Soul with Heart Book Club: Books 2002 - 2003

A classic entry in Chester Himes's trailblazing Harlem Detectives series, Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of his hardest-hitting and most entertaining thrillers. nbsp; Flim-flam man Deke O'Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta's state penitentiary than he's back on the streets working the scam of a lifetime. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement, he's counting on a big Harlem rally to produce a massive collection--for his own private charity. But the takenbsp;is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everyone wants to get his hands on. As NYPD detectives "Coffin Ed" Johnson and "Grave Digger" Jones piece together the complexity of thenbsp;scheme, we are treated to Himes's brand of hard-boiled crime fiction at its very best.

In a 1930s Dominican Republic village, the scream of a woman in labor rings out like the shot heard around Hispaniola. Every detail of the birth scene--the balance of power between the middle-aged Seora and her Haitian maid, the babies' skin color, not to mention which child is to survive--reverberates throughout Edwidge Danticat's Farming of Bones. In fact, rather than a celebration of fecundity, the unexpected double delivery gels into a metaphor for the military-sponsored mass murder of Haitian emigrants. As the Seora's doctor explains: "Many of us start out as twins in the belly and do away with the other." But Danticat's powerful second novel is far from a currently modish victimization saga, and can hold its own with such modern classics as One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Color Purple. Its watchful narrator, the Seora's shy Haitian housemaid, describes herself as "one of those sea stones that sucks its colors inside and loses its translucence once it's taken out into the sun." An astute observer of human character, Amabelle Dsir is also a conduit for the author's tart, poetic prose. Her lover, Sebastian, has "arms as wide as one of my bare thighs," while the Seora's complicit officer husband is "still shorter than the average man, even in his military boots." The orphaned Amabelle comes to assume almost messianic proportions, but she is entirely fictional, as is the town of Alegra where the tale begins. The genocide and exodus, however, are factual. Indeed, the atrocities committed by Dominican president Rafael Trujillo's army back in 1937 rival those of Duvalier's Touton Macoutes. History has rendered Trujillo's carnage much less visible than Duvalier's, but no less painful. As Amabelle's father once told her, "Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of." Thanks to Danticat's stellar novel, the world will now know.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE With meticulous observation and the seductive skill of a great storyteller, Vargas Llosa lures the reader into the shadow of perversion that, little by little, darkens the extraordinary happiness and harmony of his characters. The mysterious nature of happiness and above all, the corrupting power of innocence are the themes that underlie these pages, and the author has perfectly met the demands of the erotic novel, never dimming for an instant the fine poetic polish of his writing.

The story of Troy Maxson, once a baseball star in the Negro Leagues, now fighting for the right to be first black man to drive a garbage truck in 1950s Pittsburgh. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatisation of the African American experience in the twentieth century. This edition includes a Foreword by Samuel G. Freedman.  'A fierce commitment to particularity... August Wilson has made America see Troy Maxson, in all his precise and explicit blackness, as one of our fathers' Samuel G. Freedman, from his Foreword

A successful producer tries to revitalize the ghetto of her youth.

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick "A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." --Zadie Smith One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years--due largely to initial audiences' rejection of its strong black female protagonist--Hurston's classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.

Acclaimed Playwright, essayist and columnist Pearl Cleage breaks new ground in African American women's literature--with a debut novel that sings and crackles with life-affirming energy as it moves the reader to laughter and tears. As a girl growing up in Idlewild, Michigan, Ava Johnson had always heard that, if you were young, black, and had any sense at all, Atlanta was the place to be. So as soon as she was old enough and able enough, that was where she went--parlaying her smarts and her ambition into one of the hottest hair salons in town. In no time, she was moving with the brothers and sisters who had beautiful clothes, big cars, bigger dreams, and money in the bank. Now, after more than a decade of elegant pleasures and luxe living, Ava has come home, her fabulous career and power plans smashed to bits on one dark truth. Ava Johnson has tested positive for HIV. And she's back in little Idlewild to spend a quiet summer with her widowed sister, Joyce, before moving on to finish her life in San Francisco, the most HIV-friendly place she can imagine. But what she thinks is the end is only the beginning because there's too much going down in her hometown for Ava to ignore. There's the Sewing Circus--sister Joyce's determined effort to educate Idlewild's young black women about sex, drugs, pregnancy, whatever. . .despite the interference of the good Reverend Anderson and his most virtuous, "Just say no" wife. Plus Joyce needs a helping hand to make a loving home for Imani, an abandoned crack baby whom she's taken into her heart. And then there's Wild Eddie, whose legendary background in violence combined with his Eastern gentility has stirred Ava's interest. . .and something more. In the ten-plus years since Ava left, all the problems of the big city--drugs, crime, disease have come home to roost in the sleepy North Michigan community whose ordinariness once drove her away. Now she cannot turn her back on friends and family who sorely need her in the face of impending trouble and tragedy. Things are getting very interesting in Idlewild these days. Besides which, the unthinkable thing has started happening: Ava Johnson is failing in love. A remarkable novel sizzling with sensuality, rollicking with wild humor, and humming with gritty truth, in What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day. . .Pearl Cleage has created a world rich in character, human drama, and deep, compassionate understanding. As a girl growing up in Idlewild, Michigan, Ava Johnson had always heard that, if you were young, black, and had any sense at all, Atlanta was the place to be. So as soon as she was old enough and able enough, that was where she went--parlaying her smarts and her ambition into one of the hottest hair salons in town. In no time, she was moving with the brothers and sisters who had beautiful clothes, big cars, bigger dreams, and money in the bank. Now, after more than a decade of elegant pleasures and luxe living, Ava has come home, her fabulous career and power plans smashed to bits on one dark truth. Ava Johnson has tested positive for HIV. And she's back in little Idlewild to spend a quiet summer with her widowed sister, Joyce, before moving on to finish her life in San Francisco, the most HIV-friendly place she can imagine. And then there's Wild Eddie, whose legendary back ground in violence combined with his Eastern gentility has stirred Ava's interest...and something more. In the ten-plus years since Ava left all the problems of the big city--drugs, crime, disease--have come home to roost in the sleepy North Michigan community whose ordinariness once drove her away. Now she cannot turn her back on friends and family who sorely need her in the face of impending trouble and tragedy. Things are getting very interesting in Idlewild these days. Besides which, the unthinkable thing has started happening: Ava Johnson is falling in love.

