Search Results: Authors starting with M from Oasis in the Diaspora

A.A. Knopf, 1999. 1st. Fine. Told with the irrepressible warmth and humor of a natural-born storyteller, The Seventh Child is the chronicle of a remarkable woman's life, and of three generations of an African-American family. The seventh of eight children, Freddie Mae Baxter was born in 1923 in rural South Carolina. When her father left the family, her mother had to raise the children alone, and Freddie Mae went to work--first picking cotton, then cooking for the white families in town. At seventeen, she decided to go up North in search of new horizons and a better life. Now, in an astonishingly original voice, Freddie Mae shares with us the wisdom of her seventy-five years, and some vivid memories: from her childhood in the South ("Two cents was money in those days. . .") to her life in Harlem, where she played saxophone in an all-girl band ("We just jammed!") and danced at all the hot clubs ("Anyplace that there was music, you could find me"). Through the good times, bad times, and the… Read More

Beacon Press, 2001. 1st. Fine. A powerful collection of stories by the acclaimed author of Mother to Mother This collection of Sindiwe Magona's short fiction, following the publication to wide acclaim of her novel Mother to Mother, ranges in location from rural Transkei, her homeland, and the black township of Guguletu, where she struggled to raise her children, to New York, where she immigrated. With vivid and perceptive prose, Magona creates memorable characters, both hilarious and tragic, who bring to life the rich and varied backgrounds and cultures of South Africa. Softcover

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New Press, 1994. 1. Pristine. Global awareness of the Caribbean has come a long way from Columbus' colossal geographic error, but few readers are familiar with the diverse legacy of literature that has come out of this besieged region.In an unprecedented collection, If I Could Write This in Fire brings together fiction from the French-, Spanish-, and English-speaking Caribbean, much of it translated here for the first time, and illustrates the bridges built from one island society to another as all struggled to respond to the shared experience of conquest.The fifteen selections deal with basic, underlying themes of the region's literature: the plantation, maroon society, colonial education, rural and urban life, women's changing roles in the modern Caribbean, exile, and the diaspora. Works include Jamaican author James Carnegie's powerful novella Wages Paid about a day in the life of a slave plantation, a selection by noted Guadeloupan novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, Puerto Rican short stories… Read More

Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993. 1st. Fine. Three sexy, screwed-up Southern sisters come home to Mulberry to put their totally self-centered mother, Mudear, in her grave. We meet the Lovejoy women as they gather in their mother's house to lay her and the demons she has dumped on them to rest. Mudear Lovejoy was the kind of mother who ruled her house and raised her daughters with an iron hand even after her "change." Betty is her oldest daughter, big-boned and strong, the only one who remembers what Mudear was like before The Change. Emily is the middle child, restless and divorced, the one who every one assumed would be the first after Mudear to crack. The youngest is wild Annie Ruth, a TV anchorwoman who is pregnant out of wedlock and plagued by visions of menacing cats. Ernest, their father, is a kaolin mine worker who is so overwhelmed by all the females around him that sometimes he just wants to yell out, "Womens taking over my house!" As the sisters reminisce, they are unaware that even… Read More

Counterpoint, 2002. 1st. Pristine. Catherine McKinley was one of only a few thousand African American and bi-racial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raised in a small, white New England town, she had a persistent longing for the more diverse community that would better understand and encompass her. In an era shaped by the rhetoric of Black Power and Black Pride, McKinley's coming of age entailed her own detailed investigation into her birth history, a search complicated by the terms of a closed adoption that denied her all knowledge of the circumstances of her birth.The Book of Sarahs traces McKinley's own time of revelations: after a five-year period marked by dead ends and disappointments, she finds her birth mother and a half-sister named Sarah, the name that was originally given to her. When she locates her birth father and meets several of his eleven other children she begins to see the whole mosaic of parentage - African American, WASP, Jewish, Native… Read More

Warner, 1996. 1st. Fine. After years of working in a factory, Ginger decides to go back to school and join the 9-to-5 white-collar world. The higher she climbs, however, the more her jealous, controlling husband tries to pull her back down. Desperate to hold onto the things she loves, yet driven to achieve more, Ginger must make choices that are both extraordinary difficult--and ultimately freeing. Hardcover

