Her mother was a Jewish go-go dancer who wanted a tribe of rainbow children, and her father was Richard Pryor, perhaps the most compelling and brilliant comedian of his era.In this intimate, harrowing, and often hilarious memoir, Rain talks about her divided heritage, and about the forces that shaped her wildly schizophrenic childhood. In her father's house, she bonded with Richard's grandmother, Mamma, a one-time whorehouse madam who never tired of reminding Rain that she was black. In her mother's house, and in the home of her Jewish grandparents, Rain was a "mocha-colored Jewish princess," learning how to cook everything from kugel to beef brisket.It seemed as if Rain was blessed with the best of both worlds, but it didn't quite work out that way. Life at Mom's was unstable in the extreme, while at Richard's place Rain was exposed to sex and drugs before she had even learned to read. "Daddy," she told her father one day, sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner at the advanced age of eight, "the whores need to be paid."Jokes My Father Never Taught Me is both lovingly told and painfully frank: the story of a girl who grew up adoring her father even as she feared him—and feared for him—as his drug problems grew worse. In 1980 Pryor tried to kill himself by setting himself on fire, then joked that it had been an accident: "No one ever told me you couldn't mix cookies with two types of milk!" In his later years, Pryor succumbed to multiple sclerosis, and Rain watched in tears as her father became a shell of his former self. Once, in an unusually introspective mood, Pryor asked his daughter, "Why do you love me, Rainy, when I can be so mean?"Jokes My Father Never Taught Me answers that poignant question and many more. It is an unprecedented look at the life of a legend of comedy, told by a daughter who both understood the genius and knew the tortured man within.

    Andrew Hudgins imagines himself in the life of a now largely forgotten poet, Sidney Lanier, who served as a soldier for the Confederacy.

    Here, in this unprecedented anthology expertly selected by poet and scholar Kevin Young, this precious living heritage is revealed in all its power, beauty, and multiplicity. Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an antebellum activist like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voiced her own passionate resistance to slavery. Read nuanced, provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond. Experience the transformation of poetic modernism in the works of figures such as Langston Hughes, Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer. Understand the threads of poetic history—in movements such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, Black Arts, Cave Canem, Dark Noise Collective—and the complex bonds of solidarity and dialogue among poets across time and place. See how these poets have celebrated their African heritage and have connected with other communities in the African Diaspora. Enjoy the varied but distinctly Black music of a tradition that draws deeply from jazz, hip hop, and the rhythms and cadences of the pulpit, the barbershop, and the street. And appreciate, in the anthology's concluding sections, why contemporary African American poetry, amply recognized in recent National Book Awards and Poet Laureates, is flourishing as never before. Taking the measure of the tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.

    His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written.--back cover

    Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, in an effort to reconcile the dissonance between her black persona and her undeniably multiracial heritage, started on a journey of discovery that took her over thousands of miles and hundreds of years. While searching for her mother's family, Haizlip confronted the deeply intertwined but often suppressed tensions between race and skin color. We are drawn in by the story of an African-American family. Some members chose to "cross over" and "pass" for white while others enjoyed a successful black life. Their stories weave a tale of tangled ancestry, mixed blood, and identity issues from the 17th century to the present. The Sweeter the Juice is a memoir, a social history, a biography, and an autobiography. Haizlip gives to us the quintessential American story, unveiling truths about race, about our society, and about the ways in which we all perceive and judge one another.

    Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born. Yona's son Ariel grew up in Los Angeles, where Yona had become an esteemed professor, dedicating his career to preserving his people’s traditions. Ariel wanted nothing to do with his father’s strange immigrant heritage—until he had a son of his own.Ariel Sabar brings to life the ancient town of Zakho, discovering his family’s place in the sweeping saga of Middle-Eastern history. This powerful book is an improbable story of tolerance and hope set in what today is the very center of the world’s attention.

    One of the major poets of the twentieth century, Amichai created remarkably accessible poems, vivid in their evocation of the Israeli landscape and historical predicament, yet universally resonant. His are some of the most moving love poems written in any language in the past two generations—some exuberant, some powerfully erotic, many suffused with sadness over separation that casts its shadow on love. In a country torn by armed conflict, these poems poignantly assert the preciousness of private experience, cherished under the repeated threats of violence and death.Amichai’s poetry has attracted a variety of gifted English translators on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1960s to the present. Assembled by the award-winning Hebrew scholar and translator Robert Alter, The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai is by far the largest selection of the master poet’s work to appear in English, gathering the best of the existing translations as well as offering English versions of many previously untranslated poems. With this collection, Amichai’s vital poetic voice is now available to English readers as it never has been before.

