A new collection of hilarious, intergenerational anecdotes full of absurd detail about everyday experiences of racism from the New York Times bestselling authors of You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey, comedian Amber Ruffin and her sister Lacey.



Families may not always see eye to eye; we get on each other's nerves, have different perspectives and lives--especially when we consider how we've grown up in different generations. But for the Ruffin family and many others, there has been one constant that connects them: racism hasn't gone anywhere.



From her raucous musical numbers to turning upsetting news into laughs as the host of The Amber Ruffin Show or in her Late Night with Seth Meyers segments, Amber is no stranger to finding the funny wherever she looks. With equal parts heart and humor, she and her sister Lacey Lamar shared some of the eye-opening and outrageous experiences Lacey had faced in Nebraska in their first book. Now, the dynamic duo makes it clear--Lacey isn't the only one in the family with ridiculous encounters to share! Amber and Lacey have many more uproarious stories, both from their own lives and the entire Ruffin family.



Recounting the wildest tales of racism from their parents, their siblings, and Amber's nieces and nephews, this intergenerational look at ludicrous (but all too believable) everyday racism as experienced across age, gender, and appearance will have you gasping with shock and laughter in turn. Validating for anyone who has first-hand experience, and revealing for anyone who doesn't, Amber and Lacey's next book helps us all find the absurdity in the pervasive frustrations of racism. Illuminating and packed with love and laughter, this is a must-read for just about everyone.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY



A "sensitive, immersive, and exhaustive" portrait of Black workers and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston, from "a gifted practitioner of labor history and urban history" (Tiya Miles, National Book Award-winning author of All That She Carried)



Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation's hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, however, the city was far from a beacon of equality. 



In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small: a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Before, during, and after the Civil War, white abolitionists and Republicans refused to secure equal employment opportunity for Black Bostonians, condemning most of them to poverty. Still, Jones finds, some Black entrepreneurs ingeniously created their own jobs and forged their own career paths. 



Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston--and the United States--from securing true equality for all.

There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic "white working class," a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story.

Spanning two hundred years--from one of Kelley's earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the Covid-19 pandemic--Black Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking jobs white people didn't want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision and largely beyond white knowledge. As millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West, these networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike and laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights.

As her narrative moves from Georgia to Philadelphia, Florida to Chicago, Texas to Oakland, Kelley treats Black workers not just as laborers, or members of a class, or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered--to themselves, to their communities, and to a nation that denied that basic fact. Through affecting portraits of her great-grandfather, a sharecropper named Solicitor, and her grandmother, Brunell, who worked for more than a decade as a domestic maid, Kelley captures, in intimate detail, how generation after generation of labor was required to improve, and at times maintain, her family's status. Yet her family, like so many others, was always animated by a vision of a better future. The church yards, factory floors, railcars, and postal sorting facilities where Black people worked were sites of possibility, and, as Kelley suggests, Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be the same today. With the resurgence of labor activism in our own time, Black Folk presents a stirring history of our possible future.

A timely, crucial, and empowering exploration of racism--and antiracism--in America

This is NOT a history book.
This is a book about the here and now.
A book to help us better understand why we are where we are.
A book about race.

The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.

Through a gripping, fast-paced, and energizing narrative written by beloved award-winner Jason Reynolds, this book shines a light on the many insidious forms of racist ideas--and on ways readers can identify and stamp out racist thoughts in their daily lives.
 

"This stunning book is the story I've been waiting for my whole life; where girls rise up to claim their space with joy and power.” --Laurie Halse Anderson, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Speak

"An extraordinary story of two indomitable spirits." --Brendan Kiely, New York Times bestselling co-author of All American Boys and Tradition

"Timely, thought-provoking, and powerful." --Julie Murphy, New York Times bestselling author of Dumplin'

Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award-winning author Renée Watson teams up with poet Ellen Hagan in this YA feminist anthem about raising your voice.

