Peter Francis James

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
He describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from...

In fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever

Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power

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"Two familes from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier,...

A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author's grandson. When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that "if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there...

Novelist Marcus Major creates this sexy, sharp-witted story of love and the dating game in the style of Eric Jerome Dickey. Set in African-American and Latino communities, Good Peoples looks beyond a man's bravado to his longing for that special someone. Tired of the dating scene in suburban Philadelphia, 29-year-old Myles Moore is waiting for the right woman. He fills his days with basketball, teaching grade school, and "good peoples," but his buddies...

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. 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, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what...

When Black Boy exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, it caused a sensation. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that "if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy." Opposing forces felt compelled to comment: addressing Congress, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi argued that the purpose of this book "was...

Elmore Leonard is eternal. In Road Dogs, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award winner and America's greatest crime master brings back three of his favorite characters-Jack Foley from Out of Sight, Cundo Rey from La Brava, and Dawn Navarro from Riding the Rap-for a twisting, explosive, always surprising masterwork of crime fiction, a sly, violent, funny and superbly written story of friendship, greed, and betrayal.

Junior Brown is a musical prodigy losing touch with reality and everyone around him-except for one important friend   Junior Brown is different than the other kids in his eighth-grade class. For one, he weighs three hundred pounds. He's also a talented musician with a serious future as a professional pianist-if he survives middle school. With an overbearing mom, disappointed teachers, and fellow students who tease him mercilessly, Junior starts to...

In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps. So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as "Mr. Civil Rights," into...