18 books like Dirty Jersey
Sag Harbor
The warm, funny, and supremely original new novel from one of the most acclaimed writers in AmericaThe year is 1985. Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on…
Shares: African American teenage boys, African Americans
Don't Cry for Me
Don't miss Daniel Black's next novel Isaac's Song coming January 2025From the Georgia Author of the Year Award WinnerNAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK IN ESSENCE MAGAZINE, THE MILLIONS AND BOOKISH"Don't Cry for Me is a perfect song."—Jesmyn WardA Black father makes amends with his gay son through letters written on his deathbed in this wise and penetrating novel of empathy and…
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In love & trouble
The desires and fears of the American black woman are explored with compassion and understanding in these thirteen short stories.
Admirers of The Color Purple will find in these stories more evidence of Walker's power to depict black women-women who vary greatly in background yet are bound together. Dating back to the early 1970s and 1980s, respectively, these short stories cover the Pulitzer…
Shares: African American fiction, African Americans
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick
From “one of the greatest writers of our time” (Toni Morrison)—the author of Barracoon and Their Eyes Were Watching God—a collection of remarkable stories, including eight “lost” Harlem Renaissance tales now available to a wide audience for the first time. New York Times’ Booksto Watch forBuzzfeed’sMost Anticipated BooksNewsweek’sMost Anticipated BooksForbes.com’sMost Anticipated BooksE!’sTop…
Shares: African American fiction, African Americans
And this too shall pass
A stellar quarterback, an ambitious sportscaster. What happens when rising stars collide?In And This Too Shall Pass, Harris takes us into the locker rooms and newsrooms of Chicago, where four lives are about to intersect in romance and scandal. At the heart of the novel is the celibate Zurich, a rookie quarterback for the Chicago Cougars whose trajectory for superstardom is interrupted by a…
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Leaving Atlanta
"It was the end of summer, a summer during a two-year nightmare. African American children around Atlanta were vanishing, and twenty-nine would be murdered by the end of 1981.
Like all kids across the city, fifth-grade classmates Tasha Baxter, Rodney Green, and Octavia Harrison were discovering that back-to-school now meant special safety lessons, indoor recess, and being thrown into a world…
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Roots
Roots is a novel written by Alex Haley and published in 1976. It portrays the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his alleged descendants in the U.S. down to Haley. The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots (1977), led to a cultural…
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Sing, Unburied, Sing
A SEARING AND PROFOUND SOUTHERN ODYSSEY BY NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER JESMYN WARD
In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through…
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River, Cross My Heart
The impact of a child's drowning on a black family in 1925 Washington, especially on the 12-year-old sister who was baby-sitting the girl. Told against the background of the lot of African Americans at the time.
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Yellow Wife
Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world.
She’d been promised freedom on her eighteenth birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with…
Shares: African American fiction, African Americans
Mama Day
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.
Shares: African American fiction, African Americans
A Raisin in the Sun
This groundbreaking play starred Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeill, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands in the Broadway production which opened in 1959. Set on Chicago's South Side, the plot revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family: son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis and matriarch Lena, called Mama. When her deceased…
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If Beale Street Could Talk
Like the blues -- sweet, sad and full of truth -- this masterly work of fiction rocks us with powerful emotions. In it are anger and pain, but above all, love -- affirmative love of a woman for her man, the sustaining love of a black family. Fonny, a talented young artist, finds himself unjustly arrested and locked in New York's infamous tombs. But his girlfriend, Tish, is determined to…
Shares: African American fiction, African Americans
Soul kiss
Left by her mother in the care of her aunts at the age of seven, Mariah dreams of her mother's return and of the father she has never met, eventually beginning a correspondence with him that leads to a tumultuous visit when she turns fourteen. A first novel.
Shares: African American families, African Americans
Song of Solomon
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…
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The Between
The Between is a 1995 horror novel by Tananarive Due and her debut novel. It follows a middle-class African-American husband and father who has lived with the belief that he cheated death as a child. When his family becomes the target of racist threats, he suffers a psychological breakdown intertwined with supernatural elements that blur the boundary between reality and death. It was nominated…
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Paradise
"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…
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The man in my basement
The man at Charles Blakey's door has a proposition almost too strange for words. He wants to spend the summer in Charles's basement, and Charles cannot even begin to guess why. The beautiful house has been in the Blakey family for generations, but Charles has just lost his job and is behind on his mortgage payments. The money would be welcome. But Charles Blakey is black and Anniston Bennet is…
Shares: African American fiction, African Americans