Shug's Daddy


Book Description

Grey A divorced, small town, hardware store owner, and the man most people considered a gentleman that was me. A slip up in my strict routine would send the town gossips into a frenzy. Yet I'd grown up in that town and everyone knew everyone. No secrets were safe, but I carried one that would send my world into chaos if I let it. I was falling for a town transplant and one of my best friends, Sugar. He was everything I wasn't, spontaneous, fun, and knew exactly who he was. What would he see in a boring man like me? Sugar (Shug) I was that fat, nonbinary person who hadn't known the inside of the closet in my life. With a mom like mine I was taught to never live with regrets, but I had a massive one. I fell in love with my straight and gentlemanly best friend. Grey was everything I wasn't. He was clueless but our shared friend group wasn't, how long could they stay silent in a town as small as ours?




The Color Purple


Book Description

The Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning novel is now a new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino. A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by the society around her and abused by her own family. She strives to protect her sister, Nettie, from a similar fate, and while Nettie escapes to a new life as a missionary in Africa, Celie is left behind without her best friend and confidante, married off to an older suitor, and sentenced to a life alone with a harsh and brutal husband. In an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear, Celie begins writing letters directly to God. The letters, spanning 20 years, record a journey of self-discovery and empowerment guided by the light of a few strong women. She meets Shug Avery, her husband’s mistress and a jazz singer with a zest for life, and her stepson’s wife, Sofia, who challenges her to fight for independence. And though the many letters from Celie’s sister are hidden by her husband, Nettie’s unwavering support will prove to be the most breathtaking of all. The Color Purple has sold more than five million copies, inspired an Academy Award-nominated film starring Oprah Winfrey and directed by Steven Spielberg, and been adapted into a Tony-winning Broadway musical. Lauded as a literary masterpiece, this is the groundbreaking novel that placed Walker “in the company of Faulkner” (The Nation), and remains a wrenching—yet intensely uplifting—experience for new generations of readers. This ebook features a new introduction written by the author on the 25th anniversary of publication, and an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author’s personal collection. The Color Purple is the 1st book in the Color Purple Collection, which also includes The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy.




Shug


Book Description

Annemarie “Shug” Wilcox is clever and brave and true (on the inside anyway). And she’s about to become your new best friend in this enchanting middle grade novel from the New York Times bestselling author of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (soon to be a major motion picture!), Jenny Han. Annemarie Wilcox, or Shug as her family calls her, is beginning to think there's nothing worse than being twelve. She's too tall, too freckled, and way too flat-chested. Shug is sure that there's not one good or amazing thing about her. And now she has to start junior high, where the friends she counts most dear aren't acting so dear anymore -- especially Mark...




Maverick Feminist


Book Description

Beginning with their forced introduction to American soil, Black women have relied on maverick-like characteristics to survive. And yet, these liberating qualities have been repeatedly disparaged by the masses in favor of an elitist politics of respectability. In Maverick Feminist: To Be Female and Black in a Country Founded upon Violence and Respectability, scholar Kemeshia Randle Swanson examines the extent to which the politics of respectability diminish joy and increase sorrow throughout the lifespan of Black women. By rejecting this damaging standard in society, Black women can wholly and attentively assist in the obliteration of racist, sexist, classist, and ableist oppression. But first, they must work towards becoming self-identified, self-actualized, and self-sexualized. Bridging the gap between women in both the streets and the academy, Maverick Feminist expands the traditional understandings of activism and enlarges discussions about Black female sexuality. Swanson emphasizes sexuality’s significance to the literary and sociopolitical success of Black women of the past and in this contemporary climate. Through close readings and critical analyses of fiction, nonfiction, and popular culture, Swanson argues that #BlackGirlMagic and racial progression require rejecting respectability politics and developing an intimate appreciation of self. Maverick Feminist examines texts by and about bold Black women, including Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever, Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Sapphire’s PUSH, Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Terry McMillan’s Getting to Happy, and Michelle Obama’s Becoming. Maverick Feminist offers hope concerning the growing divide between scholars and the communities about which they theorize. The book celebrates centuries of agency and control that Black women have mustered and maintained in a world that seems to want nothing more than to see them prone and powerless. Ultimately, maverick feminism provides a freer means of living out, evaluating, understanding, and improving the lives of Black women.




Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation


Book Description

Signifying, a traditional form of expression in African American communities, includes "rapping," "sounding," "playing the dozens," "loud talking," and "testifying." According to this report's author, all forms of signifying share common qualities of indirection, understatement, and irony. Can the skills of expression found in signifying lead to an understanding of the books we teach in the classroom? Can the social use of innuendo and figurative language transfer, serving as a framework for the comprehension of literary texts? Using as sample texts Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Lee has tested her hypothesis that "novice African American adolescent readers bring into classrooms a powerful intellectual tool which too often goes unnoticed, devalued, and untapped." Her report, she promises, will give "an example of an instructional approach which speaks to the problems of literacy in African American and, by extension, other ethnically diverse populations, as well as to the problems that plague literature instruction in U.S. schools." This book delivers on that promise.




American Studies


Book Description




Shug


Book Description

A twelve-year-old girl learns about friendship, first loves, and self-worth in a small town in the South.




The Female Gaze


Book Description

In this collection of essays, leading cultural commentators and journalists explore what different media images mean to women and the influence women have had on what we read, hear and see.




The Liars' Club


Book Description

#4 on The New York Times’ list of The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of a hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation “Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet’s ear.” —Oprah.com The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as “funny, lively, and un-put-downable” (USA Today) today as it ever was.




Bauhaus


Book Description