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Books by Black Authors
Amplify Black voices—read books by Black authors. Check out some of our picks below.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 33–47 of 47 results
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Personals
$16.95These are not love poems. These are almost-love poems. Jittery, plaintive, and fresh, these are poems voiced through a startling variety of speakers who continually rev themselves up to the challenge of connecting with others, often to no avail. Ian Williams writes in traditional poetic forms: ghazals, a pantoum, blank sonnets, mock-heroic couplets. He also invents his own: poems that spin into indeterminacy, poems that don’t end. With a deft hand and playful ear, Williams entices the reader to stumble alongside his characters as they search, again and again, for intimacy, for love, and for each other.
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Response of Weeds, The
$18.95Winner of the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award!
Winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry
Winner of a 2021 High Plains Book Award for First Book!
Finalist for the 2020 City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize!
A 2020 CBC Poetry Book of the Year!
Finalist for a 2021 High Plains Book Award for PoetryBertrand Bickersteth’s debut poetry collection explores what it means to be black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical, and essentially, geographical. The Response of Weeds offers a much-needed window on often overlooked contributions to the province’s character and provides personal perspectives on the question of black identity on the prairies. Through these rousing and evocative poems, Bickersteth uses language to call up the contours of the land itself, land that is at once mesmerizing as it is dismissively effacing. Such is black identity here on this paradoxical land, too.
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Shut Up You’re Pretty
$17.95CANADA READS RUNNER-UP, 2024
Winner, Trillium Book Award and Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; Finalist, Rogers Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize; a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
In Tea Mutonji’s disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator’s experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed.
Shut Up You’re Pretty is the first book to be published under the imprint VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of colour.
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Smells Like Stars
$20.00Kerstin Ostheim, a journalist, and P. J. Banner, a freelance photographer, have been together six months after meeting on a dating website. They are getting married in two weeks and as the wedding fast approaches, they question their compatibility while investigating mysterious horse killings that are taking place in Ogweyo’s Cove, the Pacific tourist haven where they live.
In the meantime, Schuld Ostheim, Kerstin’s transgender daughter from her first marriage, is preparing for an art exhibit after being hospitalized for a physical assault while her boyfriend, Woloff, an Olympic medalist in the 1500m, comes to terms with a career ending knee injury. As Kerstin and P.J. get closer to the truth about the dead horses, they also begin to more clearly see each other. Simultaneously, Schuld and Woloff encounter obstacles caused by how their relationships with the past effects their sense of a possible future.
Ultimately, Smells Like Stars draws attention to what is hidden in plain sight, that life can be cruel, ambiguous and without meaning.
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Such a Lonely, Lovely Road
$22.95Winner of the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award for Excellence in African Writing, 2019
Coming out in South Africa … At what cost?
All his life Kabelo Mosala has been the perfect child to his doting absent parents, who show him off every chance they get. Both his parents and his small community look forward to him coming back after medical school and joining his father’s practice. They also plan to give him the perfect township wedding. But Kabelo’s one wish has always been to get as far away from the township as he possibly can and never come back. A few weeks before he leaves for university, however, he forms a close bond with Sediba, one of his childhood friends, confirming his long-held suspicion that he is gay. Their relationship is thrown into turmoil by social pressures and conflicting desires, and it starts to look as if they can’t be together. But against all odds the two young men make their way back to each other, risking scorn from the community that raised them.
In her characteristic, beautifully modulated voice, with razor-sharp clarity, Kagiso Lesego Molope tackles an urgent issue in her country of birth.
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Taximan
$16.95In the taxi rides you’re about to take, you’ll be in the company of some classic drivers and of a perspicacious and sharp-eyed passenger, the writer and broadcaster Stanley Péan. Veteran translator David Homel, who introduced readers of English to Dany Laferrière with the publication of How to Make to Love to a Negro, now brings us the other major voice of Haitian Montreal: Stanley Péan, here in English for the first time.
