Dovey Johnson Roundtree

Katie McCabe

Tayari Jones

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Virginia

My Life in Civil Rights

“Dovey Johnson Roundtree set a new path for women and proved that the vision and perseverance of a single individual can turn the tides of history.” —Michelle Obama In Mighty Justice, trailblazing African American civil rights attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree recounts her inspiring life story that speaks movingly and urgently to our racially troubled times. From the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, to the segregated courtrooms of the nation’s capital; from the male stronghold of the army where she broke gender and color barriers to the pulpits of churches where women had waited for years for the right to minister—in all these places, Roundtree sought justice. At a time when African American attorneys had to leave the courthouses to use the bathroom, Roundtree took on Washington’s white legal establishment and prevailed, winning a 1955 landmark bus desegregation case that would help to dismantle the practice of “separate but equal” and shatter Jim Crow laws. Later, she led the vanguard of women ordained to the ministry in the AME Church in 1961, merging her law practice with her ministry to fight for families and children being destroyed by urban violence. Dovey Roundtree passed away in 2018 at the age of 104. Though her achievements were significant and influential, she remains largely unknown to the American public. Mighty Justice corrects the historical record.

Mighty Justice

ed70d91c-442e-4a09-9ff7-852591b4a8d1-0

Jeannie Vanasco

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A Memoir

Jeannie Vanasco has had the same nightmare since she was a teenager. It is always about him: one of her closest high school friends, a boy named Mark. A boy who raped her. When her nightmares worsen, Jeannie decides--after fourteen years of silence--to reach out to Mark. He agrees to talk on the record and meet in person.Jeannie details her friendship with Mark before and after the assault, asking the brave and urgent question: Is it possible for a good person to commit a terrible act? Jeannie interviews Mark, exploring how rape has impacted his life as well as her own.Unflinching and courageous, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl is part memoir, part true crime record, and part testament to the strength of female friendships--a recounting and reckoning that will inspire us to ask harder questions, push towards deeper understanding, and continue a necessary and long overdue conversation.

Things We Didn't Talk about When I Was a Girl

c94319e6-eee5-4c28-a1fe-c481ada05a1c-1

Alice Bolin

Small black line on the bottom of the book pages..see additional photo

Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

“Dead Girls is everything I want in an essay collection: provocative lines of inquiry, macabre humor, blistering intelligence... I love this book. I want to take it into the middle of a crowded room and hold it up and scream until someone tackles me the ground; even then, I’d probably keep screaming.” — Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties "Bracing and blazingly smart, Alice Bolin's Dead Girls could hardly be more needed or more timely. A critical contribution to the cultural discussion of gender and genre, Los Angeles and noir, the unbearable persistence of the male gaze and the furtive potency of female rage.” — Megan Abbott, Edgar Award-winning author of You Will Know Me Named a most anticipated book of 2018 by Bitch Magazine In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator. Bolin chronicles her life in Los Angeles, dissects the Noir, revisits her own coming of age, and analyzes stories of witches and werewolves, both appreciating and challenging the narratives we construct and absorb every day. Dead Girls begins by exploring the trope of dead women in fiction, and ends by interrogating the more complex dilemma of living women – both the persistent injustices they suffer and the oppression that white women help perpetrate. Reminiscent of the piercing insight of Rebecca Solnit and the critical skill of Hilton Als, Bolin constructs a sharp, perceptive, and revelatory dialogue on the portrayal of women in media and their roles in our culture.

Dead Girls

54212390-b8a2-4829-9a30-5e96fa37823a-1

Angie Thomas

Amandla Stenberg

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

8 starred reviews ∙ William C. Morris Award Winner ∙ National Book Award Longlist ∙ Printz Honor Book ∙ Coretta Scott King Honor Book ∙ #1 New York Times Bestseller! "Absolutely riveting!" —Jason Reynolds "Stunning." —John Green "This story is necessary. This story is important." —Kirkus (starred review) "Heartbreakingly topical." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A marvel of verisimilitude." —Booklist (starred review) "A powerful, in-your-face novel." —Horn Book (starred review) Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life. And don't miss On the Come Up, Angie Thomas's powerful follow-up to The Hate U Give.