Jasmine and Chelsea are best friends on a mission--they're sick of the way women are treated even at their progressive NYC high school, so they decide to start a Women's Rights Club. They post their work online--poems, essays, videos of Chelsea performing her poetry, and Jasmine's response to the racial microaggressions she experiences--and soon they go viral. But with such positive support, the club is also targeted by trolls. When things escalate in real life, the principal shuts the club down. Not willing to be silenced, Jasmine and Chelsea will risk everything for their voices--and those of other young women--to be heard.
These two dynamic, creative young women stand up and speak out in a novel that features their compelling art and poetry along with powerful personal journeys that will inspire readers and budding poets, feminists, and activists.

Acclaim for Piecing Me Together
2018 Newbery Honor Book
2018 Coretta Scott King Author Award
2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Young Adult Finalist
"Timely and timeless." --Jacqueline Woodson, award-winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming
"Watson, with rhythm and style, somehow gets at . . . the life-changing power of voice and opportunity." --Jason Reynolds, NYT-bestselling author of Long Way Down
"Brilliant." --John Green, New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars
* “Teeming with compassion and insight." --Publishers Weekly, starred review
* "A timely, nuanced, and unforgettable story about the power of art, community, and friendship." --Kirkus , starred review
* "A nuanced meditation on race, privilege, and intersectionality." --SLJ, starred review

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 to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
 
Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”—James Baldwin

Voted America's Best-Loved Novel in PBS's The Great American Read

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred

One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

“From the first page you know you're in the hands of an exceptional writer… I adored this book.” —Zadie Smith

“Sexy and radical and intimate.” —Miranda July

Named a Best Book of 2016 by VICE, Elle, Nylon, Publishers Weekly and NPR

Named one of the most anticipated books of the fall by the Huffington Post, New York, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, and The Millions

Now available in Ecco’s Art of the Story series: a never-before-published collection of stories from a brilliant yet little known African American artist and filmmaker—a contemporary of revered writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Laurie Colwin, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Grace Paley—whose prescient work has recently resurfaced to wide acclaim.

Humorous, poignant, perceptive, and full of grace, Kathleen Collins’s stories masterfully blend the quotidian and the profound in a personal, intimate way, exploring deep, far-reaching issues—race, gender, family, and sexuality—that shape the ordinary moments in our lives.

In “The Uncle,” a young girl who idolizes her handsome uncle and his beautiful wife makes a haunting discovery about their lives. In “Only Once,” a woman reminisces about her charming daredevil of a lover and his ultimate—and final—act of foolishness. Collins’s work seamlessly integrates the African-American experience in her characters’ lives, creating rich, devastatingly familiar, full-bodied men, women, and children who transcend the symbolic, penetrating both the reader’s head and heart.

Both contemporary and timeless, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? is a major addition to the literary canon, and is sure to earn Kathleen Collins the widespread recognition she is long overdue.

Life in Short is part poetry, part prose and all about the beveled angles of living. Dasha Kelly Hamilton is a poet laureate, a published author and a seasoned storyteller. The collection of micro stories –all 100-words apiece– is described as a “memoir in moments.” Kelly Hamilton began writing the personal vignettes back in 2015 and emailing them weekly to a growing subscribers’ list. In the spare space, she crafts robust stories about growing up as an Army brat, stumbles as a quirky preteen, world travels as a writer and performer, and indelible lessons about sex, race, parenting, and pancakes. Life in Short is published as part of an encore residency with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

New York Times Bestseller • Amazon's Best History Book of the Year 201 • TIME Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 • New York Public Library’s Best Book of 2018 • NPR’s Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 • Economist Book of the Year • SELF.com’s Best Books of 2018 • Audible’s Best of the Year • BookRiot’s Best Audio Books of 2018 • The Atlantic’s Books Briefing: History, Reconsidered • Atlanta Journal Constitution, Best Southern Books 2018  • The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Books 2018 • Barnes & Noble’s Best Books of the Year

“A profound impact on Hurston’s literary legacy.”—New York Times

“One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison

“Zora Neale Hurston’s genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece.”—Alice Walker

A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.

In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.

Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.