In this wise, beguiling, and beautiful novel set in the era of the Civil War, award-winning playwright and author J. California Cooper paints a haunting portrait of a woman named Always and four generations of her African-American family.

Feisty, fiery Cuban-American p.i. Lupe Solano knows her way in and out of every tight corner of her tropical Miami home -- from the opulent watering holes of Miami Beach to the colorful back streets of Little Havana to seedy, dangerous dives no self-respecting individual would be caught dead in. But now things are about to get hotter for Lupe than they have ever gotten before. Havana Heat Poured into her tightest dress, and balancing on her highest heels, Lupe merely wants to make the best impression possible at the wedding of her niece to a scion of the ultra-wealthy Miranda family. But she finds it impossible to leave her business back in the office when she is accosted by the groom's overbearing Aunt Lucia, and tantalized by an incredible tale of a lost, five centuries-old masterpiece -- the legendary Eighth Unicorn Tapestry -- that the rich tia claims is locked away in a secret underground vault beneath the family home. The only trouble is, the mansion in question is back in Havana. And Aunt Lucia has decided that Lupe should be the one to finally return the tapestry to its rightful owners. Besides the large potential payday, Lupe Solano has her own personal reasons -- not necessarily good ones -- for agreeing to transform herself from a less-than-typical Florida investigator into a brazen art smuggler. But before she sets off on a trail that will lead Lupe across the treacherous Florida straits into the heart of Havana, a rather shady business contact turns up dead in his bed, strangled with a pair of pantyhose. After a second murder occurs, Lupe's ready to start looking for connections between the two local homicides and her covert art-rescue mission. Because it's beginning to look as if her life depends upon her making them. Once again, acclaimed author Carolina Garcia-Aguilera has captured the heart and soul of Miami's Cuban-American community in her fiction. Readers who have already enjoyed her previous novels will cheer the return of Lupe Solano, investigator without peer, in her most exciting, surprising, and colorful adventure to date. For those new to the series, Havana Heat is the ideal place to discover the intrepid investigator whom critics across the nation have placed among mystery's "freshest," "most interesting," "most formidable protagonists."

An African AmericanBreakfast at Tiffany’s–a hip, refreshingly candid tale of identity and self—discovery from the critically acclaimed author ofThe View from HereandWalking Through Mirrors. Mason Randolph, a black preppie of impeccable Southern pedigree, is bound for Stanford Law School after graduating from college. Before embarking on the path to his golden future, however, he takes a detour through Harlem, where he intends to live "authentically" with "realblack people." Mason takes the name "Malik" and moves into the orbit of the ever—fabulous Carmen, uptown diva and doyenne of Harlem. Carmen, always ready to have a handsome young man at her fabulous soirees and to add to her devoted entourage, happily takes him under her wing. Fueled by his parents' money and dodging the people who remember him as Mason Randolph, "Malik" masquerades as a "ghettonian," exploring the wonders and pleasures of a Harlem in the midst of a second Renaissance. But his odyssey takes a different turn when he meets Kyra, whose world mirrors the one he has abandoned. As he contemplates the choices Kyra has made, and begins to reexamine his own presumptions about identity and authenticity, Mason realizes that everyone has something to hide and that to get what we want, we have to be willing to let go of our secrets. Peoplecompared Brian Keith Jackson's remarkable first novel,The View from Here, to the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, andPublishers Weeklycalled it "an extraordinary debut...[by] a formidable craftsman and exceptionally gifted storyteller." A novel rich in humor and insight,The Queen of Harlemwill earn Jackson a much—deserved place in the center of today’s literary landscape. From the Hardcover edition.