African American Fiction
From Beloved to Just Above My Head, from Waiting To Exhale to Linden Hills, we can help you find the african american fiction books you are looking for. As the world's largest independent marketplace for new, used and rare books, you always get the best in service and value when you buy from Biblio.com.au, and all of your purchases are backed by our return guarantee.
Top Sellers in African American Fiction
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Beloved (1987) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Toni Morrison. Morrison was inspired to write the story after finding a newspaper article about the legal case of Margaret Garner. Garner escaped slavery in Kentucky to the free State of Ohio when U.S. Marshals captured her. To spare her children from being returned to slavery, she killed her two-year-old daughter and attempted to kill her other children. Morrison's novel is set after the Civil War in Cincinnati, Ohio. Sethe was born a slave...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel and the best-known work by African American writer Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston wrote the novel in a reported seven weeks while visited Haiti. Set in central and southern Florida in the early 20th century, the novel garnered attention and controversy at the time of its publication but fell out of print for a number of years. Its popularity was resurrected in the 1970s by an article in Ms. Magazine by Alice Walker "Looking for Zora." Their Eyes Were Watching...
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
Titled after a stanza from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem
“Sympathy,” I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of a series of seven autobiographical
novels by African-American poet and writer Maya Angelou. Personally deeply
involved and affected by the civil rights movement, the volume explores racism
and identity in her early life.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was nominated for the National
Book Award in 1970. However, due to its depiction of controversial subjects
such as sexuality,... Read more about this item
“Sympathy,” I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of a series of seven autobiographical
novels by African-American poet and writer Maya Angelou. Personally deeply
involved and affected by the civil rights movement, the volume explores racism
and identity in her early life.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was nominated for the National
Book Award in 1970. However, due to its depiction of controversial subjects
such as sexuality,... Read more about this item
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
Even
though Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man
is sometimes featured on banned books lists, it remains a consistent
staple on many high school reading curriculums. In the novel,
Ellison laments the feeling of hopelessness and invisibility that
many Black men experience in the United States, and it elegantly
explores the themes of racism and bigotry in ways that are both
unsettling and accessible.
though Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man
is sometimes featured on banned books lists, it remains a consistent
staple on many high school reading curriculums. In the novel,
Ellison laments the feeling of hopelessness and invisibility that
many Black men experience in the United States, and it elegantly
explores the themes of racism and bigotry in ways that are both
unsettling and accessible.
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
The Color Purple is an acclaimed epistolary novel by
American author Alice Walker. Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, this
collection of letters weaves an intricate mosaic of women joined by their love
for each other, the men who abuse them, and the children they care for. In
this, The Color Purple focuses on black female life in the American South
during the 1930s, addressing the numerous issues including their exceedingly
low position in American social culture. The novel received the 1983 Pulitzer... Read more about this item
American author Alice Walker. Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, this
collection of letters weaves an intricate mosaic of women joined by their love
for each other, the men who abuse them, and the children they care for. In
this, The Color Purple focuses on black female life in the American South
during the 1930s, addressing the numerous issues including their exceedingly
low position in American social culture. The novel received the 1983 Pulitzer... Read more about this item
The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin
The Fire Next Time is a book by James Baldwin. It contains two essays: "My Dungeon Shook - Letter to my Nephew on the One-Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation", and "Down At The Cross - Letter from a Region of My Mind". The first of these is written as a letter to Baldwin's 14-year-old nephew, discussing the central role of race in American history. The second essay deals with the relations between race and religion, focusing in particular on Baldwin's experiences with the Christian church as a youth,...
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Song Of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Song of Solomon is Nobel-prize winner Toni Morrison's third novel, published in 1977 by Alfred A. Knopf. It tells the story of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, a young African-American living in an unnamed mid-western city in the mid-nineteenth century as he seeks to discover his own identity and relationship to the world he lives in and uncovers his family's history. Winner of the National Book Critics Award, it has faced numerous school bans and challenges since publication. Former U.S. President Barack Obama...
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Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room was the first published novel by James Baldwin, who hit literary acclaim in 1953 with his semi-autobiographical work Go Tell it on the Mountain. Giovanni’s Room is about a young bisexual American man and his affair with an Italian in Paris. It is one of Baldwin’s only works not to deal with race, focusing instead on the characters’ romantic relationships.
