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CELEBRATE THE VOICES: |
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SHORT STORIES
Adoff, Arnold. Brothers and Sister: Modern Stories by Black Americans . Macmillan, 1970. F Ad71 SC
Bolden, Tonya ed. Rites of Passage: Stories about Growing Up by Black Writers from Around the World . Hyperion, 1994 F R6115 SC
Kanwar, Asha. The Unforgetting Heart: An Anthology of Short Stories by African American Women, 1859-1993 . Aunt Lute, 1993. F U568 SC
FICTION
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Baldwin, James. Going to Meet the Man . Dell, 1988 PB BAL A collection of eight short stories that explore with devastating frankness the roots of love, hate, and racial conflict. By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying, this is a major work by one of America's quintessential writers. |
Cary, Lorene. The Price of a Child . Knopf, 1995 F C 332p
This is a fictional saga of a former slave woman who wishes to make a break for freedom in a free slave state, but whose owner keeps her youngest child at home to prevent her from escaping and making a new life for herself and the rest of her children.
Gaines, Ernest. A Lesson Before Dying . Knopf, 1993. F G127L
A black teacher struggles to accept the injustice of a young Black man sentenced to die in the electric chair for a crime he did not commit. His one achievement and lesson is to convince the boy of his humanity and dignity before dying.
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Clair, Maxine. Rattlebone . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. F C585r Each of these related stories contains insight and intensity on its own; as a group they successfully create the African- American 1950s Kansas City community of the title as an insular world replete with detail and texture. |
Golden, Marita. And Do Remember Me . Doubleday, 1992. F G618a
The author of Long Distance Life (1989), plus other novels dealing with the various odysseys of black women, here centers on a successful actress, a victim of childhood rape, as she struggles to love and endure. Jessie Foster runs away from her Mississippi home and from the man she's just almost killed – her father.
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Johnson, Charles. Middle Passage . Atheneum, 1990. F J663m In this savage parable of the African American experience, Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave eking out a living in New Orleans in 1830, hops aboard a square rigger to evade the prim Boston schoolteacher who wants to marry him. But the Republic turns out to be a slave ship bound for Africa. |
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Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy . Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1990. F K51 Lucy, a teenager from the West Indies, comes to America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children--the perfect American family. Almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade, and bitterly compares them with the vivid realities of her native country. |
Levy, Marilyn. Love is Not Eenough . Fawcett, 1989. PB LEV
Delphi and Nick are a great couple. He's tall and blonde while she is dark with copper hair—a heritage from her Afro-American mother and Greek American father. Her world falls apart when Nick's family objects to his dating a Black girl.
Morrison, Toni. Paradise . Knopf, 1998. F M882p
The violence men inflict on women and the painful irony of an “all-black town” whose citizens themselves become oppressors are the central themes of Morrison's rich, symphonic seventh novel (after Jazz , 1992, etc.). The story begins with a scene of Faulknerian intensity: In 1976, in rural Oklahoma, nine men from the nearby town of Ruby attack a former convent now occupied by women fleeing from abusive husbands or lovers, or otherwise unhappy pasts—“women who chose themselves for company,” whose solidarity and solitude rebuke the male-dominated culture that now exacts its revenge.
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McMillan, Terry. Waiting to Exhale . Viking, 1992. PB McM In this proud, poignant tale, four thirty-something African-American women rely on one another for love and support. McMillan's portrait of these friends who struggle with differing aspects of loneliness is indelibly etched with love and understanding. |
Naylor, Gloria. The Women of Brewster Place . Penguin Books, 1988. F N3332w
Published in 1982, this novel chronicles the communal strength of seven diverse black women who live in decaying rented houses on a walled-off street of an urban neighborhood.
Sinclair, April. Coffee Will Make You Black . Hyperion, 1994 F S616c
This is a coming-of-age story of a black girl in 1960's Chicago. Jean “Stevie” Stevenson is a child of the working poor. Her father is a hospital janitor, her mother is a bank teller, and Grandma owns a popular South Side chicken-stand. Sixth-grader Stevie, meanwhile, is tired of her mother's rules, her refusal to countenance “Black English,” and her attempts to make Stevie a dreaded “L7” (square). Stevie's dream is to be popular and cool, and her wish is granted when “all the way cool” Carla invites her to a party.
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Southgate, Martha. Another Way to Dance . Delacorte, 1996. F S7275a While spending the summer at the School of American Ballet in New York City, 14 year-old Vicky Harris must come to terms with her parents' divorce, her crush on Mikhail Barishnikov, and the impact of being an African American on her future as a dancer. |
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Taylor, Mildred. The Land . Phyllis Fogelman Books, 2001. F T244L The Land is Mildred D. Taylor's wonderful prequel to her Newbery Medal winner, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry . In the stories Taylor has to tell, life is not fair, hard work doesn't always pay off, and the good guy doesn't always win. That's because this extraordinary author tells the stories of her African American family in the Deep South during and after the Civil War, a time of ugly, painful racism. Winner of the 2002 Coretta Scott King award. |
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple . Random House, 1987. PB WAL
Sisters Nettie and Celie, the former a missionary in Africa, the latter a southern woman trapped in an unhappy marriage, share their thoughts and experiences throughout a thirty-year correspondence. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
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West, Dorothy, The Wedding . Doubleday, 1995. F W517w The first novel in 45 years from the only living writer of the Harlem Renaissance spans six generations through the use of flashbacks to explore the issues confronting a Black upper-middle class family living on Martha's Vineyard. |
Williams-Garcia, Rita. Fast Talk on a Slow Track . Dutton, 1991. F W7285f
Black honors student Denzel Watson spends his last summer before college selling candy door-to-door in New York, competing on many levels with the charismatic Mello, and discovering how to motivate an apply himself.
NONFICTION
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Gates, Henry Louis and Cornell West. The Future of the Race . Knopf, 1996. 305.8 G259 In a ground-breaking collaboration, and taking the great W.E.B. Du Bois as their model, two of our foremost African-American intellectuals address the dreams, fears, aspirations, and responsibilities of the black community--especially the black elite--on the eve of the twenty-first century. |
Hooks, Bell. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood . Henry Holt, 1996 305.48 H7845
Bell Hooks, who teaches English at New York's City College, is well-known as an abrasive, take-no-prisoners feminist cultural critic. In this moving memoir of her childhood, she explains the roots of her forceful and rigorous attitude to life and literature. She grew up in a poor Southern black family, an heir to poverty and racism, surrounded by people too wrapped up in their own struggles to offer much help to her. She writes here of her mother's suffering in an abusive marriage, of her siblings' rejection of her for being "different," of her own painful discovery of sexuality, and of how she found escape through books.
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Major, Clarence,Editor. The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African American Poetry . Harper Perennial,1996. 811.5 G218 This book is a showcase of richness and diversity. It contains the exciting works of contemporary poets, gems from the Harlem Renaissance, and unknown works from the early part of the 20 th century when Black American poets published only to a Black readership. If you haven't become acquainted with Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, and Alice Walker, now is the time to meet them. |
Compiled 2/2002 by Katey Craver.
Some annotations are taken from published reviews.