In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. But, suddenly, three women, Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter, realize that they are suffocating within the lines. Aibileen is a black maid, raising her seventeenth white child. Her best friend, Minny, is the sassiest woman in Mississippi. And Skeeter Phelan is just back from college, a white woman with a degree but, to her mother's chagrin, no ring on her finger. With the civil rights...

A memoir by the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement explains the movement's position of love, humanity, and justice, challenging perspectives that have negatively labeled the movement's activists while calling for essential political changes. "A poetic and powerful memoir about what it means to be a Black woman in America--and the founding of a movement that demands restorative justice for all in the land of the free. Raised by a single...

For the first time ever, the complete poetry collection spanning three decades from Nikki Giovanni, renowned poet and one of America's national treasures. When her poems first emerged during the Black Arts Movement, in the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni immediately took her place among the most celebrated, controversial and influential poets of the era. Now, more than thirty years later, Giovanni still stands as one of the most commanding, luminous voices...

The Color Purple is the story of two sisters -- one a missionary to Africa and the other a child wife living in the South -- who remain loyal to one another across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life--Cover

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a spellbinding symphony of passion and hatred, power and perversity, color and class that spans three generations of Black women in a fading beach town.

“A marvelous work, which enlarges our conception not only of love but of racial politics.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who would do almost anything...

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro...

The Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families, falls on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War.

"Family ties are tested and transformed in the new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author of Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back With her wise, wry, and poignant novels of families and friendships-Waiting to Exhale, Getting to Happy, and A Day Late and a Dollar Short among them-Terry McMillan has touched millions of readers. Now, in her eighth novel, McMillan gives exuberant voice to characters who reveal how we live now-at...

In 1989, Gayle Saunders Hilliard is living a nightmare. Her husband, Ramsey, a compulsive gambler, has committed suicide, leaving Gayle, her young daughter and her widowed mother destitute. Pressed to add to her income as a receptionist, Gayle, who is African American, takes a part-time job as a maid at a suburban New York hotel, where she encounters her childhood best friend, Pat Reid, a polished executive for an ad agency. Pat, who was taken in...

"From the best-selling author of The Emperor of Ocean Park and The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln-a new novel of terrific suspense and surprise: a brilliant amalgam of fact and fiction about a young black woman on whom the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis depends. October 1962. In Cuba: Soviet ships off-load what intelligence reveals to be nuclear missiles. In Washington, President Kennedy and his advisers are in furious debate over how long they...