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Doubleday & Company Inc., 1967. Good. A searing, provocative satire by one of the most important African-American novelists of the twentieth century that lays bare the abiding racism and the legacy of slavery on the psyche of white America.Mitchell Pierce is a well-off New York ad executive whose marriage is falling apart. He no longer feels any passion for his pregnant wife, Tam, and his toddler son, Jake, has become a disappointment. He feels trapped in an unrewarding and loveless life and though domestic violence is not in Mitchell's character, it is never very far away. Mitchell withdraws to a fantasy world where he can act out his unfulfilled sexual desires.     Mitchell's life will irrevocably change one day, though, when a young man appears at his apartment door to pick up the family's black maid, Opal, for a date. Cooley it turns out is not a stranger to the household. The twins that Tam is carrying are a result of superfecundation--the fertilization of two separate ova by two… Read More

HarperCollins, 2001. The son of a prostitute who witnessed the death of his mother at the hands of her pimp, Jason struggles to overcome the world that created him when his girlfriend Chinaka, a former Black Panther, forces him to confront his past. 20,000 first printing. First edition
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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1992. 1. Very Good. From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author.“As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” —GlamourIn the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People)."The author conjures up worlds with complete authority… Read More

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1987. 1. Very Good. Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination.It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved.Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where… Read More

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2002. 1st. Fair. From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life. Inscribed Hard cover Damage to dust jacket but not the book Box 3

A.A. Knopf, 1998. 1. Pristine. This guide is intended to enhance your group's reading of Toni Morrison's Paradise, the powerful and extraordinary new novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Song of Solomon and Beloved. It is the 1970s, and the tiny, self-sufficient all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, has reached a crisis of conviction. Tracing its origins to the efforts of a strong and spiritual community of ex-slaves, Ruby prides itself on its uncompromising independence from the larger world. But the vicissitudes of the Sixties, from the Civil Rights movement to the Vietnam War, the counterculture to the generational conflict, inexorably touch Ruby and disturb its self-imposed isolation. In the scrubland outside of Ruby is an old Convent in which five women live, each seeking refuge and deliverance from a grim past. As the townspeople begin to lose their own convictions and succumb to the uncertainties of the times, they come to identify these unknown women with evil, and to use the Convent… Read More

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1981. 1st. Very Good. A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winnerJadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women. Hardcover
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Simon and Schuster, 2006. Fine. First introduced in Shelia P. Moses' award-winning The Legend of Buddy Bush, Pattie Mae Sheals continues her journey in The Return of Buddy Bush. Pattie Mae goes to Harlem to visit her sister after the death of their beloved grandfather and the disappearance of Uncle Buddy, who has been wrongly accused of a terrible crime. Harlem could not be more different from Rich Square, North Carolina-people speak differently, people dress differently, and black men and women work and run their own businesses, just like any white man would do. Harlem is magical to Pattie Mae, and a chance meeting with the black writer Richard Wright fully opens her eyes to the fact that anything is possible in her future. Pattie Mae is not only determined to soak up the Northern lifestyle, but she is on a secret mission to find her uncle. The rumors are that he is hiding out in Harlem, so Pattie Mae wants to bring him back. In her innocence she believes that once Uncle Buddy returns, he can… Read More

Little, Brown, 2003. Advance Reading Copy. Fine. Written with the voice and vision that have made Mosley one of the most entertaining writers in America, "Fear Itself" marks the return of a master at the top of his form. Softcover

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Little, Brown, 2004. 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 white, and it is clear that the stranger wants more than a basement view. There is something deeper and darker about his request, and Charles does not need any more trouble. But financial necessity leaves him no choice.Once Anniston Bennet is installed in his basement, Charles is cast into a role he never dreamed of. Anniston has some very particular requests for his landlord, and try as he might, Charles cannot avoid being lured into Bennet's strange world. At first he resists, but soon he is tempted - tempted by the opportunity to understand the secret ways of white folks. Tempted to… Read More