In 1873 Ohio, former runaway slave Sethe is haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter, the presence simply known as 'Beloved.' Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Morrison probes the psychological scars of slavery and the dark legacy it left to those who survived.
Four Chinese women, who emigrated to San Francisco following the 1949 Revolution, struggle to relate to their increasingly independent and Americanized thirty-something daughters.
First published in 1946, The Street follows the efforts of Lutie Johnson to shield her son from the poverty and violence that surrounds them in Harlem.
John Okada's 1957 novel follows the postwar experiences of Ichiro Yamada, a Japanese-American who refused to swear loyalty to the United States and enlist in the military--responding 'no-no' on a government loyalty questionnaire. Imprisoned for his refusal, Yamada returns to a postwar life estranged from his parents, and struggling to reconcile his experiences with those Japanese-Americans who were interned or served in the military. Perceived as neither fully American nor Japanese, Yamada's experiences echo those of the author Okada, himself an internee an
A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple is the heart-wrenching story of a young black girl in the early 20th century who's forced into a brutal marriage and separated from her sister.
Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.
Lahiri's Pulitzer-prize winning collection of stories follows the journeys of Indian Americans navigating identity and love in America and eastern India.
The story of a young girl, Ezperanza, growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong, not to her run-down neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Capturing her thoughts and emotions in poems and stories, she is able to rise above hopelessness and create a quiet space for herself in the midst of her oppressive surroundings.
Rejecting his era's genteel hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and "passing," Charles W. Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with his innovative explorations of racial identity and use of African-American speech and folklore. Chesnutt exposed the deformed logic of the Jim Crow system-creating, in the process, the modern African-American novel. Here is the best of Chesnutt's fiction and nonfiction in the largest and most comprehensive edition ever published, featuring a newly researched chronology of the writer's life.
William Wells Brown, Frances E.W. Harper, and Charles W. Chesnutt, three black writers who bore witness to the experience of their people under slavery, create a portrait of black life in the 19th century in these three novels:
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown is considered to be the first novel written by an African American. It tells the story of three generations of black women who struggle with the constrictions of slavery.