The Hate U Give

27d52d4a-c164-4226-8690-5e844f161c86-1

Liza Mundy

A notation in the margins of of page (see additional photo) and a signs of ware but nothing that effects readability of book

The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

The award-winning New York Times bestseller about the American women who secretly served as codebreakers during World War II--a "prodigiously researched and engrossing" (New York Times) book that "shines a light on a hidden chapter of American history" (Denver Post). Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, bestselling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.

Code Girls

731ae59c-4168-46bd-acaf-75fb62764903-1

Jamel Brinkley

Small black dot on top of book but does not effect readability of book (see additional photo)

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Stories

From a National Book Award finalist, Witness is an elegant, insistent narrative of actions taken and not taken. What does it mean to take action? To bear witness? What does it cost? In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters—from children to grandmothers to ghosts—live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect, to remember, to stand up for, and to really see each other, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape not only their own futures but the legacies and prospects of their families and their city. In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes show kindness while those we trust—doctors, employers, siblings—too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon. With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.

Witness

2c8ff731-8ca8-43ad-aee6-6a1c6ff75392-1

Jaquira Díaz

One of the Must-Read Books of 2019 According to O: The Oprah Magazine * Time * Bustle * Electric Literature * Publishers Weekly * The Millions * The Week * Good Housekeeping “There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime.” —Julia Alvarez In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn’t find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. Reminiscent of Tara Westover’s Educated, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz’s memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history—and reads as electrically as a novel.

Ordinary Girls

597da2cc-52df-4a51-afb8-09fde322e1a9-1

Cheryl Strayed

From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

A powerful, blazingly honest, inspiring memoir: the story of a 1,100 mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe--and built her back up again.

Wild

b085a593-b161-41ce-ad7d-7297218200e4-1

Brian Selfon

A Novel

The Nightworkers is an electrifying debut crime novel from Brian Selfon about a Brooklyn family of money launderers thrown into chaos when a runner ends up dead and a bag of dirty money goes missing. Shecky Keenan’s family is under fire—or at least it feels that way. Bank accounts have closed unexpectedly, a strange car has been parked near the house at odd hours, and Emil Scott, an enigmatic artist and the family’s new runner, is missing—along with the $250,000 of dirty money he was carrying. Shecky lives in old Brooklyn with his niece Kerasha and nephew Henry, and while his deepest desire is to keep his little makeshift family safe, that doesn’t stop him from taking advantage of their talents. Shecky moves money for an array of unsavory clients, and Henry, volatile and violent but tenderhearted, is his bagman. Kerasha, the famed former child-thief of Bushwick, is still learning the family trade, but her quick mind and quicker fingers are already being put to use. They love one another, but trust is thin when secrets are the family trade. And someone will be coming for that missing money—soon. Inspired by a career that has included corruption cases and wiretaps as an investigative analyst for New York law enforcement, Brian Selfon unspools a tale of crime and consequence through shifting perspectives across the streets, alleys, bodegas, and art studios of Brooklyn. The Nightworkers is an evocative blend of genres: a literary crime thriller with a mystery at the center of its big beating heart: What really happened to Emil Scott, and what can the future possibly hold for a family when crime is what keeps them together?

The Nightworkers

de3a58e4-fd5a-455b-b7a1-aa8d8b1c6036-1

Chantal V. Johnson

A "deeply original" (Elif Batuman), "violently funny" (Myriam Gurba), "brilliant and unforgettable" (Deesha Philyaw) debut about a young lawyer finally confronting her dark past

To the outside observer, Vivian is a success story--a dedicated lawyer who advocates for mentally ill patients at a New York City psychiatric hospital. Privately, Vivian contends with the memories and aftereffects of her bad childhood--compounded by the everyday stresses of being a Black Latinx woman in America. She lives in a constant state of hypervigilant awareness that makes even a simple subway ride into a heart-pounding drama.



