlet, and, with the help of his friend Mouse, he finds himself on the path of a killer who is suffering from a rage inherent in the riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965.
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Kingdom County, Vermont, is tucked between the Green Mountains and the White Mountains not far from the Canadian border, a small town of proud people with long memories. When the new preacher, Walter Andrews, came to town, he was an outsider, a stranger. He was also a black man. It was the summer James Kinneson turned thirteen. Son of the newspaper owner and younger brother of the town's fiery defense lawyer, James witnessed the shattering events...
18) Die upon a kiss
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Benjamin January mysteries volume 5
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The opening in New Orleans in 1835 of a new opera company propels Hambly's fifth atmospheric historical mystery (after 2000's Sold Down the River) featuring freed slave Benjamin January. As with the other entries in this popular series, the background is a hook on which Hambly hangs her main theme the conflicts of a society based on race, sex and class. A widowed, European-trained surgeon who makes his living as a piano player and teacher, January...
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"After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and cornbread, fist fights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires him to run for sheriff. He wins, and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county. Then a year to the day after his election, a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus's deputies. Titus pledges to follow the truth wherever...
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Twenty-eight-year-old Even Grade is a Black man who was orphaned as a child. 15-year-old Valuable Korner is a white girl who might as well have been orphaned. Petal, Mississippi, circa 1956, seems an unlikely spot for these two to connect, but a friendship forged across race lines is just one of many miracles waiting to happen in this small Southern town. Their paths cross through Joody Two Sun, a seer with amazing powers. Forming something that resembles...
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