Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
In 1855, an unknown but wildly ambitious young poet self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, consisting of twelve untitled poems and an explanatory preface. Walt Whitman spent the rest of his life engaged in expanding and revising this work, through six editions and nearly four decades, establishing Leaves of Grass as one of the central works in the history of world poetry. This edition reproduces the magnificent "death-bed edition," published...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Black Voices | Adults PEQ
JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
JEF - Historical Fiction - Adults
JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
JEF - Historical Fiction - Adults
Description
A novel about black Americans in Florida that centers on the life of Janie and her three marriages.
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown;s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which weve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
A first book by the prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist shares personal essays that chronicle his childhood, adolescence and college years as a Black queer youth, exploring subjects ranging from gender identity and toxic masculinity to structural marginalization and Black joy.
5) If it bleeds
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"The four never-before-published novellas in this collection represent horror master King at his finest, using the weird and uncanny to riff on mortality, the price of creativity, and the unpredictable consequences of material attachments. A teenager discovers that a dead friend's cell phone, which was buried with the body, still communicates from beyond the grave in 'Mr. Harrigan's Phone,' which reads like a Twilight Zone episode infused with an...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"How did a kid whose dad lived in the poorhouse become one of the most successful storytellers in the world? - James nearly died early on the morning he was born. - His grandmother told him something that's been his motto for his entire writing career - 'Hungry dogs run faster'. - When James worked at a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, he met the singer James Taylor. And the poet Robert Lowell. - James's first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
The author and poet recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums.
"Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
He describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from...
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
He describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A hilarious debut novel about a wealthy but fractured Chinese immigrant family that had it all, only to lose every last cent--and about the road trip they take across America that binds them back together. Charles Wang is mad at America. A brash, lovable immigrant businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, he's just been ruined by the financial crisis. Now all Charles wants is to get his kids safely stowed away so that he can go...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"One of the most acclaimed artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston was a gifted novelist, playwright, and essayist. Drawn from three decades of her work, this anthology showcases her development as a writer, from her early pieces expounding on the beauty and precision of African American art to some of her final published works, covering the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing a white...
Author
Language
English
Description
First published in 1930, "Not Without Laughter" is the debut novel by Langston Hughes and a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical tale of an African-American family in rural Kansas. Langston Hughes, born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, spent much of his youth in Lawrence, Kansas and it is here that he set his first novel. "Not Without Laughter" tells the story of young Sandy Rogers as he grows from a boy to a young man and focuses on his "awakening...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
From the Publisher: This autobiography of a slave's rise to distinction asserts that a strong work ethic and excellence in whatever one is doing will be rewarded no matter what race or what position a person holds in life. As far as Washington was concerned, slavery only made the black person stronger. He argued that both blacks and whites would benefit more from giving blacks vocational training than from encouraging the "craze for Greek & Latin...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Quincy Troupe writes poetry in great waves. The words are just notes. It's the music you make with them that matters. He's not a wordsmith, he's a shaman conjuring long repetitive lines, cadences of looking across the sea towards Africa and haunted by the legacy of slavery and racism, or of remembering fellow conjurers, poets and musical artists, celebrating, always celebrating, but never only that. In the fifty-page, incantatory poem, "Ghost Voices,"...
14) Collected poems
Author
Language
English
Description
"The definitive collection of poems from Pulitzer Prize winner, MacArthur Fellow, and National Book Award winner Galway Kinnell. "It's the poet's job to figure out what's happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a certain shape, that have a chance of lasting." --Galway Kinnell. This long-awaited volume brings together for the first time the life's work of a major American...
15) In our time
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
When In Our Time was published in 1925, it was praised by Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and it earned Hemingway a place beside Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein among the most promising American writers of that period. In Our Time contains several early Hemingway classics, including the famous Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The...
Author
Language
English
Description
"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can't seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has...
17) Native son
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what...
18) Song of Solomon
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Before Billy Porter was slaying red carpets and giving an iconic Emmy-winning performance in the celebrated TV show Pose; before he was the groundbreaking Tony and Grammy Award-winning star of Broadway's Kinky Boots, ... Porter was a young boy in Pittsburgh who was seen as different, who didn't fit in. At five years old, Porter was sent to therapy to 'fix' his effeminacy. He was endlessly bullied at school, sexually abused by his stepfather, and...
Author
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
This first literary collection from the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Sun Also Rises contains some of his earliest work.
Three Stories and Ten Poems was originally published in a small print run in Paris in 1923. Of this collection’s three stories, two are all that remained after a suitcase containing his manuscripts was stolen in the Gare de Lyon, while the third was written the previous year in Italy.
...Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Main Library Alliance members might be available in other libraries across New Jersey. You can search JerseyCat and place a request for the item to be sent to your library.
If your library doesn't permit JerseyCat requests or the item can't be found, you can also contact your library for assistance.Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request