In 1920s New Orleans, eighteen-year-old Zora, banished after an incident in Harlem, struggles with her overbearing family, magical powers, love of jazz, and forbidden romance with a white man.

Johnson's characters traverse Virginia's landscapes, still stained by some of America's most heinous acts, in pursuit of a place to call home. In each story, she reveals intimate moments within the nation's multitudes, featuring unforgettable characters who struggle beneath burdened inheritances yet manage to persist and love. -- adapted from jacket

It is the summer of 1964. In Tupelo, Mississippi, the town of Elvis's birth, tensions are mounting over civil-rights demonstrations occurring ever more frequently--and violently--across the state. But in Paige Dunn's small, ramshackle house, there are more immediate concerns. Challenged by the effects of the polio she contracted during her last month of pregnancy, Paige is nonetheless determined to live as normal a life as possible and to raise her...

"Bestselling author Walter Mosley has proven himself a master of narrative tension, both with his extraordinary fiction and gripping writing for television. The Awkward Black Man collects seventeen of Mosley's most accomplished short stories to display the full range of his remarkable talent. Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories - heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved,...

On a school field trip to Washington, D.C., student council member Grace and her classmates learn about the three branches of the federal government, how school government operates, the qualities of effective leadership, and how to be a good citizen.

"Set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama--about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival"-- From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty...

During Mile's in-school suspension, he finds himself in a fierce battle with a classmate turned insidious termite who is determined to destroy books and the Black and Brown history they contain, and only Miles can stop him.