A Little Devil in America

Author: Hanif Abdurraqib
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 198480121X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A sweeping, genre-bending “masterpiece” (Minneapolis Star Tribune) exploring Black art, music, and culture in all their glory and complexity—from Soul Train, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Whitney Houston, and Beyoncé ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Dallas Morning News, Publishers Weekly “Gorgeous essays that reveal the resilience, heartbreak, and joy within Black performance.”—Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.” Inspired by these few words, spoken by Josephine Baker at the 1963 March on Washington, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and bestselling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines—whether it’s the twenty-seven seconds in “Gimme Shelter” in which Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,” a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance. Touching on Michael Jackson, Patti LaBelle, Billy Dee Williams, the Wu-Tan Clan, Dave Chappelle, and more, Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space—from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL AND THE GORDON BURN PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Rolling Stone, Esquire, BuzzFeed, Thrillist, She Reads, BookRiot, BookPage, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, LitHub, Library Journal, Booklist

The Devil in America

Author: Kai Ashante Wilson
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1466863560
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 53

Book Description
Scant years after the Civil War, a mysterious family confronts the legacy that has pursued them across centuries, out of slavery, and finally to the idyllic peace of the town of Rosetree. The shattering consequences of this confrontation echo backwards and forwards in time, even to the present day. "There’s so much here to appreciate and admire, fine storytelling with a clearly-realized setting and characters."--Locus At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Go Ahead in the Rain

Author: Hanif Abdurraqib
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477318445
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
A New York Times Best Seller 2019 National Book Award Longlist, Nonfiction 2019 Kirkus Book Prize Finalist, Nonfiction A February IndieNext Pick Named A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by Buzzfeed, Nylon, The A. V. Club, CBC Books, and The Rumpus, and a Winter's Most Anticipated Book by Vanity Fair and The Week Starred Reviews: Kirkus and Booklist "Warm, immediate and intensely personal."—New York Times How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group’s history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself. Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast–West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels’ shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he’s remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe’s 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg’s death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that—like the low end, the bass—are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Author: Hanif Abdurraqib
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
ISBN: 1937512665
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
* 2018 "12 best books to give this holiday season" —TODAY (Elizabeth Acevedo) * A "Best Book of 2017" —Rolling Stone (2018), NPR, Buzzfeed, Paste Magazine, Esquire, Chicago Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, CBC, Stereogum, National Post, Entropy, Heavy, Book Riot, Chicago Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review, Michigan Daily * American Booksellers Association (ABA) 'December 2017 Indie Next List Great Reads' * Midwest Indie Bestseller In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly. In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of Black Americans, Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—along with original, previously unreleased essays—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.

A Fortune for Your Disaster

Author: Hanif Abdurraqib
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1947793527
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 108

Book Description
“When an author’s unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it’s tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry.” —Booklist, Starred Review In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.

The Crown Ain't Worth Much

Author: Hanif Abdurraqib
Publisher: Button Poetry
ISBN: 1943735239
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Book Description
2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award - Poetry Honorable Mention 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award - Grand Prize Short List 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominee The Crown Ain't Worth Much, Hanif Abdurraqib's first full-length collection, is a sharp and vulnerable portrayal of city life in the United States. A regular columnist for MTV.com, Abdurraqib brings his interest in pop culture to these poems, analyzing race, gender, family, and the love that finally holds us together even as it threatens to break us. Terrance Hayes writes that Abdurraqib "bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy." The poems in this collection are challenging and accessible at once, as they seek to render real human voices in moments of tragedy and celebration.

Devil in the Grove

Author: Gilbert King
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062097717
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A must-read, cannot-put-down history.” — Thomas Friedman, New York Times Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life. In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old girl cried rape, McCall pursued four young black men who dared envision a future for themselves beyond the groves. The Ku Klux Klan joined the hunt, hell-bent on lynching the men who came to be known as "the Groveland Boys." Associates thought it was suicidal for Marshall to wade into the "Florida Terror," but the young lawyer would not shrink from the fight despite continuous death threats against him. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI's unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund files, Gilbert King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader.

Devil Dog

Author: David Talbot
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439117748
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
Pulp History brings to life extraordinary feats of bravery, violence, and redemption that history has forgotten. These stories are so dramatic and thrilling they have to be true. In DEVIL DOG, the most decorated Marine in history fights for America across the globe—and returns home to set his country straight. Smedley Butler took a Chinese bullet to the chest at age eighteen, but that did not stop him from running down rebels in Nicaragua and Haiti, or from saving the lives of his men in France. But when he learned that America was trading the blood of Marines to make Wall Street fat cats even fatter, Butler went on a crusade. He threw the gangsters out of Philadelphia, faced down Herbert Hoover to help veterans, and blew the lid off a plot to overthrow FDR.

The Devil's Highway

Author: Luis Alberto Urrea
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN: 031604928X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
This important book from a Pulitzer Prize finalist follows the brutal journey a group of men take to cross the Mexican border: "the single most compelling, lucid, and lyrical contemporary account of the absurdity of U.S. border policy" (The Atlantic). In May 2001, a group of men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona, through the deadliest region of the continent, the "Devil's Highway." Three years later, Luis Alberto Urrea wrote about what happened to them. The result was a national bestseller, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a "book of the year" in multiple newspapers, and a work proclaimed as a modern American classic.

The Little Devil and Other Stories

Author: Alexei Remizov
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545169
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Book Description
In a dilapidated and isolated old house, something peculiar seems to happen whenever the town’s bestial exterminator visits. On a seemingly bucolic country estate, the head of the household is a living corpse obsessed with other corpses. An adolescent boy who passes his days in private dream worlds experiences a sexual awakening spurred by his family’s scandalous tenant. In these and other stories, the modernist writer Alexei Remizov offers a panorama of Russian mythology, the supernatural, rural grotesques, and profound religious faith in fiery revolutionary settings. Alexei Remizov was one of the greatest writers of the Russian symbolist movement of the early twentieth century. In the thirteen stories collected in this volume, his exceptional stylistic achievements are on full display. Equally drawing on rural colloquial speech, the language of Russian fairy tales, and the customs of the Old Believers and Russian Orthodoxy, they transport the reader into a mysterious world in between uncanny folktales and encroaching modernity. The Little Devil and Other Stories includes works from across Remizov’s career, encompassing his thematic preoccupations and stylistic experimentation. Antonina W. Bouis’s translation captures Remizov’s many registers to offer English-language readers a sampling of a remarkable Russian writer.