Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
10 best books like Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts): Jazz, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond, A Small Place, Baldwin's Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin, Negroland, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, The Brontë Myth
| Author | Toni Morrison |
| ISBN | 0452269652 |
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This passionate, profound story...
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
| Author | Jenny Odell |
| ISBN | 1612197493 |
This thrilling critique of the forces vying for our attention re-defines what we think of as productivity, shows us a new way to connect with our environment and reveals all that we’ve been too distracted to see about our selves and our world.
When the technologies we use every day collapse...
Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond
| Author | Marc Lamont Hill |
| ISBN | 1501124978 |
Named a Best Book of 2016 by Kirkus Reviews
A New York Times Editor’s Choice
Nautilus Award Winner
“A worthy and necessary addition to the contemporary canon of civil rights literature.” —New York Times
In this “thought-provoking and important” (Library...
| Author | Jamaica Kincaid |
| ISBN | 0374527075 |
Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright, A Small Place magnifies our vision of one small place with Swiftian wit and precision. Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay candidly appraises the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up, and makes palpable the impact of European colonization...
Baldwin's Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin
Baldwin's Harlem is an intimate
portrait of the life and genius of one
of our most brilliant literary minds:
James Baldwin. Perhaps no other writer is as synonymous with Harlem as James Baldwin (1924-1987). The events there that shaped his youth greatly influenced Baldwin's work, much...
| Author | Margo Jefferson |
| ISBN | 0307378454 |
At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac—here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author’s rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the...
Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
| Author | Janette Sadik-Khan |
| ISBN | 0525429840 |
An empowering road map for rethinking, reinvigorating, and redesigning our cities, from a pioneer in the movement for safer, more livable streets
As New York City’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan managed the seemingly impossible and transformed the streets of...
Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem
| Author | Daniel R. Day |
| ISBN | 0525510516 |
The story of a legendary designer who pioneered high-end streetwear, from a storefront in Harlem to the red carpet in Hollywood, dressing everyone from Salt-N-Pepa and Eric B. & Rakim to Beyoncé and Jay-Z along the way.
With his now-legendary store on 125th Street in Harlem, Dapper Dan...
| Author | D.G. Compton |
| ISBN | 0575118318 |
A forgotten SF classic that exposed the pitfalls of voyeuristic entertainment decades before the reality show craze.
A few years in the future, medical science has advanced to the point where it is practically unheard of for people to die of any cause except old age. The few exceptions provide...
| Author | Lucasta Miller |
| ISBN | 1400078350 |
Following the Brontë sisters through their many reincarnations at the hands of biographers, Lucasta Miller reveals as much about the impossible art of biography as she does about the Brontës themselves. Their first biographer, Mrs Gaskell, transformed their story of literary ambition into one...
| Author | Julia Briggs |
| ISBN | 0156032295 |
Virginia Woolf is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century literature. She was original, passionate, vivid, dedicated to her art. Yet most writing about her still revolves around her social life and the Bloomsbury set.
In this fresh, absorbing book, Julia Briggs puts...
| Author | Sharla Scannell Whalen |
| ISBN | 0963078305 |
Well. I'm certainly not surprised that I LOVED this book. It was five hundred pages of details and visits about "old friends" of mine, about whom I read in the Betsy-Tacy books. Since the books so closely paralleled MHL's own life, author Sharla Scannell Whalen pointed out the similarities and differences...
Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness
| Author | Rebecca Walker |
| ISBN | 1593764170 |
Black Cool explores the ineffable state and aesthetic of Black Cool. From the effortless reserve of Miles Davis in khakis on an early album cover, to the shock of resistance in black women’s fashion from Angela Davis to Rihanna, to the cadence of poets as diverse as Staceyann Chin and Audre Lorde, Black...
Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
| Author | Deb Olin Unferth |
| ISBN | 0805093230 |
Rising literary star Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas.
Despite their earnest commitment to a...
Instead of a Letter: A Memoir
| Author | Diana Athill |
| ISBN | 0393338576 |
A classic memoir by the author of the New York Times bestseller Somewhere Towards the End.
As a young woman, Diana Athill was engaged to an air force pilot—Instead of a Letter tells how he broke off the engagement, married someone else, and, worst of all, died overseas before she could confront...
| Author | Frank Herbert |
| ISBN | 0593098250 |
Book four in Frank Herbert's magnificent Dune Chronicles--one of the most significant sagas in the history of literary science fiction.
Millennia have passed on Arrakis, and the once-desert planet is green with life. Leto Atreides, the son of the world's savior, the Emperor Paul Muad'Dib,...
| Author | Steven Dunn |
| ISBN | 1939460069 |
Potted Meat, a novel set in a decaying town in southern West Virginia, follows a young boy into adolescence as he struggles with abusive parents, poverty, alcohol addiction, and racial tensions. Using fragments as a narrative mode to highlight the terror of ellipses, Potted Meat explores the fear,...
The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District
| Author | James Rebanks |
| ISBN | 0385682840 |
Some people's lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks' isn't. The first son of a shepherd, who was the first son of a shepherd himself, he and his family have lived and worked in and around the Lake District for generations. Their way of life is ordered by the seasons and the work they demand,...