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The Old Songs
$19.95Tessa comes of age as the advent of Independence on a small British Caribbean island disturbs the status quo and establishes a new class and race hierarchy in a country that historically was a polyglot nation. As East Indians living in straitened circumstances in a city in which the social mores are now dictated by the white, mixed race, and well-to-do Blacks, Chinese, Syrians, and Portuguese, the family is under siege as they struggle with financial hardship and discrimination when they are forced to move from their beautiful home in Port of Spain to a much smaller house in the impoverished suburb of San Juan de la PIna. The family’s social life is centred around the Catholic Church and their extended family, and they have their own prejudices as Tessa discovers when the restrictions placed on them by being Catholic hampers her family’s ability to improve their circumstances. Winning entrance into the most prestigious Convent School in the Port of Spain is Tessa’s only hope to get the education she needs to climb out of poverty and break free of the racism that seeks to define and restrict her life.
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The Shade Tree
$25.00Winner of the 2020 Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction and The 2022 Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction
When the lies of thirteen-year-old Ellie Turner cause a black man’s lynching in 1930s Florida, her younger sister Mavis begins to question the family’s long-held beliefs about race. At the same time, the novel focuses on the courageous story of Sliver, a black midwife whose love for her grandson forces her to flee to Washington DC with the child, and Mavis, in tow. As the novel progresses through the decades, the lives of the three women merge and troubling family secrets are revealed.
The Shade Tree is a dramatic exploration of racial injustice and conflict set against the backdrop of some of America’s most turbulent historical events. The lives of two white sisters and a black midwife are inextricably linked through a series of haunting tragedies, and the characters must make difficult, life-changing decisions about where their loyalties lie: with their biological families or with a greater moral cause. From a Florida orange grove to the seat of power in Washington, DC, during the height of the civil rights movement, The Shade Tree tells a sweeping yet intimate story of racial discrimination and the human hunger for justice.
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The Talking Drum
$22.95Winner, 2020 National Association of Black Journalists Outstanding Literary Award; Overall Winner, 2020 Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book Award; Winner, 2021 IPPY Gold Medal for Urban Fiction; Finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
Featured on Ms. Magazine‘s June 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us and Bustle‘s 23 Debut Books That Are Too Good To Ignore.
It is 1971. The fictional city of Bellport, Massachusetts, is in decline with an urban redevelopment project on the horizon expected to transform this dying factory town into a thriving economic center. This planned transformation has a profound effect on the residents who live in Bellport as their own personal transformations take place. Sydney Stallworth steps away from her fellowship and law studies at an elite university to support husband Malachi’s dream of opening a business in the heart of the black community of his hometown, Bellport.
For Omar Bassari, an immigrant from Senegal, Bellport is where he will establish his drumming career and the launching pad from which he will spread African culture across the world, while trying to hold onto his marriage. Della Tolliver has built a fragile sanctuary in Bellport for herself, boyfriend Kwamé Rodriguez, and daughter Jasmine, a troubled child prone to nightmares and outbursts.
Tensions rise as the demolition date moves closer, plans for gentrification are laid out, and the pace of suspicious fires picks up. The residents find themselves at odds with a political system manipulating their lives and question the future of their relationships.
The Talking Drum explores intra-racial, class, and cross-cultural tensions, along with the meaning of community and belonging. Examining the profound impact gentrification has on people in many neighborhoods, and the way in which being uprooted affects the fabric of their families, friendships, and emotional well-being, the novel not only focuses on the immigrant experience, but the way in which the immigrant/African American neighborhood interface leads to friction and tension. This book thus provides a springboard to important discussions on race and class differences, on the treatment of immigrants, as well as the government’s relationship and responsibility to society.
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This Book Betrays My Brother
$18.95Winner of the Ottawa Book Award, English Fiction, 2019
Named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2018
Named to the Globe 100, 2018
CBC Books, Top YA Pick for 2018
Named to Best Books for Kids and Teens, Fall 2018
Named to Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best Books, 2018
What does a teenage girl do when she sees her beloved older brother commit a horrific crime? Should she report to her parents, or should she keep quiet? Should she confront him? All her life, Naledi has been in awe of Basi, her charming and outgoing older brother. They’ve shared their childhood, with its jokes and secrets, the alliances and stories about the community. Having reached thirteen, she is preparing to go to the school dance. Then she sees Basi commit an act that violates everything she believes about him. How will she live her life now?
