Barlowe, a single, African American in his forties, shares a ramshackle house with his nephew in an Atlanta neighborhood, the old Fourth Ward, known both as the center of the civil rights movement and for its main street, Auburn Avenue, once the richest Negro street in the world. Barlowe works as a printer and passes the time reading books from the neighborhood library and hanging out with other local black men at the corner store. When a white married...

Thelonius "Monk" Ellison is an erudite, accomplished but seldom-read author who insists on writing obscure literary papers rather than the so-called "ghetto prose" that would make him a commercial success. He finally succumbs to temptation after seeing the Oberlin-educated author of We's Lives in da Ghetto during her appearance on a talk show, firing back with a parody called My Pafology, which he submits to his startled agent under the gangsta pseudonym...

"After being approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man, Easy embarks on an investigation that takes him from mountaintops to the desert, through South Central and into sex clubs and the homes of the fabulously wealthy, facing hippies, the mob, and old friends perhaps more dangerous than anyone else."--Publisher description.

Roughneck buddies Hap Collins and Leonard Pine befriend a hapless fellow whose younger, weaker brother has fallen in with extremely bad company--he's just joined a gang of bank robbers whose leader is used to increasing his own share of the loot by killing the other gang members. Also includes "The Boy Who Became Invisible, " a story Hap tells about something he witnessed years before.

"Professor Pi Suleman is a black man from Memphis and proud of it. Still, he has to endure a lot as an adjunct professor at the city's prestigious University Along the Nile, a hard-earned career that is crushing his spirit. Pi is constantly forced to bite his tongue in the face of one of his tenured colleague's prejudice and microaggressions. At the same time, he's being blackmailed by a powerful UAN professor who threatens to claim he has assaulted...

From one of the greatest novelists of the American West comes a surprising and riveting story set in Montana and New York during the Harlem Renaissance, drawing together an unlikely set of thwarted performers in one last inspired grasp at life's set of gold rings: love and renown. Susan Duff-the bossy, indomitable schoolgirl with a silver voice from the pages of Doig's most popular work, Dancing at the Rascal Fair-has reached middle age alone, teaching...

"In the sleepy New Mexico backwater of Plata, Deputy Sheriff Ogden Walker spends his time humoring his portly boss, chasing vandals, and fly-fishing. But when a woman is murdered under strange circumstances, his life takes a turn for the worse. Over three disturbing cases, Walker scours the seedy underbelly of Denver, a ragtag hippie commune, and a fish hatchery. He is on the search for solutions to the questions he is foolish enough to ask. The answers,...

"Curtis Black is no stranger to scandal. Throughout the decades, he has done much in the public eye, both good and evil. But what most people don't realize is that Curtis has been hiding a horrific childhood, which has affected him in countless, unspeakable ways. His buried past returns in an unwelcome visit when his estranged sister becomes alarmingly ill and his youngest child, twelve-year-old Curtina, becomes the kind of problem daughter that he...