Book picks similar to
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook by John F. Callahan
lierary-criticism
literary
non-fiction
african
Buddha on the Bus
Nate Damm - 2014
When various complications arise during the journey, Nate finds himself focusing closely on the characters around him for a bit of entertainment, but ends up getting more than he bargained for. The focal point of the story is Nate's seat-mate, a young man named Bud, whose extremely odd behavior catches the attention of everyone on the bus.
Larceny: The Cruelest Lie Told in Silence
Jason Poole - 2004
Rolling over on your best friend who has been with you through thick and thin, hungry and full, freedom and state bids- that's "the cruelest lie told in silence". In this tale that plucks the innermost chords of emotion, jealousy turns to envy then to backstabbing as we observe two friends that have struggled together, hustled together and endured separate prison terms. While Jevon experiences the fruits of the hustle during his partner's first stint, Bilal humbly does his time like a true soldier after taking a manslaughter charge for his "brother". Will their friendship survive the broken bond of brotherhood, or will dishonor come before death?
Lincoln's Story: The Wayfarer
Vel - 2012
He did not claim he was God’s agent. Did he believe in God? Did he look for a sign when he was desperate? Did he follow the Divine Will? Many believers are not followers; many followers are not believers. Is he a believer or a follower or both?
Native Son
Richard Wright - 1940
It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
Success Stories
Russell Banks - 1986
Queen for a Day, Success Story, and Adultery trace fortunes of the Painter family in there pursuit of and retreat from the American dream. Banks also explores the ethos of rampant materialism in a group of contemporary moral fables. The Fish is an evocating parable of faith and greed set in a Southeast Asian village, The Gully tells of the profitability of violence and the ironies of upward mobility in a Latin American shantytown, and Chrildren's Story explores the repressed rage that boils beneath the surface of relationships between parents and children and between citizens of the first and third worlds.
Private Heat
Robert E. Bailey - 2002
So when the senior partner of one of the premier legal firms in Grand Rapids approaches Hardin about a job protecting his niece from her soon-to-be ex-husband for a couple of days, Hardin isn't exactly eager to take on the job. However, Hardin finds that the fee offered to too great to pass up. After a hatchet attack, a house burnt down, and a few violent encounters with some crooked cops, Hardin can hardly wait for the case to be over. But when the husband is found murdered, the niece attempts suicide, and Hardin is brought in on a trumped-up warrant for the crime, it is no longer a case that he is willing to walk away from -- even if he could.
The Krays
Philip Ridley - 1997
Ronnie and Reggie Kray are school ground bullies brought up by a domineering mother and two devoted aunts. National Service and spells in prison expose the brutality that helps establish the twin brothers as the kings of 1960s gangland London.Philip Ridley's original, uncut screenplay, almost as notorious as its subject matter is a stylised meditation on maternal love, childhood, violence and homoeroticism and takes its place as one of the masterpieces of contemporary cinema.
Art's Cello (Kindle Single)
James N. McKean - 2014
Told in eloquent, honest prose, Art’s Cello is a story about coming to terms with the past and letting go of the failures we allow to define us — and, in the process, honoring the lives of those we’ve lost. Jim McKean is an international award-winning violinmaker, author, and corresponding editor of Strings Magazine. He is a graduate of the first violinmaking school in America and the former president of the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers. His novel, Quattrocento, was published in 2002. Cover design by Evan Twohy.
Clotel: or, The President's Daughter
William Wells Brown - 1853
The story begins with the auction of his mistress, here called Currer, and their two daughters, Clotel and Althesa. The Virginian who buys Clotel falls in love with her, gets her pregnant, seems to promise marriage—then sells her. Escaping from the slave dealer, Clotel returns to Virginia disguised as a white man in order to rescue her daughter, Mary, a slave in her father’s house. A fast-paced and harrowing tale of slavery and freedom, of the hypocrisies of a nation founded on democratic principles, Clotel is more than a sensationalist novel. It is a founding text of the African American novelistic tradition, a brilliantly composed and richly detailed exploration of human relations in a new world in which race is a cultural construct.
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
Morgan Parker - 2017
The poems weave between personal narrative and pop-cultural criticism, examining and confronting modern media, consumption, feminism, and Blackness. This collection explores femininity and race in the contemporary American political climate, folding in references from jazz standards, visual art, personal family history, and Hip Hop. The voice of this book is a multifarious one: writing and rewriting bodies, stories, and histories of the past, as well as uttering and bearing witness to the truth of the present, and actively probing toward a new self, an actualized self. This is a book at the intersections of mythology and sorrow, of vulnerability and posturing, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence.
Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity
David Shields - 1996
It is a remoteness that both perplexes and enthralls him. Through dazzling sleight of hand in which the public becomes private and the private becomes public, the entire book—clicking from confession to family-album photograph to family chronicle to sexual fantasy to pseudo-scholarly footnote to reportage to personal essay to stand-up comedy to cultural criticism to literary criticism to film criticism to prose-poem to litany to outtake —becomes both an anatomy of American culture and a searing self-portrait. David Shields reads his own life—reads our life—as if it were an allegory about remoteness and finds persuasive, hilarious, heartbreaking evidence wherever he goes.Winner of the PEN / Revson Award?