For years, Vivian has self-medicated with a mix of dating, dieting, dark humor and smoking weed with her BFF, Jane. But after a family reunion prompts Vivian to take a bold step, she finds herself alone in new and terrifying ways, without even Jane to confide in, and she starts to unravel. Will she find a way to repair what matters most to her?



A debut from a stunning talent, Post-traumatic is a new kind of survivor narrative, featuring a complex heroine who is blazingly, indelibly alive. With razor-sharp prose and mordant wit, Chantal V. Johnson performs an extraordinary feat, delivering a psychologically astute story about the aftermath of trauma that somehow manages to brim with warmth, laughter, and hope.

 

Post-Traumatic

59b1ee3a-8794-49c1-ada6-0ee219cede30-1

Zora Neale Hurston

Alice Walker

Deborah G. Plant

The Story of the Last Black Cargo

New York Times Bestseller Amazon's Best Hostory Book of the Year 2018 Time Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 New York Public Library’s Best Book of 2018 NPR’s Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 Economist Book of the Year “A profound impact on Hurston’s literary legacy.”—New York Times “One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison “Zora Neale Hurston’s genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece.”—Alice Walker A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.

Barracoon

5055df4e-e8cb-4567-9462-afc01bb7715f-1

Marlon James

A tale inspired by the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley spans decades and continents to explore the experiences of journalists, drug dealers, killers and ghosts against a backdrop of period social and political turmoil. By the award-winning author of The Book of Night Women. 25,000 first printing.

A Brief History of Seven Killings

45488fb9-ca1d-4bd4-95df-06da1ec9a274-1

Ethan Brown

Who Killed the Women Known As the Jeff Davis 8?

Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of eight women were discovered around the town of Jennings, in Jefferson Davis Parish, Louisiana. They had all engaged in sex work as a means of survival, and they came to be called the Jeff Davis 8. The investigations into their deaths, originally searching for a serial killer, raised questions about police misconduct and corruption.

Murder in the Bayou

ac07d4de-6cf9-4853-b1ed-0c2fa5a59580-1

Abigail Dean

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Pitch-perfect... Dean tells this story with such nuance and humanity, you’re desperate to step into its pages." —The New York Times “Heart-stopping psychological drama… A modern-day classic." —Jeffery Deaver, New York Times bestselling author “A gripping story about family dynamics and the nature of human psychology.” —Good Housekeeping She thought she had escaped her past. But there are some things you can’t outrun. Lex Gracie doesn't want to think about her family. She doesn't want to think about growing up in her parents' House of Horrors. And she doesn't want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped, the eldest sister who freed her older brother and four younger siblings. It's been easy enough to avoid her parents--her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can't run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the home into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her siblings--and with the childhood they shared. What begins as a propulsive tale of escape and survival becomes a gripping psychological family story about the shifting alliances and betrayals of sibling relationships--about the secrets our siblings keep, from themselves and each other. Who have each of these siblings become? How do their memories defy or galvanize Lex's own? As Lex pins each sibling down to agree to her family's final act, she discovers how potent the spell of their shared family mythology is, and who among them remains in its thrall and who has truly broken free. For readers of Room and Sharp Objects, an absorbing and psychologically immersive novel about a young girl who escapes captivity–but not the secrets that shadow the rest of her life.

Girl A

b39070e1-71c7-416c-b24b-4cc444e76ac4

Catherine Lacey

In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Catherine Lacey's Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge.

Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.

Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister's death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another obsession: If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?

The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self.

Nobody Is Ever Missing

38a0e736-0b29-4172-8667-4a5e0db96683-1

Julia Alvarez

A Most-Anticipated Book of the Year: O, The Oprah Magazine * The New York Times * The Washington Post *Vogue * Bustle * BuzzFeed * Ms. Magazine *The Millions * The Huffington Post * PopSugar * The Lily * Goodreads * Library Journal * LitHub * Electric Literature The first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents “A stunning work of art that reminds readers Alvarez is, and always has been, in a class of her own.” —Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Poet X Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves—lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack—but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words. Afterlife is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including—maybe especially—members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?