Jazz
by Toni Morrison
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Sula
by Toni Morrison
Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal--or does it...
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Native Son
by Richard Wright
Richard Wright’s Native Son tells the story of 20-year-old
Bigger Thomas, a black American youth living in utter poverty in Chicago's
South Side during the 1930s. When Bigger unintentionally murders a white woman,
he is put on trial and eventually convicted, and sentenced to the electric
chair. Often recognized as a protest novel, Native Son stresses systemic racial
issues, prompting the reader to feel both sympathy and empathy for Bigger. In
this, the novel is one of the earliest successful attempts... Read more about this item
Bigger Thomas, a black American youth living in utter poverty in Chicago's
South Side during the 1930s. When Bigger unintentionally murders a white woman,
he is put on trial and eventually convicted, and sentenced to the electric
chair. Often recognized as a protest novel, Native Son stresses systemic racial
issues, prompting the reader to feel both sympathy and empathy for Bigger. In
this, the novel is one of the earliest successful attempts... Read more about this item
Roots
by Alex Haley
Tracing his ancestry through six generations - slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects - back to Africa, Alex Haley discovered a sixteen-year-old youth, Kunta Kinte. It was this young man, who had been torn from his homeland and in torment and anguish brought to the slave markets of the New World, who held the key to Haley's deep and distant past. Originally published: Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1976.
Black Boy
by Richard Wright
Black Boy (1945) is an autobiography by Richard Wright. Depicting Wright's life in great detail, the book tells the story of his troubled youth and race relations in the South. It is about the many struggles that a person of his race must go through in order to survive in the early 1900's. In the story, Richard is a non religious child who grows up in a racist world. He must overcome those struggles in order to bring himself and loved family members to the north.
Another Country
by James Baldwin
Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race and liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwhich Village, Harlem and France, ANOTHER COUNTRY tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.
Passing
by Nella Larsen
Nella Larsen was born in Chicago of interracial parentage on April 13, 1891. She grew up in a white world, primarily among people of German and Scandinavian stock. Her first experience with an all-black world occurred in 1909, when she matriculated at the high school division of Fisk University in Nashville. After studying at the University of Copenhagen for two years, Larsen moved to New York City in 1912 to study nursing at Lincoln Hospital. She would later train as a librarian, earning her...
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Paradise
by Toni Morrison
"Rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year's Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed . . . The proof they had been collecting since the...
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Notes Of a Native Son
by James Baldwin
Notes of a Native Son is a non-fiction book by James Baldwin. It was Baldwin's first non-fiction book, and was published in 1955. The volume collects ten of Baldwin's essays, which had previously appeared in such magazines as Harper's Magazine, Partisan Review, and The New Leader. The essays mostly tackle issues of race in America and Europe.
The Intuitionist
by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead was born in New York City in 1969. His journalism has appeared in Vibe, Spin, Newsday, and The Village Voice, where he was a television columnist. A graduate of Harvard College, he currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
If Beale Street Could Talk
by James Baldwin
If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin's fifth novel is a love story set in Harlem in the early 70's.Young Tish and Fonny, who are in love and expecting a child. They plan on marrying until Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their tragic love story paints a bleak picture of racism and injustice. It is the only Baldwin novel narrated by a woman.
Cane
by Jean Toomer
Cane is considered the first novel of the Harlem Renaissance, and today is revered as a classic. This collection was originally published in 1923, sold 500 copies, and then disappeared until it was re-discovered in the 1960s (two years after the author's death). Considered ‘High Modernist’ the novel is composed of vignettes including narrative prose, poetry, and dialogue, moving in a circular fashion to combine life experiences of black in the rural south and urban north.
Tar Baby
by Toni Morrison
Ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary, Tar Baby is Toni Morrison's reinvention of the love story. Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and...
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The Street
by Ann Petry
THE STREET tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today.