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Alex Haley - 1976
It took ten years and a half a million miles of travel across three continents to find it, but finally, in an astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered not only the name of "the African"—Kunta Kinte—but the precise location of Juffure, the very village in The Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of sixteen and taken on the Lord Ligonier to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter.Haley has talked in Juffure with his own African sixth cousins. On September 29, 1967, he stood on the dock in Annapolis where his great-great-great-great-grandfather was taken ashore on September 29, 1767. Now he has written the monumental two-century drama of Kunta Kinte and the six generations who came after him—slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lumber mill workers and Pullman porters, lawyers and architects—and one author.But Haley has done more than recapture the history of his own family. As the first black American writer to trace his origins back to their roots, he has told the story of 25,000,000 Americans of African descent. He has rediscovered for an entire people a rich cultural heritage that slavery took away from them, along with their names and their identities. But Roots speaks, finally, not just to blacks, or to whites, but to all people and all races everywhere, for the story it tells is one of the most eloquent testimonials ever written to the indomitability of the human spirit.
The Gore Supremacy
James Wolcott - 2012
(He died on July 31st, 2012 at the age of 86.) The triumphant arc of Vidal’s literary career wasn’t solely a mastery of language, though that never hurts. Handsome, poised, slim, charismatic, able to hold his own in verbal fisticuffs without losing his imperious cool, Vidal was the premiere star author of his generation, the one who elevated the role of talk-show guest to a command performance--a theatrical event. He brought the electronic crackle of the TV screen to his prose and the tactical precision of his prose to combat debate on TV. His near-violent altercations on camera with William F. Buckley, Jr. and Norman Mailer are the stuff of YouTube legend and the secret to The Gore Supremacy. A contributing writer to Vanity Fair, a partisan observer of pop culture, and the author of the New York-in-the-70s memoir Lucking Out (which comes out in paperback this fall), James Wolcott has been a closeup observer of Vidal on-camera and off for more years than seems respectable. This, his first Kindle Single, is his way of paying homage--and saying goodbye.
...And Family Drama Just Won't Stop
Daniel Whyte III - 2011
How will these church families handle the sins of their past and the challenges that life is giving them?Stacy Wilmington is on her way to college when a devastating secret from her father’s past threatens to ruin her relationship with him and causes her to commit a sin of her own. In hiding his past for so long, will Stacy’s father lose the two most important people in his life — his wife and his daughter?Terrence Montague, a man committed to providing for his wife, Stella, and daughter, Monica, finds himself caught up in an illegal drug delivering business that he knows is against the law and against his Christian convictions. Will he choose to love God and be true to his family over loving money?Meanwhile, the new assistant pastor of New Mt. Zion Missionary Evangelical Church, Dwayne Reynolds, believes he has left his past behind…only to discover that it has found him again. Will he choose to face it head on or hide it from the congregation that has come to love and trust his family? In the middle of all this drama, is Reynolds’ son, Jonathan, and Montague’s daughter, Monica. What does the future hold for them?
Serial Killers True Crime: Incredible True Stories of Psychopathic Serial Killers From The Last 200 Years: True Crime Killers (Serial Killers True Crime, ... Stories, True Crime, True Murder Stories,)
Brody Clayton - 2015
Read on your PC, Mac, smart phone, tablet or Kindle device. Every single person is unique; with different wants, needs, likes, dislikes and hates. Serial killers, however, have one thing in common, they kill, for diverse reasons and for various outcomes. Their ability to take lives easily, though, is mind-boggling. Some of them kill one or two but some also kill hundreds. It is somehow hard to fathom how these killers can do such gruesome deeds and to dig deeper into their stories can certainly be thought-provoking. The mentality of serial killers throughout the world’s history is something that will always be a curious mystery. What motivates them to kill, is something that we cannot easily understand. Some have rather simplistic, and even personal, reasons for killing: jealousy, self-inadequacy, self-confirmation, attention, self-gain and revenge. Some take lives in order to take vengeance on the government and even include solving societal problems as their main goal. Psychopaths of this type usually like playing the role of a “supreme being” who aim to eliminate people that they consider not worthy to live. From the premier poisoners and virgin murderers to baby killers and mysterious point-blank gunmen, this book offers a rich history of serial killers that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Here Is A Preview Of What You'll Learn...
Serial Killers True Crime – Vera Renczi: Jealous Killer of 35
Serial Killers True Crime – Daniel Camargo-Barbosa: The Virgin Killer
Serial Killers True Crime – The Playing Card Killer: Alfredo Galan
Serial Killers True Crime – Gennady Mikhasevich: The Unlikely Murderer
Serial Killers True Crime – The Southland Baby Farmer
Serial Killers True Crime – Murderer Mom: Kathleen Folbigg
Serial Killers True Crime – Anna Maria Zwanziger: Germany's Premier Poisoner
Much, much more!
Download your copy today! Take action today and download this book for a limited time discount of only $2.99! If you love reading twisted stories of vicious serial killers and murderers, download this book now! Tags: true crime, serial killers, cold cases true crime, serial killers true crime, murder mysteries, true crime stories, true murder stories, cannibal killers, murder stories, murder cases,