Dion Graham
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.6 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Description
At the center of Radiance of Tomorrow are Benjamin and Bockarie, two longtime friends who return to their hometown, Imperi, after the civil war. The village is in ruins, the ground covered in bones. As more villagers begin to come back, Benjamin and Bockarie try to forge a new community by taking up their former posts as teachers, but they're beset by obstacles: a scarcity of food; a rash of murders, thievery, rape, and retaliation; and the depredations...
Author
Language
English
Description
Forty years after John Edgar Wideman's first book of stories, comes this stunning collection that is vital reading for anyone interested in the state of America today. Its subjects range from Michael Jordan to Emmett Till, from distrust of authority to everyday grief, from childhood memories to the final day in a prison cell. A boy stands alone in his grandmother's house, unable to enter the room in which his grandfather's coffin lies, afraid the...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Jesmond Toak works as a repo man in the fictional town of Johnsonville, located in a hurricane alley on the Florida coast. He has a troubled relationship with his father; their pastor's gay son, Bayonne, has become implicated in a suicide by gas asphyxiation of his boyfriend; and the woman Jesmond loves, Peaches Raymond, is married (to a threatening man they call Special Ed). As various deaths, disasters, and disappearance occur in the days leading...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 10.9 - AR Pts: 4
Lexile measure
NC 1020L
Language
English
Description
Presents Shakespeare's drama about a man who kills the king of Scotland in order to claim the throne for himself, and includes explanatory notes, plot summaries, a key to notable lines and phrases, and other reference information.
Author
Language
English
Description
In this searing novel, Caryl Phillips reimagines the life of the first black entertainer in the U.S. to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.After years of struggling for success on the stage, Bert Williams (1874—1922), the child of recent immigrants from the Bahamas, made the radical decision to don blackface makeup and play the “coon.” Behind this mask he became a Broadway headliner–as influential a comedian as Chaplin,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A mysterious burnt corpse appears one morning in Saraaya, a remote border town between northern and southern Sudan. For five strangers on an NGO compound, the discovery foreshadows trouble to come. South Sudanese translator William connects the corpse to the sudden disappearance of cook Layla, a northern nomad with whom he's fallen in love. Meanwhile, Sudanese American filmmaker Dena struggles to connect to her unfamiliar homeland, and white midwestern...
10) Train: a novel
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Train is an 18-year-old black caddy at an exclusive L.A. country club. He is a golf prodigy, but the year is 1953 and there is no such thing as a black golf prodigy. Nevertheless, Train draws the interest of Miller Packard, a gambler whose smiling, distracted air earned him the nickname "the Mile Away Man." Packard's easy manner hides a proclivity for violence, and he remains an enigma to Train even months later when they are winning high stakes matches...
11) Pity the beast
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Millennia ago, Ginny's family ranch was all grass and rock and wild horses. A thousand years hence, it'll all be peacefully underwater. In the matter-of-fact here and now, though, it's a hotbed of lust and resentment, and about to turn ugly, because Ginny's just cheated on her husband Dan with the man who lives next door. Out on these prairies, word travels fast: everyone seems to know everyone's business. They know what Ginny did, and they know Ginny...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Ethiopian EmigrE author Dinaw Mengestu is a skilled observer of people who earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly for this colorful debut. Insightful and swiftly paced, this novel evokes past and present in the course of its compelling narrative. It's the '70s, and one D.C. neighborhood is undergoing big changes. In the mix is Ethiopian grocery owner Sepha Stephanos-a man with a complex past who fled his homeland after seeing his father brutalized....
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Roy Freirich's novel Winged Creatures intimately depicts the inner lives of five people driven by secret torments and dangerous compulsions, in flight from their own memories and dreams, as they struggle to regain their trust in the ordinary world.
The basis for the 2008 film starring Kate Beckinsale and Dakota Fanning.
Shots ring out in a local fast food restaurant. Teenager Anne Hagen and her best friend Jimmy hide under a table, watching...
14) Krik? Krak!
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.3 - AR Pts: 7
Lexile measure
880L
Language
English
Formats
Description
When Haitians tell a story, they say "Krik?" and the eager listeners answer "Krak!" In Krik? Krak! In her second novel, Edwidge Danticat establishes herself as the latest heir to that narrative tradition with nine stories that encompass both the cruelties and the high ideals of Haitian life. They tell of women who continue loving behind prison walls and in the face of unfathomable loss; of a people who resist the brutality of their rulers through...
15) Fanon: A Novel
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Frantz Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought in defense of France during World War II but later against France in Algeria's war for independence. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, inspired leaders of diverse liberation movements: Steve Biko in South Africa, Che Guevara in Latin America, the...
Author
Language
English
Description
The best-selling author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers announced himself as a literary force with this striking debut. It is the tale of two friends on a globe-trekking quest-at turns hilarious, frustrating, and heartbreaking-to give away money while grieving a painful loss.
Author
Language
English
Description
This latest plunge in to the psyche of the lone American male by author Lysa Williams brings us three men struggling in the war against dysfunction: a high-school student who rides the NYC subway each night in search of that perfect moment of beauty; a narcoleptic painter, the erotic Vermeer, who falls asleep on contact; and a psychic male prostitute who spends his off hours creating miniature models of the seven wonders of the world. Williams guides...
18) The wild things
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 14
Language
English
Description
Facing trouble at home with his father gone and his mother and sister uninterested in him, Max runs away from home during an argument only to end up in the island of the Wild Things. Soon Max becomes the king of the island. But things get complicated when Max realizes his subjects want as much from him as he wants from them.
20) Jesus Boy
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Sixteen-year-old Elwyn Parker is a member of the austere community of Christian believers at the Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters, a devout and sincere piano prodigy who learns too late that the saintly girl he has had a crush on all his life is inexplicably pregnant and soon to be wed. Then the beautiful forty-two-year-old widow, Sister Morrisohn, in the midst of the confused emotions of her grieving, ends up in Elwyn's arms.
Despite...