This coming-of-age novel brings together many social issues, peculiar not only to South Africa but elsewhere as well, in the modern world: class and race, young love and physical desire, homosexuality. In beautiful, lyrical, and intimate prose, Molope shows the dilemmas facing a young woman as she attempts to find her place in a new, multiracial, and dynamic nation emerging into the world after more than a century of racist colonialism. A world now dominated by men. There are no simple answers.
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Uncle
$22.95From martyr to insult, how “Uncle Tom” has influenced two centuries of racial politics.
Jackie Robinson, President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson and Christopher Darden have all been accused of being an Uncle Tom during their careers. How, why, and with what consequences for our society did Uncle Tom morph first into a servile old man and then to a racial epithet hurled at African American men deemed, by other Black people, to have betrayed their race?
Uncle Tom, the eponymous figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a loyal Christian who died a martyr’s death. But soon after the best-selling novel appeared, theatre troupes across North America and Europe transformed Stowe’s story into minstrel shows featuring white men in blackface. In Uncle, Cheryl Thompson traces Tom’s journey from literary character to racial trope. She explores how Uncle Tom came to be and exposes the relentless reworking of Uncle Tom into a nostalgic, racial metaphor with the power to shape how we see Black men, a distortion visible in everything from Uncle Ben and Rastus The Cream of Wheat chef to Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson to Bill Cosby.
In Donald Trump’s post-truth America, where nostalgia is used as a political tool to rewrite history, Uncle makes the case for why understanding the production of racial stereotypes matters more than ever before.
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Voodoo Hypothesis
$18.00Voodoo Hypothesis is a subversion of the imperial construct of “blackness” and a rejection of the contemporary and historical systems that paint black people as inferior, through constant parallel representations of “evil” and “savagery.” Pulling from pop culture, science, pseudo-science and contemporary news stories about race, Lubrin asks: What happens if the systems of belief that give science, religion and culture their importance were actually applied to the contemporary “black experience”? With its irreverence toward colonialism, and the related obsession with post-colonialism and anti-colonialism, and her wide-ranging lines, deftly touched with an intermingling of Caribbean Creole, English patois and baroque language, Lubrin has created a book that holds up a torch to the narratives of the ruling class, and shows us the restorative possibilities that exist in language itself.
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Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals
$22.95The place is white-ruled Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) of the 1970s, the exile the African in his or her own land. Young men and women flee from their towns and villages to join the freedom fighters in the forests.
These stories, set during the years of the armed struggle, tell of the other struggle, that of the survival and anxiety of those who stayed behind. Told essentially from the women’s point of view, in lyrical but unaffected prose, the stories recreate the dark atmosphere of those months full of fear and hope.
This new edition is introduced by MG Vassanji.
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Working in the Bathtub
$18.95Montreal writer Dany Laferrière became “Immortal” in 2015, when he was inducted into the Académie française, the highest honour in all French literature – and the first Quebecer and only second Black writer to receive such an honour. In these wide-ranging interviews with Adam Leith Gollner, portions of which were originally published in The Paris Review, Laferrière reveals how his life and his writing are inseparable, discussing everything from his breakout debut, How To Make Love To a Negro Without Getting Tired, to the extraordinary success of more recent novels such as The Return and I Am a Japanese Writer. Brilliant, comedic, and full of insightful advice for writers and readers, these conversations also serve as the definitive introduction to one of our greatest storytellers.
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Youth of God, The
$22.95Longlisted for Canada Reads, 2020
Finalist for the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award for Excellence in African Writing, 2019The Youth of God tells the story of Nuur, a sensitive and academically gifted seventeen-year-old boy growing up in Toronto’s Somali neighbourhood, as he negotiates perilously between the calling of his faith and his intellectual ambitions. Trying to influence him are a radical Muslim imam and a book-loving, dedicated teacher who shares his background. In its telling, this novel reveals the alienated lives of Somali youth in an environment riddled with crime and unemployment, while still in the grip of bitter memories of a home left behind. This intensely moving novel is also a powerful allegory of the struggle for the soul of Islam in modern times.