Contemporary

Wideman tackles the issues of race, family and creativity in this collection of stories, some featuring historical figures, all of which illustrate necessary, if painful, truths about how history both weaves us together and divides us.   

Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything--until it wasn't.

Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood is recalled through the voice of Joseph 'Ziggy' Johnson in an imaginative collection of miniatures that capture the legendary denizens that made mid twentieth century Detroit a cultural, economic and political center of African American life.  

A bold and irreverent observer of life among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, Alexie showcases all his talents in his newest collection, Blasphemy, where he unites fifteen beloved classics with fifteen new stories in one sweeping anthology for devoted fans and first-time readers.
 

Arturo and Alma Rivera move from Mexico to Delaware in an effort to ensure the best education and opportunities for their teenage daughter, but they must confront the fear and alienation present behind the American Dream.  

Former Chicago PD detective and private eye Cass Raines investigates when her friend and mentor, a community activist priest, is found dead in his church with the body of a teen sporting gang colors lying nearby.  As she digs into the case, she discovers greater tensions gripping her Hyde Park neighborhood than she could have imagined, and a killer willing to silence her at any cost.  

The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience.

After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.

Watkins's powerful collection of eleven stories centers on the reckonings of men and women in one Black Texan community.

Multiple Hugo- and Nebula- award winning author Jemisin focuses on resistance, particularly Black resistance, in this collection of science fiction stories.  

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: his marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comic shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish-American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter and she thinks she's white. Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he never knew.