Cherise Boothe

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. But why? As she began to write about living through all the dying, Jesmyn realized the truth -- and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle....

"A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with new introduction, excerpt, and discussion guide Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle's, estimation, but she's also the brightest. Rozelle--beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned--exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment,...

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
The Sensual Seductress, video vixen Paisley Lawrence, and The Prince of Praise, gospel singer Warren Cobb—what an unlikely pair! The media is in a frenzy, and so is Warren's wife, when the two are involved in a near fatal car accident. While the gossipmongers are speculating on what Paisley and Warren were doing together, Paisley is busy wondering who is stalking her and why.
All hell...

As rehearsals begin for the ballet version of Peter Pan, the teenaged members of an Ohio dance troupe lose their focus when one of their own goes missing.

The fugitive: Mark James tries to track down Sarah Hart, evade the Mogadorians and the FBI, and discover the identity of the mysterious blogger he knows only as GUARD. The navigator: The truth about the crew of the two Loric spaceships who escaped to Earth is revealed and readers discover what happened to the pilots after they arrived and parted ways with the Garde. The guard: The hacker who has been aiding the Lorien survivors from the shadows...

Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.

"Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world. Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity...

"Don't be alarmed - that dizzy pleasurable sensation you're experiencing is just your brain slowly exploding from all the wild magnificent worldbuilding in Nicky Drayden's Escaping Exodus. I loved these characters and this story, and so will you."

 - Sam J. Miller, Nebula-Award-winning author of The Art of Starving and Blackfish City

The Compton Crook award–winning author of The

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"The Matrix meets an Afro-futuristic retelling of Persephone set in a science fiction underworld of aliens, refugees, and genetic engineering in Jennifer Marie Brissett's Destroyer of Light. Having destroyed Earth, the alien conquerors resettle the remains of humanity on the planet of Eleusis. In the three habitable areas of the planet--Day, Dusk, and Night--the haves and have nots, criminals and dissidents, and former alien conquerors irrevocably...

A fictionalized account based on the true story of a white woman who accused a black man of rape in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, in order to avoid a forced marriage to the farmhand who actually raped her. The resulting riots pitted the National Guard against the community of Greenwood, known as the "Negro Wall Street," and resulted in the complete destruction of that town.