California Cooper has an uncanny ability to reach out to readers like an old and dear friend.  Her characters are plain-spoken and direct: simple people for whom life, despite its ever-present struggles, is always worth the journey.In Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime, Cooper's characteristic themes of romance, heartbreak, struggle and faith resonate.  We meet Darlin, a self-proclaimed femme fatale who uses her wiles to try to find a husband; MLee, whose life seems to be coming to an end at the age of forty until she decides to set out and see if she can make a new life for herself; Kissy and Buddy, both trying and failing to find them until they finally meet each other; and Aberdeen, whose daughter Uniqua shows her how to educate herself and move up in the world.These characters and others offer inspiration, laughter, instruction and pure enjoyment in what is one of J. California Cooper's finest story collections.

    African Studies. In the Introduction, Robin D. G. Kelly comments, A HISTORY OF PAN-AFRICAN REVOLT is one of those rare books that continues to strike a chord of urgency, even half a century after it was first published. Time and again, its lessons have proven to be valuable and relevant for understanding liberation movements in Africa and the diaspora. Each generation who has had the opportunity to read this small book finds new insights, new lessons, new vision for their own age....-- This new edition of James' classic, originally published in England in 1938, brings a work that previously enjoyed underground popularity to a much wider audience.

    Personal and poetic, these essays speak of matters close to the heart of a black writer. This evocative and insightful collection has been fully updated and includes four previously unpublished essays. She turns her clear, unflinching eye to issues of sex and sexism; male violence toward women; how Black women learn the erotic; the stereotypes of Black females in popular culture and the centrality of Whiteness in definitions of Canadian culture. And she examines her personal history.

    Traversing the  universal themes and conflicts between poverty and  prosperity, men and women, and young and old, and  compiling writing that spans almost seventy years,  The Richer, The Poorer not only  affords an unparalleled window into the  African-American middle class, but also delves into the  richness of experience of "one of the finest writers  produced in this country during the Roaring  Twenties"(Book Page).

    Phillips refuses to write what might be expected of him on any subject, whether it's gender, race, faith, or morality. His reticence, his refusal of polemic, remind me sometimes of the young James Merrill, even of Auden."--Marilyn HackerPriase for Cortège"Carl Phillips is a poet of eros, but for him eros isn't simply sex, or even sexual desire sublimated into social ritual, or art, or any of the overdetermined ploys by which all of us, men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, attempt to close the distance between ourselves and others. Rather, eros is the never ending struggle, as he puts it, 'to fill a space in so there's no room left for awhile for what he surely calls a suffering inside him.' In the intricacies of thinking and feeling enacted in every poem of Cortège, no feeling ever quite escapes its opposite--the joy of fulfilled desire is infused with the isolation it has momentarily eclipsed, the heaven of intimacy only heightens 'how it feels to be stranded.' Cortège is a book that has been packed in salt: the durable salt of artistic making, and the bitter salt of longing. Few other poets writing today can track so well, so unforgettably, the estranging spaces in the heart of love, the perils of beauty or the beauty of peril."--Alan Shapiro"Out so much farther than our present pieties, attentive to no social or sentimental voice, only passion's (so often ruinous, defiant of upshot), it is not in every case, every poem, that Carl Phillips triumphs over my timidity. As with Sappho and Pasolini, though, traces of the winged god are everywhere unmistakable, even when this new poet has kicked them over: it is a sacred entail his harsh graces make. I for one am an awed (if lacerated) heir."--Richard HowardCarl Phillips is author of In the Blood, winner of the 1992 Morse Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, and has published widely in journals including the dn0 Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, and the Yale Review. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is currently visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Harvard University.

    Collected here are family stories and moral fables, ghost stories and tales rich in humor, along with raps and rhymes, memoirs and commentaries, and songs, stories and poems about freedom, protest, and the change.