Afterlife

a06f22fb-5ade-4d45-882d-4509fe4c54f2-1

André Leon Talley

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the pages of Vogue to the runways of Paris, this “captivating” (Time) memoir by a legendary style icon captures the fashion world from the inside out, in its most glamorous and most cutthroat moments. “The Chiffon Trenches honestly and candidly captures fifty sublime years of fashion.”—Manolo Blahnik NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Fortune • Garden & Gun • New York Post During André Leon Talley’s first magazine job, alongside Andy Warhol at Interview, a fateful meeting with Karl Lagerfeld began a decades-long friendship with the enigmatic, often caustic designer. Propelled into the upper echelons by his knowledge and adoration of fashion, André moved to Paris as bureau chief of John Fairchild’s Women’s Wear Daily, befriending fashion's most important designers (Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta). But as André made friends, he also made enemies. A racially tinged encounter with a member of the house of Yves Saint Laurent sent him back to New York and into the offices of Vogue under Grace Mirabella. There, he eventually became creative director, developing an unlikely but intimate friendship with Anna Wintour. As she rose to the top of Vogue’s masthead, André also ascended, and soon became the most influential man in fashion. The Chiffon Trenches offers a candid look at the who’s who of the last fifty years of fashion. At once ruthless and empathetic, this engaging memoir tells with raw honesty the story of how André not only survived the brutal style landscape but thrived—despite racism, illicit rumors, and all the other challenges of this notoriously cutthroat industry—to become one of the most renowned voices and faces in fashion. Woven throughout the book are also André’s own personal struggles that impacted him over the decades, along with intimate stories of those he turned to for inspiration (Diana Vreeland, Diane von Fürstenberg, Lee Radziwill, to name a few), and of course his Southern roots and faith, which guided him since childhood. The result is a highly compelling read that captures the essence of a world few of us will ever have real access to, but one that we all want to know oh so much more about.

Well Loved Books

@well.loved.books

Books Listed

Following

Followers

Dovey Johnson Roundtree; Katie McCabe; Tayari Jones

Mighty Justice

Jeannie Vanasco

Things We Didn't Talk about When I Was a Girl

Alice Bolin

Dead Girls

Angie Thomas; Amandla Stenberg

The Hate U Give

Liza Mundy

Code Girls

Jamel Brinkley

Witness

Jaquira Díaz

Ordinary Girls

Cheryl Strayed

Wild

Brian Selfon

The Nightworkers

Chantal V. Johnson

Post-Traumatic

Zora Neale Hurston; Alice Walker; Deborah G. Plant

Barracoon

Marlon James

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Ethan Brown

Murder in the Bayou

Abigail Dean

Girl A

Catherine Lacey

Nobody Is Ever Missing

Julia Alvarez

Afterlife

André Leon Talley

The Chiffon Trenches

Get The App

Browse by categories

Dovey Johnson Roundtree; Katie McCabe; Tayari Jones

Mighty Justice

Jeannie Vanasco

Things We Didn't Talk about When I Was a Girl

Alice Bolin

Dead Girls

Angie Thomas; Amandla Stenberg

The Hate U Give

Liza Mundy

Code Girls

Jamel Brinkley

Witness

Jaquira Díaz

Ordinary Girls

Cheryl Strayed

Wild

Brian Selfon

The Nightworkers

Chantal V. Johnson

Post-Traumatic

Zora Neale Hurston; Alice Walker; Deborah G. Plant

Barracoon

Marlon James

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Ethan Brown

Murder in the Bayou

Abigail Dean

Girl A

Catherine Lacey

Nobody Is Ever Missing

Julia Alvarez

Afterlife

André Leon Talley

The Chiffon Trenches

Get The App