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
The Color Purple is an acclaimed epistolary novel by
American author Alice Walker. Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, this
collection of letters weaves an intricate mosaic of women joined by their love
for each other, the men who abuse them, and the children they care for. In
this, The Color Purple focuses on black female life in the American South
during the 1930s, addressing the numerous issues including their exceedingly
low position in American social culture. The novel received the 1983 Pulitzer... Read more about this item
American author Alice Walker. Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, this
collection of letters weaves an intricate mosaic of women joined by their love
for each other, the men who abuse them, and the children they care for. In
this, The Color Purple focuses on black female life in the American South
during the 1930s, addressing the numerous issues including their exceedingly
low position in American social culture. The novel received the 1983 Pulitzer... Read more about this item
The Heart Of a Woman
by Maya Angelou
Poet, writer, performer, teacher and director Maya Angelou was raised in Stamps, Arkansas, and then went to San Francisco. In addition to her bestselling autobiographies, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she has also written five poetry collections, including I Shall Not Be Moved and Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?, as well as the celebrated poem "On the Pulse of Morning," which she read at the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Just Above My Head
by James Baldwin
Just Above My Head is James Baldwin's sixth novel, first published in 1979.
African American Fiction Books & Ephemera
Waiting To Exhale
by McMillan, Terry
The classic novel of triumph, revenge, and friendship-now in a premium edition From the critically-acclaimed author of How Stella Got Her Groove Back comes this wise, down-to-earth story of a friendship between four African American women who lean on each other while "waiting to exhale"-waiting for that man who will take their breath away.
Just Above My Head
by Baldwin, James
Just Above My Head is James Baldwin's sixth novel, first published in 1979.
Getting Mother's Body
by Parks, Suzan-Lori
Suzan-Lori Parks is a novelist, playwright, songwriter, and screenwriter. She was the recipient of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/ Underdog, as well as a 2001 MacArthur “genius grant.” Her other plays include Fucking A, In the Blood, The America Play, Venus, and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Her first feature film, Girl 6, was directed by Spike Lee. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, where she studied with James Baldwin, she has taught...
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Possessing the Secret Of Joy
by Walker, Alice
In Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy, we meet Tashi Johnson again (she first appeared in The Color Purple). The young tribal African woman is now living in North America. As a young woman, she submitted to the customs of her people led her to submit to the tribal initiation rite of passage, which involves genital mutilation. Now severely traumatized, she spends the rest of her life trying to reconcile her heritage with her experience as a modern woman in America.
The Wedding
by West, Dorothy
Dorothy West founded the Harlem Renaissance literary magazine Challenge in 1934, and New Challenge in 1937, with Richard Wright as her associate editor. She was a welfare investigator and WPA relief worker in Harlem during the Depression. Her first novel, The Living Is Easy, appeared in 1948 and remains in print. Her second novel, The Wedding, was a national bestseller and literary landmark when published in the winter of 1995. A collection of her stories and autobiographical...
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Brothers and Sisters
by Campbell, Bebe Moore
"This book is about succeeding—and surviving—even being happy, in a society where every card seems stacked against you. If this is a fair world, Bebe Moore Campbell will be remembered as the most important African-American novelist of this century—except for, maybe, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin."—Carolyn See, Washington Post Book Review
Dessa Rose
by Williams, Sherley Anne
This acclaimed historical novel is based on two actual incidents: In 1829 in Kentucky, a pregnant black woman helped lead an uprising of a group of slaves headed to the market for sale. She was sentenced to death, but her hanging was delayed until after the birth of her baby. In North Carolina in 1830, a white woman living on an isolated farm was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. In Dessa Rose, the author asks the question: "What if these two women met?"From there the story unfolds: two...
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Going To Meet the Man
by Baldwin, James
Going to Meet the Man, published in 1965, is a short-story collection by American writer James Baldwin. It is concerned with racism in American society. The eight stories collected in the book are: "The Rockpile" "The Outing" "The Man Child" "Previous Condition" "Sonny's Blues" "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" "Come Out the Wilderness" "Going to Meet the Man"
A Different Kind Of Christmas
by Haley, Alex
ALEX HALEY was the author of ROOTS: The Saga of An American Family, now available as a Modern Classic from Gramercy Books. Haley became a journalist while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard, and first gained national attention as the collaborator of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He died in 1992.
Mama Day
by Naylor, Gloria
Mama day is about many things. It's the story of Ophelia and George two black American's and how they fall in love in try to reconcile their differences of upbringing and culture. It's about the dying culture of Gullah on the Georgia sea islands and it is even a reworking of Shakespeare's Tempest.