    Icon. TV star. Role model. Trash talker. Fag hag. Gypsy. Tramp. Thief. Margaret Cho displays her numerous sides in this funny, fierce, and honest memoir. As one of the country’s most visible Asian Americans, she has a unique perspective on identity and acceptance. As one of the country’s funniest and most quoted personalities, she takes no prisoners. And as a warm and wise woman who has seen the highs and lows of life, she has words of encouragement for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider. With I’m the One That I Want, Margaret Cho has written a book every bit as hilarious, shocking, and insightful as she is.

    Yentl’s Revenge chronicles a range of experiences lived by an entire generation of women, from Judeo-pagan witches to young Orthodox mothers, from rabbis to sex educators. Contributors ponder Jewish transgenderdom, Jewish body image, Jewish punk, the stereotype of the Jewish American Princess, intermarriage, circumcision, faith, and intolerance. Essays include “Bubbe Got Back: Tales of a Jewish Caboose” by Ophira Edut, and “On Being a Jewish Feminist Valley Girl” by Tobin Belzer.

    But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

    It is a voice thick with the humidity and whirring cicadas of Kentucky, but the poems are dangerous, smelling of the crisp cucumber scent of a copperhead about to strike. Epistolary in nature, and with a novel's arc, Sister is a story that begins with a teen giving birth to a baby girl--the narrator--during a tornado, and in some ways, that tornado never ends. In the hands of a lesser poet, this debut collection would be a standard-issue confession, a melodramatic exercise in anger and self-pity. But melodrama requires simple villains and victims, and there is neither in this richly complex portrait. Ultimately, Sister is more about the narrator's transgressions and failures, more about her relationships to her sister and their mother than about that which divided them. With equal parts sass and sorrow, these poems etch out survival won not with tender-hearted reflections but by smoking cigarettes through fly-specked screens, by using cans of aerosol hair spray as a makeshift flamethrowers, and, most cruelly, by leaving home and trying to forget her sister entirely. From there, each poem is a letter of explanation and apology to that younger sister she never knew.Sister recounts a return to a place that Brown never truly left. It is a book of forgiveness, of seeking what is beyond mere survival, of finding your way out of a place of poverty and abuse only to realize that you must go back again, all the way back to where everything began--that warm, dark nest of mother.

    Abraham Joshua Heschel's philosophy of religion is not a philosophy of doctrine or the interpretation of a dogma. He erects his carefully built structure of thought upon foundations which are universally valid but almost generally ignored. It was Man Is Not Alone which led Reinhold Niebuhr accurately to predict that Heschel would "become a commanding and authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of America." With its companion volume, God in Search of Man, it is revered as a classic of modern theology.

    African American Studies. "Cameron Awkward-Rich's wintry collection is full of broken surfaces. Fists surge in bodies, blades cleave skin, but most recurrent, a boy dives into black water. Think of an anti-Narcissus who longs to break the liquid mirror, both fractalizing and multiplying his image. Yet the poet winds tight TRANSIT's shifting reflections of puncture and fracture into poems of great tonal discipline and grimly mordant observation, pushing us deeper into memory into myth into girl into bird into mouth into sex onto cars onto trains into your hands, reader. Open the book and get opened by it." Douglas Kearney"

    "SHORTA not uncommon story is here captured with astonishing beauty" the childhood of a gifted daughter whose immigrant parents must struggle in order to provide her with the educational and social opportunities not available to them or, for that matter, to most blacks of her generation. In vivid prose that re-creates the heady impressions of youth, June Jordan takes us to the Harlem and Brooklyn neighborhoods where she lived and out into the larger landscape of her burgeoning imagination. Exploring the nature of memory, writing, and familial as well as social responsibility, Jordan re-creates the world in which her identity as a social and artistic revolutionary was forged.

    In it, he shares acrid and poignant stories of blacks colliding--sometimes humorously, but often tragically--with whites throughout the 1920s and 1930s.The book consists of fourteen moving stories:"Cora Unashamed""Slave on the Block""Home""Passing""A Good Job Gone""Rejuvenation Through Joy""The Blues I'm Playing""Red-Headed Baby""Poor Little Black Fellow""Little Dog""Berry""Mother and Child""One Christmas Eve""Father and Son"